Mr. Vandermeer wasn’t watching me—he was watching a butler exit the kitchen with several silver platters.

  “Dinner is served,” he said, and he went to the dining table, for the first time turning his back on me.

  I knew this might be the only chance I had, and so I took it without thinking. Instead of following him into the dining room, I hurried up the polished mahogany stairs to the second floor and swung the attic door wide. If I hesitated, I knew I would lose my nerve, so I bounded up the attic steps into that warm current of air blowing down on me, until, in the darkness, I banged into a second door at the top of the steps. Air whistled beneath it. With my heart pounding in my ears, I turned the knob and pushed hard against the door. It flung open and I fell… onto dirt. Not the musty, dusty dirt that coats the floors of most attics, but hard-packed earth. I quickly got up to get my bearings, and what I saw around me, to this day I have no way to explain.

  I was on an unpaved street. To the left and right of me, shoddy-looking concrete apartment buildings rose five stories into the air. Clotheslines crisscrossed like cobwebs between them, across a narrow dirt alley. People on bicycles bumped past me on the uneven alley, and I heard voices, dozens of voices, all babbling in too many different languages to distinguish one from the other.

  Mr. Vandermeer’s attic wasn’t an attic at all. It was a ghetto.

  Two strong hands gripped firmly onto my shoulders from behind. They carried with them a chill as potent as an electric shock. I froze in place.

  “You are a meddlesome girl,” said Mr. Vandermeer, with a furious, frustrated sigh.

  I squirmed out of his grip and tried to get past him, down the attic steps. “I want to go now,” was all I could say. “Please, can I go now?”

  But Mr. Vandermeer stood in my way. “No. You wanted to see what was in my attic, and now you will see what’s in my attic. You’ll see all of it. And maybe then you’ll understand.”

  He turned me around to face the street again. This time I dared to look up, and saw dense, billowing clouds blowing past. Above those clouds, through a mile-high haze, I could see the heavy slanted beams of the attic roof!

  I look to the windblown clouds, and the great beams beyond…

  That diary entry wasn’t just being poetic—that boy was writing exactly what he saw!

  The sun shone through a gap in the clouds, but I realized it wasn’t the sun at all. It was a single massive lightbulb, dangling from a cord, a mile in the sky.

  “You’ve shrunken us!” I shouted. “You’ve shrunken all these people!” But when I looked behind us, I could see that the attic door wasn’t towering over our heads; it was exactly the same size as when I’d stumbled through it.

  “I assure you that no one’s been shrunken,” explained Mr. Vandermeer. “I don’t downsize people.”

  “Then how—”

  “You will find, Lien, that space can be made in ways you’ve never even imagined.”

  And then he led me down the narrow street.

  We strode through row after row of identical apartment buildings. As I looked into the windows, I could see whole families. Others lingered in entryways, as if they were overflowing from the crowded apartments—and as Mr. Vandermeer passed, they all lowered their heads in a show of respect. Or fear.

  “Don’t be fooled by appearances,” Mr. Vandermeer said. “These people want to be here. They want to live this way. Some are refugees from warring nations. Others left their homelands to escape starvation and poverty. But here, everyone works, and no one starves.”

  We came out of the shadows of the tenement buildings to an open field, where dozens of workers planted and harvested crops. It was then that I began to hear the churning noise—a distant mechanical grinding that shook the ground.

  “On the outside, my attic is only thirty-four feet across,” explained Mr. Vandermeer, “but on the inside it extends for more than a mile in all directions. That’s plenty of land for building, for planting, and for manufacturing.”

  He pointed across the field to the left. “My clothing factory,” he said. “I have one hundred and fifty workers putting in an honest day’s labor there.”

  I wondered how many hours made labor honest.

  He turned and pointed to a complex to his right that spewed out white smoke from a high smokestack. “Concrete and steel factories, for building,” he explained. “I employ three hundred and twenty-nine there.”

  I was still reeling from the sheer size of Mr. Vandermeer’s attic space, but I tried not to show how disoriented and confused I was. “I guess you really are rich,” I said. “To be able to pay so many people.”

  He turned to me as if I had said something in a language he didn’t understand. “Pay?” he said. “There’s no need for payment here. This is a perfect society, without money. If the people do their work properly, then I make sure they get what they need.”

  I felt that electric chill run through me again. “In other words… it’s slave labor.”

  Mr. Vandermeer tossed back his head and gave his superior laugh again. “Lien, you are so naive.”

  Straight ahead of us, directly beneath the mile-high dangling incandescent sun, was another factory. It was from there that the deep mechanical grinding sound came. It must have been hot, for the air around it shimmered and rippled in heat waves, like a road in the desert.

  “What’s that place?” I asked.

  Mr. Vandermeer hesitated, as if he really didn’t want to tell me. But finally he said, “That is the space-maker.”

  As we drew closer, it became clear how very large this factory was, and then I realized it wasn’t quite a factory. It was a single, open-air machine, full of gnashing gears and powerful pistons pumping up and down in an unrelenting rhythm. It was a beast of a machine that counted out time in perfectly metered beats.

  On the fringe of this great machine, new gears, levers, and pistons were being installed, frantically welded together by workers, as if their lives depended on getting the job done.

  “This is the most important part of our little village,” said Mr. Vandermeer, as he led me deep into the superstructure of the clocklike mechanism. Around us, gears towered over our heads, and heavy springs coiled around themselves like pythons.

  But by far the most amazing, and most disturbing, part of the machine was the human part, because everywhere you looked there were workers—hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them. They pushed and pulled on massive levers. They threw their bodies against giant flywheels, to get them to turn. They turned cranks, their bodies covered in sweat and their mouths contorted into strained grimaces. From each of their bodies, waves of heat radiated outward. Or, at least I thought it was heat.

  “What does this machine do?” I asked. “What are they making?”

  “They are making space,” Mr. Vandermeer said, not at all bothered by the struggling workers around him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  And he proceeded to explain. “Surely you know that matter and energy are one and the same. E=mc²? Matter can be converted into energy—it’s the principle behind a nuclear bomb. Well, in the same way, space and time are interchangeable. That is, one can be converted into the other.”

  He led me up a narrow catwalk, where I could get a wider view of the immense machine. “These workers here… they are charged with the crucial task of converting time into space. Space enough to fit an entire village into my attic. Even now, they’re building new wings to my machine, making it bigger as more and more people arrive. In six months it will double its power—and my attic will quadruple in size! In just a few short years the area inside this attic will be larger than most of the nations these people came from!”

  I let his words hit me. I tried to absorb them, but it was simply coming too fast. A machine that converted time into space? How could that be?

  “The time that you’re converting… where does it come from?”

  “From them, of course.” Mr. Vandermeer gestured to the sweating laborers around us, too absorbed by their backbreaking work to even know we were there. “The time comes from their lives.”

  They were all of different nationalities, and yet, they were all the same, as if they had lost their individuality to the machine—just nameless cogs like the cranks and gears they turned. But one face in that crowd did look familiar. An Asian face, hair drenched in sweat.

  “I know him….”

  It was the boy gardener, whose diary I had come to return. Only he didn’t look like a boy anymore. He looked like a man—a tired, downtrodden man. The circles under his eyes were just as dark as those of the gray-haired laborers around him. It was then that I truly understood what Mr. Vandermeer meant.

  “This machine,” I said, “it ages them, doesn’t it? It slowly pulls the life right out of them.”

  “And turns it into something far more useful!” insisted Mr. Vandermeer. “Room to live and breathe!”

  “It’s horrible.”

  “If it’s so horrible, then why don’t any of them leave? After all, my attic door is never locked.”

  I turned to look at the exhausted boy. He threw me the slightest glance but couldn’t afford the energy to keep looking. He continued to pull and push on the crank that powered the engine that pulled the time from his life, radiating it outward from his body, in rippling waves of space. Waves that I had first taken for heat.

  “These workers sacrifice their time for their families. They stay here because they know how much better it is than the outside world.”

  I shook my head, refusing to accept Vandermeer’s twisted logic. “No. They stay here because they don’t know how to leave. Sure, they can see the door, but they’re afraid of what’s outside it. They’re afraid of you!” I pulled the journal out of my pocket and showed it angrily to Vandermeer. “This belongs to him! I found it when he was gardening in your yard. He has dreams. He wants to go to school and learn English.”

  Mr. Vandermeer just waved the thought away. “Why does he need to know English here? Why does he need further schooling at all? He knows all he needs to know.”

  I approached the boy as he labored at the machine. He didn’t slow his pace, but I could tell that he knew what I was doing. Gently, I placed the diary at his feet. But he couldn’t take his hands off the machine long enough to retrieve it, so it just sat there by the tip of his worn shoe.

  “You don’t own these people!” I screamed at Vandermeer, over the monotonous drone of the hellish space-maker.

  The old man crossed his arms. “I own their time, I own their space, and I own every ounce of their labor,” he said. “So I own all of them that is worth having.”

  My words began to fail me, and I found my emotions balling up in my fists. I pounded against Mr. Vandermeer’s chest. I pushed him back against his own machine, but he kept his balance, and just smiled at me.

  That was when I ran. I bolted through the maze of gears and workers, out into the great field, where more workers plowed at a panicked pace, as frantically as the machinists. Did they know they had no future except for whatever future Mr. Vandermeer chose to give them? Was this what they had hoped for when they left the shores of their distant lands?

  I reached the overcrowded apartment buildings, winding through the maze, searching for the one door that would lead me out. I looked behind me many times but never saw Mr. Vandermeer following. And then I realized that he didn’t have to follow me. I meant nothing to him. Once I found my way out, what could I do? I couldn’t tell anyone—no one would believe me. All I could do would be to sit in my room, the horrible knowledge of this place stuck in my head, just as the people were stuck in this attic.

  I finally found the door. Just as he’d said, it was not locked, it was wide open, as more women brought boxes of clothing from the factory down the stairs, then came back up again, to return to Mr. Vandermeer’s little universe.

  I pushed past them on the attic stairs, ran down the grand mahogany staircase, past the elaborate turkey dinner that was still set on the dining table, and out the front door.

  All those workers tending to his home—Mr. Vandermeer could have a hundred people working on his yard and in his kitchen, and in the rooms of his house, and there’d still be hundreds more anxious to take their place the next day—anxious to be used by their landlord.

  I raced into my own house, into my own cramped room, and cried for every soul trapped in Mr. Vandermeer’s shameful attic.

  * * *

  My parents noticed that something was wrong with me, but they didn’t know what it was. They figured I was overworked at school, or I was fighting the flu, or something like that. How could they know that my thoughts had been poisoned by what I had seen across the street?

  “You should do something after school, Lien,” my mother suggested. “A sport maybe, or computer club, or dance. Something that will cheer you up.”

  I thanked her for the suggestion but did nothing. I thought my depression was as deep as Mr. Vandermeer’s attic was high. I lived like that for weeks. Until the truck came again. Its deep rumble pulled me out of my light sleep at four in the morning. This time when I heard it, I didn’t waste time—I didn’t convert it into space, either—I converted it into action. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I knew I had to do something. Quickly I dressed and ran across the street, as the driver opened the big double doors.

  A wave of people poured out of the truck, as I knew they would. This batch of desperate newcomers were Eastern European—refugees of some bloody conflict. All their belongings were packed into tiny suitcases, and the driver shuffled them out like cattle, toward Mr. Vandermeer’s front door.

  I ran up to them.

  “No!” I screamed, shattering the quiet of the night. “Don’t go! He’ll use you! You’ll never get away!”

  But the people pulled away from me, not understanding my words. Terrified that I meant them harm, they moved toward the warm, safe light of Mr. Vandermeer’s door. But I knew that it was a false light.

  Vandermeer heard me right away as he stood on his porch, shepherding in his huddled masses. He strode toward me with an anger in his eyes I hadn’t seen before.

  That was when I knew exactly what I had to do. I dodged him and pushed past the crowds of frightened people into his house. I wove around them on the grand staircase and pushed them out of the way as I climbed the steep stairs to the attic and pushed through the door at the top, into the narrow street.

  It was dark and quiet up there. It was night, just like it was outside. Then I reached over and flicked on the attic light switch, and suddenly the entire world was lit by the dangling sun-bulb above. For Mr. Vandermeer, being God was as simple as turning on a light.

  I heard heavy footsteps behind me. This time Vandermeer was chasing me, but I wouldn’t let him catch me. I might not be the fastest runner in the world, but I’m not slow, either, and I ran with every ounce of my soul. Quickly I made it out into the field. Far ahead, the great space-maker churned away, boiling time into space. I headed straight for it, not sure what I would do when I got there, but knowing that if anything was to be done, it had to be done there. All the while Mr. Vandermeer was right behind, shouting at me, cursing at me, but his words only pushed me faster.

  I burst onto the narrow catwalks between the gears and slaving workers of the space-maker, searching for a way to stop the machine. Surely there had to be a button or lever that would grind the thing to a screeching halt. But the longer I searched, the more I began to despair. Why would a machine that was never intended to stop moving have a cutoff switch?

  I only slowed my pace for a moment, but that was all it took. Mr. Vandermeer grabbed me by the collar, pulled me off my feet, and lifted me out over the churning gears.

  “I have no use for you,” was all he said, and I felt his grip begin to loosen. He was going to drop me into the mechanism without a second thought!

  Then, among the many movements of the intricate machine, I saw a new motion. An iron pole arced across the air and hit Mr. Vandermeer in the head. He let go of me, but as he did, someone else caught me. The one who had swung that pole. The boy with the diary. With his machine-strengthened arms he lifted me over the railing, to safety.

  Vandermeer lay on the floor, dazed, but was quickly recovering. If I was to do something, I had to do it now… and suddenly I knew exactly what it was. This machine was like a clock—and like a clock, every gear was connected to something, which was connected to something else.

  And clocks break down all the time.

  I took the pole from the boy. It was heavier than anything that I had ever carried, but I wouldn’t be holding it for long. With all my strength I rammed it into the teeth of the great gear in front of me. Then I watched as the gear turned and tried to mesh with the cog beside it.

  A screaming metal complaint resounded from the gears as their teeth tried to mesh, but the pole was firmly lodged in the way… and the machine just stopped.

  Every gear, every piston, everything came to a screeching halt.

  “No!!” Vandermeer got up and tried to dislodge the pole, but it was no use. The many workers ceased their labors, wondering what was going on, and the machine wailed as its last moving piece—the mainspring—continued to turn, building up incredible torque as it wound itself tighter and tighter.

  All that energy had to go somewhere—and it did! The spring broke free, tearing out the gear that drove it, and that in turn tore out the gear beside that. In an instant, the entire machine was an exploding chaos of gears and springs. Massive chunks of metal tore free, gears rolled down catwalks, and everyone began to run for their lives.

  Everyone except Mr. Vandermeer.

  He alone stayed with the machine, mourning its destruction as it came down around him.

  Together, the boy and I ran across the field, following the rest of the scattering workers. As we ran, I noticed our shadows begin to change, becoming longer. I looked up to see the great light in the sky shifting position, rapidly dropping, and saw the immense attic beams crushing the clouds into wisps of vapor as they came down. Now that the machine had stopped, the attic was losing space. The sky was falling!