she?” Cati said.
“Yes.” Dr Diamond ruffled Cati’s hair fondly.
Owen had never thought about Cati having a mother before. He wondered where she was and what had happened to her. But now was not the time to ask. He told Dr Diamond what had been scratched in the table.
“City of Time?” Dr Diamond said sharply. “Are you sure it said City of Time? Those words exactly?”
“Yes.”
Dr Diamond got up and began to pace up and down. “City of Time and not enough time,” he repeated to himself. “Obviously, he didn’t have enough strength to spell out exactly what he meant. It is a long time since I heard the City mentioned. And I wonder why we need a tempod? Wait here…”
The scientist turned away and, with bewildering speed, disappeared through the door at the back of the Skyward which led into his private quarters.
“What do we do now?” Owen said, staring after him.
“Don’t know,” Cati said. “It feels late. Are you going home?”
“No.”
Cati sniffed the air. “You know what?”
“What?”
“You think Dr Diamond would mind if we checked the cake?”
“Just in case it burns?”
“Just in case it burns.”
Across the fields someone else had noticed it was getting late. Mary White’s little thatched shop was just down the road from Owen’s house. Mary was a good friend and neighbour to Owen and his mother. Often, when Owen did not have enough money for groceries, Mary had given him food, saying he could pay later. She was much older than anyone suspected, and much wiser, and could see things that others couldn’t.
She had stood behind the counter of her shop all day and now she locked the door, turned out the lights and went into the parlour behind the counter. It had been a long day and Mary moved slowly, but there was something that must be done. Something that could not wait.
A grandfather clock stood in the corner of the parlour. Mary opened the glass door below the clock face. A brass pendulum hung there, apparently unmoving. But if you looked deep into the case you could see that it was in fact swinging, making a tiny motion, almost a tremble. Not quite still, but almost.
All year, Mary had watched the pendulum get slower and slower. She stood there for a long time looking at it. Looking beyond it, for if you gazed closely, you could see that there was no back to the case; instead, there was a velvet blackness studded with pinpricks of light. It was like looking into deep space, the blackness going on for ever and ever, as though the grandfather clock contained all of eternity.
Mary closed the glass door gently and locked it, removing the long, thin key. She went to the mirror on the wall beside the door and twisted a length of her grey hair around her fingers, using the key to fix it in position. It looked like an ornate hairpin, perfectly hidden.
She bolted the back door, took her coat from the peg and went out through the front of the shop. As she reached down to unlock the shop door she looked through the glass panel. She stopped and the hand that held the door key trembled. She quickly relocked the door. It was dark outside, but she recognised the lorry that was parked on the other side of the road. The battered and filthy scrap lorry that went up and down the road every day. The lorry driven by Johnston, the Resisters’ mortal enemy.
Mary slipped back into the parlour and sat down heavily on the sofa. She had no idea that things were so bad. Never before would Johnston have had the nerve to post a guard on her front door. Without thinking, her hand went to the little key that she had concealed in her hair. There was something she had to do, something she had promised herself she would do a long time ago. Mary hoped it wasn’t too late.
Dr Diamond came back as Owen and Cati were helping themselves to cake. “Not enough time,” he muttered to himself. “What did he mean? Is it too late? Is that why the Resisters won’t wake?”
“What is a tempod?” Cati asked, thinking about the final odd word of her father’s message.
“A tempod is a strange thing, not much understood,” Dr Diamond said. “It looks like a hollow rock, by all accounts, but it is capable of storing a large quantity of time.”
“Speaking of time, what time is it?” Owen said.
“That is an interesting question,” Dr Diamond said, turning to look at him.
“No,” Owen groaned, “I meant is it morning or the middle of the night? I can’t tell down here.”
“Oh,” Dr Diamond said. “About eleven o’clock, I think.” A thought struck him and he strode to his blackboard. He swiftly wrote out a long sum with lots of fractions, looked at it, then seized the duster and wiped it out.
“No good.” He sat down, looking glum. “I can’t figure out why he left that message in particular. Not enough time. What does it mean?”
“What about…” Owen said slowly, almost afraid to be laughed at. “What if he just meant that there wasn’t enough time?”
“That is precisely what it does mean,” the doctor cried. “But not enough time for what?”
“No,” Owen said, sure now that Dr Diamond would laugh out loud. “What if it meant that there really wasn’t enough time. I mean not enough to go around. Say the world or universe, or whatever, is filled with time, but that it has run short or something, so that there just isn’t enough of it…” He ground lamely to a halt. Dr Diamond was staring at him. “It’s just a theory,” Owen said. “Probably pretty stupid.”
“A theory?” Dr Diamond said, finding his voice. “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Owen! That was exactly what the message meant. It makes sense now. That is why the clocks are all slowing down. That was why your friend’s face changed in the playground, although fortunately the change wasn’t permanent. The geese turned to dust. There isn’t enough time. And that’s why he told us about the City.”
“What is this City of Time?” Cati asked.
“It is called Hadima in the old books,” Dr Diamond said. “Years ago there was a lot of coming and going between the Workhouse and Hadima. There used to be an entrance…”
Cati noticed a strange expression on Dr Diamond’s face. His eyes fell on Owen and stayed there, as if lost in a dream.
“The City of Time, Dr Diamond,” Owen reminded him gently.
“Oh yes. Well, to cut it short, it is a trading city, you might say; a city with its roots stretching back in the past and far into the future.”
“What does it trade?”
“Time,” Dr Diamond
