"Somewhere!" echoed the Clockwork man, "that's what seems to me so extraordinary! Everybody says that. The idea of a thing being _somewhere_, you know. Elsewhere than where you expect it to be. It's so confusing."
Arthur consulted his common sense. "Can't you remember the place where you lost them," he suggested.
A faint wrinkle of perplexity appeared on the other's forehead. He shook his head once "Place. There, again, I can't grasp that idea. What is a place? And how does a thing come to be in one place and not in another?" He jerked a hand up as though to emphasise the point. "A thing either is or it isn't. It can't be in a _place_."
"But it must be somewhere," objected Arthur, "that's obvious."
The Clockwork man looked vaguely distressed. "Theoretically," he agreed, "what you say is correct. I can conceive it as a mathematical problem. But actually, you know, it isn't at all obvious."
He jerked his head slowly round and gazed at the surrounding objects. "It's such an extraordinary world. I can't get used to it at all. One keeps on bumping into things and falling into things--things that ought not to be there, you know."
Arthur could hardly control an eager curiosity to know what the thing was, round and shiny, that looked like a sort of halo at the back of the Clockwork man's head. He kept on dodging from one side to the other in an effort to see it clearly.
"Are you looking at my clock?" enquired the Clockwork man, without altering his tone of speech. "I must apologise. I feel quite indecent."
"It's the regulating mechanism," said the other, monotonously, "I keep on forgetting that you _can't_ know these things. You see, it controls me. But, of course, it's out of order. That's how I came to be here, in this absurd world. There can't be any other reason, I'm sure." He looked so childishly perplexed that Arthur's sense of pity was again aroused, and he listened in respectful silence.
"You see," the mechanical voice went on, "only about half the clock is in action. That accounts for my present situation." There was a pause, broken only by obscure tickings, regular but thin in sound. "I had been feeling very run down, and went to have myself attended to. Then some careless mechanic blundered, and of course I went all wrong." He turned swiftly and looked hard at Arthur. "All wrong. Absolutely all wrong. And of course, I--I--lapsed, you see."