Hora entrusts Momo with the plan to save time

Professor Hora’s plan makes Momo the only person able to act during a world-stopping hour, and gives her a task whose success is necessary for time and life to begin again. He reveals that the Men in Gray’s theft is not merely a loss of leisure: they turn stolen human time into the substance that sustains them, and now threaten to contaminate all time distributed to the world. Momo agrees to carry out the plan despite its immense risks; at this point, the outcome remains uncertain.

The Crisis Behind the Plan

The scheme answers a danger built gradually into the city. Time is presented not simply as what clocks and calendars measure, but as life itself, residing in the human heart. The Men in Gray understand its value and have secretly established themselves in the city, identifying people they can exploit and waiting for the right moment to influence them. Their methods reach into ordinary routines rather than appearing as an open conquest.

Mr Figaro’s barber shop shows how that influence takes hold. An agent advises him to shorten customer appointments, end conversations, reduce visits to his mother, send her to an inexpensive old folks’ home, sell his budgerigar, see Miss Daria less often, and give up reading, singing, and time with friends. Figaro adopts these measures believing they are his own decisions. He hires assistants, watches them closely, and organizes the shop around a notice promising that saved time will be doubled. Yet the time he saves never becomes time he can use: his days seem to shrink, and the more he feels them slipping away, the more grimly he tries to save time.

The same pressure spreads through the city. Advertising promotes timesaving devices and promises a better life to come, while notices demand efficiency in workplaces, shops, schools, and kindergartens. The built environment changes too: old buildings give way to identical housing blocks, and straight, monotonous streets extend across the outskirts. The people who join the movement may earn more and dress better, but they look tired and sour; they have less room for conversation, celebration, silence, or enjoyment of work. The children feel the loss especially keenly. This history explains why Professor Hora’s warning concerns more than recovering spare minutes: a society that treats time as a resource to accumulate is already losing the life those minutes contain.

What the Men in Gray Do With Stolen Time

Professor Hora distinguishes between the time he allots to people and the Men in Gray’s attempt to steal it. They cannot intercept his distribution directly, but they can poison the time people receive. He explains that each person has a place in the heart where hour-lilies grow. When the Men in Gray gain a foothold there, they steal more of those flowers. The stolen blossoms neither die nor live normally: separated from their rightful owners, they strive to return to them.

The flowers are kept frozen in a vast underground store, preserved until they are hard as glass. The Men in Gray take their petals, dry them until they turn gray, and roll them into cigars. Even then, the petals retain traces of life, which harms the Men in Gray; burning and smoking them converts that living time into dead time, on which the Men in Gray depend. Their cigars are thus both a visible sign of their dependence and the means by which stolen time is made to sustain them.

The hidden store gives the immediate crisis its scale. The Men in Gray are building a wall of dead time around Professor Hora’s house. If smoke closes off the open sky above it, the time he sends to people will be contaminated by the time-thieves’ poison. Professor Hora warns that this would make people ill and could turn them into creatures like the Men in Gray. His enemies seek to force his hand by threatening the world, not by gaining access to him personally.

The Assignment and Its Constraints

Professor Hora says that he has waited for people to rid the world of the Men in Gray, since people brought them into existence, but can wait no longer. He cannot act alone and asks Momo to help. She accepts, quietly and resolutely, after the possibility of the Tortoise’s company gives her some comfort. Professor Hora makes clear that the choice carries an incalculable risk: the world might begin to live again, or stand still forever.

The plan depends on Professor Hora’s sleeplessness. If he were to doze, time would stop and the world would come to a halt. With no new time to steal, the Men in Gray could survive for a while on their reserves, but would eventually dissolve when those reserves were exhausted. However, stopping time would also prevent Professor Hora from waking, leaving the world motionless indefinitely. He can give Momo—and only Momo—one hour-lily, because only one blooms at a time. That flower would give her an hour of grace while the rest of the world stood still.

That hour cannot be spent simply waking Professor Hora. The Men in Gray have reserves enough to outlast it, and stopping the supply of cigars would alert them that time had stopped. They would lift the siege and head for their secret store. Momo must follow them and prevent them from reaching it; when their cigars are gone, the Men in Gray will be gone as well. Then she must release every stolen minute within the same hour. Only when people have their time back can Professor Hora wake and the world resume its life.

Stakes and Significance

The assignment links two forms of recovery: ending the Men in Gray’s existence and returning stolen time to its owners. Destroying their supply alone would not complete the rescue. The world’s return depends on Momo releasing what has been hoarded, so the plan treats restoration—not merely defeat—as essential. Its strict one-hour limit makes the task a test of sequence as well as courage: Momo must pursue the Men in Gray, stop them reaching the store, and return the stolen minutes before her grace expires.

Professor Hora tells Momo that she will be taking a risk on which the world’s future depends. Cassiopeia chooses to accompany her, spelling out that someone must look after Momo. The episode therefore ends not with the danger resolved but with Momo’s commitment and the beginning of a difficult undertaking. Her willingness to act gives Professor Hora the help he needs, while the precise conditions he lays out make clear how much remains to be done.