-- from The Lost Five Minutes

The town genius, whose name was Marcantonio Smith-to-the-power-Nine, did not live in the town nowadays; he had done so, but found out he got little work done because people constantly came to him asking to solve their problems. So now he lived in a tower with a studio in the nearby forest, where he painted, and sculpted, and wrote poetry, and conceived new kinds of mathematics, and invented perpetual motion, and did everything a genius ought.

Bill found him in the studio, standing in front of a huge slab of marble. On the marble he had a football-sized lump of colourless, shining material, like nothing so much in the world as a good big bit of glass putty, and he was squeezing it, and kneading it, and thumping it, and palming it into a ball, and then flattening it out, and then rolling it into a sausage, and then tearing it into thin strips, and those into small nuggets, shaping them all into different things, animals, stars, flowers, figures, faces, and then flinging the whole mass together and beginning again.

He smiled kindly at Bill, who came hesitating over and stood by the slab.

"Well, my boy? What can I do for you?"

All this time, Smith never stopped playing with the lump of stuff.

Bill told the sad tale of Anthea and the lost five minutes.

"I was wondering if you could possible help us," he said. "The dragon's due to swallow her tomorrow at eight sharp unless I can find somebody to give me five minutes."

"Five minutes? Is that all?" said Marcantonio Smith-to-the-power-Nine, and he pinched off a bit of his glass putty. "Do you want them marked out?" He flattened the small lump he had pinched off, shaped it into an oblong, and marked five divisions on it as if he were scoring fudge.

Bill gaped, watching him, and he laughed.

"No need to look so astonished, my boy!"

"It seems so easy for you!"

"It's always easy to be kind."

"It didn't seem so for the other people in the town," Bill said. "How is it you have so much time when nobody else has any at all?"

"That's because I only do the things that interest me. Do you want your five minutes in a bag?"

"Oh, please don't trouble, sir. I wish I could do something for you!"

"Bring your sister to visit me sometime. I like fairy tales too."