Free Pig: A Thriller by Darvin Babiuk

tool. We chain it to our wrists, attempting to convince ourselves that we have mastered it. We could use it to make our day more efficient we told ourselves, allotting each of our activities a certain amount of Time, compartmentalizing each function into a certain part of each day.
    What has happened? Time has ended up calling the shots. Supper-time, bed-time, recess-time, home-time: Time tells us what we can do and when we can do it. It has removed free choice. Not liking this, we spend most of our time trying to sneak past time.
    We spend time, hoping to exhaust our supply of it. But time knows no bounds – its supply is infinite -- it will play that game until the cows come home (on time of course).
    We take time. It ends up taking us.
    We get lost in time, or lose track of Time. It manages to find us.
    We tell time. It refuses to listen. It tells us.
    We stretch time, bent on taking it past its point of elasticity, hoping to snap its hold on us. But time is amorphous, it will stretch as far as we take it, and then rebound to sting us.
    We waste time, dropping little bits and pieces of it here and there as we go along, like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs in the forest. Too bad, there is a never-ending supply.
     
     
     
     
    Jim Croce notwithstanding, we even try to save time (though not many of use bottles for this purpose. Most of those are already full of another terrible invention--alcohol). Oh, what a laugh time must get out of that. We should not be trying to save it, but to kill it!
    Be honest. How many of you have tried to "kill" time? Do not answer too loudly. The cop that sleeps within all of us may be listening. He has not yet been killed. When he's not busy enforcing The Entropy Laws he keeps time in protective custody, ensuring its well-being from assassins like you.
    We have created a monster in time. Like Frankenstein's ogre, it returns to pillage the countryside, wreaking destruction and drawing down a curtain of guilt wherever it passes, a curtain that the cop within us keeps drawn even once time has passed. Unlike Frankenstein, time is a three-headed monster, however, using past, present, and future to terrorize us. Time has become inescapable. There is no law in Physics which does not use it to explain the underlying reality of the physical world.
    Still, there is some hope. Time has a big job ahead of it. Perhaps too big. Surely, there must be times when it dozes off. No, Time never gets a day off. It must be very tiring to be time. After all, time has to put in twenty four hour days, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, year after year. Christ, in Newfoundland, time even has to put in a half hour of overtime.
    Twenty four hours is 86,400 seconds (the half hour of overtime adds an additional 1,800 seconds to the bill). A second is a very long time. If you don't believe this, consider that it takes only 1X10 -20 seconds, or a quintillionth of a second, for that most important of all events, the recoil of an atomic nucleus leading to a nuclear explosion, to occur. Imagine what can happen in the rest of that second.
    A bullet cap explodes in a millionth of a second. It takes a thousandth of a second for a nerve impulse to cross a synapse. A human heartbeat takes one second, The average act of love but 180 seconds (for the lucky among us it lasts a lifetime). Light reaches the Earth from the Sun in 492 seconds. The Earth rotates on its axis once every 86,164.1 seconds. It completes an orbit around the Sun once every 31,472,329 seconds. The estimated age of  the universe is 320,000,000,000,000,000 seconds. Time has been on the job for every one of them. Doesn't time ever go on strike for shorter hours?
    Of course it doesn't. Time knows, as all fascists know, that it cannot release its grip on Man for one instant. Even in that most joyous of occasions, retirement, when we feel we have finally escaped from dead end jobs and can make time march to the beat of our drummer for a change, it reminds