“Rick, you’ve been staring at that thing for twenty minutes. It can’t be that interesting!”
Rick flinched, his attention broken for the first time since he had started counting the pendulum’s swings twenty-one minutes before. He sighed; clearly Don was not going to give him long enough to work it out tonight.
“I nearly had it. If you hadn’t interrupted me I might have got it in a few more minutes.”
Don shook his head and smiled a wry, indulgent smile;
“Rick, if you want to know what pattern Taylor encoded into the damn Chronophage why don’t you just ask him? He’s probably bursting for someone boring enough to ask him.”
“Don, do you think that I would spend thirty to forty minutes every day counting pendulum beats, by the minute, at different hours of the day and night if Taylor was telling people who simply asked? It’s his big secret! Come on, let’s get a drink.”
As they slouched away a shadow moved and then gave birth to a slight man who did not look even remotely as though he belonged in Corpus Christi College.
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This does not yet appear on ficlets.com due to a technical problem with that site and its OpenID login, i.e. I can’t get on the site, logged in.
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This Ficlet was inspired by the front page of Wikipedia for the 22nd of September 2008, in English. The Article was from teh “Did you know…” section from the 22nd of September 2008 and concerned The Corpus Clock, also known as the Chronophage; you can find out more here.