It’s midnight in Mendon’s lab, just as it should be. His shielded clocks tick straight on over the line between Greenwich Standard days, but those on the wall don’t. London, Paris, Istanbul, Beijing: they all say it’s five o’clock.

The webcam feeds confirm it. Dim winter afternoon in a Berlin window, late summer evening in Oahu. If you stuck a sword in a globe you’d hit one of them going in and the other going out, but there they are. Nobody anywhere has noticed.

Mendon flips on all the monitors at once and gazes, fearful, at the metastasis of the sun.