‘Yeah, but …’ said Tom, and went on. ‘The last thing you said didn’t work out. It’s okay to say the old people are from another planet, but what about Grandpa and Grandma? We’ve known them all our lives. Are you saying that they’re aliens, too?’

Doug’s face turned red. He hadn’t quite worked this part out, and here was his brother – his second–in–command, his junior officer – questioning his theory.

‘And,’ Tom went on, ‘what do we have new in the way of action, Doug? We can’t just sit here. What do we do next?’

Doug swallowed hard. Before he had a chance to speak, Tom, now that everybody was looking at him, said slowly, ‘The only thing that comes to mind right now is maybe we stop the courthouse clock. You can hear that darned thing ticking all over town. Bong! Midnight! Whang! Get outta bed! Boom! Jump into bed! Up down, up down, over and over.’

Ohmigosh, thought Douglas. I saw it last night. The clock! Why in heck didn’t I say so first?

Tom picked his nose calmly. ‘Why don’t we just lambaste that darn old clock – kill it dead! Then we can do whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it. Okay?’

Everyone stared at Tom. Then they began to cheer and yell, even Douglas, trying to forget it was his younger brother, not himself, who was saving the day.

‘Tom!’ they all shouted. ‘Good old Tom!’

‘Ain’t nothin’,’ said Tom. He looked to his brother. ‘When do we kill the blasted thing?’

Douglas bleated, his tongue frozen. The soldiers stared, waiting.

‘Tonight?’ said Tom.

‘I was just going to say that!’ Douglas cried.

Chapter Twenty-Three

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The courthouse clock somehow knew they were coming to kill it.

It loomed high above the town square with its great marble façade and sun–blazed face, a frozen avalanche, waiting to bury the assassins. Simultaneously, it allowed the leaders of its religion and philosophy, the ancient gray–haired messengers of Time and dissolution, to pass through the thundering bronze doors below.

Douglas, watching the soldiery of death and mummification slip calmly through the dark portals, felt a stir of panic. There, in the shellac–smelling, paper–rustling rooms of Town Hall, the Board of Education slyly unmade destinies, pared calendars, devoured Saturdays in torrents of homework, instigated reprimands, tortures, and criminalities. Their dead hands pulled streets straighter, loosed rivers of asphalt over soft dirt to make roads harder, more confining, so that open country and freedom were pushed further and further away, so that one day, years from now, green hills would be a distant echo, so far off that it would take a lifetime of travel to reach the edge of the city and peer out at one lone small forest of dying trees.