Gray Cigars of Stolen Hour-Lilies

The Gray Cigars of Stolen Hour-Lilies sustain the Men in Gray by converting stolen human time into something they can smoke. They are at once a practical necessity and the material trace of the Men in Gray’s hidden system: each cigar contains time taken from a person, altered until it can keep its thieves alive. When that supply is cut off, the object’s role reverses. The cigars that had prolonged the Men in Gray’s existence become the measure of how close each is to vanishing.

Nature and Origin

The cigars are made from hour-lily petals stolen from human hearts. Professor Hora explains that the Men in Gray cannot intercept the time he distributes to people, but they can poison it. Each person has a place like the hour-lily garden because each has a heart; when the Men in Gray gain a foothold there, they steal more of that person’s hour-lilies. The flowers cannot die after being taken, but neither can they live while separated from their rightful owner. Their continuing pull toward that owner makes the theft a rupture rather than a simple transfer.

The Men in Gray preserve the stolen blossoms by freezing them until they are hard as glass goblets in a vast underground cold store. They then remove the petals and let them wither until they are dry and gray, rolling the dried petals into cigars. The petals retain traces of life, but living time harms the Men in Gray. Burning and smoking the petals finally converts that time into dead smoke, which is what keeps the smokers alive. The cigar is thus the last stage in a process that takes living time from a human heart, suspends it in storage, and destroys its living quality for the benefit of its thieves.

Time-Saving and Everyday Discipline

The cigars belong to a broader campaign that makes time theft appear to be a reasonable personal choice. The Men in Gray understand time’s value and secretly enter the city’s inhabitants’ lives, arranging to entrap people at carefully chosen moments. Their recruitment of Mr Figaro shows how this conversion of life into savings reaches ordinary work. The gray visitor urges him to limit each customer’s appointment to fifteen minutes rather than half an hour, avoid conversation, and measure his apprentice’s work by an accurate clock. The pressure to save time is presented as a program of efficiency, but its proposed economies also include reducing visits to his mother, placing her in an inexpensive old people’s home, selling his budgerigar, and abandoning music, reading, and friendships.

After the visitor is gone, Mr Figaro forgets him but retains the resolution, believing it to be his own. He begins serving customers in twenty minutes, imposes the same treatment on all of them, hires two assistants, and watches their work closely. A notice in the barbershop declares, “TIME SAVED IS TIME DOUBLED!” He also sends Miss Daria a brief note ending their meetings and visits his mother only once a month. These details show how the Men in Gray’s enterprise works beyond the visible cigar: the promise of saved time reorganizes work and private life, while concealing what is being lost. The account makes the relation between the two operations clear: the Men in Gray turn stolen time into the substance of their cigars, while the citizens’ pursuit of time-saving steadily impoverishes the lives from which that time is taken. The children feel the loss especially sharply because adults no longer have time for them; the more people save, the less they have.

Dependence and the Siege

Professor Hora reveals that the cigars are not merely a source of comfort or habit. The Men in Gray cannot exist without them. Their dependence also gives the smoke a larger consequence: the wall they are building around the House of Nowhere is made of dead time. While open sky remains above the house, Professor Hora can still send people their time in good condition. If the smoke closes over it, the hours he sends will be contaminated by the time-thieves’ poison and make people ill. The cigar’s waste product therefore extends the harm beyond the individual flowers from which it was made and threatens the supply of healthy time to others.

When the world comes to a standstill, the Men in Gray learn that their cars have stopped, no time is available, and their supplies have been cut off. Their first fear is practical and immediate: what will happen when the cigars already in their possession are finished? They compare how many minutes remain in their respective cigars, and a rush for the exit turns into a struggle over what remains. Men who lose their cigars lose their strength; they grow transparent and vanish. The scene exposes the fragility beneath their planned control of other people’s time. Their power depends on a supply they do not create and cannot replace once time has ceased to flow.

The Final Cigars

During their flight through the motionless city, the remaining Men in Gray must run while keeping their cigars clenched in their mouths. Some drop them and vanish before they can retrieve them. Others, desperate as their own supplies dwindle, snatch cigars from their companions. Those with reserves conceal them, while the have-nots attack in an effort to seize them; in the ensuing struggles, cigars spill onto the road and are trampled. The object that once supported a coordinated system of theft now drives the Men in Gray into competition with one another. Their dwindling supply turns the group’s dependence into mutual danger.

At the final confrontation, one Man in Gray knocks another’s cigar from his mouth during a struggle over the hour-lily Momo carries; the second vanishes. The last Man in Gray advances with only a tiny cigar butt, which falls and rolls beyond his reach. He tries to retrieve it, then acknowledges that it is over and vanishes too. The ending completes the cigar’s double function: it has sustained the Men in Gray only by consuming stolen time, and once its remaining life is inaccessible, it cannot save them. Their disappearance follows not from a defeat in ordinary combat, but from the failure of the object on which their continued existence depends.