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diff --git a/32256.txt b/32256.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4b1e72c --- /dev/null +++ b/32256.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4847 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Big Time, by Fritz Reuter Leiber + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Big Time + +Author: Fritz Reuter Leiber + +Illustrator: Virgil Finlay + +Release Date: May 5, 2010 [EBook #32256] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIG TIME *** + + + + +Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + + + +[Illustration] + + +By FRITZ LEIBER + +THE BIG TIME + + _You can't know there's a war on--for the Snakes coil and Spiders + weave to keep you from knowing it's being fought over your live and + dead body!_ + +Illustrated by FINLAY + + + + +CHAPTER 1 + + When shall we three meet again + In thunder, lightning, or in rain? + + When the hurlyburly's done. + When the battle's lost and won. + + --Macbeth + +ENTER THREE HUSSARS + + +My name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe +me. I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate +chiefly outside space and time--not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such +places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either. + +I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star who also +bears my first name, but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own. I +need it, for my job is to nurse back to health and kid back to sanity +Soldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going. This war is the +Change War, a war of time travelers--in fact, our private name for being +in this war is being on the Big Time. Our Soldiers fight by going back +to change the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help +our side win the final victory a billion or more years from now. A long +killing business, believe me. + +You don't know about the Change War, but it's influencing your lives all +the time and maybe you've had hints of it without realizing. + +Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be +bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the +next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing +because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt +sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever +been scared of Ghosts--not the story-book kind, but the billions of +beings who were once so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll +just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things +you may call devils or Demons--spirits able to range through all time +and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of +space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole +universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints +of the Change War. + +How I got recruited into the Change War, how it's conducted, what the +two sides are, why you don't consciously know about it, what I really +think about it--you'll learn in due course. + + * * * * * + +The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I +simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and +humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal +title is Entertainer and I've got my silly side, as you'll find out. + +My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of +times and places. We're a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run +a pretty good Recuperation Station, though we have our family troubles. +But most of our troubles come slamming into the Place with the beat-up +Soldiers, who've generally just been going through hell and want to +raise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived +Soldiers who started this thing I'm going to tell you about, this thing +that showed me so much about myself and everything. + +When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and +two thousand nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one +thousand. This two-nightmares routine every time you lay down your dizzy +little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to it because being on +the Big Time is supposed to be worth it. + +The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub +where the Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated +for a party, though a Zeppelin is one thing we haven't had yet. You go +out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an +Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with +anything from the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look +strangely similar except for size. + +Solely on doctor's orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since +coming to work at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if +you care to call them that, for believe me they are busman's holidays, +considering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last one I spent +in Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got +over it. Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be +fitted by the Spiders into serious operations of the Change War, and you +can imagine how restful that makes them. + +"See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don't +go too far up front, though, but don't wander off either. Relax and +enjoy yourself." + +Ha! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they come to the +Place is a horse of a far brighter color, simply dazzling by comparison. +Entertainment is our business and we give them a bang-up time and send +them staggering happily back into action, though once in a great while +something may happen to throw a wee shadow on the party. + + * * * * * + +I am dead in some ways, but don't let that bother you--I am lively +enough in others. If you met me in the cosmos, you would be more apt to +yak with me or try to pick me up than to ask a cop to do same or a +father to douse me with holy water, unless you are one of those +hard-boiled reformer types. But you are not likely to meet me in the +cosmos, because (bar Basin Street and the Prater) 15th Century Italy and +Augustan Rome--until they spoiled it--are my favorite (Ha!) vacation +spots and, as I have said, I stick as close to the Place as I can. It is +really the nicest Place in the whole Change World. (Crisis! I even +_think_ of it capitalized!) + +Anyhoo, when this thing started, I was twiddling my thumbs on the couch +nearest the piano and thinking it was too late to do my fingernails and +whoever came in probably wouldn't notice them anyway. + +The Place was jumpy like it always is on an approach and the gray velvet +of the Void around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when +you close your eyes in the dark. + +Sid was tuning the Maintainers for the pick-up and the right shoulder of +his gold-worked gray doublet was streaked where he'd been wiping his +face on it with quick ducks of his head. + +Beauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid's other shoulder, +one white-trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control +divan, and he wasn't missing a single flicker of Sid's old fingers on +the dials; Beau's co-pilot besides piano player. Beau's face had that +dead blank look it must have had when every double eagle he owned and +more he didn't were riding on the next card to be turned in the gambling +saloon on one of those wedding-cake Mississippi steamboats. + +Doc was soused as usual, sitting at the bar with his top hat pushed back +and his knitted shawl pulled around him, his wide eyes seeing whatever +horrors a life in Nazi-occupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk +Demon in the Change World. + +Maud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili--the New Girl, of course--were +telling the big beads of their identical pearl necklaces. + +You might say that all us Entertainers were a bit edgy; being Demons +doesn't automatically make us brave. + +Then the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door +began to darken in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds +blowing hard and my heart missed a couple of beats, and the next thing +three Soldiers had stepped out of the cosmos and into the Place, their +first three steps hitting the floor hard as they changed times and +weights. + + * * * * * + +They were dressed as officers of hussars, as we'd been advised, +and--praise the Bonny Dew!--I saw that the first of them was Erich, my +own dear little commandant, the pride of the von Hohenwalds and the +Terror of the Snakes. Behind him was some hard-faced Roman or other, and +beside Erich and shouldering into him as they stamped forward was a new +boy, blond, with a face like a Greek god who's just been touring a +Christian hell. + +They were uniformed exactly alike in black--shakos, fur-edged pelisses, +boots, and so forth--with white skull emblems on the shakos. The only +difference between them was that Erich had a Caller on his wrist and the +New Boy had a black-gauntleted glove on his left hand and was clenching +the mate in it, his right hand being bare like both of Erich's and the +Roman's. + +"You've made it, lads, hearts of gold," Sid boomed at them, and Beau +twitched a smile and murmured something courtly and Maud began to chant, +"Shut the Door!" and the New Girl copied her and I joined in because the +Change Winds do blow like crazy when the Door is open, even though it +can't ever be shut tight enough to keep them from leaking through. + +"Shut it before it blows wrinkles in our faces," Maud called in her +gamin voice to break the ice, looking like a skinny teen-ager in the +tight, knee-length frock she'd copied from the New Girl. + +But the three Soldiers weren't paying attention. The Roman--I remembered +his name was Mark--was blundering forward stiffly as if there were +something wrong with his eyes, while Erich and the New Boy were yelling +at each other about a kid and Einstein and a summer palace and a bloody +glove and the Snakes having booby-trapped Saint Petersburg. Erich had +that taut sadistic smile he gets when he wants to hit me. + +The New Boy was in a tearing rage. "Why'd you pull us out so bloody +fast? We fair chewed the Nevsky Prospekt to pieces galloping away." + +"Didn't you feel their stun guns, _Dummkopf_, when they sprung the +trap--too soon, _Gott sei Dank_?" Erich demanded. + +"I did," the New Boy told him. "Not enough to numb a cat. Why didn't you +show us action?" + +"Shut up. I'm your leader. I'll show you action enough." + +"You won't. You're a filthy Nazi coward." + +"_Weibischer Englaender!_" + +"Bloody Hun!" + +"_Schlange!_" + +The blond lad knew enough German to understand that last crack. He threw +back his sable-edged pelisse to clear his sword arm and he swung away +from Erich, which bumped him into Beau. At the first sign of the +quarrel, Beau had raised himself from the divan as quickly and silently +as a--no, I won't use that word--and slithered over to them. + +"Sirs, you forget yourselves," he said sharply, off balance, supporting +himself on the New Boy's upraised arm. "This is Sidney Lessingham's +Place of Entertainment and Recuperation. There are ladies--" + + * * * * * + +With a contemptuous snarl, the New Boy shoved him off and snatched with +his bare hand for his saber. Beau reeled against the divan, it caught +him in the shins and he fell toward the Maintainers. Sid whisked them +out of the way as if they were a couple of beach radios--simply nothing +in the Place is nailed down--and had them back on the coffee table +before Beau hit the floor. Meanwhile, Erich had his saber out and had +parried the New Boy's first wild slash and lunged in return, and I heard +the scream of steel and the rutch of his boot on the diamond-studded +pavement. + + * * * * * + +Beau rolled over and came up pulling from the ruffles of his shirt bosom +a derringer I knew was some other weapon in disguise--a stun gun or even +an Atropos. Besides scaring me damp for Erich and everybody, that +brought me up short: us Entertainers' nerves must be getting as naked as +the Soldiers', probably starting when the Spiders canceled all cosmic +leaves twenty sleeps back. + +Sid shot Beau his look of command, rapped out, "I'll handle this, you +whoreson firebrand," and turned to the Minor Maintainer. I noticed that +the telltale on the Major was glowing a reassuring red again, and I +found a moment to thank Mamma Devi that the Door was shut. + +Maud was jumping up and down, cheering I don't know which--nor did she, +I bet--and the New Girl was white and I saw that the sabers were working +more businesslike. Erich's flicked, flicked, flicked again and came away +from the blond lad's cheek spilling a couple of red drops. The blond lad +lunged fiercely, Erich jumped back, and the next moment they were both +floating helplessly in the air, twisting like they had cramps. + +I realized quick enough that Sid had shut off gravity in the Door and +Stores sectors of the Place, leaving the rest of us firm on our feet in +the Refresher and Surgery sectors. The Place has sectional gravity to +suit our Extraterrestrial buddies--those crazy ETs sometimes come +whooping in for recuperation in very mixed batches. + +From his central position, Sid called out, kindly enough but taking no +nonsense, "All right, lads, you've had your fun. Now sheathe those +swords." + +For a second or so, the two black hussars drifted and contorted. Erich +laughed harshly and neatly obeyed--the commandant is used to free fall. +The blond lad stopped writhing, hesitated while he glared upside down at +Erich and managed to get his saber into its scabbard, although he turned +a slow somersault doing it. Then Sid switched on their gravity, slow +enough so they wouldn't get sprained landing. + + * * * * * + +Erich laughed, lightly this time, and stepped out briskly toward us. He +stopped to clap the New Boy firmly on the shoulder and look him in the +face. + +"So, now you get a good scar," he said. + +The other didn't pull away, but he didn't look up and Erich came on. Sid +was hurrying toward the New Boy, and as he passed Erich, he wagged a +finger at him and gayly said, "You rogue." Next thing I was giving Erich +my "Man, you're home" hug and he was kissing me and cracking my ribs and +saying, "_Liebchen! Doppchen!_"--which was fine with me because I do +love him and I'm a good lover and as much a Doubleganger as he is. + +We had just pulled back from each other to get a breath--his blue eyes +looked so sweet in his worn face--when there was a thud behind us. With +the snapping of the tension, Doc had fallen off his bar stool and his +top hat was over his eyes. As we turned to chuckle at him, Maud squeaked +and we saw that the Roman had walked straight up against the Void and +was marching along there steadily without gaining a foot, like it does +happen, his black uniform melting into that inside-your-head gray. + +Maud and Beau rushed over to fish him back, which can be tricky. The +thin gambler was all courtly efficiency again. Sid supervised from a +distance. + +"What's wrong with him?" I asked Erich. + +He shrugged. "Overdue for Change Shock. And he was nearest the stun +guns. His horse almost threw him. _Mein Gott_, you should have seen +Saint Petersburg, _Liebchen_: the Nevsky Prospekt, the canals flying by +like reception carpets of blue sky, a cavalry troop in blue and gold +that blundered across our escape, fine women in furs and ostrich plumes, +a monk with a big tripod and his head under a hood--it gave me the +horrors seeing all those Zombies flashing past and staring at me in that +sick unawakened way they have, and knowing that some of them, say the +photographer, might be Snakes." + +Our side in the Change War is the Spiders, the other side is the Snakes, +though all of us--Spiders and Snakes alike--are Doublegangers and Demons +too, because we're cut out of our lifelines in the cosmos. Your lifeline +is all of you from birth to death. We're Doublegangers because we can +operate both in the cosmos and outside of it, and Demons because we act +reasonably alive while doing so--which the Ghosts don't. Entertainers +and Soldiers are all Demon-Doublegangers, whichever side they're +on--though they say the Snake Places are simply ghastly. Zombies are +dead people whose lifelines lie in the so-called past. + + * * * * * + +"What were you doing in Saint Petersburg before the ambush?" I asked +Erich. "That is, if you can talk about it." + +"Why not? We were kidnapping the infant Einstein back from the Snakes in +1883. Yes, the Snakes got him, _Liebchen_, only a few sleeps back, +endangering the West's whole victory over Russia--" + +"--which gave your dear little Hitler the world on a platter for fifty +years and got me loved to death by your sterling troops in the +Liberation of Chicago--" + +"--but which leads to the ultimate victory of the Spiders and the West +over the Snakes and Communism, _Liebchen_, remember that. Anyway, our +counter-snatch didn't work. The Snakes had guards posted--most unusual +and we weren't warned. The whole thing was a great mess. No wonder Bruce +lost his head--not that it excuses him." + +"The New Boy?" I asked. Sid hadn't got to him and he was still standing +with hooded eyes where Erich had left him, a dark pillar of shame and +rage. + +"_Ja_, a lieutenant from World War One. An Englishman." + +"I gathered that," I told Erich. "Is he really effeminate?" + +"_Weibischer?_" He smiled. "I had to call him something when he said I +was a coward. He'll make a fine Soldier--only needs a little more +shaping." + +"You men are so original when you spat." I lowered my voice. "But you +shouldn't have gone on and called him a Snake, Erich mine." + +"_Schlange?_" The smile got crooked. "Who knows--about any of us? As +Saint Petersburg showed me, the Snakes' spies are getting cleverer than +ours." The blue eyes didn't look sweet now. "Are you, _Liebchen_, really +nothing more than a good loyal Spider?" + +"Erich!" + +"All right, I went too far--with Bruce and with you too. We're all +hacked these days, riding with one leg over the breaking edge." + +Maud and Beau were supporting the Roman to a couch, Maud taking most of +his weight, with Sid still supervising and the New Boy still sulking by +himself. The New Girl should have been with him, of course, but I +couldn't see her anywhere and I decided she was probably having a +nervous breakdown in the Refresher, the little jerk. + +"The Roman looks pretty bad, Erich," I said. + +"Ah, Mark's tough. Got virtue, as his people say. And our little +starship girl will bring him back to life if anybody can and if ..." + +"... you call this living," I filled in dutifully. + + * * * * * + +He was right. Maud had fifty-odd years of psychomedical experience, 23rd +Century at that. It should have been Doc's job, but that was fifty +drunks back. + +"Maud and Mark, that will be an interesting experiment," Erich said. +"Reminiscent of Goering's with the frozen men and the naked gypsy +girls." + +"You are a filthy Nazi. She'll be using electrophoresis and deep +suggestion, if I know anything." + +"How will you be able to know anything, _Liebchen_, if she switches on +the couch curtains, as I perceive she is preparing to do?" + +"Filthy Nazi I said and meant." + +"Precisely." He clicked his heels and bowed a millimeter. "Erich +Friederich von Hohenwald, _Oberleutnant_ in the army of the Third Reich. +Fell at Narvik, where he was Recruited by the Spiders. Lifeline +lengthened by a Big Change after his first death and at latest report +Commandant of Toronto, where he maintains extensive baby farms to +provide him with breakfast meat, if you believe the handbills of the +_voyageurs_ underground. At your service." + +"Oh, Erich, it's all so lousy," I said, touching his hand, reminded that +he was one of the unfortunates Resurrected from a point in their +lifelines well before their deaths--in his case, because the date of his +death had been shifted forward by a Big Change after his Resurrection. +And as every Demon finds out, if he can't imagine it beforehand, it is +pure hell to remember your future, and the shorter the time between your +Resurrection and your death back in the cosmos, the better. Mine, bless +Bab-ed-Din, was only an action-packed ten minutes on North Clark Street. + +Erich put his other hand lightly over mine. "Fortunes of the Change War, +_Liebchen_. At least I'm a Soldier and sometimes assigned to future +operations--though why we should have this monomania about our future +personalities back there, I don't know. Mine is a stupid _Oberst_, thin +as paper--and frightfully indignant at the _voyageurs_! But it helps me +a little if I see him in perspective and at least I get back to the +cosmos pretty regularly, _Gott sei Dank_, so I'm better off than you +Entertainers." + +I didn't say aloud that a Changing cosmos is worse than none, but I +found myself sending a prayer to the Bonny Dew for my father's repose, +that the Change Winds would blow lightly across the lifeline of Anton A. +Forzane, professor of physiology, born in Norway and buried in Chicago. +Woodlawn Cemetery is a nice gray spot. + +"That's all right, Erich," I said. "We Entertainers Got Mittens too." + +He scowled around at me suspiciously, as if he were wondering whether I +had all my buttons on. + +"Mittens?" he said. "What do you mean? I'm not wearing any. Are you +trying to say something about Bruce's gloves--which incidentally seem to +annoy him for some reason. No, seriously, Greta, why do you Entertainers +need mittens?" + +"Because we get cold feet sometimes. At least I do. Got Mittens, as I +say." + + * * * * * + +A sickly light dawned in his Prussian puss. He muttered, "Got mittens +... _Gott mit uns_ ... God with us," and roared softly, "Greta, I don't +know how I put up with you, the way you murder a great language for +cheap laughs." + +"You've got to take me as I am," I told him, "mittens and all, thank the +Bonny Dew--" and hastily explained, "That's French--_le bon Dieu_--the +good God--don't hit me. I'm not going to tell you any more of my +secrets." + +He laughed feebly, like he was dying. + +"Cheer up," I said. "I won't be here forever, and there are worse places +than the Place." + +He nodded grudgingly, looking around. "You know what, Greta, if you'll +promise not to make some dreadful joke out of it: on operations, I +pretend I'll soon be going backstage to court the world-famous ballerina +Greta Forzane." + +He was right about the backstage part. The Place is a regular +theater-in-the-round with the Void for an audience, the Void's gray +hardly disturbed by the screens masking Surgery (Ugh!), Refresher and +Stores. Between the last two are the bar and kitchen and Beau's piano. +Between Surgery and the sector where the Door usually appears are the +shelves and taborets of the Art Gallery. The control divan is stage +center. Spaced around at a fair distance are six big low couches--one +with its curtains now shooting up into the gray--and a few small tables. +It is like a ballet set and the crazy costumes and characters that turn +up don't ruin the illusion. By no means. Diaghilev would have hired most +of them for the Ballet Russe on first sight, without even asking them +whether they could keep time to music. + + + + +CHAPTER 2 + + Last week in Babylon, + Last night in Rome, + + --Hodgson + +A RIGHT-HAND GLOVE + + +Beau had gone behind the bar and was talking quietly at Doc, but with +his eyes elsewhere, looking very sallow and professional in his white, +and I thought--Damballa!--I'm in the French Quarter. I couldn't see the +New Girl. Sid was at last getting to the New Boy after the fuss about +Mark. He threw me a sign and I started over with Erich in tow. + +"Welcome, sweet lad. Sidney Lessingham's your host, and a fellow +Englishman. Born in King's Lynn, 1564, schooled at Cambridge, but London +was the life and death of me, though I outlasted Bessie, Jimmie, +Charlie, and Ollie almost. And what a life! By turns a clerk, a spy, a +bawd--the two trades are hand in glove--a poet of no account, a beggar, +and a peddler of resurrection tracts. Beau Lassiter, our throats are +tinder!" + +At the word "poet," the New Boy looked up, but resentfully, as if he had +been tricked into it. + +"And to spare your throat for drinking, sweet gallant, I'll be so bold +as to guess and answer one of your questions," Sid rattled on. "Yes, I +knew Will Shakespeare--we were of an age--and he was such a modest, +mind-your-business rogue that we all wondered whether he really did +write those plays. Your pardon, 'faith, but that scratch might be looked +to." + +Then I saw that the New Girl hadn't lost her head, but gone to Surgery +(Ugh!) for a first-aid tray. She reached a swab toward the New Boy's +sticky cheek, saying rather shrilly, "If I might ..." + +Her timing was bad. Sid's last words and Erich's approach had darkened +the look in the young Soldier's face and he angrily swept her arm aside +without even glancing at her. Erich squeezed my arm. The tray clattered +to the floor--and one of the drinks that Beau was bringing almost +followed it. Ever since the New Girl's arrival, Beau had been figuring +that she was his responsibility, though I don't think the two of them +had reached an agreement yet. Beau was especially set on it because I +was thick with Sid at the time and Maud with Doc, she loving tough +cases. + +"Easy now, lad, and you love me!" Sid thundered, again shooting Beau the +"Hold it" look. "She's just a poor pagan trying to comfort you. Swallow +your bile, you black villain, and perchance it will turn to poetry. Ah, +did I touch you there? Confess, you are a poet." + + * * * * * + +There isn't much gets by Sid, though for a second I forgot my psychology +and wondered if he knew what he was doing with his insights. + +"Yes, I'm a poet, all right," the New Boy roared. "I'm Bruce Marchant, +you bloody Zombies. I'm a poet in a world where even the lines of the +King James and your precious Will whom you use for laughs aren't safe +from Snakes' slime and the Spiders' dirty legs. Changing our history, +stealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and best +intentioned and efficient, and what does it lead to? This bloody SI +glove!" + +He held up his black-gloved left hand which still held the mate and he +shook it. + +"What's wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?" Sid +demanded. "And you love us, tell us." While Erich laughed, "Consider +yourself lucky, _Kamerad_. Mark and I didn't draw any gloves at all." + +"What's wrong with it?" Bruce yelled. "The bloody things are both +lefts!" He slammed it down on the floor. + +We all howled, we couldn't help it. He turned his back on us and stamped +off, though I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed my +arm and said between gasps, "_Mein Gott, Liebchen_, what have I always +told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It +is infallible!" + +One of us didn't laugh. Ever since the New Girl heard the name Bruce +Marchant, she'd had a look in her eyes like she'd been given the +sacrament. I was glad she'd got interested in something, because she'd +been pretty much of a snoot and a wet blanket up until now, although +she'd come to the Place with the recommendation of having been a real +whoopee girl in London and New York in the Twenties. She looked +disapprovingly at us as she gathered up the tray and stuff, not +forgetting the glove, which she placed on the center of the tray like a +holy relic. + + * * * * * + +Beau cut over and tried to talk to her, but she ghosted past him and +once again he couldn't do anything because of the tray in his hands. He +came over and got rid of the drinks quick. I took a big gulp right away +because I saw the New Girl stepping through the screen into Surgery and +I hate to be reminded we have it and I'm glad Doc is too drunk to use +it, some of the Arachnoid surgical techniques being very sickening as I +know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my +list of things to be forgotten. + +By that time, Bruce had come back to us, saying in a carefully hard +voice, "Look here, it's not the dashed glove itself, as you very well +know, you howling Demons." + +"What is it then, noble heart?" Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard +heightening the effect of innocent receptivity. + +"It's the principle of the thing," Bruce said, looking around sharply, +but none of us cracked a smile. "It's this mucking inefficiency and +death of the cosmos--and don't tell me that isn't in the +cards!--masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders--and we +don't know who they are ultimately; it's just a name; we see only agents +like ourselves--the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of our +lifelines--" + +"Is that bad, lad?" Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced. + +"--and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another +time-traveling power called the Snakes--just a name, too--which is bent +on perverting and enslaving the whole cosmos, past, present and future." + +"And isn't it, lad?" + +"Before we're properly awake, we're Recruited into the Big Time and +hustled into tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserable +closets, gray sacks, puss pockets--no offense to this Place--that the +Spiders have created, maybe by gigantic implosions, but no one knows for +certain, and then we're sent off on all sorts of missions into the past +and future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart the +Snakes." + +"True, lad." + +"And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks come +so fast, our emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public and +private metaphysics distorted so insanely, the deepest thread of reality +we cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can get things +straight." + +"We've all felt that way, lad," Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek +death's head; "You should have seen me, _Kamerad_, my first fifty +sleeps," Erich put in; while I added, "Us girls, too, Bruce." + +"Oh, I know I'll get hardened to it, and don't think I can't. It's not +that," Bruce said harshly. "And I wouldn't mind the personal confusion, +the mess it's made of my spirit, I wouldn't even mind remaking history +and destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past, +if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart +the Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the +East. But what have they done to achieve this? I'll give you some +beautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, +they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost +city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor +key." + + * * * * * + +"You got time for culture?" I heard myself say and I clapped my hand +over my mouth in gentle reproof. + +"But _you_ remember the dialogues, lad," Sid observed. "And rail not at +Crete--I have a sweet Keftian friend." + +"For how long will I remember Plato's dialogues? And who after me?" +Bruce challenged. "Here's another. The Spiders want Rome powerful and, +to date, they've helped Rome so much that she collapses in a blaze of +German and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of Julius +Caesar." + +This time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place loves +these bull sessions. "You omit to mention, sir, that Rome's newest +downfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes have +fomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized +Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power +futurewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever +letting it pass into the hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is the +Snakes' Three-Thousand-Year Plan which we are fighting against, striving +to revive Rome's glories." + +"Striving is the word for it," Bruce snapped. "Here's yet another +example. To beat Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out of +World War Two, thereby ensuring a German invasion of the New World and +creating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines of Siberia to the +plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!" + +He stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chanting +in a weird spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow. + +"_Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Kein' Peitsch', gnaedige Herren. Salz, Salz, +Salz._" + +I turned and there was Doc waltzing toward us with little tiny steps, +bent over so low that the ends of his shawl touched the floor, his head +crooked up sideways and looking through us. + +I knew then, but Erich translated softly. "'Salt, salt, I bring salt. No +whip, merciful sirs.' He is speaking to my countrymen in their +language." Doc had spent his last months in a Nazi-operated salt mine. + + * * * * * + +He saw us and got up, straightening his top hat very carefully. He +frowned hard while my heart thumped half a dozen times. Then his face +slackened, he shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "_Nichevo_." + +"And it does not matter, sir," Beau translated, but directing his remark +at Bruce. "True, great civilizations have been dwarfed or broken by the +Change War. But others, once crushed in the bud, have bloomed. In the +1870s, I traveled a Mississippi that had never known Grant's gunboats. I +studied piano, languages, and the laws of chance under the greatest +European masters at the University of Vicksburg." + +"And you think your pipsqueak steamboat culture is compensation for--" +Bruce began but, "Prithee none of that, lad," Sid interrupted smartly. +"Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards, and I'll drink +dead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so puny +as to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no, +nor with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and +nerves of brass. Waste not your pity on them." + +"True indeed, sir," Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack on +his Greater South. "Most of us enter the Change World with the false +metaphysic that the slightest change in the past--a grain of dust +misplaced--will transform the whole future. It is a long while before we +accept with our minds as well as our intellects the law of the +Conservation of Reality: that when the past is changed, the future +changes barely enough to adjust, barely enough to admit the new data. +The Change Winds meet maximum resistance always. Otherwise the first +operation in Babylonia would have wiped out New Orleans, Sheffield, +Stuttgart, and Maud Davies' birthplace on Ganymede! + +"Note how the gap left by Rome's collapse was filled by the +imperialistic and Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historian +can tell the difference in most ages between the former Latin and the +present Gothic Catholic Church. As you yourself, sir, said of Greece, it +is as if an old melody were shifted into a slightly different key. In +the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it's +true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the +usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless +accidents." + +"All right, you bloody savants--maybe I pushed my point too far," Bruce +growled. "But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methods +we use in our wonderful Change War. Poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra. +Kidnapping Einstein when he's a baby." + +"The Snakes did it first," I reminded him. + +"Yes, and we copied them. How resourceful does that make us?" he +retorted, arguing like a woman. "If we need Einstein, why don't we +Resurrect him, deal with him as a man?" + + * * * * * + +Beau said, serving his culture in slightly thicker slices, +"_Pardonnez-moi_, but when you have enjoyed your status as Doubleganger +a _soupcon_ longer, you will understand that great men can rarely be +Resurrected. Their beings are too crystallized, sir, their lifelines too +tough." + +"Pardon me, but I think that's rot. I believe that most great men refuse +to make the bargain with the Snakes, or with us Spiders either. They +scorn Resurrection at the price demanded." + +"Brother, they ain't that great," I whispered, while Beau glided on +with, "However that may be, you have accepted Resurrection, sir, and so +incurred an obligation which you as a gentleman must honor." + +"I accepted Resurrection all right," Bruce said, a glare coming into his +eyes. "When they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '17 ten +minutes before I died, I grabbed at the offer of life like a drunkard +grabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I was also +seizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace." His voice was +getting wilder all the time. Just beyond our circle, I noticed the New +Girl watching him worshipfully. "But what did I find the Spiders wanted +me for? Only to fight more wars, over and over again, make them crueler +and stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each Big +Change, work our way a little closer to the death of the cosmos." + +Sid touched my wrist and, as Bruce raved on, he whispered to me, "What +kind of ball, think you, will please and so quench this fire-brained +rogue? And you love me, discover it." + +I whispered back without taking my eyes off Bruce either, "I know +somebody who'll be happy to put on any kind of ball he wants, if he'll +just notice her." + +"The New Girl, sweetling? 'Tis well. This rogue speaks like an angry +angel. It touches my heart and I like it not." + +Bruce was saying hoarsely but loudly, "And so we're sent on operations +in the past and from each of those operations the Change Winds blow +futurewards, swiftly or slowly according to the opposition they breast, +sometimes rippling into each other, and any one of those Winds may shift +the date of our own death ahead of the date of our Resurrection, so that +in an instant--even here, outside the cosmos--we may molder and rot or +crumble to dust and vanish away. The wind with our name in it may leak +through the Door." + + * * * * * + +Faces hardened at that, because it's bad form to mention Change Death, +and Erich flared out with, "_Halt's Maul, Kamerad!_ There's always +another Resurrection." + +But Bruce didn't keep his mouth shut. He said, "Is there? I know the +Spiders promise it, but even if they do go back and cut another +Doubleganger from my lifeline, is he me?" He slapped his chest with his +bare hand. "I don't think so. And even if he is me, with unbroken +consciousness, why's he been Resurrected again? Just to refight more +wars and face more Change Death for the sake of an almighty power--" his +voice was rising to a climax--"an almighty power so bloody ineffectual, +it can't furnish one poor Soldier pulled out of the mud of +Passchendaele, one miserable Change Commando, one Godforsaken Recuperee +a proper issue of equipment!" + +And he held out his bare right hand toward us, fingers spread a little, +as if it were the most amazing object and most deserving of outraged +sympathy in the whole world. + +The New Girl's timing was perfect. She whisked through us, and before he +could so much as wiggle the fingers, she whipped a black gauntleted +glove on it and anyone could see that it fitted his hand perfectly. + +This time our laughing beat the other. We collapsed and slopped our +drinks and pounded each other on the back and then started all over. + +"_Ach, der Handschuh, Liebchen!_ Where'd she get it?" Erich gasped in my +ear. + +"Probably just turned the other one inside out--that turns a left into a +right--I've done it myself," I wheezed, collapsing again at the idea. + +"That would put the lining outside," he objected. + +"Then I don't know," I said. "We got all sorts of junk in Stores." + +"It doesn't matter, _Liebchen_," he assured me. "_Ach, der Handschuh!_" + +All through it, Bruce just stood there admiring the glove, moving the +fingers a little now and then, and the New Girl stood watching him as if +he were eating a cake she'd baked. + + * * * * * + +When the hysteria quieted down, he looked up at her with a big smile. +"What did you say your name was?" + +"Lili," she said, and believe you me, she was Lili to me even in my +thoughts from then on, for the way she'd handled that lunatic. + +"Lilian Foster," she explained. "I'm English also. Mr. Marchant, I've +read _A Young Man's Fancy_ I don't know how many times." + +"You have? It's wretched stuff. From the Dark Ages--I mean my Cambridge +days. In the trenches, I was working up some poems that were rather +better." + +"I won't hear you say that. But I'd be terribly thrilled to hear the new +ones. Oh, Mr. Marchant, it was so strange to hear you call it +Passiondale." + +"Why, if I may ask?" + +"Because that's the way I pronounce it to myself. But I looked it up and +it's more like Pas-ken-DA-luh." + +"Bless you! All the Tommies called it Passiondale, just as they called +Ypres Wipers." + +"How interesting. You know, Mr. Marchant, I'll wager we were Recruited +in the same operation, summer of 1917. I'd got to France as a Red Cross +nurse, but they found out my age and were going to send me back." + +"How old were you--are you? Same thing, I mean to say." + +"Seventeen." + +"Seventeen in '17," Bruce murmured, his blue eyes glassy. + +It was real corny dialogue and I couldn't resent the humorous leer Erich +gave me as we listened to them, as if to say, "Ain't it nice, +_Liebchen_, Bruce has a silly little English schoolgirl to occupy him +between operations?" + +Just the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklace +and tight little gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Bruce +hulking over her tenderly in his snazzy hussar's rig, I knew that I was +seeing the start of something that hadn't been part of me since Dave +died fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort of +thing that almost made me wish there could be children in the Change +World. I wondered why I'd never thought of trying to work things so that +Dave got Resurrected and I told myself: no, it's all changed, I've +changed, better the Change Winds don't disturb Dave or I know about it. + +"No, I didn't die in 1917--I was merely Recruited then," Lili was +telling Bruce. "I lived all through the Twenties, as you can see from +the way I dress. But let's not talk about that, shall we? Oh, Mr. +Marchant, do you think you can possibly remember any of those poems you +started in the trenches? I can't fancy them bettering your sonnet that +concludes with, 'The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep; Look +at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.'" + +That one almost made me whoop--what monkeys we are, I thought--though +I'd be the first to admit that the best line to use on a poet is one of +his own--in fact, as many as possible. I decided I could safely forget +our little Britons and devote myself to Erich or whatever needed me. + + + + +CHAPTER 3 + + Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine churchmen, and the + fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave + soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go. There go + also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside + their lord. There go the gold and the silver, the sables and ermine. + There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth. + + --Aucassin + +NINE FOR A PARTY + + +I exchanged my drink for a new one from another tray Beau was bringing +around. The gray of the Void was beginning to look real pleasant, like +warm thick mist with millions of tiny diamonds floating in it. Doc was +sitting grandly at the bar with a steaming tumbler of tea--a chaser, I +guess, since he was just putting down a shot glass. Sid was talking to +Erich and laughing at the same time and I said to myself it begins to +feel like a party, but something's lacking. + +It wasn't anything to do with the Major Maintainer; its telltale was +glowing a steady red like a nice little home fire amid the tight cluster +of dials that included all the controls except the lonely and +frightening Introversion switch that was never touched. Then Maud's +couch curtains winked out and there were she and the Roman sitting +quietly side by side. + +He looked down at his shiny boots and the rest of his black duds like he +was just waking up and couldn't believe it all, and he said, "_Omnia +mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis_," and I raised my eyebrows at Beau, +who was taking the tray back, and he did proud by old Vicksburg by +translating: "All things change and we change with them." + +Then Mark slowly looked around at us, and I can testify that a Roman +smile is just as warm as any other nationality, and he finally said, "We +are nine, the proper number for a party. The couches, too. It is good." + +Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, "Welcome back from the Void, +_Kamerad_," and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to +be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, +"_Herren und Damen_, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them +all, Marcus Vipsaius Niger, legate to Nero Claudius (called Germanicus +in a former time stream) and who in 763 A.U.C. (Correct, Mark? It means +10 A.D., you meatheads!) died bravely fighting the Parthians and the +Snakes in the Battle of Alexandria. _Hoch, hoch, hoch!_" + + * * * * * + +We all swung our glasses and cheered with him and Sid yelled at Erich, +"Keep your feet off the furniture, you unschooled rogue," and grinned +and boomed at all three hussars, "Take your ease, Recuperees," and Maud +and Mark got their drinks, the Roman paining Beau by refusing Falernian +wine in favor of scotch and soda, and right away everyone was talking a +mile a minute. + +We had a lot to catch up on. There was the usual yak about the war--"The +Snakes are laying mine fields in the Void," "I don't believe it, how can +you mine nothing?"--and the shortages--bourbon, bobby pins, and the +stabilitin that would have brought Mark out of it faster--and what had +become of people--"Marcia? Oh, she's not around any more," (She'd been +caught in a Change Gale and green and stinking in five seconds, but I +wasn't going to say that)--and Mark had to be told about Bruce's glove, +which convulsed us all over again, and the Roman remembered a legionary +who had carried a gripe all the way to Octavius because he'd +accidentally been issued the unbelievable luxury item sugar instead of +the usual salt, and Erich asked Sid if he had any new Ghostgirls in +stock and Sid sucked his beard like the old goat he is. "Dost thou ask +me, lusty Allemand? Nay, there are several great beauties, amongst them +an Austrian countess from Strauss's Vienna, and if it were not for +sweetling here ... Mnnnn." + +I poked a finger in Erich's chest between two of the bright buttons with +their tiny death's heads. "You, my little von Hohenwald, are a menace to +us real girls. You have too much of a thing about the unawakened, ghost +kind." + +He called me his little Demon and hugged me a bit too hard to prove it +wasn't so, and then he suggested we show Bruce the Art Gallery. I +thought this was a real brilliant idea, but when I tried to argue him +out of it, he got stubborn. Bruce and Lili were willing to do anything +anyone wanted them to, though not so willing to pay any attention while +doing it. The saber cut was just a thin red line on his cheek; she'd +washed away all the dried blood. + +The Gallery gets you, though. It's a bunch of paintings and sculptures +and especially odd knick-knacks, all made by Soldiers recuperating here, +and a lot of them telling about the Change War from the stuff they're +made of--brass cartridges, flaked flint, bits of ancient pottery glued +into futuristic shapes, mashed-up Incan gold rebeaten by a Martian, +whorls of beady Lunan wire, a picture in tempera on a crinkle-cracked +thick round of quartz that had filled a starship porthole, a Sumerian +inscription chiseled into a brick from an atomic oven. + + * * * * * + +There are a lot of things in the Gallery and I can always find some I +haven't ever seen before. It gets you, as I say, thinking about the guys +that made them and their thoughts and the far times and places they came +from, and sometimes, when I'm feeling low, I'll come and look at them so +I'll feel still lower and get inspired to kick myself back into a good +temper. It's the only history of the Place there is and it doesn't +change a great deal, because the things in it and the feelings that went +into them resist the Change Winds better than anything else. + +Right now, Erich's witty lecture was bouncing off the big ears I hide +under my pageboy bob and I was thinking how awful it is that for us that +there's not only change but Change. You don't know from one minute to +the next whether a mood or idea you've got is really new or just welling +up into you because the past has been altered by the Spiders or Snakes. + +Change Winds can blow not only death but anything short of it, down to +the featheriest fancy. They blow thousands of times faster than time +moves, but no one can say how much faster or how far one of them will +travel or what damage it'll do or how soon it'll damp out. The Big Time +isn't the little time. + +And then, for the Demons, there's the fear that our personality will +just fade and someone else climb into the driver's seat and us not even +know. Of course, we Demons are supposed to be able to remember through +Change and in spite of it; that's why we are Demons and not Ghosts like +the other Doublegangers, or merely Zombies or Unborn and nothing more, +and as Beau truly said, there aren't any great men among us--and blamed +few of the masses, either--we're a rare sort of people and that's why +the Spiders have to Recruit us where they find us without caring about +our previous knowledge and background, a Foreign Legion of time, a +strange kind of folk, bright but always in the background, with built-in +nostalgia and cynicism, as adaptable as Centaurian shape-changers but +with memories as long as a Lunan's six arms, a kind of Change People, +you might say, the cream of the damned. + +But sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are +and if the whole past wasn't once entirely different from anything we +remember, and we've forgotten that we forgot. + +As I say, the Gallery gets you feeling real low, and so now I said to +myself, "Back to your lousy little commandant, kid," and gave myself a +stiff boot. + +Erich was holding up a green bowl with gold dolphins or spaceships on it +and saying, "And, to my mind, this proves that Etruscan art is derived +from Egyptian. Don't you agree, Bruce?" + +Bruce looked up, all smiles from Lili, and said, "What was that, dear +chap?" + + * * * * * + +Erich's forehead got dark as the Door and I was glad the hussars had +parked their sabers along with their shakos, but before he could even +get out a Jerry cussword, Doc breezed up in that plateau-state of +drunkenness so like hypnotized sobriety, moving as if he were on a +dolly, ghosted the bowl out of Erich's hand, said, "A beautiful specimen +of Middle Systemic Venusian. When Eightaitch finished it, he told me you +couldn't look at it and not feel the waves of the Northern Venusian +Shallows rippling around your hoofs. But it might look better inverted. +I wonder. Who are you, young officer? _Nichevo_," and he carefully put +the bowl back on its shelf and rolled on. + +It's a fact that Doc knows the Art Gallery better than any of us, really +by heart, he being the oldest inhabitant, though he maybe picked a bad +time to show off his knowledge. Erich was going to take out after him, +but I said, "Nix, _Kamerad_, remember gloves and sugar," and he +contented himself with complaining, "That _nichevo_--it's so gloomy and +hopeless, _ungeheuerlich_. I tell you, _Liebchen_, they shouldn't have +Russians working for the Spiders, not even as Entertainers." + +I grinned at him and squeezed his hand. "Not much entertainment in Doc +these days, is there?" I agreed. + +He grinned back at me a shade sheepishly and his face smoothed and his +blue eyes looked sweet again for a second and he said, "I shouldn't want +to claw out at people that way, Greta, but at times I am just a jealous +old man," which is not entirely true, as he isn't a day over +thirty-three, although his hair is nearly white. + +Our lovers had drifted on a few steps until they were almost fading into +the Surgery screen. It was the last spot I would have picked for the +formal preliminaries to a little British smooching, but Lili probably +didn't share my prejudices, though I remembered she'd told me she'd +served a brief hitch in an Arachnoid Field Hospital before being +transferred to the Place. + +But she couldn't have had anything like the experience I'd had during my +short and sour career as a Spider nurse, when I'd acquired my best-hated +nightmare and flopped completely (jobwise, but on the floor, too) at +seeing a doctor flick a switch and a being, badly injured but human, +turn into a long cluster of glistening strange fruit--ugh, it always +makes me want to toss my cookies and my buttons. And to think that dear +old Daddy Anton wanted his Greta chile to be a doctor. + + * * * * * + +Well, I could see this wasn't getting me anywhere I wanted to go, and +after all there was a party going on. + +Doc was babbling something at a great rate to Sid--I just hoped Doc +wouldn't get inspired to go into his animal imitations, which sound +pretty fierce and once seriously offended some recuperating ETs. + +Maud was demonstrating to Mark a 23rd Century two-step and Beau sat down +at the piano and improvised softly on her rhythm. + +As the deep-thrumming relaxing notes hit us, Erich's face brightened and +he dragged me over. Pleasantly soon I had my feet off the diamond-rough +floor, which we don't carpet because most of the ETs, the dear boys, +like it hard, and I was shouldering back deep into the couch nearest the +piano, with cushions all around me and a fresh drink in my hand, while +my Nazi boy friend was getting ready to discharge his _Weltschmerz_ as +song, which didn't alarm me too much, as his baritone is passable. + +Things felt real good, like the Maintainer was just idling to keep the +Place in existence and moored to the cosmos, not exerting itself at all +or at most taking an occasional lazy paddle stroke. At times the Place's +loneliness can be happy and comfortable. + +Then Beau raised an eyebrow at Erich, who nodded, and next thing they +were launched into a song we all know, though I've never found out where +it originally came from. This time it made me think of Lili, and I +wondered why--and why it's a tradition at Recuperation Stations to call +the new girl Lili, though in this case it happened to be her real name. + + _Standing in the Doorway just outside of space, + Winds of Change blow 'round you but don't touch your face; + You smile as you whisper tenderly, + "Please cross to me, Recuperee; + The operation's over, come in and close the Door."_ + + + + +CHAPTER 4 + + De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled + Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear + In fractured atoms. + + --Eliot + +SOS FROM NOWHERE + + +I realized the piano had deserted Erich and I cranked my head up and saw +Beau, Maud and Sid streaking for the control divan. The Major Maintainer +was blinking emergency-green and fast, but the code was plain enough for +even me to recognize the Spider distress call and for a second I felt +just sick. Then Erich blew out his reserve breath in the middle of +"Door" and I gave myself another of those helpful mental boots at the +base of the spine and we hurried after them toward the center of the +Place along with Mark. + +The blinks faded as we got there and Sid told us not to move because we +were making shadows. He glued an eye to the telltale and we held still +as statues as he caressed the dials like he was making love. + +One sensitive hand flicked out past the Introversion switch over to the +Minor Maintainer and right away the Place was dark as your soul and +there was nothing for me but Erich's arm and the knowledge that Sid was +nursing a green light I couldn't even see, although my eyes had plenty +time to accommodate. + +Then the green light finally came back very slowly and I could see the +dear reliable old face--the green-gold beard making him look like a +merman--and then the telltale flared bright and Sid flicked on the Place +lights and I leaned back. + +"That nails them, lads, whoever and whenever they may be. Get ready for +a pick-up." + +Beau, who was closest of course, looked at him sharply. Sid shrugged +uneasily. "Meseemed at first it was from our own globe a thousand years +before our Lord, but that indication flickered and faded like witchfire. +As it is, the call comes from something smaller than the Place and +certes adrift from the cosmos. Meseemed too at one point I knew the fist +of the caller--an antipodean atomicist named Benson-Carter--but that +likewise changed." + +Beau said, "We're not in the right phase of the cosmos-Places rhythm for +a pick-up, are we, sir?" + +Sid answered, "Ordinarily not, boy." + +Beau continued, "I didn't think we had any pick-ups scheduled. Or +stand-by orders." + +Sid said, "We haven't." + +Mark's eyes glowed. He tapped Erich on the shoulder. "An octavian +denarius against ten Reichsmarks it is a Snake trap." + +Erich's grin showed his teeth. "Make it first through the Door next +operation and I'm on." + + * * * * * + +It didn't take that to tell me things were serious, or the thought that +there's always a first time for bumping into something from really +outside the cosmos. The Snakes have broken our code more than once. Maud +was quietly serving out weapons and Doc was helping her. Only Bruce and +Lili stood off. But they were watching. + +The telltale brightened. Sid reached toward the Maintainer, saying, "All +right, my hearties. Remember, through this Doorway pass the fishiest +finaglers in and out of the cosmos." + +The Door appeared to the left and above where it should be and darkened +much too fast. There was a gust of stale salt seawind, if that makes +sense, but no stepped-up Change Winds I could tell--and I had been +bracing myself against them. The Door got inky and there was a flicker +of gray fur whips and a flash of copper flesh and gilt and something +dark and a clump of hoofs and Erich was sighting a stun gun across his +left forearm, and then the Door had vanished like that and a tentacled +silvery Lunan and a Venusian satyr were coming straight toward us. + +The Lunan was hugging a pile of clothes and weapons. The satyr was +helping a wasp-waisted woman carry a heavy-looking bronze chest. The +woman was wearing a short skirt and high-collared bolero jacket of +leather so dark brown it was almost black. She had a two-horned +_petsofa_ hairdress and she was boldly gilded here and there and wore +sandals and copper anklets and wristlets--one of them a copper-plated +Caller--and from her wide copper belt hung a short-handled double-headed +ax. She was dark-complexioned and her forehead and chin receded, but the +effect was anything but weak; she had a face like a beautiful +arrowhead--and a familiar one, by golly! + +But before I could say, "Kabysia Labrys," Maud shrilly beat me to it +with, "It's Kaby with two friends. Break out a couple of Ghostgirls." + +And then I saw it really was old-home week because I recognized my Lunan +boy friend Ilhilihis, and in the midst of all the confusion I got a nice +kick out of knowing I was getting so I could tell the personality of one +silver-furred muzzle from another. + +They reached the control divan and Illy dumped his load and the others +let down the chest, and Kaby staggered but shook off the two ETs when +they started to support her, and she looked daggers at Sid when he tried +to do the same, although she's his "sweet Keftian friend" he'd mentioned +to Bruce. + + * * * * * + +She leaned straight-armed on the divan and took two gasping breaths so +deep that the ridges of her spine showed through her brown-skinned +waist, and then she threw up her head and commanded, "Wine!" + +While Beau was rushing it, Sid tried to take her hand again, saying, +"Sweetling, I'd never heard you call before and knew not this pretty +little fist," but she ripped out, "Save your comfort for the Lunan," and +I looked and saw--Hey, Zeus!--that one of Ilhilihis' six tentacles was +lopped off halfway. + +That was for me, and, going to him, I fast briefed myself: "Remember, he +only weighs fifty pounds for all he's seven feet high; he doesn't like +low sounds or to be grabbed; the two legs aren't tentacles and don't act +the same; uses them for long walks, tentacles for leaps; uses tentacles +for close vision too and for manipulation, of course; extended, they +mean he's at ease; retracted, on guard or nervous; sharply retracted, +disgusted; greeting--" + +Just then, one of them swept across my face like a sweet-smelling +feather duster and I said, "Illy, man, it's been a lot of sleeps," and +brushed my fingers across his muzzle. It still took a little +self-control not to hug him, and I did reach a little cluckingly for +his lopped tentacle, but he wafted it away from me and the little +voice-box belted to his side squeaked, "Naughty, naughty. Papa will fix +his little old self. Greta girl, ever bandaged even a Terra octopus?" + +I had, an intelligent one from around a quarter billion A.D., but I +didn't tell him so. I stood and let him talk to the palm of my hand with +one of his tentacles--I don't savvy feather-talk but it feels good, +though I've often wondered who taught him English--and watched him use a +couple others to whisk a sort of Lunan band-aid out of his pouch and cap +his wound with it. + +Meanwhile, the satyr knelt over the bronze chest, which was decorated +with little death's heads and crosses with hoops at the top and +swastikas, but looking much older than Nazi, and the satyr said to Sid, +"Quick thinkin, Gov, when ya saw the Door comin in high n soffened up +gravty unner it, but cud I hav sum hep now?" + +Sid touched the Minor Maintainer and we all got very light and my +stomach did a flip-flop while the satyr piled on the chest the clothes +and weapons that Illy had been carrying and pranced off with it all and +carefully put it down at the end of the bar. I decided the satyr's +English instructor must have been quite a character, too. Wish I'd met +him--her--it. + +Sid thought to ask Illy if he wanted Moon-normal gravity in one sector, +but my boy likes to mix, and being such a lightweight, Earth-normal +gravity doesn't bother him. As he said to me once, "Would Jovian gravity +bother a beetle, Greta girl?" + + * * * * * + +I asked Illy about the satyr and he squeaked that his name was Sevensee +and that he'd never met him before this operation. I knew the satyrs +were from a billion years in the future, just as the Loonies were from a +billion in the past, and I thought--Kreesed us!--but it must have been +a real big or emergency-like operation to have the Spiders using those +two for it, with two billion years between them--a time-difference that +gives you a feeling of awe for a second, you know. + +[Illustration] + +I started to ask Illy about it, but just then Beau came scampering back +from the bar with a big red-and-black earthenware goblet of wine--we try +to keep a variety of drinking tools in stock so folks will feel more at +home. Kaby grabbed it from him and drained most of it in one swallow and +then smashed it on the floor. She does things like that, though Sid's +tried to teach her better. Then she stared at what she was thinking +about until the whites showed all around her eyes and her lips pulled +way back from her teeth and she looked a lot less human than the two +ETs, just like a fury. Only a time traveler knows how like the wild +murals and engravings of them some of the ancients can look. + +My hair stood up at the screech she let out. She smashed a fist into the +divan and cried, "Goddess! Must I see Crete destroyed, revived, and now +destroyed again? It is too much for your servant." + +Personally, I thought she could stand anything. + +There was a rush of questions at what she said about Crete--I asked one +of them, for the news certainly frightened me--but she shot up her arm +straight for silence and took a deep breath and began. + +"In the balance hung the battle. Rowing like black centipedes, the +Dorian hulls bore down on our outnumbered ships. On the bright beach, +masked by rocks, Sevensee and I stood by the needle gun, ready to give +the black hulls silent wounds. Beside us was Ilhilihis, suited as a sea +monster. But then ... then ..." + +Then I saw she wasn't altogether the iron babe, for her voice broke and +she started to shake and to sob rackingly, although her face was still a +mask of rage, and she threw up the wine. Sid stepped in and made her +stop, which I think he'd been wanting to do all along. + + + + +CHAPTER 5 + + Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts + creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. + They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to + me. + + --Ibsen + +SID INSISTS ON GHOSTGIRLS + + +My Elizabethan boy friend put his fists on his hips and laid down the +law to us as if we were a lot of nervous children who'd been playing too +hard. + +"Look you, masters, this is a Recuperation Station and I am running it +as such. A plague of all operations! I care not if the frame of things +disjoints and the whole Change World goes to ruin, but you, warrior +maid, are going to rest and drink more wine slowly before you tell your +tale and your colleagues are going to be properly companioned. No +questions, anyone. Beau, and you love us, give us a lively tune." + +Kaby relaxed a little and let him put his hand carefully against her +back in token of support and she said grudgingly, "All right, Fat +Belly." + +Then, so help me, to the tune of the Muskrat Ramble, which I'd taught +Beau, we got girls for those two ETs and everybody properly paired up. + +Right here I want to point out that a lot of the things they say in the +Change World about Recuperation Stations simply aren't so--and anyway +they always leave out nine-tenths of it. The Soldiers that come through +the Door are looking for a good time, sure, but they're hurt real bad +too, every one of them, deep down in their minds and hearts, if not +always in their bodies or so you can see it right away. + +Believe me, a temporal operation is no joke, and to start with, there +isn't one person in a hundred who can endure to be cut from his lifeline +and become a really wide-awake Doubleganger--a Demon, that is--let alone +a Soldier. What does a badly hurt and mixed-up creature need who's been +fighting hard? _One individual_ to look out for him and feel for him and +patch him up, and it helps if the one is of the opposite sex--that's +something that goes beyond species. + +There's your basis for the Place and the wild way it goes about its +work, and also for most other Recuperation Stations or Entertainment +Spots. The name Entertainer can be misleading, but I like it. She's got +to be a lot more than a good party girl--or boy--though she's got to be +that too. She's got to be a nurse and a psychologist and an actress and +a mother and a practical ethnologist and a lot of things with longer +names--and a reliable friend. + + * * * * * + +None of us are all those things perfectly or even near it. We just try. +But when the call comes, Entertainers have to forget grudges and gripes +and envies and jealousies--and remember, they're lively people with +sharp emotions--because there isn't any time then for anything but _help +and don't ask who_! + +And, deep inside her, a good Entertainer doesn't care who. Take the way +it shaped up this time. It was pretty clear to me I ought to shift to +Illy, although I wasn't quite easy in my mind about leaving Erich, +because the Lunan was a long time from home and, after all, Erich was +among anthropoids. Ilhilihis needed someone who was _simpatico_. + +I like Illy and not just because he is a sort of tall cross between a +spider monkey and a persian cat--though that is a handsome combo when +you come to think of it. I like him for himself. So when he came in all +lopped and shaky after a mean operation, I was the right person to look +out for him. Now I've made my little speech and know-nothings in the +Change World can go on making their bum jokes. But I ask you, how could +an arrangement between Illy and me be anything but Platonic? + +We might have had some octopoid girls and nymphs in stock--Sid couldn't +be sure until he checked--but Ilhilihis and Sevensee voted for real +people and I knew Sid saw it their way. Maud squeezed Mark's hand and +tripped over to Sevensee ("Those are sharp hoofs you got, man"--she's +picked up some of my language, like she has everything else), though +Beau did frown over his shoulder at Lili from the piano, maybe to argue +that she ought to take on the ET, as Mark had been a real casualty and +could use live nursing. But it was plain as day to anybody but Beau that +Bruce and Lili were a big thing and the last to be disturbed. + +Erich acted stiffly hurt at losing me, but I knew he wasn't. He thinks +he has a great technique with Ghostgirls and he likes to show it off, +and he really is pretty slick at it, if you go for that sort of thing +and--yang my yin!--who doesn't at times? + +And when Sid formally wafted the Countess out of Stores--a real blonde +stunner in a white satin hobble skirt with a white egret swaying up from +her tiny hat, way ahead of Maud and Lili and me when it came to looks, +though transparent as cigarette smoke--and when Erich clicked his heels +and bowed over her hand and proudly conducted her to a couch, black +Svengali to her Trilby, and started to German-talk some life into her +with much head cocking and toothy smiling and a flow of witty flattery, +and when she began to flirt back and the dream look in her eyes +sharpened hungrily and focused on him--well, then I knew that Erich was +happy and felt he was doing proud by the _Reichswehr_. No, my little +commandant wasn't worrying me on that score. + + * * * * * + +Mark had drawn a Greek hetaera, name of Phryne; I suppose not the one +who maybe still does the famous courtroom striptease back in Athens, and +he was waking her up with little sips of his scotch and soda, though, +from some looks he'd flashed, I got the idea Kaby was the kid he really +went for. Sid was coaxing the fighting gal to take some high-energy +bread and olives along with the wine, and, for a wonder, Doc seemed to +be carrying on an animated and rational conversation with Sevensee and +Maud, maybe comparing notes on the Northern Venusian Shallows, and Beau +had got on to Panther Rag, and Bruce and Lili were leaning on the piano, +smiling very appreciatively, but talking to each other a mile a minute. + +Illy turned back from inspecting them all and squeaked, "Animals with +clothes are so refreshing, dahling! Like you're all carrying banners!" + +Maybe he had something there, though my banners were kind of Ash +Wednesday, a charcoal gray sweater and skirt. He looked at my mouth with +a tentacle to see how I was smiling and he squeaked softly, "Do I seem +dull and commonplace to you, Greta girl, because I haven't got banners? +Just another Zombie from a billion years in your past, as gray and +lifeless as Luna is today, not as when she was a real dreamy sister +planet simply bursting with air and water and feather forests. Or am I +as strangely interesting to you as you are to me, girl from a billion +years in my future?" + +"Illy, you're sweet," I told him, giving him a little pat. I noticed his +fur was still vibrating nervously and I decided the heck with Sid's +orders, I'm going to pump him about what he was doing with Kaby and the +satyr. Couldn't have him a billion years from home and bottled up, too. +Besides, I was curious. + + + + +CHAPTER 6 + + Maiden, Nymph, and Mother are the eternal royal Trinity of the + island, and the Goddess, who is worshipped there in each of these + aspects, as New Moon, Full Moon, and Old Moon, is the sovereign + Deity. + + --Graves + +CRETE CIRCA 1300 B.C. + + +Kaby pushed back at Sid some seconds of bread and olives, and, when he +raised his bushy eyebrows, gave him a curt nod that meant she knew what +she was doing. She stood up and sort of took a position. All the talk +quieted down fast, even Bruce's and Lili's. Kaby's face and voice +weren't strained now, but they weren't relaxed either. + +"Woe to Spider! Woe to Cretan! Heavy is the news I bring you. Bear it +bravely, like strong women. When we got the gun unlimbered, I heard +seaweed fry and crackle. We three leaped behind the rock wall, saw our +gun grow white as sunlight in a heat-ray of the Serpents! Natch, we +feared we were outnumbered and I called upon my Caller." + +[Illustration] + +I don't know how she does it, but she does--in English too. That is, +when she figures she's got something important to report, and maybe she +needs a little time to get ready. + +Beau claims that all the ancients fit their thoughts into measured lines +as naturally as we pick a word that will do, but I'm not sure how good +the Vicksburg language department is. Though why I should wonder about +things like that when I've got Kaby spouting the stuff right in front of +me, I don't know. + +"But I didn't die there, kiddos. I still hoped to hurt the Greek ships, +maybe with the Snake's own heat gun. So I quick tried to outflank them. +My two comrades crawled beside me--they are males, but they have +courage. Soon we spied the ambush-setters. They were Snakes and they +were many, filthily disguised as Cretans." + +There was an indignant murmur at this, for our cutthroat Change War has +its code, the Soldiers tell me. Being an Entertainer, I don't have to +say what I think. + +"They had seen us when we saw them," Kaby swept on, "and they loosed a +killing volley. Heat- and knife-rays struck about us in a storm of wind +and fire, and the Lunan lost a feeler, fighting for Crete's Triple +Goddess. So we dodged behind a sand hill, steered our flight back toward +the water. It was awful, what we saw there: Crete's brave ships all sunk +or sinking, blue sky sullied by their death-smoke. Once again the Greeks +had licked us!--aided by the filthy Serpents. + +"Round our wrecks, their black ships scurried, like black beetles, filth +their diet, yet this day they dine on heroes. On the quiet sunlit beach +there, I could feel a Change Gale blowing, working changes deep inside +me, aches and pains that were a stranger's. Half my memories were +doubled, half my lifeline crooked and twisted, three new moles upon my +sword-hand. Goddess, Goddess, Triple Goddess--" + + * * * * * + +Her voice wavered and Sid reached out a hand, but she straightened her +back. + +"Triple Goddess, give me courage to tell everything that happened. We +ran down into the water, hoping to escape by diving. We had hardly +gotten under when the heat-rays hit above us, turning all the cool green +surface to a roaring white inferno. But as I believe I told you, I was +calling on my Caller, and a Door now opened to us, deep below the deadly +steam-clouds. We dived in like frightened minnows and a lot of water +with us." + +Off Chicago's Gold Coast, Dave once gave me a lesson in skin-diving and, +remembering it, I got a flash of Kaby's Door in the dark depths. + +"For a moment, all was chaos. Then the Door slammed shut behind us. We'd +been picked up in time's nick by--an Express Room of our +Spiders!--sloshing two feet deep in water, much more cramped for space +than this Place. It was manned by a magician, an old coot named +Benson-Carter. He dispelled the water quickly and reported on his +Caller. We'd got dry, were feeling human, Illy here had shed his +swimsuit, when we looked at the Maintainer. It was glowing, changing, +melting! And when Benson-Carter touched it, he fell backward--death was +in him. Then the Void began to darken, narrow, shrink and close around +us, so I called upon my Caller--without wasting time, let me tell you! + +"We can't say for sure what was it slowly squeezed that sweet Express +Room, but we fear the dirty Snakes have found a way to find our Places +and attack outside the cosmos!--found the Spiderweb that links us in the +Void's gray less-than-nothing." + +No murmur this time. This reaction was genuine; we'd been hit where we +lived and I could see everybody was scared as sick as I was. Except +maybe Bruce and Lili, who were still holding hands and beaming gently. I +decided they were the kind that love makes brave, which it doesn't do to +me. It just gives me two people to worry about. + +"I can see you dig our feelings," Kaby continued. "This thing scared the +pants off of us. If we could have, we'd have even Introverted the +Maintainer, broken all the ties that bind us, chanced it incommunicado. +But the little old Maintainer was a seething red-hot puddle filled with +bubbles big as handballs. We sat tight and watched the Void close. I +kept calling on my Caller." + + * * * * * + +I squeezed my eyes shut, but that made it easier to see the three of +them with the Void shutting down on them. (Was ours still behaving? Yes, +Bibi Miriam.) Poetry or no poetry, it got me. + +"Benson-Carter, lying dying, also thought the Snakes had done it. And he +knew that death was in him, so he whispered me his mission, giving me +precise instructions: how to press the seven death's hands, starting +lockside counterclockwise, one, three, five, six, two, four, seven, then +you have a half an hour; after you have pressed the seven, do not monkey +with the buttons--get out fast and don't stop moving." + +I wasn't getting this part and I couldn't see that anyone else was, +though Bruce was whispering to Lili. I remembered seeing skulls engraved +on the bronze chest. I looked at Illy and he nodded a tentacle and +spread two to say, I guessed, that yes, Benson-Carter had said something +like that, but no, Illy didn't know much about it. + +"All these things and more he whispered," Kaby went on, "with the last +gasps of his life-force, telling all his secret orders--for he'd not +been sent to get us, he was on a separate mission, when he heard my +SOSs. Sid, it's you he was to contact, as the first leg of his mission, +pick up from you three black hussars, death's-head Demons, daring +Soldiers, then to wait until the Places next match rhythm with the +cosmos--matter of two mealtimes, barely--and to tune in northern Egypt +in the age of the last Caesar, in the year of Rome's swift downfall, +there to start an operation in a battle near a city named for Thrace's +Alexander, there to change the course of battle, blow sky-high the +stinking Serpents, all their agents, all their Zombies! + +"Goddess, pardon, now I savvy how you've guided my least footstep, when +I thought you'd gone and left me--for I flubbed your three-mole signal. +We've found Sid's Place, that's the first leg, and I see the three black +hussars, and we've brought with us the weapon and the Parthian +disguises, salvaged from the doomed Express Room when your Door appeared +in time's nick, and the Room around us closing spewed us through before +it vanished with the corpse of Benson-Carter. Triple Goddess, draw the +milk now from the womanhood I flaunt here and inject the blackest +hatred! Vengeance now upon the Serpents, vengeance sweet in northern +Egypt, for your island, Crete, Goddess!--and a victory for the Spiders! +Goddess, Goddess, we can swing it!" + +The roar that made me try to stop my ears with my shoulders didn't come +from Kaby--she'd spoken her piece--but from Sid. The dear boy was purple +enough to make me want to remind him you can die of high blood pressure +just as easy in the Change World. + +"Dump me with ops! 'Sblood, I'll not endure it! Is this a battle post? +They'll be mounting operations from field hospitals next. Kabysia +Labrys, thou art mad to suggest it. And what's this prattle of locks, +clocks, and death's heads, buttons and monkeys? This brabble, this +farrago, this hocus-pocus! And where's the weapon you prate of? In that +whoreson bronze casket, I suppose." + +She nodded, looking blank and almost a little shy as poetic possession +faded from her. Her answer came like its faltering last echo. + +"It is nothing but a tiny tactical atomic bomb." + + + + +CHAPTER 7 + + After about 0.1 millisecond (one ten-thousandth part of a second) + has elapsed, the radius of the ball of fire is some 45 feet, and the + temperature is then in the vicinity of 300,000 degrees Centigrade. + At this instant, the luminosity, as observed at a distance of + 100,000 yards (5.7 miles), is approximately 100 times that of the + sun as seen at the earth's surface ... the ball of fire expands very + rapidly to its maximum radius of 450 feet within less than a second + from the explosion. + + --Los Alamos + +TIME TO THINK + + +Brother, that was all we needed to make everybody but Kaby and the two +ETs start yelping at once, me included. It may seem strange that Change +People, able to whiz through time and space and roust around outside the +cosmos and knowing at least by hearsay of weapons a billion years in the +future, like the Mindbomb, should panic at being shut in with a little +primitive mid-20th Century gadget. Well, they feel the same as atomic +scientists would feel if a Bengal tiger were brought into their +laboratory, neither more nor less scared. + +I'm a moron at physics, but I do know the Fireball is bigger than the +Place. Remember that, besides the bomb, we'd recently been presented +with a lot of other fears we hadn't had time to cope with, especially +the business of the Snakes having learned how to get at our Places and +melt the Maintainers and collapse them. Not to mention the general +impression--first Saint Petersburg, then Crete--that the whole Change +War was going against the Spiders. + +Yet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were all +panicking. It made me admit what I didn't like to: that we were all in +pretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn't happen +to be our out. + +And had the rest of us been controlling our drinking so well lately? + +Maud yelled, "Jettison it!" and pulled away from the satyr and ran from +the bronze chest. Beau, harking back to what they'd thought of doing in +the Express Room when it was too late, hissed, "Sirs, we must +Introvert," and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for the +control divan. Erich seconded him with a white-faced "_Gott in Himmel, +ja!_" from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slim +stem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass. + +I felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degrees +worse than foxholing. It's supposed not only to keep the Door tight +shut, but also to lock it so even the Change Winds can't get +through--cut the Place loose from the cosmos altogether. + +I'd never talked with anyone from a Place that had been Introverted. + + * * * * * + +Mark dumped Phryne off his lap and ran after Maud. The Greek Ghostgirl, +quite solid now, looked around with sleepy fear and fumbled her +apple-green chiton together at the throat. She wrenched my attention +away from everyone else for a moment, and I couldn't help wondering +whether the person or Zombie back in the cosmos, from whose lifeline the +Ghost has been taken, doesn't at least have strange dreams or thoughts +when something like this happens. + +Sid stopped Beau, though he almost got bowled over doing it, and he held +the gambler away from the Maintainer in a bear hug and bellowed over his +shoulders, "Masters, are you mad? Have you lost your wits? Maud! Mark! +Marcus! Magdalene! On your lives, unhand that casket!" + +Maud had swept the clothes and bows and quivers and stuff off it and was +dragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump it +through fast when we got one, I guess, while Mark acted as if he were +trying to help her and wrestle it away from her at the same time. + +They kept on as if they hadn't heard a word Sid said, with Mark yelling, +"Let go, _meretrix_! This holds Rome's answer to Parthia on the Nile." + +Kaby watched them as if she wanted to help Mark but scorned to scuffle +with a mere--well, Mark had said it in Latin, I guess--call girl. + +Then, on the top of the bronze chest, I saw those seven lousy skulls +starting at the lock as plain as if they'd been under a magnifying +glass, though ordinarily they'd have been a vague circle to my eyes at +the distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the opposite +direction, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, and +squeaked, "Easy now, Greta girl, don't you be doing it, too. Hold still +or Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you have +a mind to." + +My stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but it +stopped me and I got my mind back, partly. + +"Unhand it, I say!" Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and he +released Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler's shoulder. + +Then my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Void +and blustered at no one in particular, "'Sdeath, think you I'd mutiny +against my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent fox +and pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggests +it? Introversion's no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervised +and sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I'd Introverted ere we got +Kaby's call for succor, hey?" + + * * * * * + +His warrior maid nodded with harsh approval and he noticed it and shook +his free hand at her and scolded her, "Not that I say yea to your mad +plan for that Devil's casket, you half-clad lackwit. And yet to +jettison.... Oh, ye gods, ye gods--" he wiped his hand across his +face--"grant me a minute in which I may think!" + +Thinking time wasn't an item even on the strictly limited list at the +moment, although Sevensee, squatting dourly on his hairy haunches where +Maud had left him, threw in a dead-pan "Thas tellin em, Gov." + +Then Doc at the bar stood up tall as Abe Lincoln in his top hat and +shawl and 19th Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence and +said something that sounded like: "Introversh, inversh, glovsh," and +then his enunciation switched to better than perfect as he continued, "I +know to an absolute certainty what we must do." + +It showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a church +while we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for a +poor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves. + +He said something like, "Inversh ... bosh ..." and held our eyes for a +moment longer. Then the light went out of his and he slobbered out a +"_Nichevo_" and slid an arm far along the bar for a bottle and started +to pour it down his throat without stopping sliding. + +Before he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second while +our attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top of +it, so fast it was almost like he'd popped up from nowhere, though I'd +seen him start from behind the piano. + +"I've a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?" he said in a +voice that was very clear and just loud enough. "So it can't go off," he +went on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk manner +putting more heart into me all the time. "What's more, if it were to be +triggered, we'd still have half an hour. I believe you said it had that +long a fuse?" + +He stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded. + +"Right," he said. "It'd have to be that long for whoever plants it in +the Parthian camp to get away. There's another safety margin. + +"Second question. Is there a locksmith in the house?" + + * * * * * + +For all Bruce's easiness, he was watching us like a golden eagle and he +caught Beau's and Maud's affirmatives before they had a chance to +explain or hedge them and said, "That's very good. Under certain +circumstances, you two'd be the ones to go to work on the chest. But +before we consider that, there's Question Three: Is anyone here an +atomics technician?" + +That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to +explain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power--hadn't they +blasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly +craters?--but no, he wasn't a technician exactly, he was a "thinger" (I +thought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?--well, +a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly +impossible to describe, but no, you couldn't possibly thing atomics; the +idea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn't be an atomics thinger; the +term was worse than a contradiction, well, really!--while Sevensee, from +his two-thousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect +that his culture didn't rightly use any kind of power, but just sort of +moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling space-time around, "or think em roun +ef we hafta. Can't think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have--I +dunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow." + +"So we don't have an A-tech," Bruce summed up, "which makes it worse +than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn't +know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question." He +directed it toward Sid. "How long before we can jettison anything?" + +Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had +calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn't seem to be +taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the +word "rhythm," he pulled the answer away from him. + +"In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again. +Thank you, Master Lessingham. That's at least five hours--two mealtimes, +as the Cretan officer put it," and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly +smile. "So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there's not a +thing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!" + +His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and +down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail +glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn't seem to notice them and we +hardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to +another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight +golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void. + +"All right then," he repeated suddenly. "We're twelve Spiders and two +Ghosts, and we've time for a bit of a talk, and we're all in the same +bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we'll all know what we're +talking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up +about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are +off!" + + * * * * * + +Bruce ripped them out of his belt where they'd been tucked and slammed +them down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and +forth, and it wasn't funny. + +"Because," he went right on, "I've been getting a completely new picture +of what this Spiders' war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it's +jolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged +little party outside both of them when the operation's over. It's sweet +to know there's no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate +or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can't +shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or +gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the +ultimate insatiable hunger, and it's great to be Faust, even in a pack +of other Fausts. + +"It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's life +or a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, +and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes--hah! killing men +or carrying off women isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It's +sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts +that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to +wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and +look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it +and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and +decide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what. + +"Or he can't stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you've got +to decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams, +only they'll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, or +whether, if she's got that tantalizing something, to bring her shell +along for a Ghostgirl--that's sweet, too. It's even sweet to have Change +Death poised over your neck, to know that the past isn't the precious +indestructible thing you've been taught it was, to know that there's no +certainty about the future either, whether there'll even be one, to know +that no part of reality is holy, that the cosmos itself may wink out +like a flicked switch and God be not and nothing left but nothing!" + +He threw out his arms against the Void. "And knowing all that, it's +doubly sweet to come through the Door into the Place and be out of the +worst of the Change Winds and enjoy a well-earned Recuperation and share +the memories of all these sweetnesses I've been talking about, and work +out all the fascinating feelings you've been accumulating back in the +cosmos, layer by black layer, in the company of and with the help of the +best bloody little band of fellow Fausts and Faustines going! + +"Oh, it's a sweet life, all right, but I'm asking you--" and here his +eyes stabbed us again, one by one, fast--"I'm asking you what it's done +to us. I've been getting a completely new picture, as I said, of what my +life was and what it could have been if there'd been changes of the sort +that even we Demons can't make, and what my life is. I've been watching +how we've all been responding to things just now, to the news of Saint +Petersburg and to what the Cretan officer told beautifully--only it +wasn't beautiful what she had to tell--and mostly to that bloody box of +bomb. And I'm simply asking each one of you, what's happened to you?" + + * * * * * + +He stopped his pacing and stuck his thumbs in his belt and seemed to be +listening to the wheels turning in at least eleven other heads--only I +stopped mine pretty quick, with Dave and Father and the Rape of Chicago +coming up out of the dark on the turn and Mother and the Indiana Dunes +and Jazz Limited just behind them, followed by the unthinkable thing +the Spider doctor had flicked into existence when I flopped as a nurse, +because I can't stand that to be done to my mind by anybody but myself. + +I stopped them by using the old infallible Entertainers' gimmick, a fast +survey of the most interesting topic there is--other people's troubles. + + * * * * * + +Offhand, Beau looked as if he had most troubles, shamed by his boss and +his girl given her heart to a Soldier; he was hugging them to himself +very quiet. + +I didn't stop for the two ETs--they're too hard to figure--or for Doc; +nobody can tell whether a fallen-down drunk's at the black or bright end +of his cycle; you just know it's cycling. + +Maud ought to be suffering as much as Beau, called names and caught out +in a panic, which always hurts her because she's plus three hundred +years more future than the rest of us and figures she ought to be that +much wiser, which she isn't always--not to mention she's over fifty +years old, though her home-century cosmetic science keeps her looking +and acting teenage most of the time. She'd backed away from the bronze +chest so as not to stand out, and now Lili came from behind the piano +and stood beside her. + +Lili had the opposite of troubles, a great big glow for Bruce, proud as +a promised princess watching her betrothed. Erich frowned when he saw +her, for he seemed proud too, proud of the way his _Kamerad_ had taken +command of us panicky whacks _Fuehrer_-fashion. Sid still looked mostly +grateful and inclined to let Bruce keep on talking. + +Even Kaby and Mark, those two dragons hot for battle, standing a little +in front and to one side of us by the bronze chest, like its guardians, +seemed willing to listen. They made me realize one reason Sid had for +letting Bruce run on, although the path his talk was leading us down was +flashing with danger signals: When it was over, there'd still be the +problem of what to do with the bomb, and a real opposition shaping up +between Soldiers and Entertainers, and Sid was hoping a solution would +turn up in the meantime or at least was willing to put off the evil day. + +But beyond all that, and like the rest of us, I could tell from the way +Sid was squinting his browy eyes and chewing his beardy lip that he was +shaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped into +our hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of us +could have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had to +think of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs we +were--well, we wanted to keep on listening. + + + + +CHAPTER 8 + + Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. + + --Archimedes + +A PLACE TO STAND + + +Bruce's voice had a faraway touch and he was looking up left at the Void +as he said, "Have you ever really wondered why the two sides of this war +are called the Snakes and the Spiders? Snakes may be clear enough--you +always call the enemy something dirty. But Spiders--our name for +ourselves? Bear with me, Ilhilihis; I know that no being is created +dirty or malignant by Nature, but this is a matter of anthropoid +feelings and folkways. Yes, Mark, I know that some of your legions have +nicknames like the Drunken Lions and the Snails, and that's about as +insulting as calling the British Expeditionary Force the Old +Contemptibles. + +"No, you'd have to go to bands of vicious youths in cities slated for +ruin to find a habit of naming like ours, and even they would try to +brighten up the black a bit. But simply--Spiders. And Snakes, for that's +their name for themselves too, you know. Spiders and Snakes. What are +our masters, that we give them names like that?" + +It gave me the shivers and set my mind working in a dozen directions and +I couldn't stop it, although it made the shivers worse. + +Illy beside me now--I'd never given it a thought before, but he did have +eight legs of a sort, and I remembered thinking of him as a spider +monkey, and hadn't the Lunans had wisdom and atomic power and a billion +years in which to get the Change War rolling? + +Or suppose, in the far future, Terra's own spiders evolved intelligence +and a cruel cannibal culture. They'd be able to keep their existence +secret. I had no idea of who or what would be on Earth in Sevensee's +day, and wouldn't it be perfect black hairy poisoned spider-mentality to +spin webs secretly through the world of thought and all of space and +time? + +And Beau--wasn't there something real Snaky about him, the way he moved +and all? + +Spiders and Snakes. _Spinne und Schlange_, as Erich called them. S & S. +But SS stood for the Nazi _Schutzstaffel_, the Black Shirts, and what if +some of those cruel, crazy Jerries had discovered time travel and--I +brought myself up with a jerk and asked myself, "Greta, how nuts can you +get?" + + * * * * * + +From where he was on the floor, the front of the bar his sounding board, +Doc shrieked up at Bruce like one of the damned from the pit, "Don't +speak against the Spiders! Don't blaspheme! They can hear the Unborn +whisper. Others whip only the skin, but they whip the naked brain and +heart," and Erich called out, "That's enough, Bruce!" + +But Bruce didn't spare him a look and said, "But whatever the Spiders +are and no matter how much whip they use, it's plain as the telltale on +the Maintainer that the Change War is not only going against them, but +getting away from them. Dwell for a bit on the current flurry of stupid +slugging and panicky anachronism, when we all know that anachronism is +what gets the Change Winds out of control. This punch-drunk pounding on +the Cretan-Dorian fracas as if it were the only battle going and the +only way to work things. Whisking Constantine from Britain to the +Bosporus by rocket, sending a pocket submarine back to sail with the +Armada against Drake's woodensides--I'll wager you hadn't heard those! +And now, to save Rome, an atomic bomb. + +"Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a +fission weapon.... I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will +make in what's left of history--the smothering of Greece and the +vanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy's Irish +Captivity won't be in it!" + +The cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he +didn't pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned +in irony and he said, "But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and +that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of +planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're +just one little world--one little solar system, Sevensee--and we can +hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing +preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially +understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and +centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about +preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear. + +"Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever +than go on living in a world without the _Summa_, the Field Equations, +_Process and Reality_, _Hamlet_, Matthew, Keats, and the _Odyssey_, but +our masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those +rugged souls who want to go on living no matter what." + + * * * * * + +Erich's "Bruce, I'm telling you that's enough," was lost in the +quickening flow of the New Boy's words. "I won't spend much time on the +minor signs of our major crack-up--the canceling of leaves, the sharper +shortages, the loss of the Express Room, the use of Recuperation +Stations for ops and all the other frantic patchwork--last operation +but one, we were saddled with three Soldiers from outside the Galaxy +and, no fault of theirs, they were no earthly use. Such little things +might happen at a bad spot in any war and are perhaps only local. But +there's a big thing." + +He paused again, to let us wonder, I guess. Maud must have worked her +way over to me, for I felt her dry little hand on my arm and she +whispered out of the side of her mouth, "What do we do now?" + +"We listen," I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her +need to be doing something about things. + +She cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, "You, too?" + +I didn't get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts!--because +just then Bruce's voice took up again in the faraway range. + +"Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of +history can stand before it's all stitches, whether too much Change +won't one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, +the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality +any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? +Change Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every +operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more +makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that +are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you've +stripped off the paint. + +"If that goes on, won't the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself, +then nothing? How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more +Doublegangers cut out of it? And there's another thing about every +operation--it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change +Winds die, it leaves them a little more disturbed and nightmare-ridden +and frazzled. Those of you who have been on operations in heavily +worked-over temporal areas will know what I mean--that look they give +you out of the sides of their eyes as if to say, 'You again? For +Christ's sake, go away. We're the dead. We're the ones who don't want to +wake up, who don't want to be Demons and hate to be Ghosts. Stop +torturing us.'" + + * * * * * + +I looked around at the Ghostgirls; I couldn't help it. They'd somehow +got together on the control divan, facing us, their backs to the +Maintainers. The Countess had dragged along the bottle of wine Erich had +fetched her earlier and they were passing it back and forth. The +Countess had a big rose splotch across the ruffled white lace of her +blouse. + +Bruce said, "There'll come a day when all the Zombies and all the Unborn +wake up and go crazy together and figuratively come marching at us in +their numberless hordes, saying, 'We've had enough.'" + +But I didn't turn back to Bruce right away. Phryne's chiton had slipped +off one shoulder and she and the Countess were sitting sagged forward, +elbows on knees, legs spread--at least, as far as the Countess's hobble +skirt would let her--and swayed toward each other a little. They were +still surprisingly solid, although they hadn't had any personal +attention for a half hour, and they were looking up over my head with +half-shut eyes and they seemed, so help me, to be listening to what +Bruce was saying and maybe hearing some of it. + +"We make a careful distinction between Zombies and Unborn, between those +troubled by our operations whose lifelines lie in the past and those +whose lifelines lie in the future. But is there any distinction any +longer? Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can +we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places +have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we're on, but that's +different and it's not made for real living. + +"The Spiders tell us that the real now is somewhere in the last half of +the 20th Century, which means that several of us here are also alive in +the cosmos, have lifelines along which the now is traveling. But do you +swallow that story quite so easily, Ilhilihis, Sevensee? How does it +strike the servants of the Triple Goddess? The Spiders of Octavian Rome? +The Demons of Good Queen Bess? The gentlemen Zombies of the Greater +South? Do the Unborn man the starships, Maud? + +"The Spiders also tell us that, although the fog of battle makes the now +hard to pin down precisely, it will return with the unconditional +surrender of the Snakes and the establishment of cosmic peace, and roll +on as majestically toward the future as before, quickening the continuum +with its passage. Do you really believe that? Or do you believe, as I +do, that we've used up all the future as well as the past, wasted it in +premature experience, and that we've had the real now smudged out of +existence, stolen from us forever, the precious now of true growth, the +child-moment in which all life lies, the moment like a newborn baby that +is the only home for hope there is?" + + * * * * * + +He let that start to sink in, then took a couple of quick steps and went +on, his voice rising over Erich's "Bruce, for the last time--" and +seeming to pick up a note of hope from the very word he had used, "But +although things look terrifyingly black, there remains a chance--the +slimmest chance, but still a chance--of saving the cosmos from Change +Death and restoring reality's richness and giving the Ghosts good sleep +and perhaps even regaining the real now. We have the means right at +hand. What if the power of time traveling were used not for war and +destruction, but for healing, for the mutual enrichment of the ages, for +quiet communication and growth, in brief, to bring a peace message--" + +But my little commandant is quite an actor himself and knows a wee bit +about the principles of scene-stealing, and he was not going to let +Bruce drown him out as if he were just another extra playing a Voice +from the Mob. He darted across our front, between us and the bar, took a +running leap, and landed bang on the bloody box of bomb. + +A bit later, Maud was silently showing me the white ring above her elbow +where I'd grabbed her and Illy was teasing a clutch of his tentacles out +of my other hand and squeaking reproachfully, "Greta girl, don't ever do +that." + +Erich was standing on the chest and I noticed that his boots carefully +straddled the circle of skulls, and I should have known anyway you could +hardly push them in the right order by jumping on them, and he was +pointing at Bruce and saying, "--and that means mutiny, my young sir. +_Um Gottes willen_, Bruce, listen to me and step down before you say +anything worse. I'm older than you, Bruce. Mark's older. Trust in your +_Kameraden_. Guide yourself by their knowledge." + +He had got my attention, but I had much rather have him black my eye. + +"You older than me?" Bruce was grinning. "When your twelve-years' +advantage was spent in soaking up the wisdom of a race of sadistic +dreamers gone paranoid, in a world whose thought-stream had already been +muddied by one total war? Mark older than me? When all his ideas and +loyalties are those of a wolf pack of unimaginative sluggers two +thousand years younger than I am? Either of you older because you have +more of the killing cynicism that is all the wisdom the Change World +ever gives you? Don't make me laugh! + +"I'm an Englishman, and I come from an epoch when total war was still a +desecration and the flowers and buds of thoughts not yet whacked off or +blighted. I'm a poet and poets are wiser than anyone because they're the +only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time. Right, +Sid? When I talk to all of you about a peace message, I want you to +think about it concretely in terms of using the Places to bring help +across the mountains of time when help is really needed, not to bring +help that's undeserved or knowledge that's premature or contaminating, +sometimes not to bring anything at all, but just to check with infinite +tenderness and concern that everything's safe and the glories of the +universe unfolding as they were intended to--" + +"Yes, you are a poet, Bruce," Erich broke in. "You can tootle soulfully +on the flute and make us drip tears. You can let out the stops on the +big organ pipes and make us tremble as if at Jehovah's footsteps. For +the last twenty minutes, you have been giving us some very _charmante_ +poetry. But what are you? An Entertainer? Or are you a Soldier?" + + * * * * * + +Right then--I don't know what it was, maybe Sid clearing his throat--I +could sense our feelings beginning to turn against Bruce. I got the +strangest feeling of reality clamping down and bright colors going dull +and dreams vanishing. Yet it was only then I also realized how much +Bruce had moved us, maybe some of us to the verge of mutiny, even. I was +mad at Erich for what he was doing, but I couldn't help admiring his +cockiness. + +I was still under the spell of Bruce's words and the more-than-words +behind them, but then Erich would shift around a bit and one of his +heels would kick near the death's-head pushbuttons and I wanted to stamp +with spike heels on every death's-head button on his uniform. I didn't +know exactly what I felt yet. + +"Yes, I'm a Soldier," Bruce told him, "and I hope you won't ever have to +worry about my courage, because it's going to take more courage than any +operation we've ever planned, ever dreamed of, to carry the peace +message to the other Places and to the wound-spots of the cosmos. +Perhaps it will be a fast wicket and we'll be bowled down before we +score a single run, but who cares? We may at least see our real masters +when they come to smash us, and for me that will be a deep satisfaction. +And we may do some smashing of our own." + +"So you're a Soldier," Erich said, his smile showing his teeth. "Bruce, +I'll admit that the half-dozen operations you've been on were rougher +than anything I drew in my first hundred sleeps. For that, I am all +honest sympathy. But that you should let them get you into such a state +that love and a girl can turn you upside down and start you babbling +about peace messages--" + +"Yes, by God, love and a girl have changed me!" Bruce shouted at him, +and I looked around at Lili and I remembered Dave saying, "I'm going to +Spain," and I wondered if anything would ever again make my face flame +like that. "Or, rather, they've made me stand up for what I've believed +in all along. They've made me--" + +"_Wunderbar_," Erich called and began to do a little sissy dance on the +bomb that set my teeth on edge. He bent his wrists and elbows at arty +angles and stuck out a hip and ducked his head simperingly and blinked +his eyes very fast. "Will you invite me to the wedding, Bruce? You'll +have to get another best man, but I will be the flower girl and throw +pretty little posies to all the distinguished guests. Here, Mark. Catch, +Kaby. One for you, Greta. _Danke schoen. Ach, zwei Herzen in +dreivierteltakt ... ta-ta ... ta-ta ... ta-ta-ta-ta-ta ..._" + +"What the hell do you think a woman is?" Bruce raged. "Something to mess +around with in your spare time?" + + * * * * * + +Erich kept on humming "Two Hearts in Waltz Time"--and jigging around to +it, damn him--but he slipped in a nod to Bruce and a "Precisely." So I +knew where I stood, but it was no news to me. + +"Very well," Bruce said, "let's leave this Brown Shirt _maricon_ to +amuse himself and get down to business. I made all of you a proposal and +I don't have to tell you how serious it is or how serious Lili and I are +about it. We not only must infiltrate and subvert other Places, which +luckily for us are made for infiltration, we also must make contact with +the Snakes and establish working relationships with their Demons at our +level as one of our first steps." + +That stopped Erich's jig and got enough of a gasp from some of us to +make it seem to come from practically everybody. Erich used it to work a +change of pace. + +"Bruce! We've let you carry this foolery further than we should. You +seem to have the idea that because anything goes in the Place--dueling, +drunkenness, _und so weiter_--you can say what you have and it will all +be forgotten with the hangover. Not so. It is true that among such a set +of monsters and free spirits as ourselves, and working as secret agents +to boot, there cannot be the obvious military discipline that would +obtain in a Terran army. + +"But let me tell you, Bruce, let me grind it home into you--Sid and Kaby +and Mark will bear me out in this, as officers of equivalent rank--that +the Spider line of command stretches into and through this Place just as +surely as the word of _der Fuehrer_ rules Chicago. And as I shouldn't +have to emphasize to you, Bruce, the Spiders have punishments that +would make my countrymen in Belsen and Buchenwald--well, pale a little. +So while there is still a shadow of justification for our interpreting +your remarks as utterly tasteless clowning--" + +"Babble on," Bruce said, giving him a loose downward wave of his hand +without looking. "I made you people a proposal." He paused. "How do you +stand, Sidney Lessingham?" + +Then I felt my legs getting weak, because Sid didn't answer right away. +The old boy swallowed and started to look around at the rest of us. Then +the feeling of reality clamping down got something awful, because he +didn't look around, but straightened his back a little. Just then, Mark +cut in fast. + +"It grieves me, Bruce, but I think you are possessed. Erich, he must be +confined." + + * * * * * + +Kaby nodded, almost absently. "Confine or kill the coward, whichever is +easier, whip the woman, and let's get on to the Egyptian battle." + +"Indeed, yes," Mark said. "I died in it. But now perhaps no longer." + +Kaby said to him, "I like you, Roman." + +Bruce was smiling, barely, and his eyes were moving and fixing. "You, +Ilhilihis?" + +Illy's squeak box had never sounded mechanical to me before, but it did +as he answered, "I'm a lot deeper into borrowed time than the rest of +you, tra-la-la, but Papa still loves living. Include me very much out, +Brucie." + +"Miss Davies?" + +Beside me, Maud said flatly, "Do you think I'm a fool?" Beyond her, I +saw Lili and I thought, "My God, I might look as proud if I were in her +shoes, but I sure as hell wouldn't look as confident." + +Bruce's eyes hadn't quite come to Beau when the gambler spoke up. "I +have no cause to like you, sir, rather the opposite. But this Place has +come to bore me more than Boston and I have always found it difficult to +resist a long shot. A very long one, I fear. I am with you, sir." + +There was a pain in my chest and a roaring in my ears and through it I +heard Sevensee grunting, "--sicka these lousy Spiders. Deal me in." + +And then Doc reared up in front of the bar and he'd lost his hat and his +hair was wild and he grabbed an empty fifth by the neck and broke the +bottom of it all jagged against the bar and he waved it and screeched, +"_Ubivaytye Pauki--i Nyemetzi!_" + +And right behind his words, Beau sang out fast the English of it, "Kill +the Spiders--and the Germans!" + +And Doc didn't collapse then, though I could see he was hanging onto +the bar tight with his other hand, and the Place got stiller, inside and +out, than I've ever known it, and Bruce's eyes were finally moving back +toward Sid. + + * * * * * + +But the eyes stopped short of Sid and I heard Bruce say, "Miss Forzane?" +and I thought, "That's funny," and I started to look around at the +Countess, and felt all the eyes and I realized, "Hey, that's me! But +this can't happen to me. To the others, yes, but not to me. I just work +here. Not to Greta, no, no, no!" + +But it had, and the eyes didn't let go, and the silence and the feeling +of reality were Godawful, and I said to myself, "Greta, you've got to +say something, if only a suitable four-letter word," and then suddenly I +knew what the silence was like. It was like that of a big city if there +were some way of shutting off all the noise in one second. It was like +Erich's singing when the piano had deserted him. It was as if the Change +Winds should ever die completely ... and I knew beforehand what had +happened when I turned my back on them all. + +The Ghostgirls were gone. The Major Maintainer hadn't merely been +switched to Introvert. It was gone, too. + + + + +[Illustration] + + +CHAPTER 9 + + "We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed." + + "You looked among D----'s papers, of course, and into the books of + the library?" + + "Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened + every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume...." + + --Poe + +A LOCKED ROOM + + +Three hours later, Sid and I plumped down on the couch nearest the +kitchen, though too tired to want to eat for a while yet. A tighter +search than I could ever have cooked up had shown that the Maintainer +was not in the Place. + +Of course it had to be in the Place, as we kept telling each other for +the first two hours. It had to be, if circumstances and the theories we +lived by in the Change World meant anything. A Maintainer is what +maintains a Place. The Minor Maintainer takes care of oxygen, +temperature, humidity, gravity, and other little life-cycle and +matter-cycle things generally, but it's the Major Maintainer that keeps +the walls from buckling and the ceiling from falling in. It is little, +but oh my, it does so much. + +It doesn't work by wires or radio or anything complicated like that. It +just hooks into local space-time. + +I have been told that its inside working part is made up of vastly +tough, vastly hard giant molecules, each one of which is practically a +vest-pocket cosmos in itself. Outside, it looks like a portable radio +with a few more dials and some telltales and switches and plug-ins for +earphones and a lot of other sensory thingumajigs. + +But the Maintainer was gone and the Void hadn't closed in, yet. By this +time, I was so fagged, I didn't care much whether it did or not. + +One thing for sure, the Maintainer had been switched to Introvert before +it was spirited away or else its disappearance automatically produced +Introversion, take your choice, because we sure were Introverted--real +nasty martinet-schoolmaster grip of reality on my thoughts that I knew, +without trying, liquor wouldn't soften, not a breath of Change Wind, +absolutely stifling, and the gray of the Void seeming so much inside my +head that I think I got a glimmering of what the science boys mean when +they explain to me that the Place is a kind of interweaving of the +material and the mental--a Giant Monad, one of them called it. + +Anyway, I said to myself, "Greta, if this is Introversion, I want no +part of it. It is not nice to be cut adrift from the cosmos and know it. +A lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific and a starship between galaxies +are not in it for loneliness." + + * * * * * + +I asked myself why the Spiders had ever equipped Maintainers with +Introversion switches anyway, when we couldn't drill with them and +weren't supposed to use them except in an emergency so tight that it was +either Introvert or surrender to the Snakes, and for the first time the +obvious explanation came to me: + +Introversion must be the same as scuttling, its main purpose to withhold +secrets and materiel from the enemy. It put a place into a situation +from which even the Spider high command couldn't rescue it, and there +was nothing left but to sink down, down (out? up?), down into the Void. + +If that was the case, our chances of getting back were about those of my +being a kid again playing in the Dunes on the Small Time. + +I edged a little closer to Sid and sort of squunched under his shoulder +and rubbed my cheek against the smudged, gold-worked gray velvet. He +looked down and I said, "A long way to Lynn Regis, eh, Siddy?" + +"Sweetling, thou spokest a mouthful," he said. He knows very well what +he is doing when he mixes his language that way, the wicked old +darling. + +"Siddy," I said, "why this gold-work? It'd be a lot smoother without +it." + +"Marry, men must prick themselves out and, 'faith I know not, but it +helps if there's metal in it." + +"And girls get scratched." I took a little sniff. "But don't put this +doublet through the cleaner yet. Until we get out of the woods, I want +as much you around as possible." + +"Marry, and why should I?" he asked blankly, and I think he wasn't +fooling me. The last thing time travelers find out is how they do or +don't smell. Then his face clouded and he looked as though he wanted to +squunch under my shoulder. "But 'faith, sweetling, your forest has a few +more trees than Sherwood." + +"Thou saidst it," I agreed, and wondered about the look. He oughtn't to +be interested in my girlishness now. I knew I was a mess, but he had +stuck pretty close to me during the hunt and you never can tell. Then I +remembered that he was the other one who hadn't declared himself when +Bruce was putting it to us, and it probably troubled his male vanity. +Not me, though--I was still grateful to the Maintainer for getting me +out of that spot, whatever other it had got us all into. It seemed ages +ago. + + * * * * * + +We'd all jumped to the conclusion that the two Ghostgirls had run away +with the Maintainer, I don't know where or why, but it looked so much +that way. Maud had started yipping about how she'd never trusted Ghosts +and always known that some day they'd start doing things on their own, +and Kaby had got it firmly fixed in her head, right between the horns, +that Phryne, being a Greek, was the ringleader and was going to wreak +havoc on us all. + +But when we were checking Stores the first time, I had noticed that the +Ghostgirl envelopes looked flat. Ectoplasm doesn't take up much space +when it's folded, but I had opened one anyway, then another, and then +called for help. + +Every last envelope was empty. We had lost over a thousand Ghostgirls, +Sid's whole stock. + +Well, at least it proved what none of us had ever seen or heard of being +demonstrated: that there is a spooky link--a sort of Change Wind +contact--between a Ghost and its lifeline; and when that umbilicus, I've +heard it called, is cut, the part away from the lifeline dies. + +Interesting, but what had bothered me was whether we Demons were going +to evaporate too, because we are as much Doublegangers as the Ghosts and +our apron strings had been cut just as surely. We're more solid, of +course, but that would only mean we'd take a little longer. Very +logical. + +I remember I had looked up at Lili and Maud--us girls had been checking +the envelopes; it's one of the proprieties we frequently maintain and +anyway, if men check them, they're apt to trot out that old wheeze about +"instant women" which I'm sick to death of hearing, thank you. + +Anyway, I had looked up and said, "It's been nice knowing you," and Lili +had said, "Twenty-three, skiddoo," and Maud had said, "Here goes +nothing," and we had shook hands all around. + +We figured that Phryne and the Countess had faded at the same time as +the other Ghostgirls, but an idea had been nibbling at me and I said, +"Siddy, do you suppose it's just barely possible that, while we were all +looking at Bruce, those two Ghostgirls would have been able to work the +Maintainer and get a Door and lam out of here with the thing?" + +"Thou speakst my thoughts, sweetling. All weighs against it: Imprimis, +'tis well known that Ghosts cannot lay plots or act on them. Secundo, +the time forbade getting a Door. Tercio--and here's the real meat of +it--the Place folds without the Maintainer. Quadro, 'twere folly to +depend on not one of--how many of us? ten, elf--not looking around in +all the time it would have taken them--" + +"I looked around once, Siddy. They were drinking and they had got to the +control divan under their own power. Now when was that? Oh, yes, when +Bruce was talking about Zombies." + +"Yes, sweetling. And as I was about to cap my argument with quinquo when +you 'gan prattle, I could have sworn none could touch the Maintainer, +much less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet ..." + +"Eftsoons yet," I seconded him. + + * * * * * + +Somebody must have got a door and walked out with the thing. It +certainly wasn't in the Place. The hunt had been a lulu. Something the +size of a portable typewriter is not easy to hide and we had been inside +everything from Beau's piano to the renewer link of the Refresher. + +We had even fluoroscoped everybody, though it had made Illy writhe like +a box of worms, as he'd warned us; he said it tickled terribly and I +insisted on smoothing his fur for five minutes afterward, although he +was a little standoffish toward me. + +Some areas, like the bar, kitchen and Stores, took a long while, but we +were thorough. Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made the +Place, she has been stationed in a Field Hospital (it turns out the +Spiders actually are mounting operations from them) and learned a few +nice new wrinkles. + +However, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course, +every check was observed by at least three people, not including Bruce +or Lili. When the Maintainer vanished, Doc had pulled out of his +glassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me if I hadn't seen +it happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to the +Art Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out his +coat and duck his head and whip out a flask and take a swig and by now +he was well on his way toward another peak. + +The Art Gallery had taken time too, because there's such a jumble of +strange stuff, and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split a +beautiful blue woodcarving of a Venusian medusa because, although there +wasn't a mark in the paw-polished surface, she claimed it was just big +enough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces together +and mooning over the other stuff. + +After we'd finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling the +floor. Beau and Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a one-sided +Place, that there is nothing, but nothing, under the floor; it just gets +a lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you get a quarter +inch down--that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark was +knuckle-headed (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the q.t.) and broke +four diamond-plus drills before he was satisfied. + +Except for some trick hiding places, that left the Void, and things +don't vanish if you throw them at the Void--they half melt and freeze +forever unless you can fish them out. Back of the Refresher, at about +eye-level, are three Venusian coconuts that a Hittite strongman threw +there during a major brawl. I try not to look at them because they are +so much like witch heads they give me the woolies. The parts of the +Place right up against the Void have strange spatial properties which +one of the gadgets in Surgery makes use of in a way that gives me the +worse woolies, but that's beside the point. + + * * * * * + +During the hunt, Kaby and Erich had used their Callers as direction +finders to point out the Maintainer, just as they're used in the cosmos +to locate the Door--and sometimes in the Big Places, people tell me. But +the Callers only went wild--like a compass needle whirling around +without stopping--and nobody knew what that meant. + +The trick hiding places were the Minor Maintainer, a cute idea, but it +is no bigger than the Major and has its own mysterious insides and had +obviously kept on doing its own work, so that was out for several +reasons, and the bomb chest, though it seemed impossible for anyone to +have opened it, granting they knew the secret of its lock, even before +Erich jumped on it and put it in the limelight double. But when you've +ruled out everything else, the word impossible changes meaning. + +Since time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts of +tricks for sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanently +or temporarily. But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybody +that should know tells me that time traveling _through_ the Big Time is +out. It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the +countryside and we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as +Gertie Stein might put it, you can't time travel through the time you +time travel in when you time travel. + +I'd also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvious +hiding place, maybe something that several people could pass back and +forth between them, which would mean a conspiracy, and, of course, if +you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including +the cosmos itself. Still, I'd got a sort of shell-game idea about the +Soldiers' three big black shakos and I hadn't been satisfied until I'd +got the three together and looked in them all at the same time. + +"Wake up, Greta, and take something. I can't stand here forever." Maud +had brought us a tray of hearty snacks from then and yon, and I must say +they were tempting; she whips up a mean hors d'oeuvre. + +I looked them over and said, "Siddy, I want a hot dog." + +"And I want a venison pasty! Out upon you, you finical jill, you +o'erscrupulous jade, you whimsic and tyrannous poppet!" + +I grabbed a handful and snuggled back against him. + +"Go on, call me some more, Siddy," I told him. "Real juicy ones." + + + + +CHAPTER 10 + + My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, + Shakes so my single state of man that function + Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is + But what is not. + + --Macbeth + +MOTIVES AND OPPORTUNITIES + + +My big bad waif from King's Lynn had set the tray on his knees and +started to wolf the food down. The others were finishing up. Erich, Mark +and Kaby were having a quietly furious argument I couldn't overhear at +the end of the bar nearest the bronze chest, and Illy was draped over +the piano like a real octopus, listening in. + +Beau and Sevensee were pacing up and down near the control divan and +throwing each other a word now and then. Beyond them, Bruce and Lili +were sitting on the opposite couch from us, talking earnestly about +something. Maud had sat down at the other end of the bar and was +knitting--it's one of the habits like chess and quiet drinking, or +learning to talk by squeak box, that we pick up to pass the time in the +Place in the long stretches between parties. Doc was fiddling around the +Gallery, picking things up and setting them down, still managing to stay +on his feet at any rate. + + * * * * * + +Lili and Bruce stood up, still gabbing intensely at each other, and Illy +began to pick out with one tentacle a little tune in the high keys that +didn't sound like anything on God's earth. "Where do they get all the +energy?" I wondered. + +As soon as I asked myself that, I knew the answer and I began to feel +the same way myself. It wasn't energy; it was nerves, pure and simple. + +Change is like a drug, I realized--you get used to the facts never +staying the same, and one picture of the past and future dissolving into +another maybe not very different but still different, and your mind +being constantly goosed by strange moods and notions, like nightclub +lights of shifting color with weird shadows between shining right on +your brain. + +The endless swaying and jogging is restful, like riding on a train. + +You soon get to like the movement and to need it without knowing, and +when it suddenly stops and you're just you and the facts you think from +and feel from are exactly the same when you go back to them--boy, that's +rough, as I found out now. + +The instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks into +the Place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing but +ourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make of +that, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation. + +I decided I felt like I'd been dropped into a swimming pool full of +cement and held under until it hardened. + +I could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonder +they didn't hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best; maybe +she'd got a little preparation from the long watches between stars; and +then she is older than all of us, even Sid, though with a small "o" in +"older." + + * * * * * + +The restless work of the search for the Maintainer had masked the +feeling, but now it was beginning to come full force. Before the search, +Bruce's speech and Erich's interruptions had done a passable masking job +too. I tried to remember when I'd first got the feeling and decided it +was after Erich had jumped on the bomb, about the time he mentioned +poetry. Though I couldn't be sure. Maybe the Maintainer had been +Introverted even earlier, when I'd turned to look at the Ghostgirls. I +wouldn't have known. Nuts! + +Believe me, I could feel that hardened cement on every inch of me. I +remembered Bruce's beautiful picture of a universe without Big Change +and decided it was about the worst idea going. I went on eating, though +I wasn't so sure now it was a good idea to keep myself strong. + +"Does the Maintainer have an Introversion telltale? Siddy!" + +"'Sdeath, chit, and you love me, speak lower. Of a sudden, I feel not +well, as if I'd drunk a butt of Rhenish and slept inside it. Marry yes, +blue. In short flashes, saith the manual. Why ask'st thou?" + +"No reason. God, Siddy, what I'd give for a breath of Change Wind." + +"Thou can'st say that eftsoons," he groaned. I must have looked pretty +miserable myself, for he put his arm around my shoulders and whispered +gruffly, "Comfort thyself, sweetling, that while we suffer thus sorely, +we yet cannot die the Change Death." + +"What's that?" I asked him. + +I didn't want to bounce around like the others. I had a suspicion I'd +carry it too far. So, to keep myself from going batty, I started to +rework the business of who had done what to the Maintainer. + +During the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossed +around as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat of +Snake science amounting to sorcery; the Spider high command bunkering +the Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the Express +Room, in such a hurry that they hadn't even time to transmit warnings; +the hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beings +who are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of the +Change War into the future much beyond Sevensee's epoch--unless the Late +Cosmicians are the ones fighting the Change War. + +One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one +of us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political +police, agent of--who knows, after Bruce?--a secret Change World +Committee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, or +strictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the +Maintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich's and Bruce's +factions. + +Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but +that didn't apply to what I did with my own thoughts. + + * * * * * + +Who wanted to escape so bad they'd Introvert the Place, cutting off all +possible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and +running the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all? + +Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things +up, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid +couldn't keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments +for derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as +Erich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of +the bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly +hadn't had my eye on him every second. + +Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he +said counted, so he'd hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to +mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for. + +Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people +especially, more than any man or woman I've ever known--he's like a +big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his +mouth--and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the +cosmos. + +Maud, Kaby, Mark and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of, +though Sevensee's being from the very far future did tie in with that +idea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something +developing between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to +be Introverted together. + +"Stick to the facts, Greta," I reminded myself with a private groan. + +That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself. + +Erich, I thought--now we're getting somewhere. The little commandant has +the nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if +he thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be +locked in with him, he'd do it in a second. + +But even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he'd been heckling Bruce +from the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for +him to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and ... well, +that was nine-tenths of the problem. + +If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanation +of all. Gr-r-r! + +Bruce's motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it +immortal?) danger he'd put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed +a shame he'd been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the +Maintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar, we'd all +have noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I'd have +noticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls--if it worked as Sid +claimed, and he said he had never seen it in operation, just read in the +manual--oh, 'sdeath! + + * * * * * + +But Bruce didn't need opportunity, as I'm sure all the males in +the Place would have told me right off, because he had Lili to +pull the job for him and she had as much opportunity as any of +the rest of us. Myself, I have large reservations to this +woman-putty-in-the-hands-of-the-man-she-loves-madly theory, but I had to +admit there was something to be said for it in this case, and it had +seemed quite natural to me when the rest of us had decided, by unspoken +agreement, that neither Lili's nor Bruce's checks counted when we were +hunting for the Maintainer. + +That took care of all of us and left only the mysterious stranger, +intruding somehow through a Door (how'd he get it without using our +Maintainer?) or from an unimaginable hiding place or straight out of the +Void itself. I know that last is impossible--nothing can step out of +nothing--but if anything ever looked like it was specially built for +something not at all nice to come looming out of, it's the Void--misty, +foggily churning, slimy gray.... + +"Wait a second," I told myself, "and hang onto this, Greta. It should +have smacked you in the face at the start." + +Whatever came out of the Void, or, more to the point, whoever slipped +back from our crowd to the Maintainer, Bruce would have seen them. He +was looking at the Maintainer past our heads the whole time, and +whatever happened to it, he saw it. + +Erich wouldn't have, even after he was on the bomb, because he'd been +stagewise enough to face Bruce most of the time to build up his role as +tribune of the people. + +But Bruce would have--unless he got so caught up in what he was +saying.... + +No, kid, a Demon is always an actor, no matter how much he believes in +what he's saying, and there never was an actor yet who wouldn't +instantly notice a member of the audience starting to walk out on his +big scene. + +So Bruce knew, which made him a better actor than I'd have been willing +to grant, since it didn't look as if anyone else had thought of what had +just occurred to me, or they'd have gone over and put it to him. + +Not me, though--I don't work that way. Besides, I didn't feel up to +it--Nervy Anna enfold me, I felt like pure hell. + +"Maybe," I told myself encouragingly, "the Place is Hell," but added, +"Be your age, Greta--be a real rootless, ruleless, ruthless +twenty-nine." + + + + +CHAPTER 11 + + The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed + With bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear, + Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire. + Lines of gray, muttering faces, masked with fear, + They leave their trenches, going over the top, + While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists + + --Sassoon + +THE WESTERN FRONT, 1917 + + +"Please don't, Lili." + +"I shall, my love." + +"Sweetling, wake up! Hast the shakes?" + +I opened my eyes a little and lied to Siddy with a smile and locked my +hands together tight and watched Bruce and Lili quarrel nobly near the +control divan and wished I had a great love to blur my misery and +provide me with a passable substitute for Change Winds. + +Lili won the argument, judging from the way she threw her head back and +stepped away from Bruce's arms while giving him a proud, tender smile. +He walked off a few steps; praise be, he didn't shrug his shoulders at +us like an old husband, though his nerves were showing and he didn't +seem to be standing Introversion well at all, as who of us were? + +Lili rested a hand on the head of the control divan and pressed her lips +together and looked around at us, mostly with her eyes. She'd wound a +gray silk bandeau around her bangs. Her short gray silk dress without a +waistline made her look, not so much like a flapper, though she looked +like that all right, as like a little girl, except the neckline was +scooped low enough to show she wasn't. + +Her gaze hesitated and then stopped at me and I got a sunk feeling of +what was coming, because women are always picking on me for an audience. +Besides, Sid and I were the centrist party of two in our +fresh-out-of-the-shell Place politics. + +She took a deep breath and stuck out her chin and said in a voice that +was even a little higher and Britisher than she usually uses, "We girls +have often cried, 'Shut the Door!' But now the Door is jolly well shut +for keeps!" + +I knew I'd guessed right and I felt crawly with embarrassment, because I +know about this love business of thinking you're the other person and +trying to live their life--and grab their glory, though you don't know +that--and carry their message for them, and how it can foul things up. +Still, I couldn't help admitting what she said wasn't too bad a +start--unpleasantly apt to be true, at any rate. + +"My fiance believes we may yet be able to open the Door. I do not. He +thinks it is a bit premature to discuss the peculiar pickle in which we +all find ourselves. I do not." + +There was a rasp of laughter from the bar. The militarists were +reacting. Erich stepped out, looking very happy. "So now we have to +listen to women making speeches," he called. "What is this Place, +anyhow? Sidney Lessingham's Saturday Evening Sewing Circle?" + + * * * * * + +Beau and Sevensee, who'd stopped their pacing halfway between the bar +and the control divan, turned toward Erich, and Sevensee looked a little +burlier, a little more like half a horse, than satyrs in mythology book +illustrations. He stamped--medium hard, I'd say--and said, "Ahh, go flya +kite." I'd found out he'd learned English from a Demon who'd been a +longshoreman with syndicalist-anarchist sympathies. Erich shut up for a +moment and stood there grinning, his hands on his hips. + +Lili nodded to the satyr and cleared her throat, looking scared. But she +didn't speak; I could see she was thinking and feeling something, and +her face got ugly and haggard, as if she were in a Change Wind that +hadn't reached me yet, and her mouth went into a snarl to fight tears, +but some spurted out, and when she did speak her voice was an octave +lower and it wasn't just London talking but New York too. + +"I don't know how Resurrection felt to you people, because I'm new and I +loathe asking questions, but to me it was pure torture and I wished only +I'd had the courage to tell Suzaku, 'I wish to remain a Zombie, if you +don't mind. I'd rather the nightmares.' But I accepted Resurrection +because I've been taught to be polite and because there is the Demon in +me I don't understand that always wishes to live, and I found that I +still felt like a Zombie, although I could flit about, and that I still +had the nightmares, except they'd grown a deal vivider. + +"I was a young girl again, seventeen, and I suppose every woman wishes +to be seventeen, but I wasn't seventeen inside my head--I was a woman +who had died of Bright's disease in New York in 1929 and also, because a +Big Change blew my lifeline into a new drift, a woman who had died of +the same disease in Nazi-occupied London in 1955, but rather more slowly +because, as you can fancy, the liquor was in far shorter supply. I had +to live with both those sets of memories and the Change World didn't +blot them out any more than I'm told it does those of any Demon, and it +didn't even push them into the background as I'd hoped it would. + +"When some Change Fellow would say to me, 'Hallo, beautiful, how about a +smile?' or 'That's a posh frock, kiddo,' I'd be back at Bellevue looking +down at my swollen figure and the light getting like spokes of ice, or +in that dreadful gin-steeped Stepney bedroom with Phyllis coughing +herself to death beside me, or at best, for a moment, a little girl in +Glamorgan looking at the Roman road and wondering about the wonderful +life that lay ahead." + + * * * * * + +I looked at Erich, remembering he had a long nasty future back in the +cosmos himself, and at any rate he wasn't smiling, and I thought maybe +he's getting a little humility, knowing someone else has two of those +futures, but I doubted it. + +"Because, you see," Lili kept forcing it out, "all my three lives I'd +been a girl who fell in love with a great young poet she'd never met, +the voice of the new youth and all youth, and she'd told her first big +lie to get in the Red Cross and across to France to be nearer him, and +it was all danger and dark magics and a knight in armor, and she +pictured how she'd find him wounded but not seriously, with a little +bandage around his head, and she'd light a fag for him and smile +lightly, never letting him guess what she felt, but only being her best +self and watching to see if that made something happen to him.... + +"And then the Boche machine guns cut him down at Passchendaele and there +couldn't ever have been bandages big enough and the girl stayed +seventeen inside and messed about and tried to be wicked, though she +wasn't very good at that, and to drink, and she had a bit more talent +there, though drinking yourself to death is not nearly as easy as it +sounds, even with a kidney weakness to help. But she turned the trick. + +"Then a cock crows. She wakes with a tearing start from the gray dreams +of death that fill her lifeline. It's cold daybreak. There's the smell +of a French farm. She feels her ankles and they're not at all like huge +rubber boots filled with water. They're not swollen the least bit. +They're young legs. + +"There's a little window and the tops of a row of trees that may be +poplars when there's more light, and what there is shows cots like her +own and heads under blankets, and hanging uniforms make large shadows +and a girl is snoring. There's a very distant rumble and it moves the +window a bit. Then she remembers they're Red Cross girls many, many +kilometers from Passchendaele and that Bruce Marchant is going to die at +dawn today. + +"In a few more minutes, he's going over the top where there's a +crop-headed machine-gunner in field gray already looking down the sights +and swinging the gun a bit. But she isn't going to die today. She's +going to die in 1929 and 1955. + +"And just as she's going mad, there's a creaking and out of the shadows +tiptoes a Jap with a woman's hairdo and the whitest face and the +blackest eyebrows. He's wearing a rose robe and a black sash which belts +to his sides two samurai swords, but in his right hand he has a strange +silver pistol. And he smiles at her as if they were brother and sister +and lovers at the same time and he says, '_Voulez-vous vivre, +mademoiselle?_' and she stares and he bobs his head and says, 'Missy +wish live, yes, no?'" + +[Illustration] + + * * * * * + +Sid's paw closed quietly around my shaking hands. It always gets me to +hear about anyone's Resurrection, and although mine was crazier, it also +had the Krauts in it. I hoped she wouldn't go through the rest of the +formula and she didn't. + +"Five minutes later, he's gone down a stairs more like a ladder to wait +below and she's dressing in a rush. Her clothes resist a little, as if +they were lightly gummed to the hook and the stained wall, and she hates +to touch them. It's getting lighter and her cot looks as if someone were +still sleeping there, although it's empty, and she couldn't bring +herself to put her hand on the place if her new life depended on it. + +"She climbs down and her long skirt doesn't bother her because she knows +how to swing it. Suzaku conducts her past a sentry who doesn't see them +and a puffy-faced farmer in a smock coughing and spitting the night out +of his throat. They cross the farmyard and it's filled with rose light +and she sees the sun is up and she knows that Bruce Marchant has just +bled to death. + +"There's an empty open touring car chugging loudly, waiting for someone; +it has huge muddy wheels with wooden spokes and a brass radiator that +says 'Simplex.' But Suzaku leads her past it to a dunghill and bows +apologetically and she steps through a Door." + +I heard Erich say to the others at the bar, "How touching! Now shall I +tell everyone about my operation?" But he didn't get much of a laugh. + +"That's how Lilian Foster came into the Change World with its +steel-engraved nightmares and its deadly pace and deadlier lassitudes. I +was more alive than I ever had been before, but it was the kind of life +a corpse might get from unending electrical shocks and I couldn't summon +any purpose or hope and Bruce Marchant seemed farther away than ever. + +"Then, not six hours ago, a Soldier in a black uniform came through the +Door and I thought, 'It can't be, but it does look like his +photographs,' and then I thought I heard someone say the name Bruce, and +then he shouted as if to all the world that he was Bruce Marchant, and I +knew there was a Resurrection beyond Resurrection, a true resurrection. +Oh, Bruce--" + +She looked at him and he was crying and smiling and all the young beauty +flooded back into her face, and I thought, "It has to be Change Winds, +but it can't be. Face it without slobbering, Greta--there's something +that works bigger miracles than Change." + +And she went on, "And then the Change Winds died when the Snakes +vaporized the Maintainer or the Ghostgirls Introverted it and all three +of them vanished so swiftly and silently that even Bruce didn't +notice--those are the best explanations I can summon and I fancy one of +them is true. At all events, the Change Winds died and my past and even +my futures became something I could bear lightly, because I have someone +to bear them with me, and because at last I have a true future +stretching out ahead of me, an unknown future which I shall create by +living. Oh, don't you see that all of us have it now, this big +opportunity?" + +"_Hussa_ for Sidney's suffragettes and the W.C.T.U.!" Erich cheered. +"Beau, will you play us a medley of 'Hearts and Flowers' and 'Onward, +Christian Soldiers'? I'm deeply moved, Lili. Where do the rest of us +queue up for the Great Love Affair of the Century?" + + + + +CHAPTER 12 + + Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight + of the past's mistakes and the future's fears. + + I had to learn to close the front door to tomorrow and the back door + to yesterday and settle down to here and now. + + --Anonymous + +A BIG OPPORTUNITY + + +Nobody laughed at Erich's screwball sarcasms and still I thought, "Yes, +perish his hysterical little gray head, but he's half right--Lili's got +the big thing now and she wants to serve it up to the rest of us on a +platter, only love doesn't cook and cut that way." + +Those weren't bad ideas she had about the Maintainer, though, especially +the one about the Ghostgirls doing the Introverting--it would explain +why there couldn't be Introversion drill, the manual stuff about blue +flashes being window-dressing, and something disappearing without +movement or transition is the sort of thing that might not catch the +attention--and I guess they gave the others something to think about +too, for there wasn't any follow-up to Erich's frantic sniping. + +But I honestly didn't see where there was this big opportunity being +stuck away in a gray sack in the Void and I began to wonder and I got +the strangest feeling and I said to myself, "Hang onto your hat, Greta. +It's hope." + +"The dreadful thing about being a Demon is that you have all time to +range through," Lili was saying with a smile. "You can never shut the +back door to yesterday or the front door to tomorrow and simply live in +the present. But now that's been done for us: the Door is shut, we need +never again rehash the past or the future. The Spiders and Snakes can +never find us, for who ever heard of a Place that was truly lost being +rescued? And as those in the know have told me, Introversion is the end +as far as those outside are concerned. So we're safe from the Spiders +and Snakes, we need never be slaves or enemies again, and we have a +Place in which to live our new lives, the Place prepared for us from the +beginning." + +She paused. "Surely you understand what I mean? Sidney and Beauregard +and Dr. Pyeshkov are the ones who explained it to me. The Place is a +balanced aquarium, just like the cosmos. No one knows how many ages of +Big Time it has been in use, without a bit of new material being brought +in--only luxuries and people--and not a bit of waste cast off. No one +knows how many more ages it may not sustain life. I never heard of Minor +Maintainers wearing out. We have all the future, all the security, +anyone can hope for. We have a Place to live together." + + * * * * * + +You know, she was dead right and I realized that all the time I'd had +the conviction in the back of my mind that we were going to suffocate or +something if we didn't get a Door open pretty quick. I should have known +differently, if anybody should, because I'd once been in the Place +without a Door for as long as a hundred sleeps during a foxhole stretch +of the Change War and we'd had to start cycling our food and it had been +okay. + +And then, because it is also the way my mind works, I started to picture +in a flash the consequences of our living together all by ourselves like +Lili said. + +I began to pair people off; I couldn't help it. Let's see, four women, +six men, two ETs. + +"Greta," I said, "you're going to be Miss Polly Andry for sure. We'll +have a daily newspaper and folk-dancing classes, we'll shut the bar +except evenings, Bruce'll keep a rhymed history of the Place." + +I even thought, though I knew this part was strictly silly, about +schools and children. I wondered what Siddy's would look like, or my +little commandant's. "Don't go near the Void, dears." Of course that +would be specially hard on the two ETs, but Sevensee at least wasn't so +different and the genetics boys had made some wonderful advances and +Maud ought to know about them and there were some amazing gadgets in +Surgery when Doc sobered up. The patter of little hoofs ... + +"My fiance spoke to you about carrying a peace message to the rest of +the cosmos," Lili added, "and bringing an end to the Big Change, and +healing all the wounds that have been made in the Little Time." + +I looked at Bruce. His face was set and strained, as will happen to the +best of them when a girl starts talking about her man's business, and I +don't know why, but I said to myself, "She's crucifying him, she's +nailing him to his purpose as a woman will, even when there's not much +point to it, as now." + +And Lili went on, "It was a wonderful thought, but now we cannot carry +or send any message and I believe it is too late in any event for a +peace message to do any good. The cosmos is too raveled by change, too +far gone. It will dissolve, fade, 'leave not a rack behind.' We're the +survivors. The torch of existence has been put in our hands. + +"We may already be all that's left in the cosmos, for have you thought +that the Change Winds may have died at their source? We may never reach +another cosmos, we may drift forever in the Void, but who of us has been +Introverted before and who knows what we can or cannot do? We're a seed +for a new future to grow from. Perhaps all doomed universes cast off +seeds like this Place. It's a seed, it's an embryo, let it grow." + +She looked swiftly at Bruce and then at Sid and she quoted, "'Come, my +friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world'." + + * * * * * + +I squeezed Sid's hand and I started to say something to him, but he +didn't know I was there; he was listening to Lili quote Tennyson with +his eyes entranced and his mouth open, as if he were imagining new +things to put into it--oh, Siddy! + +And then I saw the others were looking at her the same way. Ilhilihis +was seeing finer feather forests than long-dead Luna's grow. The +greenhouse child Maud ap-Ares Davies was stowing away on a starship +bound for another galaxy, or thinking how different her life might have +been, the children she might have had, if she'd stayed on the planets +and out of the Change World. Even Erich looked as though he might be +blitzing new universes, and Mark subduing them, for an eight-legged +_Fuehrer-imperator_. Beau was throbbing up a wider Mississippi in a +bigger-than-life sidewheeler. + +Even I--well, I wasn't dreaming of a Greater Chicago. "Let's not go +hog-wild on this sort of thing," I told myself, but I did look up at the +Void and I got a shiver because I imagined it drawing away and the whole +Place starting to grow. + +"I truly meant what I said about a seed," Lili went on slowly. "I know, +as you all do, that there are no children in the Change World, that +there cannot be, that we all become instantly sterile, that what they +call a curse is lifted from us girls and we are no longer in bondage to +the moon." + +She was right, all right--if there's one thing that's been proved a +million times in the Change World, it's that. + +"But we are no longer in the Change World," Lili said softly, "and its +limitations should no longer apply to us, including that one. I feel +deeply certain of it, but--" she looked around slowly--"we are four +women here and I thought one of us might have a surer indication." + +My eyes followed hers around like anybody's would. In fact, everybody +was looking around except Maud, and she had the silliest look of +surprise on her face and it stayed there, and then, very carefully, she +got down from the bar stool with her knitting. She looked at the +half-finished pink bra with the long white needles stuck in it and her +eyes bugged bigger yet, as if she were expecting it to turn into a baby +sweater right then and there. Then she walked across the Place to Lili +and stood beside her. While she was walking, the look of surprise +changed to a quiet smile. The only other thing she did was throw her +shoulders back a little. + +I was jealous of her for a second, but it was a double miracle for her, +considering her age, and I couldn't grudge her that. And to tell the +truth, I was a little frightened, too. Even with Dave, I'd been bothered +about this business of having babies. + + * * * * * + +Yet I stood up with Siddy--I couldn't stop myself and I guess he +couldn't either--and hand in hand we walked to the control divan. Beau +and Sevensee were there and Bruce, of course, and then, so help me, +those Soldiers to the death, Kaby and Mark, started over from the bar +and I couldn't see anything in their eyes about the greater glory of +Crete and Rome, but something, I think, about each other, and after a +moment Illy slowly detached himself from the piano and followed, lightly +trailing his tentacles on the floor. + +I couldn't exactly see him hoping for little Illies in this company, +unless it was true what the jokes said about Lunans, but maybe he was +being really disinterested and maybe he wasn't; maybe he was simply +figuring that Illy ought to be on the side with the biggest battalions. + +I heard dragging footsteps behind us and here came Doc from the Gallery, +carrying in his folded arms an abstract sculpture as big as a newborn +baby. It was an agglomeration of perfect shiny gray spheres the size of +golf balls, shaping up to something like a large brain, but with holes +showing through here and there. He held it out to us like an infant to +be admired and worked his lips and tongue as if he were trying very hard +to say something, though not a word came out that you could understand, +and I thought, "Maxey Aleksevich may be speechless drunk and have all +sorts of holes in his head, but he's got the right instincts, bless his +soulful little Russian heart." + +We were all crowded around the control divan like a football team +huddling. The Peace Packers, it came to me. Sevensee would be fullback +or center and Illy left end--what a receiver! The right number, too. +Erich was alone at the bar, but now even he--"Oh, no, this can't be," I +thought--even he came toward us. Then I saw that his face was working +the worst ever. He stopped halfway and managed to force a smile, but it +was the worst, too. "That's my little commandant," I thought, "no team +spirit." + +"So now Lili and Bruce--yes, and _Grossmutterchen_ Maud--have their +little nest," he said, and he wouldn't have had to push his voice very +hard to get a screech. "But what are the rest of us supposed to +be--cowbirds?" + + * * * * * + +He crooked his neck and flapped his hands and croaked, "Cuc-koo! +Cuc-koo!" And I said to myself, "I often thought you were crazy, boy, +but now I know." + +"_Teufelsdreck!_--yes, Devil's dirt!--but you all seem to be infected +with this dream of children. Can't you see that the Change World is the +natural and proper end of evolution?--a period of enjoyment and +measuring, an ultimate working out of things, which women call +destruction--'Help, I'm being raped!' 'Oh, what are they doing to my +children?'--but which men know as fulfillment. + +"You're given good parts in _Goetterdaemmerung_ and you go up to the +author and tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, Herr Wagner, but +this Twilight of the Gods is just a bit morbid. Why don't you write an +opera for me about the little ones, the dear little blue-eyed +curly-tops? A plot? Oh, boy meets girl and they settle down to breed, +something like that.' + +"Devil's dirt doubled and damned! Have you thought what life will +be like without a Door to go out of to find freedom and adventure, +to measure your courage and keenness? Do you want to grow long gray +beards hobbling around this asteroid turned inside out? Putter around +indoors to the end of your days, mooning about little baby +cosmoses?--incidentally, with a live bomb for company. The cave, the +womb, the little gray home in the nest--is that what you want? It'll +grow? Oh, yes, like the city engulfing the wild wood, a proliferation +of _Kinder_, _Kirche_, _Kueche_--I should live so long! + +"Women!--how I hate their bright eyes as they look at me from the +fireside, bent-shouldered, rocking, deeply happy to be old, and say, +'He's getting weak, he's giving out, soon I'll have to put him to bed +and do the simplest things for him.' Your filthy Triple Goddess, Kaby, +the birther, bride, and burier of man! Woman, the enfeebler, the +fetterer, the crippler! Woman!--and the curly-headed little cancers she +wants!" + +He lurched toward us, pointing at Lili. "I never knew one who didn't +want to cripple a man if you gave her the chance. Cripple him, swaddle +him, clip his wings, grind him to sausage to mold another man, hers, a +doll man. You hid the Maintainer, you little smother-hen, so you could +have your nest and your Brucie!" + +He stopped, gasping, and I expected someone to bop him one on the +schnozzle, and I think he did, too. I turned to Bruce and he was +looking, I don't know how, sorry, guilty, anxious, angry, shaken, +inspired, all at once, and I wished people sometimes had simple suburban +reactions like magazine stories. + +Then Erich made the mistake, if it was one, of turning toward Bruce and +slowly staggering toward him, pawing the air with his hands as if he +were going to collapse into his arms, and saying, "Don't let them get +you, Bruce. Don't let them tie you down. Don't let them clip you--your +words or your deeds. You're a Soldier. Even when you talked about a +peace message, you talked about doing some smashing of your own. No +matter what you think and feel, Bruce, no matter how much lying you do +and how much you hide, you're really not on their side." + +That did it. + + * * * * * + +It didn't come soon enough or, I think, in the right spirit to please +me, but I will say it for Bruce that he didn't muck it up by tipping or +softening his punch. He took one step forward and his shoulders spun and +his fist connected sweet and clean. + +As he did it, he said only one word, "Loki!" and darn if that didn't +switch me back to a campfire in the Indiana Dunes and my mother telling +me out of the Elder Saga about the malicious, sneering, all-spoiling +Norse god and how, when the other gods came to trap him in his hideaway +by the river, he was on the point of finishing knotting a mysterious net +big enough, I had imagined, to snare the whole universe, and that if +they'd come a minute later, he would have. + +Erich was stretched on the floor, his head hitched up, rubbing his jaw +and glaring at Bruce. Mark, who was standing beside me, moved a little +and I thought he was going to do something, maybe even clobber Bruce in +the old spirit of you can't do that to my buddy, but he just shook his +head and said, "_Omnia vincit amor._" I nudged him and said, "Meaning?" +and he said, "Love licks everything." + +I'd never have expected it from a Roman, but he was half right at any +rate. Lili had her victory: Bruce clearing the field for the marriage by +laying out the woman-hating boy friend who would be trying to get him to +go out nights. At that moment, I think Bruce wanted Lili and a life with +her more than he wanted to reform the Change World. Sure, us women have +our little victories--until the legions come or the Little Corporal +draws up his artillery or the Panzers roar down the road. + +Erich scrambled to his feet and stood there in a half-slump, +half-crouch, still rubbing his jaw and glaring at Bruce over his hand, +but making no move to continue the fight, and I studied his face and +said to myself, "If he can get a gun, he's going to shoot himself, I +know." + +Bruce started to say something and hesitated, like I would have in his +shoes, and just then Doc got one of his unpredictable inspirations and +went weaving out toward Erich, holding out the sculpture and making +deaf-and-dumb noises like he had to us. Erich looked at him as if he +were going to kill him, and then grabbed the sculpture and swung it up +over his head and smashed it down on the floor, and for a wonder, it +didn't shatter. It just skidded along in one piece and stopped inches +from my feet. + +That thing not breaking must have been the last straw for Erich. I swear +I could see the red surge up through his eyes toward his brain. He swung +around into the Stores sector and ran the few steps between him and the +bronze bomb chest. + +Everything got very slow motion for me, though I didn't do any moving. +Almost every man started out after Erich. Bruce didn't, though, and +Siddy turned back after the first surge forward, while Illy squunched +down for a leap, and it was between Sevensee's hairy shanks and Beau's +scissoring white pants that I saw that under-the-microscope circle of +death's heads and watched Erich's finger go down on them in the order +Kaby had given: one, three, five, six, two, four, seven. I was able to +pray seven distinct times that he'd make a mistake. + +He straightened up. Illy landed by the box like a huge silver spider and +his tentacles whipped futilely across its top. The others surged to a +frightened halt around them. + +Erich's chest was heaving, but his voice was cool and collected as he +said, "You mentioned something about our having a future, Miss Foster. +Now you can make that more specific. Unless we get back to the cosmos +and dump this box, or find a Spider A-tech, or manage to call +headquarters for guidance on disarming the bomb, we have a future +exactly thirty minutes long." + + + + +CHAPTER 13 + + But whence he was, or of what wombe ybore, + Of beasts, or of the earth, I have not red: + But certes was with milke of wolves and tygres fed. + + --Spenser + +THE TIGER IS LOOSE + + +I guess when they really push the button or throw the switch or spring +the trap or focus the beam or what have you, you don't faint or go crazy +or anything else convenient. I didn't. Everything, everybody, every move +that was made, every word that was spoken, was painfully real to me, +like a hand twisting and squeezing things deep inside me, and I saw +every least detail spotlighted and magnified like I had the seven +skulls. + +Erich was standing beyond the bomb chest; little smiles were ruffling +his lips. I'd never seen him look so sharp. Illy was beside him, but not +on his side, you understand. Mark, Sevensee and Beau were around the +chest to the nearer side. Beau had dropped to a knee and was scanning +the chest minutely, terror-under-control making him bend his head a +little closer than he needed to for clear vision, but with his hands +locked together behind his back, I guess to restrain the impulse to push +any and everything that looked like a disarming button. + +Doc was sprawled face down on the nearest couch, out like a light, I +suppose. + +Us four girls were still by the control divan. With Kaby, that surprised +me, because she didn't look scared or frozen, but almost as intensely +alive as Erich. + +Sid had turned back, as I'd said, and had one hand stretched out toward +but not touching the Minor Maintainer, and a look on his beardy face as +if he were calling down death and destruction on every boozy rogue who +had ever gone up from King's Lynn to Cambridge and London, and I +realized why: if he'd thought of the Minor Maintainer a second sooner, +he could have pinned Erich down with heavy gravity before he could touch +the buttons. + +Bruce was resting one hand on the head of the control divan and was +looking toward the group around the chest, toward Erich, I think, as if +Erich had done something rather wonderful for him, though I can't +imagine myself being tickled at being included in anybody's suicide +surprise party. Bruce looked altogether too dreamy, Brahma blast him, +for someone who must have the same steel-spiked thought in his head that +I know darn well the rest of us had: that in twenty-nine minutes or so, +the Place would be a sun in a bag. + + * * * * * + +Erich was the first to get down to business, as I'd have laid any odds +he would be. He had the jump on us and he wasn't going to lose it. + +"Well, when are you going to start getting Lili to tell us where she hid +the Maintainer? It has to be her--she was too certain it was gone +forever when she talked. And Bruce must have seen from the bar who took +the Maintainer, and who would he cover up for but his girl?" + +There he was plagiarizing my ideas, but I guess I was willing to sign +them over to him in full if he got us the right pail of water for that +time-bomb. + +He glanced at his wrist. "According to my Caller, you have twenty-nine +and a half minutes, including the time it will take to get a Door or +contact headquarters. When are you going to get busy on the girl?" + +Bruce laughed a little--deprecatingly, so help me--and started toward +him. "Look here, old man," he said, "there's no need to trouble Lili, or +to fuss with headquarters, even if you could. Really not at all. Not to +mention that your surmises are quite unfounded, old chap, and I'm a bit +surprised at your advancing them. But that's quite all right because, as +it happens, I'm an atomics technician and I even worked on that very +bomb. To disarm it, you just have to fiddle a bit with some of the +ankhs, those hoopy little crosses. Here, let me--" + +Allah il allah, but it must have struck everybody as it did me as being +just too incredible an assertion, too bloody British a bare-faced bluff, +for Erich didn't have to say a word; Mark and Sevensee grabbed Bruce by +the arms, one on each side, as he stooped toward the bronze chest, and +they weren't gentle about it. Then Erich spoke. + +"Oh, no, Bruce. Very sporting of you to try to cover up for your girl +friend, but we aren't going to let ourselves be blown to stripped atoms +twenty-eight minutes too soon while you monkey with the buttons, the +very thing Benson-Carter warned against, and pray for a guesswork +miracle. It's too thin, Bruce, when you come from 1917 and haven't been +on the Big Time for a hundred sleeps and were calling for an A-tech +yourself a few hours ago. Much too thin. Bruce, something is going to +happen that I'm afraid you won't like, but you're going to have to put +up with it. That is, unless Miss Foster decides to be cooperative." + +"I say, you fellows, let me go," Bruce demanded, struggling +experimentally. "I know it's a bit thick to swallow and I did give you +the wrong impression calling for an A-tech, but I just wanted to capture +your attention then; I didn't want to have to work on the bomb. Really, +Erich, would they have ordered Benson-Carter to pick us up unless one of +us were an A-tech? They'd be sure to include one in the bally +operation." + +"When they're using patchwork tactics?" Erich grinningly quoted back at +him. + + * * * * * + +Kaby spoke up beside me and said, "Benson-Carter was a magician of +matter and he was going on the operation disguised as an old woman. We +have the cloak and hood with the other garments," and I wondered how +this cold fish of a she-officer could be the same girl who was giving +Mark slurpy looks not ten minutes ago. + +"Well?" Erich asked, glancing at his Caller and then swinging his eyes +around at us as if there must be some of the old _Wehrmacht_ iron +somewhere. We all found ourselves looking at Lili and she was looking so +sharp herself, so ready to jump and so at bay, that it was all _I_ +needed, at any rate, to make Erich's theory about the Maintainer a +rock-bottom certainty. + +Bruce must have realized the way our minds were working, for he started +to struggle in earnest and at the same time called, "For God's sake, +don't do anything to Lili! Let me loose, you idiots! Everything's true I +told you--I can save you from that bomb. Sevensee, you took my side +against the Spiders; you've nothing to lose. Sid, you're an Englishman. +Beau, you're a gentleman and you love her, too--for God's sake, stop +them!" + +Beau glanced up over his shoulder at Bruce and the others surging around +close to his ankles and he had on his poker face. Sid I could tell was +once more going through the purgatory of decision. Beau reached his own +decision first and I'll say it for him that he acted on it fast and +intelligently. Right from his kneeling position and before he'd even +turned his head quite back, he jumped Erich. + +But other things in this cosmos besides Man can pick sides and act fast. +Illy landed on Beau midway and whipped his tentacles around him tight +and they went wobbling around like a drunken white-and-silver barber +pole. Beau got his hands each around a tentacle, and at the same time +his face began to get purple, and I winced at what they were both going +through. + +Maybe Sevensee had a hoof in Sid's purgatory, because Bruce shook loose +from the satyr and tried to knock out Mark, but the Roman twisted his +arm and kept him from getting in a good punch. + +Erich didn't make a move to mix into either fight, which is my little +commandant all over. Using his fists on anybody but me is beneath him. + + * * * * * + +Then Sid made his choice, but there was no way for me to tell what it +was, for, as he reached for the Minor Maintainer, Kaby contemptuously +snatched it away from his hands and gave him a knee in the belly that +doubled me up in sympathy and sent him sprawling on his knees toward the +fighters. On the return, Kaby gave Lili, who'd started to grab too, an +effortless backhand smash that set her down on the divan. + +Erich's face lit up like an electric sign and he kept his eyes fixed on +Kaby. + +She crouched a little, carrying her weight on the balls of her feet and +firmly cradling the Minor Maintainer in her left arm, like a basketball +captain planning an offensive. Then she waved her free hand decisively +to the right. I didn't get it, but Erich did and Mark too, for Erich +jumped for the Refresher sector and Mark let go of Bruce and followed +him, ducking around Sevensee's arms, who was coming back into the fight +on which side I don't know. Illy un-whipped from Beau and copied Erich +and Mark with one big spring. + +Then Kaby twisted a dial as far as it would go and Bruce, Beau, Sevensee +and poor Siddy were slammed down and pinned to the floor by about eight +gravities. + +It should have been lighter near us--I hoped it was, but you couldn't +tell from watching Siddy; he went flat on his face, spread-eagled, one +hand stretched toward me so close, I could have touched it (but not let +go!), and his mouth was open against the floor and he was gasping +through a corner of it and I could see his spine trying to sink through +his belly. Bruce just managed to get his head and one shoulder up a bit, +and they all made me think of a Dore illustration of the _Inferno_ where +the cream of the damned are frozen up to their necks in ice in the +innermost circle of Hell. + +The gravity didn't catch me, although I could feel it in my left arm. I +was mostly in the Refresher sector, but I dropped down flat too, partly +out of a crazy compassion I have, but mostly because I didn't want to +take a chance of having Kaby knock me down. + +Erich, Mark and Illy had got clear and they headed toward us. Maud +picked the moment to make her play; she hadn't much choice of times, if +she wanted to make one. The Old Girl was looking it for once, but I +guess the thought of her miracle must have survived alongside the fear +of sacked sun and must have meant a lot to her, for she launched out +fast, all set to straight-arm Kaby into the heavy gravity and grab the +Minor Maintainer with the other hand. + + + + +CHAPTER 14 + + Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust. + + --Webster + +"NOW WILL YOU TALK?" + + +Cretans have eyes under their back hair, or let's face it, Entertainers +aren't Soldiers. Kaby weaved to one side and flicked a helpful hand and +poor old Maud went where she'd been going to send Kaby. It sickened me +to see the gravity take hold and yank her down. + +I could have jumped up and made it four in a row for Kaby, but I'm not a +bit brave when things like my life are at stake. + +Lili was starting to get up, acting a little dazed. Kaby gently pushed +her down again and quietly said, "Where is it?" and then hauled off and +slapped her across the face. What got me was the matter-of-fact way Kaby +did it. I can understand somebody getting mad and socking someone, or +even deliberately working up a rage so as to be able to do something +nasty, but this cold-blooded way turns my stomach. + +Lili looked as if half her face were about to start bleeding, but she +didn't look dazed any more and her jaw set. Kaby grabbed Lili's pearl +necklace and twisted it around her neck and it broke and the pearls went +bouncing around like ping-pong balls, so Kaby yanked down Lili's gray +silk bandeau until it was around the neck and tightened that. Lili +started to choke through her tight-pressed lips. Erich, Mark and Illy +had come up and crowded around, but they seemed to be content with the +job Kaby was doing. + +"Listen, slut," she said, "we have no time. You have a healing room in +this place. I can work the things." + +"Here it comes," I thought, wishing I could faint. On top of everything, +on top of death even, they had to drag in the nightmare personally +stylized for me, the horror with my name on it. I wasn't going to be +allowed to blow up peacefully. They weren't satisfied with an A-bomb. +They had to write my private hell into the script. + +"There is a thing called an Invertor," Kaby said exactly as I'd known +she would, but as I didn't really hear it just then--a mental split I'll +explain in a moment. "It opens you up so they can cure your insides +without cutting your skin or making you bleed anywhere. It turns the big +parts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin--your +eyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it--becoming the lining of a little hole +that's half-filled with your hair. + +"Meantime, your insides are exposed for whatever the healer wants to do +to them. You live for a while on the air inside the hole. First the +healer gives you an air that makes you sleep, or you go mad in about +fifty heartbeats. We'll see what ten heartbeats do to you without the +sleepy air. Now will you talk?" + + * * * * * + +I hadn't been listening to her, though, not the real me, or I'd have +gone mad without getting the treatment. I once heard Doc say your liver +is more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, because +although you live with your liver all your life, you never see it or +learn to point to it instinctively, and the thought of someone messing +around with that intimate yet unknown part of you is just too awful. + +I knew I had to do something quick. Hell, at the first hint of +Introversion, before Kaby had even named it, Illy had winced so that his +tentacles were all drawn up like fat feather-sausages. Erich had looked +at him questioningly, but that lousy Looney had un-endeared himself to +me by squeaking, "Don't mind me, I'm just sensitive. Get on with the +girl. Make her tell." + +Yes, I knew I had to do something, and here on the floor that meant +thinking hard and in high gear about something else. The screwball +sculpture Erich had tried to smash was a foot from my nose and I saw a +faint trail of white stuff where it had skidded. I reached out and +touched the trail; it was finely gritty, like powdered glass. I tipped +up the sculpture and the part on which it had skidded wasn't marred at +all, not even dulled; the gray spheres were as glisteningly bright as +ever. So I knew the trail was diamond dust rubbed off the diamonds in +the floor by something even harder. + +That told me the sculpture was something special and maybe Doc had had a +real idea in his pickled brain when he'd been pushing the thing at all +of us and trying to tell us something. He hadn't managed to say anything +then, but he had earlier when he'd been going to tell us what to do +about the bomb, and maybe there was a connection. + +I twisted my memory hard and let it spring back and I got "Inversh ... +bosh ..." Bosh, indeed! Bosh and inverse bosh to all boozers, Russki or +otherwise. + +So I quick tried the memory trick again and this time I got "glovsh" and +then I grasped and almost sneezed on diamond dust as I watched the +pieces fit themselves together in my mind like a speeded-up movie reel. + +It all hung on that black right-hand hussar's glove Lili had produced +for Bruce. Only she couldn't have found it in Stores, because we'd +searched every fractional pigeonhole later on and there hadn't been any +gloves there, not even the left-hand mate there would have been. Also, +Bruce had had two left-hand gloves to start with, and we had been +through the whole Place with a fine-tooth comb, and there had been only +the two black gloves on the floor where Bruce had kicked them off the +bar--those two and those two only, the left-hand glove he'd brought from +outside and the right-hand glove Lili had produced for him. + + * * * * * + +So a left-hand glove had disappeared--the last I'd seen of it, Lili had +been putting it on her tray--and a right-hand glove had appeared. Which +could only add up to one thing: Lili had turned the left-hand glove into +an identical right. She couldn't have done it by turning it inside out +the ordinary way, because the lining was different. + +But as I knew only too sickeningly well, there was an extraordinary way +to turn things inside out, things like human beings. You merely had to +put them on the Invertor in Surgery and flick the switch for full +Inversion. + +Or you could flick it for partial Inversion and turn something into a +perfect three-dimensional mirror image of itself, just what a right-hand +glove is of a left. Rotation through the fourth dimension, the science +boys call it; I've heard of it being used in surgery on the highly +asymmetric Martians, and even to give a socially impeccable right hand +to a man who'd lost one, by turning an amputated right arm into an +amputated left. + +Ordinarily, nothing but live things are ever Inverted in Surgery and you +wouldn't think of doing it to an inanimate object, especially in a Place +where the Doc's a drunk and the Surgery hasn't been used for hundreds of +sleeps. + +But when you've just fallen in love, you think of wonderful crazy things +to do for people. Drunk with love, Lili had taken Bruce's extra +left-hand glove into Surgery, partially Inverted it, and got a +right-hand glove to give him. + +What Doc had been trying to say with his "Inversh ... bosh ..." was +"Invert the box," meaning we should put the bronze chest through full +Inversion to get at the bomb inside to disarm it. Doc too had got the +idea from Lili's trick with the glove. What an inside-out tactical +atomic bomb would look like, I could not imagine and did not +particularly care to see. I might have to, though, I realized. + +But the fast-motion film was still running in my head. Later on, Lili +had decided like I had that her lover was going to lose out in his plea +for mutiny unless she could give him a really captive audience--and +maybe, even then, she had been figuring on creating the nest for Bruce's +chicks and ... all those other things we'd believed in for a while. So +she'd taken the Major Maintainer and remembered the glove, and not many +seconds later, she had set down on a shelf of the Art Gallery an object +that no one would think of questioning--except someone who knew the +Gallery by heart. + + * * * * * + +I looked at the abstract sculpture a foot from my nose, at the clustered +gray spheres the size of golf balls. I had known that the inside of the +Maintainer was made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, but +I hadn't realized they were quite _that_ big. + +I said to myself, "Greta, this is going to give you a major psychosis, +but you're the one who has to do it, because no one is going to listen +to your deductions when they're all practically living on negative time +already." + +I got up as quietly as if I were getting out of a bed I shouldn't have +been in--there are some things Entertainers are good at--and Kaby was +just saying "you go mad in about fifty heartbeats." Everybody on their +feet was looking at Lili. Sid seemed to have moved, but I had no time +for him except to hope he hadn't done anything that might attract +attention to me. + +I stepped out of my shoes and walked rapidly to Surgery--there's one +good thing about this hardest floor anywhere, it doesn't creak. I walked +through the Surgery screen that is like a wall of opaque, odorless +cigarette smoke and I concentrated on remembering my snafued nurse's +training, and before I had time to panic, I had the sculpture positioned +on the gleaming table of the Invertor. + +I froze for a moment when I reached for the Inversion switch, thinking +of the other time and trying to remember what it had been that bothered +me so much about an inside-out brain being bigger and not having eyes, +but then I either thumbed my nose at my nightmare or kissed my sanity +good-by, I don't know which, and twisted the switch all the way over, +and there was the Major Maintainer winking blue about three times a +second as nice as you could want it. + +It must have been working as sweet and steady as ever, all the time it +was Inverted, except that, being inside out, it had hocused the +direction finders. + + + + +CHAPTER 15 + + black legged spiders + with red hearts of hell + + --marquis + +LORD SPIDER + + +"Jesu!" I turned and Sid's face was sticking through the screen like a +tinted bas-relief hanging on a gray wall and I got the impression he had +peered unexpectedly through a slit in an arras into Queen Elizabeth's +bedroom. + +He didn't have any time to linger on the sensation, even if he'd wanted +to, for an elbow with a copper band thrust through the screen and dug +his ribs and Kaby marched Lili in by the neck. Erich, Mark and Illy were +right behind. They caught the blue flashes and stopped dead, staring at +the long-lost. Erich spared me one look which seemed to say, so you did +it, not that it matters. Then he stepped forward and picked it up and +held it solidly to his left side in the double right-angle made by +fingers, forearm and chest, and reached for the Introversion switch with +a look on his face as if he were opening a fifth of whisky. + +The blue light died and Change Winds hit me like a stiff drink that had +been a long, long time in coming, like a hot trumpet note out of +nowhere. + +I felt the changing pasts blowing through me, and the uncertainties +whistling past, and ice-stiff reality softening with all its duties and +necessities, and the little memories shredding away and dancing off like +autumn leaves, leaving maybe not even ghosts behind, and all the crazy +moods like Mardi Gras dancers pouring down an evening street, and +something inside me had the nerve to say it didn't care whether Greta +Forzane's death was riding in those Winds because they felt so good. + +I could tell it was hitting the others the same way. Even battered, +tight-lipped Lili seemed to be saying, you're making me drink the stuff +and I hate you for it, but I do love it. I guess we'd all had the worry +that even finding and Extroverting the Maintainer wouldn't put us back +in touch with the cosmos and give us those Winds we hate and love. + +The thing that cut through to us as we stood there glowing was not the +thought of the bomb, though that would have come in a few seconds more, +but Sid's voice. He was still standing in the screen, except that now +his face was out the other side and we could just see parts of his +gray-doubleted back, but, of course, his "Jesu!" came through the screen +as if it weren't there. + +At first I couldn't figure out who he could be talking to, but I swear I +never heard his voice so courtly obsequious before, so strong and yet so +filled with awe and an under-note of, yes, sheer terror. + +"Lord, I am filled from top to toe with confusion that you should so +honor my poor Place," he said. "Poor say I and mine, when I mean that I +have ever busked it faithfully for you, not dreaming that you would ever +condescend ... yet knowing that your eye was certes ever upon me ... +though I am but as a poor pinch of dust adrift between the suns ... I +abase myself. Prithee, how may I serve thee, sir? I know not e'en how +most suitably to address thee, Lord ... King ... Emperor Spider!" + + * * * * * + +I felt like I was getting very small, but not a bit less visible, worse +luck, and even with the Change Winds inside me to give me courage, I +thought this was really too much, coming on top of everything else; it +was simply unfair. + +At the same time, I realized it was to be expected that the big bosses +would have been watching us with their unblinking beady black eyes ever +since we had Introverted waiting to pounce if we should ever come out of +it. I tried to picture what was on the other side of the screen and I +didn't like the assignment. + +But in spite of being petrified, I had a hard time not giggling, like +the zany at graduation exercises, at the way the other ones in Surgery +were taking it. + +I mean the Soldiers. They each stiffened up like they had the old ramrod +inside them, and their faces got that important look, and they glanced +at each other and the floor without lowering their heads, as if they +were measuring the distance between their feet and mentally chalking +alternate sets of footprints to step into. The way Erich and Kaby held +the Major and Minor Maintainers became formal; the way they checked +their Callers and nodded reassuringly was positively esoteric. Even Illy +somehow managed to look as if he were on parade. + +Then from beyond the screen came what was, under the circumstances, the +worst noise I've ever heard, a seemingly wordless distant-sounding +howling and wailing, with a note of menace that made me shake, although +it also had a nasty familiarity about it I couldn't place. Sid's voice +broke into it, loud, fast and frightened. + +"Your pardon, Lord, I did not think ... certes, the gravity ... I'll +attend to it on the instant." He whipped a hand and half a head back +through the screen, but without looking back and snapped his fingers, +and before I could blink, Kaby had put the Minor Maintainer in his hand. + +Sid went completely out of sight then and the howling stopped, and I +thought that if that was the way a Lord Spider expressed his annoyance +at being subjected to incorrect gravity, I hoped the bosses wouldn't +start any conversations with me. + +Erich pursed his lips and threw the other Soldiers a nod and the four of +them marched through the screen as if they'd drilled a lifetime for this +moment. I had the wild idea that Erich might give me his arm, but he +strode past me as if I were ... an Entertainer. + +I hesitated a moment then, but I had to see what was happening outside, +even if I got eaten up for it. Besides, I had a bit of the thought that +if these formalities went on much longer, even a Lord Spider was going +to discover just how immune he was to confined atomic blast. + +I walked through the screen with Lili beside me. + + * * * * * + +The Soldiers had stopped a few feet in front of it. I looked around +ahead for whatever it was going to turn out to be, prepared to drop a +curtsy or whatever else, bar nothing, that seemed expected of me. + +I had a hard time spotting the beast. Some of the others seemed to be +having trouble too. I saw Doc weaving around foolishly by the control +divan, and Bruce and Beau and Sevensee and Maud on their feet beyond it, +and I wondered whether we were dealing with an invisible monster; ought +to be easy enough for the bosses to turn a simple trick like +invisibility. + +Then I looked sharply left where everyone else, even glassy-eyed Doc, +was coming to look, into the Door sector, only there wasn't any monster +there or even a Door, but just Siddy holding the Minor Maintainer and +grinning like when he is threatening to tickle me, only more fiendishly. + +"Not a move, masters," he cried, his eyes dancing, "or I'll pin the pack +of you down, marry and amen I will. It is my firm purpose to see the +Place blasted before I let this instrument out of my hands again." + +My first thought was, "'Sblood but Siddy is a real actor! I don't care +if he didn't study under anyone later than Burbage, that just proves how +good Burbage is." + +Sid had convinced us not only that the real Spiders had arrived, but +earlier that the gravity in the edge of Stores had been a lot heavier +than it actually was. He completely fooled all those Soldiers, including +my swelled-headed victorious little commandant, and I kind of filed away +the timing of that business of reaching out the hand and snapping the +fingers without looking, it was so good. + +"Beauregard!" Sid called. "Get to the Major Maintainer and call +headquarters. But don't come through Door, marry go by Refresher. I'll +not trust a single Demon of you in this sector with me until much more +has been shown and settled." + +"Siddy, you're wonderful," I said, starting toward him. "As soon as I +got the Maintainer unsnarled and looked around and saw your sweet old +face--" + +"Back, tricksy trull! Not the breadth of one scarlet toenail nearer me, +you Queen of Sleights and High Priestess of Deception!" he bellowed. +"You least of all do I trust. Why you hid the Maintainer, I know not, +'faith, but later you'll discover the truth to me or I'll have your +gizzard." + +I could see there was going to have to be a little explaining. + + * * * * * + +Doc, touched off, I guess, by Sid waving his hand at me, threw back his +head and let off one of those shuddery Siberian wolf-howls he does so +blamed well. Sid waved toward him sharply and he shut up, beaming +toothily, but at least I knew who was responsible for the Spider wail of +displeasure that Sid had either called for or more likely got as a gift +of the gods and used in his act. + +Beau came circling around fast and Erich shoved the Major Maintainer +into his hands without making any fuss. The four Soldiers were looking +pretty glum after losing their grand review. + +Beau dumped some junk off one of the Art Gallery's sturdy taborets and +set the Major Maintainer on it carefully but fast, and quickly knelt in +front of it and whipped on some earphones and started to tune. The way +he did it snatched away from me my inward glory at my big Inversion +brainwave so fast, I might never have had it, and there was nothing in +my mind again but the bronze bomb chest. + +I wondered if I should suggest Inverting the thing, but I said to +myself, "Uh-uh, Greta, you got no diploma to show them and there +probably isn't time to try two things, anyway." + +Then Erich for once did something I wanted him to, though I didn't care +for its effect on my nerves, by looking at his Caller and saying +quietly, "Nine minutes to go, if Place time and cosmic time are +synching." + +Beau was steady as a rock and working adjustments so fine that I +couldn't even see his fingers move. + +Then, at the other end of the Place, Bruce took a few steps toward us. +Sevensee and Maud followed a bit behind him. I remembered Bruce was +another of our nuts with a private program for blowing up the place. + +"Sidney," he called, and then, when he'd got Sid's attention, "Remember, +Sidney, you and I both came down to London from Peterhouse." + +I didn't get it. Then Bruce looked toward Erich with a devil-may-care +challenge and toward Lili as if he were asking her forgiveness for +something. I couldn't read her expression; the bruises were blue on her +throat and her cheek was puffy. + +Then Bruce once more shot Erich that look of challenge and he spun and +grabbed Sevensee by a wrist and stuck out a foot--even half-horses +aren't too sharp about infighting, I guess, and the satyr had every +right to feel at least as confused as I felt--and sent him stumbling +into Maud, and the two of them tumbled to the floor in a jumble of hairy +legs and pearl-gray frock. Bruce raced to the bomb chest. + + * * * * * + +Most of us yelled, "Stop him, Sid, pin him down," or something like +that--I know I did because I was suddenly sure that he'd been asking +Lili's pardon for blowing the two of them up--and all the rest of us +too, the love-blinded stinker. + +Sid had been watching him all the time and now he lifted his hand to the +Minor Maintainer, but then he didn't touch any of the dials, just +watched and waited, and I thought, "Shaitan shave us! Does Siddy want in +on death, too? Ain't he satisfied with all he knows about life?" + +Bruce had knelt and was twisting some things on the front of the chest, +and it was all as bright as if he were under a bank of Klieg lights, and +I was telling myself I wouldn't know anything when the fireball fired, +and not believing it, and Sevensee and Maud had got unscrambled and were +starting for Bruce, and the rest of us were yelling at Sid, except that +Erich was just looking at Bruce very happily, and Sid was still not +doing anything, and it was unbearable except just then I felt the little +arteries start to burst in my brain like a string of fire-crackers and +the old aorta pop, and for good measure, a couple of valves come +unhinged in my ticker, and I was thinking, "Well, now I know what it's +like to die of heart failure and high blood pressure," and having a last +quiet smile at having cheated the bomb, when Bruce jumped up and back +from the chest. + +"That does it!" he announced cheerily. "She's as safe as the Bank of +England." + +Sevensee and Maud stopped themselves just short of knocking him down and +I said to myself, "Hey, let's get a move on! I thought heart attacks +were fast." + +Before anyone else could speak, Beau did. He had turned around from the +Major Maintainer and pulled aside one of the earphones. + +"I got headquarters," he said crisply. "They told me how to disarm the +bomb--I merely said I thought we ought to know. What did you do, sir?" +he called to Bruce. + +"There's a row of four ankhs just below the lock. The first to your left +you give a quarter turn to the right, the second a quarter turn to the +left, same for the fourth, and you don't touch the third." + +"That is it, sir," Beau confirmed. + +The long silence was too much for me; I guess I must have the shortest +span for unspoken relief going. I drew some nourishment out of my +restored arteries into my brain cells and yelled, "Siddy, I know I'm a +tricksy trull and the High Vixen of all Foxes, but what the Hell is +Peterhouse?" + +"The oldest college at Cambridge," he told me rather coolly. + + + + +CHAPTER 16 + + "Familiar with infinite universe sheafs and open-ended postulate + systems?--the notion that everything is possible--and I mean + everything--and everything has happened. _Everything._" + + --Heinlein + +THE POSSIBILITY-BINDERS + + +An hour later, I was nursing a weak highball and a black eye in the +sleepy-time darkness on the couch farthest from the piano, half watching +the highlighted party going on around it and the bar, while the Place +waited for rendezvous with Egypt and the Battle of Alexandria. + +Sid had swept all our outstanding problems into one big bundle and, +since his hand held the joker of the Minor Maintainer, he had settled +them all as high-handedly as if they'd been those of a bunch of +schoolkids. + +It amounted to this: + +We'd been Introverted when most of the damning things had happened, so +presumably only we knew about them, and we were all in so deep one way +or another that we'd all have to keep quiet to protect our delicate +complexions. + +Well, Erich's triggering the bomb did balance rather neatly Bruce's +incitement to mutiny, and there was Doc's drinking, while everybody who +had declared for the peace message had something to hide. Mark and Kaby +I felt inclined to trust anywhere, Maud for sure, and Erich in this +particular matter, damn him. Illy I didn't feel at all easy about, but I +told myself there always has to be a fly in the ointment--a darn big +one this time, and furry. + +Sid didn't mention his own dirty linen, but he knew we knew he'd flopped +badly as boss of the Place and only recouped himself by that last-minute +flimflam. + +Remembering Sid's trick made me think for a moment about the real +Spiders. Just before I snuck out of Surgery, I'd had a vivid picture of +what they must look like, but now I couldn't get it again. It depressed +me, not being able to remember--oh, I probably just imagined I'd had a +picture, like a hophead on a secret-of-the-universe kick. Me ever find +out anything about the Spiders?--except for nervous notions like I'd had +during the recent fracas?--what a laugh! + +The funniest thing (ha-ha!) was that I had ended up the least-trusted +person. Sid wouldn't give me time to explain how I'd deduced what had +happened to the Maintainer, and even when Lili spoke up and admitted +hiding it, she acted so bored I don't think everybody believed +her--although she did spill the realistic detail that she hadn't used +partial Inversion on the glove; she'd just turned it inside out to make +it a right and then done a full Inversion to get the lining back inside. + + * * * * * + +I tried to get Doc to confirm that he'd reasoned the thing out the same +way I had, but he said he had been blacked out the whole time, except +during the first part of the hunt, and he didn't remember having any +bright ideas at all. Right now, he was having Maud explain to him twice, +in detail, everything that had happened. I decided that it was going to +take a little more work before my reputation as a great detective was +established. + +I looked over the edge of the couch and just made out in the gloom one +of Bruce's black gloves. It must have been kicked there. I fished it up. +It was the right-hand one. My big clue, and was I sick of it! Got +mittens, God forbid! I slung it away and, like a lurking octopus, Illy +shot up a tentacle from the next couch, where I hadn't known he was +resting, and snatched the glove like it was a morsel of underwater +garbage. These ETs can seem pretty shuddery non-human at times. + +I thought of what a cold-blooded, skin-saving louse Illy had been, and +about Sid and his easy suspicions, and Erich and my black eye, and how, +as usual, I'd got left alone in the end. My men! + +Bruce had explained about being an A-tech. Like a lot of us, he'd had +several widely different jobs during his first weeks in the Change World +and one of them had been as secretary to a group of the minor atomics +boys from the Manhattan-Project-Earth-Satellite days. I gathered he'd +also absorbed some of his bothersome ideas from them. I hadn't quite +decided yet what species of heroic heel he belonged to, but he was thick +with Mark and Erich again. Everybody's men! + +Sid didn't have to argue with anybody; all the wild compulsions and +mighty resolves were dead now, anyway until they'd had a good long rest. +I sure could use one myself, I knew. + +The party at the piano was getting wilder. Lili had been dancing the +black bottom on top of it and now she jumped down into Sid's and +Sevensee's arms, taking a long time about it. She'd been drinking a lot +and her little gray dress looked about as innocent on her as diapers +would on Nell Gwyn. She continued her dance, distributing her marks of +favor equally between Sid, Erich and the satyr. Beau didn't mind a bit, +but serenely pounded out "Tonight's the Night"--which she'd practically +shouted to him not two minutes ago. + +I was glad to be out of the party. Who can compete with a highly +experienced, utterly disillusioned seventeen-year-old really throwing +herself away for the first time? + + * * * * * + +Something touched my hand. Illy had stretched a tentacle into a furry +wire to return me the black glove, although he ought to have known I +didn't want it. I pushed it away, privately calling Illy a washed-out +moronic tarantula, and right away I felt a little guilty. What right had +I to be critical of Illy? Would my own character have shown to advantage +if I'd been locked in with eleven octopoids a billion years away? For +that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone? + +Still, I was glad to be out of the party, though I kept on watching it. +Bruce was drinking alone at the bar. Once Sid had gone over to him and +they'd had one together and I'd heard Bruce reciting from Rupert Brooke +those deliberately corny lines, "For England's the one land, I know, +Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; and Cambridgeshire, of all +England, The Shire for Men who Understand;" and I'd remembered that +Brooke too had died young in World War One and my ideas had got fuzzy. +But mostly Bruce was just calmly drinking by himself. Every once in a +while Lili would look at him and stop dead in her dancing and laugh. + +I'd figured out this Bruce-Lili-Erich business as well as I cared to. +Lili had wanted the nest with all her heart and nothing else would ever +satisfy her, and now she'd go to hell her own way and probably die of +Bright's disease for a third time in the Change World. Bruce hadn't +wanted the nest or Lili as much as he wanted the Change World and the +chances it gave for Soldierly cavorting and poetic drunks; Lili's seed +wasn't his idea of healing the cosmos; maybe he'd make a real mutiny +some day, but more likely he'd stick to bar-room epics. + +His and Lili's infatuation wouldn't die completely, no matter how rancid +it looked right now. The real-love angle might go, but Change would +magnify the romance angle and it might seem to them like a big thing of +a sort if they met again. + +Erich had his _Kamerad_, shaped to suit him, who'd had the guts and +cleverness to disarm the bomb he'd had the guts to trigger. You have to +hand it to Erich for having the nerve to put us all in a situation where +we'd have to find the Maintainer or fry, but I don't know anything +disgusting enough to hand to him. + +I had tried a while back. I had gone up behind him and said, "Hey, how's +my wicked little commandant? Forgotten your _und so weiter_?" and as he +turned, I clawed my nails and slammed him across the cheek. That's how I +got the black eye. Maud wanted to put an electronic leech on it, but I +took the old handkerchief in ice water. Well, at any rate Erich had his +scratches to match Bruce's, not as deep, but four of them, and I told +myself maybe they'd get infected--I hadn't washed my hands since the +hunt. Not that Erich doesn't love scars. + + * * * * * + +Mark was the one who helped me up after Erich knocked me down. + +"You got any omnias for that?" I snapped at him. + +"For what?" Mark asked. + +"Oh, for everything that's been happening to us," I told him +disgustedly. + +He seemed to actually think for a moment and then he said, "_Omnia +mutantur, nihil interit._" + +"Meaning?" I asked him. + +He said, "All things change, but nothing is really lost." + +It would be a wonderful philosophy to stand with against the Change +Winds. Also damn silly. I wondered if Mark really believed it. I wished +I could. Sometimes I come close to thinking it's a lot of baloney trying +to be any decent kind of Demon, even a good Entertainer. Then I tell +myself, "That's life, Greta. You've got to love through it somehow." But +there are times when some of these cookies are not too easy to love. + +Something brushed the palm of my hand again. It was Illy's tentacle, +with the tendrils of the tip spread out like a little bush. I started to +pull my hand away, but then I realized the Loon was simply lonely. I +surrendered my hand to the patterned gossamer pressures of +feather-talk. + +[Illustration] + +Right away I got the words, "Feeling lonely, Greta girl?" + +It almost floored me, I tell you. Here I was understanding feather-talk, +which I just didn't, and I was understanding it in English, which didn't +make sense at all. + +For a second, I thought Illy must have spoken, but I knew he hadn't, and +for a couple more seconds I thought he was working telepathy on me, +using the feather-talk as cues. Then I tumbled to what was happening: he +was playing English on my palm like on the keyboard of his squeakbox, +and since I could play English on a squeakbox myself, my mind translated +automatically. + +Realizing this almost gave my mind stage fright, but I was too fagged to +be hocused by self-consciousness. I just lay back and let the thoughts +come through. It's good to have someone talk to you, even an underweight +octopus, and without the squeaks Illy didn't sound so silly; his +phrasing was soberer. + + * * * * * + +"Feeling sad, Greta girl, because you'll never understand what's +happening to us all," Illy asked me, "because you'll never be anything +but a shadow fighting shadows--and trying to love shadows in between the +battles? It's time you understood we're not really fighting a war at +all, although it looks that way, but going through a kind of evolution, +though not exactly the kind Erich had in mind. + +"Your Terran thought has a word for it and a theory for it--a theory +that recurs on many worlds. It's about the four orders of life: Plants, +Animals, Men and Demons. Plants are energy-binders--they can't move +through space or time, but they can clutch energy and transform it. +Animals are space-binders--they can move through space. Man (Terran or +ET, Lunan or non-Lunan) is a time-binder--he has memory. + +"Demons are the fourth order of evolution, possibility-binders--they can +make all of what might be part of what is, and that is their +evolutionary function. Resurrection is like the metamorphosis of a +caterpillar into a butterfly: a third-order being breaks out of the +chrysalis of its lifeline into fourth-order life. The leap from the +ripped cocoon of an unchanging reality is like the first animal's leap +when he ceases to be a plant, and the Change World is the core of +meaning behind the many myths of immortality. + +"All evolution looks like a war at first--octopoids against monopoids, +mammals against reptiles. And it has a necessary dialectic: there must +be the thesis--we call it Snake--and the antithesis--Spider--before +there can be the ultimate synthesis, when all possibilities are fully +realized in one ultimate universe. The Change War isn't the blind +destruction it seems. + +"Remember that the Serpent is your symbol of wisdom and the Spider your +sign for patience. The two names are rightly frightening to you, for all +high existence is a mixture of horror and delight. And don't be +surprised, Greta girl, at the range of my words and thoughts; in a way, +I've had a billion years to study Terra and learn her languages and +myths. + +"Who are the real Spiders and Snakes, meaning who were the first +possibility-binders? Who was Adam, Greta girl? Who was Cain? Who were +Eve and Lilith? + +"In binding all possibility, the Demons also bind the mental with the +material. All fourth-order beings live inside and outside all minds, +throughout the whole cosmos. Even this Place is, after its fashion, a +giant brain: its floor is the brainpan, the boundary of the Void is the +cortex of gray matter--yes, even the Major and Minor Maintainers are +analogues of the pineal and pituitary glands, which in some form sustain +all nervous systems. + +"There's the real picture, Greta girl." + +The feather-talk faded out and Illy's tendril tips merged into a soft +pad on which I fingered, "Thanks, Daddy Longlegs." + + * * * * * + +Chewing over in my mind what Illy had just told me, I looked back at the +gang around the piano. The party seemed to be breaking up; at least some +of them were chopping away at it. Sid had gone to the control divan and +was getting set to tune in Egypt. Mark and Kaby were there with him, all +bursting with eagerness and the vision of ranks on ranks of mounted +Zombie bowmen going up in a mushroom cloud; I thought of what Illy had +told me and I managed a smile--seems we've got to win and lose all the +battles, every which way. + +Mark had just put on his Parthian costume, groaning cheerfully, +"Trousers again!" and was striding around under a hat like a fur-lined +ice-cream cone and with the sleeves of his metal-stuffed candys flapping +over his hands. He waved a short sword with a heart-shaped guard at +Bruce and Erich and told them to get a move on. + +Kaby was going along on the operation wearing the old-woman disguise +intended for Benson-Carter. I got a half-hearted kick out of knowing she +was going to have to cover that chest and hobble. + +Bruce and Erich weren't taking orders from Mark just yet. Erich went +over and said something to Bruce at the bar, and Bruce got down and +went over with Erich to the piano, and Erich tapped Beau on the shoulder +and leaned over and said something to him, and Beau nodded and yanked +"Limehouse Blues" to a fast close and started another piece, something +slow and nostalgic. + +Erich and Bruce waved to Mark and smiled, as if to show him that whether +he came over and stood with them or not, the legate and the lieutenant +and the commandant were very much together. And while Sevensee hugged +Lili with a simple enthusiasm that made me wonder why I've wasted so +much imagination on genetic treatments for him, Erich and Bruce sang: + + "_To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned, + To our brothers in the tunnels outside time, + Sing three Change-resistant Zombies, raised from death and + robot-crammed, + And Commandos of the Spiders-- + Here's to crime! + We're three blind mice on the wrong time-track, + Hush--hush--hush! + We've lost our now and will never get back, + Hush--hush--hush! + Change Commandos out on the spree, + Damned through all possibility, + Ghostgirls, think kindly on such as we, + Hush--hush--hush!_" + +While they were singing, I looked down at my charcoal skirt and over at +Maud and Lili and I thought, "Three gray hustlers for three black +hussars, that's our speed." Well, I'd never thought of myself as a +high-speed job, winning all the races--I wouldn't feel comfortable that +way. Come to think of it, we've got to lose and win all the races in the +long run, the way the course is laid out. + +I fingered to Illy, "That's the picture, all right, Spider boy." + + --FRITZ LEIBER + + + + +Transcriber's Note: + + This etext was produced from _Galaxy Science Fiction_ March and + April 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the + U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and + typographical errors have been corrected without note. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Big Time, by Fritz Reuter Leiber + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIG TIME *** + +***** This file should be named 32256.txt or 32256.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/2/5/32256/ + +Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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