Thief of Time

glass house again, stretching away as a pale outline overlaid onto the city.
    “Clock,” he said thickly.
    “Run, boy, run!” shouted Lu-Tze. “And don’t stop for anything.”
    Lobsang plunged forward and found it hard. Time moved aside for him, sluggishly at first, as his legs pumped; with every step he pushed himself faster and faster, the landscape changing colors again as the world slowed even further.
    There was another stitch in time, the sweeper had said. Another valley, even closer to the null point. Insofar as he could think at all, Lobsang hoped he reached it soon. His body felt as though it would fly apart; he could feel his bones creaking.
    The glow ahead was halfway to the iron-heavy clouds now, but he’d reached a crossroads and he could see it rising from a house halfway down the street.
    He turned to look for the sweeper, and saw the man yards behind him, mouth open, a statue falling forward.
    Lobsang turned, concentrated, let time speed up.
    He reached Lu-Tze and caught him before he hit the ground. There was blood coming from the old man’s ears.
    “I can’t do it, lad,” the sweeper mumbled. “Get on! Get on!”

“I can do it! It’s like running downhill!”
    “Not for me it ain’t!”
    “I can’t just leave you here like this!”
    “Save us from heroes! Get that bloody clock!”
    Lobsang hesitated. The downstroke was already emerging from the clouds, a drifting, glowing spike.
    He ran. The lightning was falling toward a shop, a few buildings away. He could see a big clock hanging over its window.
    He pushed against the flow of time ever further, and it yielded. But the lightning had reached the iron pole atop the building.
    The window was closer than the door. He lowered his head and jumped through it, the glass shattering around him and then freezing in midair, clocks pinwheeling off the display and stopping as if caught in invisible amber.
    There was another door ahead of him. He grabbed the knob and pulled, feeling the terrible resistance of a slab of wood urged to move at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
    It was barely open a few inches when he saw, beyond, the slow ooze of lightning down the rod and into the heart of the big clock.
    The clock struck one.
    Time stopped.
    Ti—
    Mr. Soak, the dairyman, was washing bottles at the sink when the air dimmed and the water solidified.
    He stared at it for a moment and then, with the manner of a man trying an experiment, held the bottle over the stone floor and let it go.
    It remained hanging in the air.
    “Damn it,” he said. “Another idiot with a clock, eh?”
    What he did then was not usual dairy practice. He walked into the center of the room and made a few passes in the air with his hands.
    The air brightened. The water splashed. The bottle smashed—although, when Ronnie turned around and waved a hand at it, the glass slivers ran together again.
    Then Ronnie Soak sighed and went into the cream settling room. Large wide bowls stretched away into the distance and, if Ronnie had ever allowed another to notice this, the distance contained far more distance than is usually found in a normal building.
    “Show me,” he said.
    The surface of the nearest bowl of milk became a mirror, and then began to show pictures…
    Ronnie went back into the dairy, took his peaked cap off its hook by the door, and crossed the courtyard to the stable. The sky overhead was a sullen, unmoving gray as he emerged leading his horse.
    It was black, glistening with health, and there was this about it that was odd: it shone as though it was illuminated by a red light. Redness spangled off its shoulders and flanks, even under the grayness.
    And even when it was harnessed to the cart it didn’t look like any kind of horse that should be hitched to any kind of wagon, but people never noticed this and, again, Ronnie took care to make sure that they didn’t.
    The cart gleamed with white paint, picked out here and there with a fresh green. The wording on the side declared proudly:

    RONALD SOAK, H YGENIC D AIRYMAN.
    E STABLISHED

    Perhaps it was odd that people never said, “Established when , exactly?” and, if they ever had, the answer would have had to be quite complicated.
    Ronnie opened the gates to the yard and, milk crates rattling, set out into the timeless moment. It was terrible, he thought, the way things conspired against the small businessman.

    Lobsang Ludd awoke to a little clicking, spinning sound.
    He was in darkness, but