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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 neighbor 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 and turned out the lights and went into the parlor behind the counter. It had been a long day and she moved slowly, but she knew there was something that must be done. Something that could not wait.
    There was a grandfather clock in the corner of the parlor. She went over to it and 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 onforever 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 gray 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 shop at the front. As she reached down and opened 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 recognized the truck that was parked on the other side of the road. The battered and filthy scrap truck that went up and down the road every day. The truck driven by Johnston, the Resisters' mortal enemy.
    Mary slipped back behind the counter and into the parlor, where she 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, she put her hand 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. She hoped it wasn't too late.

D r. Diamond came back into the room 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 asked.
    “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 p.m., I think.” An idea 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, 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?”
    “Precisely!” the doctor cried. “But not enough for what?”
    “No,” Owen said, sure now that Dr. Diamond would