Time Stops and the Men in Gray Flee to the Time Warehouse is the turning point in which Professor Hora’s stoppage of time reverses the pursuit: the Men in Gray, who had hunted Momo, become fugitives, while she alone can move through the frozen city after them. The timequake makes their dependence on stolen time visible, and sets Momo on the route to the Time Warehouse with the hour-lily that has appeared in her hand.

Background: A city trained to hurry

The crisis follows a transformation that has reached beyond individual habits. More and more people have taken to saving time, encouraged by daily advertisements for timesaving gadgets and slogans promising that the future belongs to timesavers. Yet the promised freedom has not arrived. The better-paid timesavers look tired and sour; they treat even leisure as something to optimize, avoid silence, and have no time to listen to one another. Old buildings give way to identical developments, whose straight streets and programmed lives extend the same uniformity across the city. The more time people save, the poorer and more monotonous their lives become.

Against this accelerating social order, the stillness that follows is not merely a pause in activity. It reveals what the Men in Gray’s system has concealed: the time they have stolen is the condition on which their own existence depends. When Professor Hora opens the way for time to stop, the agents lose the steady supply on which their lives have relied. Their flight is therefore both an immediate response to danger and the exposure of a weakness built into their power.

The timequake and the flower

After opening the little door marked with Professor Hora’s name, Momo runs along the statue-lined corridor and exerts all her strength to open the heavy bronze front door. She returns to the great hall with Cassiopeia in her arms and waits. The change arrives as a jolt that does not shake the ground: a timequake, accompanied by a sound like a sigh from the depths of the ages. Then it is over.

The clocks stop ticking, whirring, and chiming. Pendulums hang at odd angles, and a silence deeper than any that has reigned before fills the world. Time itself stands still. Momo discovers that she is holding an hour-lily of exceptional size and beauty, though she did not feel anyone place it in her hand. Its sudden appearance gives her a concrete sign of the time that remains available to her, even as everything around her has been arrested.

She can still move, but the ordinary world has become immovable. The remains of breakfast are fixed in place: a chair is hard as marble, the cup will not move, and even the chocolate, honey, and crumbs are stuck fast. The contrast establishes the strange terms of the event. Momo remains able to act, while the objects and people whose movement normally structures a day are caught in the instant when time stopped.

The Men in Gray break and flee

Inside Nowhere House, the Men in Gray hear that their agents’ cars have stopped and that everything in the city is at a standstill. Their supplies have been cut off; one of them cries that Professor Hora has switched time off. The news converts their confidence into panic. They argue that they must lift the siege and reach the time store, but also realize they have no cars with which to get there. Their immediate measure of survival is the cigars they are smoking: one estimates that his will last twenty-seven minutes, another forty-eight.

The struggle for the small door exposes the agents’ desperation physically. They shove, scuffle, punch, knock off one another’s hats, and snatch cigars from one another’s mouths. When a Man in Gray loses his cigar, he seems to lose his strength as well. He stands with arms outstretched and a frightened, pleading expression, grows increasingly transparent, and vanishes without leaving even his hat behind. The rush becomes a violent competition for the remaining source of their lives, and the group destroys itself from within even as it tries to escape.

Three Men in Gray finally make it through the little door and hurry down the passage. Momo follows with Cassiopeia under one arm and the hour-lily clenched in her free hand; keeping the fugitives in sight is now essential. Outside, the three have reached the mouth of Never Lane, where other smoke-wreathed agents are gathered. As soon as they see the fugitives, they run too, and the flight spreads until the whole force streams toward the city. The usual rule of haste no longer applies when time is standing still.

The reverse chase through the frozen city

The pursuit reverses the earlier relation between hunter and hunted. Countless Men in Gray flee ahead, while Momo follows discreetly behind the stragglers, a girl carrying a flower with a tortoise under her arm. The city through which they run has become an inventory of arrested gestures: cars clog the roads, exhaust fumes are solidified, and drivers remain fixed at their wheels. Cyclists hold their signals at intersections; traffic policemen are caught waving cars onward; pigeons hang above a square, an aeroplane is motionless in the sky, and leaves remain suspended in mid-fall. Even a dog is frozen in the act of cocking its leg against a lamppost.

The stillness makes the city difficult as well as uncanny. Crowded streets become obstacles that Momo must thread through, and even a feather suspended in midair could hurt her if she ran into it. Her small, thin build helps her navigate the motionless pedestrians, but she still has to watch her step. The flower offers a measure of reassurance: when she anxiously checks it, it has only just come into full bloom, so she knows there is no need to worry yet.

The pursuit also tests her resolve by diverting her attention. In a side street she catches sight of Beppo Roadsweeper and runs toward him, overjoyed to find him after searching everywhere. The encounter interrupts her immediate effort to follow the fugitives; when she loses sight of them, she stops and looks to Cassiopeia for direction. The tortoise signals her to keep going and promises, through its message, that she will find them. Trusting that guidance, Momo runs on and turns left or right as the fancy takes her.

She reaches the vast housing development on the city’s northern outskirts, where identical buildings and ruler-straight streets make the landscape feel like a maze despite its rigid regularity. The uniformity threatens to make her feel she is running in place. Just as she is close to losing hope, she sees a Man in Gray disappear around a corner: limping, dressed in tatters, without his bowler hat or briefcase, and still holding a smouldering cigar stub in his mouth. The pursuit continues toward the time store, with Momo’s hour-lily, Cassiopeia’s guidance, and the fugitives’ failing supply shaping what can happen next.