Set in a Danish school which seeks to integrate problem children into the world of normal ones. It is run on disciplinarian lines, and the narrator, with two of his mates, discovers what the head's game is - it is a sinister one, to do with asserting control over the children's lives. Peter, Katarina, August - three emotionally damaged children in Biehl's experimental school - were all borderliners, that is, they were under assessment by the authorities to determine their futures: integration with “normal” children (under the Darwinian test for the survival of the fittest) or relegation to institutions for the mentally defective. They were fully alert to their guinea-pig status in Biehl’s experiment, and determined to deregulate the clockwork mechanism which entrapped them in the school, which indeed trapped them in the uncontrollable grip of Time, here employed as servant of the system. Their attempt to escape from the school and expose its oppressive mechanisms, is at the centre of this deeply probing, sensitive and totally fascinating novel.