The Timesaving Bank’s emergency conference about Momo

The Timesaving Bank’s emergency conference about Momo exposes a crisis inside the Men in Gray’s secret campaign to take people’s time: an operation intended to eliminate a threat has cost them more than a human lifetime, and the directors cannot agree whether thrift or a costly all-out response offers greater safety. Their meeting moves from accounting to panic, then toward a new strategy based on human accomplices.

Causes and Background

The conference takes place within a system built on a predatory understanding of time. The Men in Gray recognize that clock time does not describe how an hour is experienced, yet they treat time as a resource to seize and accumulate. They have quietly installed themselves in the city, identify people who could advance their plans, and wait for opportunities to entrap them. Concealment is essential: their influence grows while the inhabitants remain unaware of its source.

Their methods work by turning the language of efficiency into private conviction. When a gray agent recruits Mr Figaro, he recommends shorter customer appointments, less time with his mother, putting her in a home, selling his budgerigar, seeing Miss Daria less often, and abandoning reading, singing, and conversation with friends. Mr Figaro adopts these measures believing the resolutions are his own. His business becomes tightly timed: he hires two assistants, watches them closely, and displays a notice declaring that saved time will be doubled. Yet he becomes irritable, his days seem to shrink, and the time he saves never becomes time he can use. As the same practice spreads through the city, the conference’s central contradiction is already visible: the Bank’s pursuit of accumulated time brings ordinary people less life to enjoy.

The Cost of the Manhunt

The emergency meeting is convened at the Timesaving Bank’s headquarters, a gray-lit maze of passages and corridors. News of the extraordinary general meeting passes through the building in anxious whispers. In the boardroom, the directors sit along a seemingly endless table, each with a steel-gray briefcase and small gray cigar. They have removed their bowler hats; every head is bald and gray. Their dejection gives the gathering the air of an institution confronting a danger it cannot resolve by routine procedure.

The chairman reports that every available agent was assigned to hunt Momo. The operation lasted six hours, thirteen minutes, and eight seconds. Its cost includes both the time the agents could not spend gathering time and the time they themselves expended. The Bank’s calculations put the resulting deficit at 3,738,259,114 seconds, which the chairman identifies as more than a human lifetime. He points to a huge steel door fitted with combination locks and other safety devices as he warns that the Bank’s reserves are not inexhaustible. The hunt has failed, he says in effect, and he urges the directors to prevent a recurrence of such waste.

The loss makes the Bank’s governing principle collide with its immediate need for security. The chairman’s proposed response is restraint: no more operations that consume time without producing a result. But the failed pursuit has not made Momo harmless, and the meeting cannot settle into the economy he recommends.

Disagreement Over Momo and Professor Hora

A second director tries to calm the board. He argues that the Bank’s reserves are so vast that even a much greater loss would not endanger it. In his view, the manhunt did achieve its purpose because Momo has disappeared beyond the borders of time. He treats that escape as a reason to congratulate themselves rather than fear what may follow.

A third speaker rejects this reassurance. Momo, he insists, is unlike an ordinary child and has powers that could threaten the Men in Gray and their activities. Her absence is no guarantee of safety: she may return, and the directors should not rest until she is in their power. This argument shifts the discussion from the cost of the last operation to the possibility that the threat remains active.

A fourth director identifies what he considers the decisive complication. He gives the odds against anyone crossing the borders of time alive and unaided as forty-two million to one, then reasons that someone must have helped Momo escape. He names Professor Hora. The name makes many of the directors flinch; some leap up, shouting and gesturing. The speaker acknowledges how improper its mention seems to them, but argues that they must face the possibility that Professor Hora aided Momo for reasons hostile to the Bank. If he can send her back and equip her against them, the directors may have to risk everything they possess. In this argument, the prospect of preserving their resources by avoiding further expense becomes inseparable from the danger that excessive thrift could destroy them.

From Panic to a Proposed Strategy

The directors’ agitation increases. A fifth speaker climbs onto his chair and demands practical instructions, objecting that warnings about possible dangers do not tell the board what to do. The prospect of facing an unknown power leaves the meeting in uproar: directors shout, drum their fists on the table, or bow their heads. The scene reverses the order the Bank tries to impose on time. Its leaders, who make efficiency and calculation instruments of control, cannot calmly calculate their way through a danger whose shape they do not know.

A sixth speaker eventually restores enough order to make a proposal. He argues that the Men in Gray need not fight Momo personally. They are poorly equipped for such a confrontation, as the fate of their late employee, Agent No. BLW/553/c, has shown. Instead, he proposes drawing on the Bank’s many human accomplices and using them discreetly to deal with Momo. He presents this course as economical, safe, and effective. The meeting therefore turns from debating whether the failed hunt was too costly to considering a means of acting without the Men in Gray intervening in person. The account establishes this as a proposal, not as a completed operation.

Significance

The conference makes the Bank’s calculation of time visible as both an accounting system and a source of institutional anxiety. Its directors can assign an exact number to the failed hunt, but that precision does not tell them whether Momo has truly been removed as a danger, whether Professor Hora is involved, or what response will protect them. Their argument exposes the weakness beneath their confidence: the institution that treats time as a controllable reserve must contemplate spending everything when its power is threatened.

The episode also places the Bank’s private strategy against the wider transformation it has helped normalize. Across the city, time-saving habits have shortened work and personal encounters, displaced attention from family and friendship, and made even leisure answer to efficiency. Advertising promises a better future, while the actual timesavers appear tired and unfriendly; old buildings give way to identical developments, and life grows poorer and more monotonous. Against the maxim that people gain by saving time stands the story’s principle that time is life, and that people possess less as they save more. The directors’ conference translates that contradiction into institutional terms: the Bank counts an immense loss in seconds while struggling to recognize what its pursuit of those seconds has made vulnerable.