have been
ice, leaves falling from trees were suspended in mid-air, and one little
dog, which was cocking its leg against a lamp-post, looked as if it had been
stuffed that way.
Lifeless as a photograph, the city rang to the hurrying footsteps of
the men in grey. Momo followed them cautiously, fearful of being spotted,
but she needn't have worried. Their headlong flight was proving so arduous
and exhausting that they had ceased to notice anything any more.
Unaccustomed to running so far and so fast, they panted and gasped for
breath, grimly clenching their teeth on the little grey cigars that kept
them in existence. More than one of them let his cigar fall while running
and vanished into thin air before he could retrieve it.
But their companions in misfortune represented an even greater threat.
Such was the desperation of those whose own cigars were almost finished that
many of them snatched the butts from their neighbours' mouths, so their
numbers slowly but steadily dwindled.
Those who still had a small store of cigars in their briefcases were
careful to conceal them from the others, because the have-nots kept hurling
themselves at the haves and trying to wrest their precious possessions from
them. Scores of struggling figures engaged in ferocious tussles, scrabbling
and clawing with such wild abandon that most of the coveted cigars spilled
on to the road and were trampled underfoot.
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The men in grey had become so frightened of extinction that they
completely lost their heads.
There was something else that caused them increasing difficulty the
further into town they got. The streets were so crowded at many points that
it was all they could do to thread their way through the forest of
motionless pedestrians. Momo, being small and thin, had an easier time of
it, but even she had to watch her step. You could hurt yourself badly on a
feather suspended in mid-air if you ran into it by mistake.
On and on they went, and Momo still had no idea how much further it was
to the time store. She peered anxiously at her hour-lily, but it had only
just come into full flower. There was no need to worry yet.
Then something happened that temporarily drove every other thought from
her mind. Glancing down a side street, she caught sight of Beppo!
'Beppo!' she called, beside herself with joy, as she ran towards him.
'I've been looking for you everywhere. Where have you been all this time?
Why did you never come to see me? Oh, Beppo, dearest Beppo!'
Still ck'tching Cassiopeia, she flung her free arm around his neck --
and promptly bounced off, because he might have been made of cast iron. It
was such a painful collision that tears sprang to her eyes. She stepped
back, sobbing, and gazed at him.
The little old man looked more bent-backed than ever. His kindly face
was thin and gaunt and very pale, and his chin was frosted with white
stubble because he so seldom found the time to shave nowadays. Incessant
sweeping had worn away his broom until the bristles were little longer than
his beard. There he stood, as motionless as everyone and everything else,
staring down at the dirty street through his steel-rimmed spectacles.
Momo had found him at last, but only now, when she couldn't get him to
notice her and it might be the very last
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time she saw him. If things went wrong, old Beppo would continue to
stand there forever more.
Cassiopeia started fidgeting again. 'KEEP GOING!' she spelled out.
Momo dashed back to the main street and stopped dead. There were no men
in grey to be seen! She ran on a little way, but it was no use, she'd lost
track of them. She halted again, wondering what to do, and looked
inquiringly at Cassiopeia.
'KEEP GOING,' the tortoise signaled again, then:
YOU'LL FIND THEM.'
If Cassiopeia knew in advance that she would find the time-thieves, she
would find them whichever way she went. Any direction was bound to be the
right one, so she simply ran on, turning left or right as the fancy took
her.
She had now reached the housing development on the city's northern
outskirts, where the buildings were as alike as peas in a pod and the
streets ran dead straight from horizon to horizon. On and on she ran, but
the sheer sameness of the buildings and streets soon made her feel as if she
were running on the spot and getting nowhere. The housing development was a
veritable maze, but a maze that deceived one by its regularity and
uniformity.
Momo had almost lost hope when she caught sight of a man in grey
disappearing around a corner. He was limping ..long with his suit in tatters
and his bowler hat and briefcase gone, mouth grimly pursed around the
smouldering butt of a little grey cigar.
She followed him along a street flanked by endless rows of houses until
they came to a gap. The big rectangular site where the missing house should
have stood was boarded up, and set in the fence was a gate. The gate was a
little ajar, and the last grey straggler squeezed quickly through it.
There was a notice above the gate. Momo paused to read it.
225
DANGER!
KEEP OUT!
NO UNAUTHORIZED
PERSONS ADMITTED
TWENTY-ONE
An End and a Beginning
Momo took several seconds to decipher the longer words on the
noticeboard, and by the time she slipped through the gate the last of the
men in grey had disappeared.
In front of her yawned a gigantic pit, eighty or ninety feet deep, with
bulldozers and excavators around it. Several trucks had stopped mid way down
the ramp that led to the bottom of the pit and construction workers were
standing motionless all over the place, frozen in a variety of positions.
Where to now? There was no sign of the man in the grey and no clue as
to where he might have gone. Cassiopeia seemed equally at a loss. Her shell
did not light up.
Momo made her way down the ramp to the bottom of the pit and looked
around. Suddenly she saw a familiar face. It was Salvatore, the bricklayer
who had painted the pretty flower picture on the wall of her room. He was as
motionless as all the rest, but something about his pose made Momo think
twice. He was cupping his mouth as though calling to someone and pointing to
the rim of a huge pipe jutting from the ground beside him, almost as if
drawing Memo's attention to it.
Momo wasted no time. Taking this as a good omen, she hurried over to
the pipe and climbed inside. She lost her footing almost at once, because
the pipe sloped downwards at a steep angle, twisting and turning so sharply
that she slithered back and forth like a child on a helter-skelter. She
could see and hear almost nothing as she hurtled ever deeper into the
ground, sometimes sliding on her bottom, sometimes
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rolling head over heels, but never letting go of the tortoise and the
hour-lily.
The deeper she went, the colder it became. She began to wonder how she
would ever get out again, but before she could give the problem any real
thought the pipe abruptly ended in an underground passage. It wasn't as dark
here. The tunnel was bathed in a grey twilight that seemed to ooze from its
very walls. Momo scrambled up and ran on. Her bare feet made no sound, but
she could hear footsteps ahead of her. Guessing that they belonged to the
men in grey, she allowed herself to be guided by them. To judge by the
innumerable passages leading off her own in all directions, she was in a
maze of tunnels that ran the full extent of the housing development.
Then she heard a babble of voices. Having traced the hubbub to its
source, she cautiously peeped around the corner.
She found herself looking at a room as vast as the conference table
that ran down the middle of it, and at this table, in two long rows, sat the
surviving men in grey. Momo almost felt sorry for them, they looked so
woebegone. Their suits were torn, their bald grey heads cut and bruised, and
their faces convulsed with fear, but their cigars were still smouldering.
Embedded in the wall at the far end of the room, Momo saw a huge steel
door. The door was ajar, and an icy draught was streaming from whatever lay
beyond. Although Momo knew it would do little good, she burrowed down and
tucked her bare feet under her skirt.
A man in grey was presiding at the head of the conference table, just
in front of the strong-room door. 'We must economize,' Momo heard him say.
'Our reserves must be carefully husbanded. After all, we don't know how long
they'll have to last us.'
'There's only a handful of us left,' cried someone. 'They'll last us
for years.'
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'The sooner we start economizing,' the chairman went on imperturbably,
'the longer we'll hold out. I don't have to tell you, gentlemen, what I mean
by economizing. It will be quite sufficient if only some of us survive this
disaster. Let's face facts. As things stand now, there are far too many of
us. Common sense dictates that our ranks be drastically thinned. May I ask
you to call out numbers in turn?'
When the men in grey had called out numbers, all round the table, the
chairman produced a coin from his pocket. 'I shall now toss up,' he said.
'Heads mean the even numbers survive, tails the odd numbers.' He flipped the
coin and caught it.
'Heads,' he announced. 'Even numbers may remain seated, odd numbers are
requested to dissolve forthwith.'
The losers emitted a dull groan, but none of them demurred. As soon as
the winners had relieved them of their cigars, they vanished into thin air.
The chairman's voice broke the hush. 'And now, gentlemen, kindly do the
same again.'
The same gruesome procedure was followed a second time, then a third
and a fourth, until only half a dozen men in grey remained. They sat at the
head of the conference table, three a side, and glared at each other in icy
silence.
Momo, who had watched these developments with horrified fascination,
noticed that the temperature rose appreciably every time another batch of
losers disappeared. Compared to what it had been before, the cold was quite
tolerable.
'Six,' remarked one of the survivors, 'is an unlucky number.'
'That's enough,' said another. 'There's no point in reducing our
numbers still further. If six of us can't survive this disaster, neither
will three.'
'Not necessarily,' said someone else, 'but we can always review the
situation if the need arises - later, I mean.'
229
No one spoke for a while. Then another survivor said, 'Lucky for us the
door to the time store was open when disaster struck. If it had been shut at
the crucial moment, no power on earth could open it now. We'd be absolutely
sunk.'
'You're not entirely right, I'm afraid,' replied another. 'Because the
door is open, cold is escaping from the refrigeration plant. The hour-lilies
will slowly thaw out, and you all know what'll happen then. We won't be able
to prevent them from returning to their original owners.'
'You mean,' said yet another, 'that our own coldness won't be
sufficient to keep them deep-frozen?'
'There are only six of us, unfortunately,' said the second speaker.
'You can calculate our freezing capability for yourself. Personally, I feel
it was rather rash to cut down our numbers so drastically. It hasn't paid
off.'
'We had to opt for one course of action or the other,' snapped the
first speaker, 'and we did, so that's that.'
Another silence fell.
'In other words,' said someone, 'we may have to sit here for years on
end, twiddling our thumbs and gawping at each other. I find that a dismal
prospect, I must confess.'
Momo racked her brains. There was certainly no point in her sitting
there and waiting any longer. When the men in grey were gone, the
hour-lilies would thaw out by themselves, but the men in grey still existed
and would continue to exist unless she did something about it. But what
could she do, given that the door to the cold store was open and the
time-thieves could help themselves to fresh supplies of cigars whenever they
wanted?
At that moment, Cassiopeia nudged her in the ribs. Momo looked down and
saw a message on her shell. 'SHUT THF. DOOR,' she read.
'I can't,' she whispered back. 'I'd never move it.'
'USE THE FLOWER,' Cassiopeia replied.
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'You mean I could move it if I touched it with the hour-lily?'
whispered Momo.
'YES, AND YOU WILL,' the tortoise spelled out.
If Cassiopeia knew this in advance, it had to be true. Momo carefully
put the tortoise down. Then she took the hour-lily, which was wilting by now
and had lost most of its petals, and stowed it inside her jacket.
Going down on all fours, she sneaked unseen beneath the conference
table and crawled to the far end. By the time she was on a level with the
time-thieves' six pairs of legs, her heart was pounding fit to burst.
Very, very gingerly, she took out the hour-lily and, gripping the stem
between her teeth, crawled on. Still unobserved by the men in grey, she
reached the open door, touched it with the hour-lily and simultaneously gave
it a push. The well-oiled hinges didn't make a sound. The door swung
silently to, then shut with a mighty clang that went echoing around the
conference chamber and reverberated from the walls of the innumerable
underground passages.
Momo jumped to her feet. The men in grey, who hadn't the remotest idea
that anyone but themselves was exempt from the universal standstill, sat
rooted to their chairs in horror, staring at her.
Without a second thought, she dashed past them and sprinted back to the
exit. The men in grey recovered from their shock and raced after her.
'It's that frightful little girl!' she heard one of them shout. 'It's
Momo!'
'Impossible!' yelled another. 'The creature's moving!' 'She's got an
hour-lily!' bellowed a third. Is that how she moved the door?' asked a
fourth. The fifth smote his brow. 'Then we could have moved it ourselves.
We've got plenty of hour-lilies.'
'We did have, you mean!' screamed the sixth. 'Only one
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thing can save us now that the door's shut. If we don't get hold of
that flower of hers, we're done for!'
Meanwhile, Momo had already disappeared into the maze of tunnels. The
men in grey knew their way around better, of course, but she just managed to
elude them by zigzagging to and fro.
Cassiopeia played her own special pan in this chase. Although she could
only crawl, she always knew in advance where Momo's pursuers would go next,
so she got there in good time and stationed herself in their path. The men
in grey tripped over her and went sprawling, and the ones behind tripped
over them and went sprawling too, with the result that she more than once
saved Momo from almost certain capture. Although she herself was often sent
hurtling against walls by flying feet, nothing could deter her from
continuing to do what she knew in advance she would do.
As the chase proceeded, several of the pursuing men in grey became so
maddened by their craving for the hour-lily that they dropped their cigars
and vanished into thin air, one after the other. In the end, only two were
left.
Momo doubled back and took refuge in the conference chamber. The two
surviving time-thieves chased her around the table but failed to catch her,
so they split up and ran in opposite directions. Momo was trapped at last.
She cowered in a corner and gazed at her pursuers in terror with the
hour-lily clasped to her chest. All but three of its shimmering petals had
withered and fallen.
The foremost man in grey was just about to snatch the flower when the
other one yanked him away.
'No,' he shrieked, 'that flower's mine! Mine, I tell you!'
They grappled with each other, and in the ensuing scrimmage the first
man knocked the second man's cigar out of his mouth. With a weird groan, the
second man spun around, went transparent and vanished.
The last of the men in grey advanced on Momo with a
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minuscule cigar butt smouldering in the corner of his mouth.
'Give it here!' he gasped, but as he did so the butt fell out of his
mouth and rolled away under the table. He flung himself to the ground and
groped for it, but it eluded his outstretched fingers. Turning his ashen
face towards Momo, he struggled into a sitting position and raised one
trembling hand.
'Please,' he whispered faintly, 'please, dear child, give me the
flower.'
Momo, still cowering in her corner, couldn't get a word out. She
clasped the flower still tighter and shook her head.
The last of the men in grey nodded slowly. 'I'm glad,' he murmured.
'I'm glad ... it's all ... over ...' Then he vanished, too.
Momo was staring dazedly at the place where he had been when Cassiopeia
crawled into view. 'YOU'LL OPEN THE DOOR,' her shell announced.
Momo went over to the door, touched it with her hour-lily, which had
only one last petal left, and opened it wide.
The time store was cold no longer, now that the last of the
time-thieves had gone. Momo marvelled at the contents of the huge vault.
Innumerable hour-lilies were arrayed on its endless shelves like crystal
goblets, no two alike and each more beautiful than the other. Hundreds of
thousands, indeed, millions of hours were stored here, all of them stolen
from people's lives.
The temperature steadily rose until the vault was as hot as a
greenhouse. Just as the last petal of Momo's hour-lily fluttered to the
ground, all the other flowers left their shelves in clouds and swirled
around her head. It was like a warm spring storm, bur a storm made up of
time released from captivity.
As if in a dream, Momo looked around and saw Cassiopeia on the ground
beside her. The glowing letters on her shell read: 'FLY HOME, MOMO, FLY
HOME!' That was the last Momo ever saw of Cassiopeia, because
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the tempest of flowers rose to an indescribable pitch. And as it gained
strength, so Momo was lifted off her feet and borne away like a flower
herself, along the dark passages, out into the open air and high above the
city. Soaring over the roofs in a cloud of flowers that grew bigger every
moment, she was wafted up and down and around and around like someone
performing a triumphal dance to glorious music.
Then the cloud of flowers drifted slowly, lazily down and landed like
snowflakes on the frozen face of the earth. And, like snowflakes, they
gently dissolved and became invisible as they returned to their true home in
the hearts of mankind.
In that same moment, time began again and everything awoke to new life.
The cars drove on, the traffic police blew their whistles, the pigeons
continued circling, and the little dog made a puddle against the lamp-post.
Nobody noticed that time had stood still for an hour, because nothing had
moved in the interval. It was all over in the twinkling of an eye.
Nothing had moved - no, but something had changed. All of a sudden,
people found they had plenty of time to spare. They were delighted,
naturally, but they never realized that it was their own time that had
miraculously been restored to them.
When Momo came to her senses again, she found herself back in the side
street where she had last seen Beppo. Sure enough, there he was, leaning on
his broom with his back to her, gazing ruminatively into the distance as he
used to in the old days. He wasn't in a hurry any more, and for some unknown
reason he felt brighter and more hopeful.
'I wonder,' he thought. 'Maybe I've already saved the hundred thousand
hours I need to ransom Momo.'
At that moment, someone tugged at his jacket and he turned to see Momo
smiling up at him as large as life.
There are no words to describe the joy of that reunion.
234
Beppo and Momo laughed and cried by turns, and they both kept talking
at once - talking all kinds of nonsense, too, as people do when they're
dazed with delight. They hugged each other again and again, and passers-by
paused to share in their happiness, their tears and laughter, because they
all had plenty of time to spare.
At long last, Beppo shouldered his broom - he took the rest of the day
off, of course - and the two of them strolled arm in arm through the city to
the old amphitheatre, still talking nineteen to the dozen.
It was a long time since the city had witnessed such scenes. Children
played in the middle of the street, getting in the way of cars whose drivers
not only watched and waited, smiling broadly, but sometimes got out and
joined in their games. People stood around chatting with the friendliness of
those who take a genuine interest in their neighbours' welfare. Other
people, on their way to work, had time to stop and admire the flowers in a
window-box or feed the birds. Doctors, too, had time to devote themselves
properly to their patients, and workers of all kinds did their jobs with
pride and loving care, now that they were no longer expected to turn out as
much work as possible in the shortest possible time. They could take as much
time as they needed and wanted, because from now on there was enough time
for everyone.
Many people never discovered whom they had to thank for all this, just
as they never knew what had actually happened during the hour that passed in
a flash. Few of them would have believed the story anyway.
The only ones that knew and believed it were Memo's friends. By the
time Momo and Beppo reached the amphitheatre, they were all there waiting:
Guido, Paolo, Massimo, Franco, Maria and her little sister Rosa, Claudio and
a host of other children, Nino the innkeeper and his plump wife Liliana and
their baby, Salvatore the bricklayer, and all of Memo's regular visitors in
days gone by.
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The celebration that followed, which was as merry and joyous as only
Momo's friends could have made it, went on till the stars came out. And when
all the cheers and hugs and handshakes and excited chatter had subsided,
everyone sat down on the grass-grown steps.
A great hush fell as Momo stepped out into the middle of the arena. She
thought of the music of the stars and the hour-lilies, and then, in a sweet,
pure voice, she began to sing.
Meanwhile, in Nowhere House, the return of time had roused Professor
from his first sleep ever. Still very pale, he looked as if he had just
recovered from a serious illness, but his eyes sparkled and there was a
smile on his lips as he watched Momo and her friends through his omnivision
glasses.
Then he felt something touch his foot. Taking off his glasses, he
looked down and saw Cassiopeia sitting there.
'Cassiopeia,' he said, tickling her affectionately under the chin, 'the
two of you did a fine job. I couldn't watch you, for once, so you must tell
me all about it.'
'LATER,' the tortoise signalled. Then she sneezed.
The professor looked concerned. 'You haven't caught cold, have you?'
'YOU BET I HAVE!' replied Cassiopeia.
'You must have gone too close to the men in grey,' said the professor.
'I expect you're very tired, too. We can talk later. Better go off and have
a good sleep first.'
'THANKS,' came the answer.
Cassiopeia limped off and picked herself a nice, dark, quiet corner.
She tucked her head and legs in, and very slowly, in letters visible only to
those who have read this story, her shell spelled out two words:
THE END
AUTHOR'S POSTSCRIPT
Many of my readers may have questions they'd like to ask. If so, I'm
afraid I can't help them. The fact is, I wrote this story down from memory,
just as it was told me. I never met Momo or any of her friends, nor do I
know what became of them or how they are today. As for the city where they
lived, I can only guess which one it was. The most I can tell you is this.
One night in a train, while I was on a long journey (as I still am), I
found myself sitting opposite a remarkable fellow passenger -- remarkable in
that I found it quite impossible to tell his age. At first I put him down as
an old man, but I soon saw that I must have been mistaken, because he
suddenly seemed very young - though that impression, too, soon proved to be
false.
At any rate, it was he who told me the story during our long night's
journey together.
Neither of us spoke for some moments after he had finished. Then my
mysterious acquaintance made a remark which I feel bound to put on record.
'I've described all these events,' he said, 'as if they'd already happened.
I might just as well have described them as if they still lay in the future.
To me, there's very little difference.'
He must have left the train at the next station, because I noticed
after a while that I was alone.
I've never bumped into him again, unfortunately. If by any chance I do,
though, I shall have plenty of questions to ask him myself.