"CHAPTER 1\n\n    When shall we three meet again\n    In thunder, lightning, or in rain?\n\n    When the hurlyburly's done.\n    When the battle's lost and won.\n\n                             --Macbeth\n\nENTER THREE HUSSARS\n\n\nMy name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe\nme. I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate\nchiefly outside space and time--not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such\nplaces, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either.\n\nI am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star who also\nbears my first name, but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own. I\nneed it, for my job is to nurse back to health and kid back to sanity\nSoldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going. This war is the\nChange War, a war of time travelers--in fact, our private name for being\nin this war is being on the Big Time. Our Soldiers fight by going back\nto change the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help\nour side win the final victory a billion or more years from now. A long\nkilling business, believe me.\n\nYou don't know about the Change War, but it's influencing your lives all\nthe time and maybe you've had hints of it without realizing.\n\nHave you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be\nbringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the\nnext? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing\nbecause of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt\nsure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever\nbeen scared of Ghosts--not the story-book kind, but the billions of\nbeings who were once so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll\njust sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things\nyou may call devils or Demons--spirits able to range through all time\nand space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of\nspace between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole\nuniverse might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints\nof the Change War.\n\nHow I got recruited into the Change War, how it's conducted, what the\ntwo sides are, why you don't consciously know about it, what I really\nthink about it--you'll learn in due course.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I\nsimply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and\nhumanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal\ntitle is Entertainer and I've got my silly side, as you'll find out.\n\nMy pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of\ntimes and places. We're a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run\na pretty good Recuperation Station, though we have our family troubles.\nBut most of our troubles come slamming into the Place with the beat-up\nSoldiers, who've generally just been going through hell and want to\nraise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived\nSoldiers who started this thing I'm going to tell you about, this thing\nthat showed me so much about myself and everything.\n\nWhen it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and\ntwo thousand nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one\nthousand. This two-nightmares routine every time you lay down your dizzy\nlittle head is rough, but you pretend to get used to it because being on\nthe Big Time is supposed to be worth it.\n\nThe Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub\nwhere the Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated\nfor a party, though a Zeppelin is one thing we haven't had yet. You go\nout of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an\nEntertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with\nanything from the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look\nstrangely similar except for size.\n\nSolely on doctor's orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since\ncoming to work at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if\nyou care to call them that, for believe me they are busman's holidays,\nconsidering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last one I spent\nin Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got\nover it. Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be\nfitted by the Spiders into serious operations of the Change War, and you\ncan imagine how restful that makes them.\n\n\"See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don't\ngo too far up front, though, but don't wander off either. Relax and\nenjoy yourself.\"\n\nHa! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they come to the\nPlace is a horse of a far brighter color, simply dazzling by comparison.\nEntertainment is our business and we give them a bang-up time and send\nthem staggering happily back into action, though once in a great while\nsomething may happen to throw a wee shadow on the party.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI am dead in some ways, but don't let that bother you--I am lively\nenough in others. If you met me in the cosmos, you would be more apt to\nyak with me or try to pick me up than to ask a cop to do same or a\nfather to douse me with holy water, unless you are one of those\nhard-boiled reformer types. But you are not likely to meet me in the\ncosmos, because (bar Basin Street and the Prater) 15th Century Italy and\nAugustan Rome--until they spoiled it--are my favorite (Ha!) vacation\nspots and, as I have said, I stick as close to the Place as I can. It is\nreally the nicest Place in the whole Change World. (Crisis! I even\n_think_ of it capitalized!)\n\nAnyhoo, when this thing started, I was twiddling my thumbs on the couch\nnearest the piano and thinking it was too late to do my fingernails and\nwhoever came in probably wouldn't notice them anyway.\n\nThe Place was jumpy like it always is on an approach and the gray velvet\nof the Void around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when\nyou close your eyes in the dark.\n\nSid was tuning the Maintainers for the pick-up and the right shoulder of\nhis gold-worked gray doublet was streaked where he'd been wiping his\nface on it with quick ducks of his head.\n\nBeauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid's other shoulder,\none white-trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control\ndivan, and he wasn't missing a single flicker of Sid's old fingers on\nthe dials; Beau's co-pilot besides piano player. Beau's face had that\ndead blank look it must have had when every double eagle he owned and\nmore he didn't were riding on the next card to be turned in the gambling\nsaloon on one of those wedding-cake Mississippi steamboats.\n\nDoc was soused as usual, sitting at the bar with his top hat pushed back\nand his knitted shawl pulled around him, his wide eyes seeing whatever\nhorrors a life in Nazi-occupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk\nDemon in the Change World.\n\nMaud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili--the New Girl, of course--were\ntelling the big beads of their identical pearl necklaces.\n\nYou might say that all us Entertainers were a bit edgy; being Demons\ndoesn't automatically make us brave.\n\nThen the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door\nbegan to darken in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds\nblowing hard and my heart missed a couple of beats, and the next thing\nthree Soldiers had stepped out of the cosmos and into the Place, their\nfirst three steps hitting the floor hard as they changed times and\nweights.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThey were dressed as officers of hussars, as we'd been advised,\nand--praise the Bonny Dew!--I saw that the first of them was Erich, my\nown dear little commandant, the pride of the von Hohenwalds and the\nTerror of the Snakes. Behind him was some hard-faced Roman or other, and\nbeside Erich and shouldering into him as they stamped forward was a new\nboy, blond, with a face like a Greek god who's just been touring a\nChristian hell.\n\nThey were uniformed exactly alike in black--shakos, fur-edged pelisses,\nboots, and so forth--with white skull emblems on the shakos. The only\ndifference between them was that Erich had a Caller on his wrist and the\nNew Boy had a black-gauntleted glove on his left hand and was clenching\nthe mate in it, his right hand being bare like both of Erich's and the\nRoman's.\n\n\"You've made it, lads, hearts of gold,\" Sid boomed at them, and Beau\ntwitched a smile and murmured something courtly and Maud began to chant,\n\"Shut the Door!\" and the New Girl copied her and I joined in because the\nChange Winds do blow like crazy when the Door is open, even though it\ncan't ever be shut tight enough to keep them from leaking through.\n\n\"Shut it before it blows wrinkles in our faces,\" Maud called in her\ngamin voice to break the ice, looking like a skinny teen-ager in the\ntight, knee-length frock she'd copied from the New Girl.\n\nBut the three Soldiers weren't paying attention. The Roman--I remembered\nhis name was Mark--was blundering forward stiffly as if there were\nsomething wrong with his eyes, while Erich and the New Boy were yelling\nat each other about a kid and Einstein and a summer palace and a bloody\nglove and the Snakes having booby-trapped Saint Petersburg. Erich had\nthat taut sadistic smile he gets when he wants to hit me.\n\nThe New Boy was in a tearing rage. \"Why'd you pull us out so bloody\nfast? We fair chewed the Nevsky Prospekt to pieces galloping away.\"\n\n\"Didn't you feel their stun guns, _Dummkopf_, when they sprung the\ntrap--too soon, _Gott sei Dank_?\" Erich demanded.\n\n\"I did,\" the New Boy told him. \"Not enough to numb a cat. Why didn't you\nshow us action?\"\n\n\"Shut up. I'm your leader. I'll show you action enough.\"\n\n\"You won't. You're a filthy Nazi coward.\"\n\n\"_Weibischer Engländer!_\"\n\n\"Bloody Hun!\"\n\n\"_Schlange!_\"\n\nThe blond lad knew enough German to understand that last crack. He threw\nback his sable-edged pelisse to clear his sword arm and he swung away\nfrom Erich, which bumped him into Beau. At the first sign of the\nquarrel, Beau had raised himself from the divan as quickly and silently\nas a--no, I won't use that word--and slithered over to them.\n\n\"Sirs, you forget yourselves,\" he said sharply, off balance, supporting\nhimself on the New Boy's upraised arm. \"This is Sidney Lessingham's\nPlace of Entertainment and Recuperation. There are ladies--\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWith a contemptuous snarl, the New Boy shoved him off and snatched with\nhis bare hand for his saber. Beau reeled against the divan, it caught\nhim in the shins and he fell toward the Maintainers. Sid whisked them\nout of the way as if they were a couple of beach radios--simply nothing\nin the Place is nailed down--and had them back on the coffee table\nbefore Beau hit the floor. Meanwhile, Erich had his saber out and had\nparried the New Boy's first wild slash and lunged in return, and I heard\nthe scream of steel and the rutch of his boot on the diamond-studded\npavement.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBeau rolled over and came up pulling from the ruffles of his shirt bosom\na derringer I knew was some other weapon in disguise--a stun gun or even\nan Atropos. Besides scaring me damp for Erich and everybody, that\nbrought me up short: us Entertainers' nerves must be getting as naked as\nthe Soldiers', probably starting when the Spiders canceled all cosmic\nleaves twenty sleeps back.\n\nSid shot Beau his look of command, rapped out, \"I'll handle this, you\nwhoreson firebrand,\" and turned to the Minor Maintainer. I noticed that\nthe telltale on the Major was glowing a reassuring red again, and I\nfound a moment to thank Mamma Devi that the Door was shut.\n\nMaud was jumping up and down, cheering I don't know which--nor did she,\nI bet--and the New Girl was white and I saw that the sabers were working\nmore businesslike. Erich's flicked, flicked, flicked again and came away\nfrom the blond lad's cheek spilling a couple of red drops. The blond lad\nlunged fiercely, Erich jumped back, and the next moment they were both\nfloating helplessly in the air, twisting like they had cramps.\n\nI realized quick enough that Sid had shut off gravity in the Door and\nStores sectors of the Place, leaving the rest of us firm on our feet in\nthe Refresher and Surgery sectors. The Place has sectional gravity to\nsuit our Extraterrestrial buddies--those crazy ETs sometimes come\nwhooping in for recuperation in very mixed batches.\n\nFrom his central position, Sid called out, kindly enough but taking no\nnonsense, \"All right, lads, you've had your fun. Now sheathe those\nswords.\"\n\nFor a second or so, the two black hussars drifted and contorted. Erich\nlaughed harshly and neatly obeyed--the commandant is used to free fall.\nThe blond lad stopped writhing, hesitated while he glared upside down at\nErich and managed to get his saber into its scabbard, although he turned\na slow somersault doing it. Then Sid switched on their gravity, slow\nenough so they wouldn't get sprained landing.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nErich laughed, lightly this time, and stepped out briskly toward us. He\nstopped to clap the New Boy firmly on the shoulder and look him in the\nface.\n\n\"So, now you get a good scar,\" he said.\n\nThe other didn't pull away, but he didn't look up and Erich came on. Sid\nwas hurrying toward the New Boy, and as he passed Erich, he wagged a\nfinger at him and gayly said, \"You rogue.\" Next thing I was giving Erich\nmy \"Man, you're home\" hug and he was kissing me and cracking my ribs and\nsaying, \"_Liebchen! Doppchen!_\"--which was fine with me because I do\nlove him and I'm a good lover and as much a Doubleganger as he is.\n\nWe had just pulled back from each other to get a breath--his blue eyes\nlooked so sweet in his worn face--when there was a thud behind us. With\nthe snapping of the tension, Doc had fallen off his bar stool and his\ntop hat was over his eyes. As we turned to chuckle at him, Maud squeaked\nand we saw that the Roman had walked straight up against the Void and\nwas marching along there steadily without gaining a foot, like it does\nhappen, his black uniform melting into that inside-your-head gray.\n\nMaud and Beau rushed over to fish him back, which can be tricky. The\nthin gambler was all courtly efficiency again. Sid supervised from a\ndistance.\n\n\"What's wrong with him?\" I asked Erich.\n\nHe shrugged. \"Overdue for Change Shock. And he was nearest the stun\nguns. His horse almost threw him. _Mein Gott_, you should have seen\nSaint Petersburg, _Liebchen_: the Nevsky Prospekt, the canals flying by\nlike reception carpets of blue sky, a cavalry troop in blue and gold\nthat blundered across our escape, fine women in furs and ostrich plumes,\na monk with a big tripod and his head under a hood--it gave me the\nhorrors seeing all those Zombies flashing past and staring at me in that\nsick unawakened way they have, and knowing that some of them, say the\nphotographer, might be Snakes.\"\n\nOur side in the Change War is the Spiders, the other side is the Snakes,\nthough all of us--Spiders and Snakes alike--are Doublegangers and Demons\ntoo, because we're cut out of our lifelines in the cosmos. Your lifeline\nis all of you from birth to death. We're Doublegangers because we can\noperate both in the cosmos and outside of it, and Demons because we act\nreasonably alive while doing so--which the Ghosts don't. Entertainers\nand Soldiers are all Demon-Doublegangers, whichever side they're\non--though they say the Snake Places are simply ghastly. Zombies are\ndead people whose lifelines lie in the so-called past.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\"What were you doing in Saint Petersburg before the ambush?\" I asked\nErich. \"That is, if you can talk about it.\"\n\n\"Why not? We were kidnapping the infant Einstein back from the Snakes in\n1883. Yes, the Snakes got him, _Liebchen_, only a few sleeps back,\nendangering the West's whole victory over Russia--\"\n\n\"--which gave your dear little Hitler the world on a platter for fifty\nyears and got me loved to death by your sterling troops in the\nLiberation of Chicago--\"\n\n\"--but which leads to the ultimate victory of the Spiders and the West\nover the Snakes and Communism, _Liebchen_, remember that. Anyway, our\ncounter-snatch didn't work. The Snakes had guards posted--most unusual\nand we weren't warned. The whole thing was a great mess. No wonder Bruce\nlost his head--not that it excuses him.\"\n\n\"The New Boy?\" I asked. Sid hadn't got to him and he was still standing\nwith hooded eyes where Erich had left him, a dark pillar of shame and\nrage.\n\n\"_Ja_, a lieutenant from World War One. An Englishman.\"\n\n\"I gathered that,\" I told Erich. \"Is he really effeminate?\"\n\n\"_Weibischer?_\" He smiled. \"I had to call him something when he said I\nwas a coward. He'll make a fine Soldier--only needs a little more\nshaping.\"\n\n\"You men are so original when you spat.\" I lowered my voice. \"But you\nshouldn't have gone on and called him a Snake, Erich mine.\"\n\n\"_Schlange?_\" The smile got crooked. \"Who knows--about any of us? As\nSaint Petersburg showed me, the Snakes' spies are getting cleverer than\nours.\" The blue eyes didn't look sweet now. \"Are you, _Liebchen_, really\nnothing more than a good loyal Spider?\"\n\n\"Erich!\"\n\n\"All right, I went too far--with Bruce and with you too. We're all\nhacked these days, riding with one leg over the breaking edge.\"\n\nMaud and Beau were supporting the Roman to a couch, Maud taking most of\nhis weight, with Sid still supervising and the New Boy still sulking by\nhimself. The New Girl should have been with him, of course, but I\ncouldn't see her anywhere and I decided she was probably having a\nnervous breakdown in the Refresher, the little jerk.\n\n\"The Roman looks pretty bad, Erich,\" I said.\n\n\"Ah, Mark's tough. Got virtue, as his people say. And our little\nstarship girl will bring him back to life if anybody can and if ...\"\n\n\"... you call this living,\" I filled in dutifully.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nHe was right. Maud had fifty-odd years of psychomedical experience, 23rd\nCentury at that. It should have been Doc's job, but that was fifty\ndrunks back.\n\n\"Maud and Mark, that will be an interesting experiment,\" Erich said.\n\"Reminiscent of Goering's with the frozen men and the naked gypsy\ngirls.\"\n\n\"You are a filthy Nazi. She'll be using electrophoresis and deep\nsuggestion, if I know anything.\"\n\n\"How will you be able to know anything, _Liebchen_, if she switches on\nthe couch curtains, as I perceive she is preparing to do?\"\n\n\"Filthy Nazi I said and meant.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\" He clicked his heels and bowed a millimeter. \"Erich\nFriederich von Hohenwald, _Oberleutnant_ in the army of the Third Reich.\nFell at Narvik, where he was Recruited by the Spiders. Lifeline\nlengthened by a Big Change after his first death and at latest report\nCommandant of Toronto, where he maintains extensive baby farms to\nprovide him with breakfast meat, if you believe the handbills of the\n_voyageurs_ underground. At your service.\"\n\n\"Oh, Erich, it's all so lousy,\" I said, touching his hand, reminded that\nhe was one of the unfortunates Resurrected from a point in their\nlifelines well before their deaths--in his case, because the date of his\ndeath had been shifted forward by a Big Change after his Resurrection.\nAnd as every Demon finds out, if he can't imagine it beforehand, it is\npure hell to remember your future, and the shorter the time between your\nResurrection and your death back in the cosmos, the better. Mine, bless\nBab-ed-Din, was only an action-packed ten minutes on North Clark Street.\n\nErich put his other hand lightly over mine. \"Fortunes of the Change War,\n_Liebchen_. At least I'm a Soldier and sometimes assigned to future\noperations--though why we should have this monomania about our future\npersonalities back there, I don't know. Mine is a stupid _Oberst_, thin\nas paper--and frightfully indignant at the _voyageurs_! But it helps me\na little if I see him in perspective and at least I get back to the\ncosmos pretty regularly, _Gott sei Dank_, so I'm better off than you\nEntertainers.\"\n\nI didn't say aloud that a Changing cosmos is worse than none, but I\nfound myself sending a prayer to the Bonny Dew for my father's repose,\nthat the Change Winds would blow lightly across the lifeline of Anton A.\nForzane, professor of physiology, born in Norway and buried in Chicago.\nWoodlawn Cemetery is a nice gray spot.\n\n\"That's all right, Erich,\" I said. \"We Entertainers Got Mittens too.\"\n\nHe scowled around at me suspiciously, as if he were wondering whether I\nhad all my buttons on.\n\n\"Mittens?\" he said. \"What do you mean? I'm not wearing any. Are you\ntrying to say something about Bruce's gloves--which incidentally seem to\nannoy him for some reason. No, seriously, Greta, why do you Entertainers\nneed mittens?\"\n\n\"Because we get cold feet sometimes. At least I do. Got Mittens, as I\nsay.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nA sickly light dawned in his Prussian puss. He muttered, \"Got mittens\n... _Gott mit uns_ ... God with us,\" and roared softly, \"Greta, I don't\nknow how I put up with you, the way you murder a great language for\ncheap laughs.\"\n\n\"You've got to take me as I am,\" I told him, \"mittens and all, thank the\nBonny Dew--\" and hastily explained, \"That's French--_le bon Dieu_--the\ngood God--don't hit me. I'm not going to tell you any more of my\nsecrets.\"\n\nHe laughed feebly, like he was dying.\n\n\"Cheer up,\" I said. \"I won't be here forever, and there are worse places\nthan the Place.\"\n\nHe nodded grudgingly, looking around. \"You know what, Greta, if you'll\npromise not to make some dreadful joke out of it: on operations, I\npretend I'll soon be going backstage to court the world-famous ballerina\nGreta Forzane.\"\n\nHe was right about the backstage part. The Place is a regular\ntheater-in-the-round with the Void for an audience, the Void's gray\nhardly disturbed by the screens masking Surgery (Ugh!), Refresher and\nStores. Between the last two are the bar and kitchen and Beau's piano.\nBetween Surgery and the sector where the Door usually appears are the\nshelves and taborets of the Art Gallery. The control divan is stage\ncenter. Spaced around at a fair distance are six big low couches--one\nwith its curtains now shooting up into the gray--and a few small tables.\nIt is like a ballet set and the crazy costumes and characters that turn\nup don't ruin the illusion. By no means. Diaghilev would have hired most\nof them for the Ballet Russe on first sight, without even asking them\nwhether they could keep time to music.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 2\n\n    Last week in Babylon,\n    Last night in Rome,\n\n                --Hodgson\n\nA RIGHT-HAND GLOVE\n\n\nBeau had gone behind the bar and was talking quietly at Doc, but with\nhis eyes elsewhere, looking very sallow and professional in his white,\nand I thought--Damballa!--I'm in the French Quarter. I couldn't see the\nNew Girl. Sid was at last getting to the New Boy after the fuss about\nMark. He threw me a sign and I started over with Erich in tow.\n\n\"Welcome, sweet lad. Sidney Lessingham's your host, and a fellow\nEnglishman. Born in King's Lynn, 1564, schooled at Cambridge, but London\nwas the life and death of me, though I outlasted Bessie, Jimmie,\nCharlie, and Ollie almost. And what a life! By turns a clerk, a spy, a\nbawd--the two trades are hand in glove--a poet of no account, a beggar,\nand a peddler of resurrection tracts. Beau Lassiter, our throats are\ntinder!\"\n\nAt the word \"poet,\" the New Boy looked up, but resentfully, as if he had\nbeen tricked into it.\n\n\"And to spare your throat for drinking, sweet gallant, I'll be so bold\nas to guess and answer one of your questions,\" Sid rattled on. \"Yes, I\nknew Will Shakespeare--we were of an age--and he was such a modest,\nmind-your-business rogue that we all wondered whether he really did\nwrite those plays. Your pardon, 'faith, but that scratch might be looked\nto.\"\n\nThen I saw that the New Girl hadn't lost her head, but gone to Surgery\n(Ugh!) for a first-aid tray. She reached a swab toward the New Boy's\nsticky cheek, saying rather shrilly, \"If I might ...\"\n\nHer timing was bad. Sid's last words and Erich's approach had darkened\nthe look in the young Soldier's face and he angrily swept her arm aside\nwithout even glancing at her. Erich squeezed my arm. The tray clattered\nto the floor--and one of the drinks that Beau was bringing almost\nfollowed it. Ever since the New Girl's arrival, Beau had been figuring\nthat she was his responsibility, though I don't think the two of them\nhad reached an agreement yet. Beau was especially set on it because I\nwas thick with Sid at the time and Maud with Doc, she loving tough\ncases.\n\n\"Easy now, lad, and you love me!\" Sid thundered, again shooting Beau the\n\"Hold it\" look. \"She's just a poor pagan trying to comfort you. Swallow\nyour bile, you black villain, and perchance it will turn to poetry. Ah,\ndid I touch you there? Confess, you are a poet.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThere isn't much gets by Sid, though for a second I forgot my psychology\nand wondered if he knew what he was doing with his insights.\n\n\"Yes, I'm a poet, all right,\" the New Boy roared. \"I'm Bruce Marchant,\nyou bloody Zombies. I'm a poet in a world where even the lines of the\nKing James and your precious Will whom you use for laughs aren't safe\nfrom Snakes' slime and the Spiders' dirty legs. Changing our history,\nstealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and best\nintentioned and efficient, and what does it lead to? This bloody SI\nglove!\"\n\nHe held up his black-gloved left hand which still held the mate and he\nshook it.\n\n\"What's wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?\" Sid\ndemanded. \"And you love us, tell us.\" While Erich laughed, \"Consider\nyourself lucky, _Kamerad_. Mark and I didn't draw any gloves at all.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with it?\" Bruce yelled. \"The bloody things are both\nlefts!\" He slammed it down on the floor.\n\nWe all howled, we couldn't help it. He turned his back on us and stamped\noff, though I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed my\narm and said between gasps, \"_Mein Gott, Liebchen_, what have I always\ntold you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It\nis infallible!\"\n\nOne of us didn't laugh. Ever since the New Girl heard the name Bruce\nMarchant, she'd had a look in her eyes like she'd been given the\nsacrament. I was glad she'd got interested in something, because she'd\nbeen pretty much of a snoot and a wet blanket up until now, although\nshe'd come to the Place with the recommendation of having been a real\nwhoopee girl in London and New York in the Twenties. She looked\ndisapprovingly at us as she gathered up the tray and stuff, not\nforgetting the glove, which she placed on the center of the tray like a\nholy relic.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBeau cut over and tried to talk to her, but she ghosted past him and\nonce again he couldn't do anything because of the tray in his hands. He\ncame over and got rid of the drinks quick. I took a big gulp right away\nbecause I saw the New Girl stepping through the screen into Surgery and\nI hate to be reminded we have it and I'm glad Doc is too drunk to use\nit, some of the Arachnoid surgical techniques being very sickening as I\nknow only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my\nlist of things to be forgotten.\n\nBy that time, Bruce had come back to us, saying in a carefully hard\nvoice, \"Look here, it's not the dashed glove itself, as you very well\nknow, you howling Demons.\"\n\n\"What is it then, noble heart?\" Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard\nheightening the effect of innocent receptivity.\n\n\"It's the principle of the thing,\" Bruce said, looking around sharply,\nbut none of us cracked a smile. \"It's this mucking inefficiency and\ndeath of the cosmos--and don't tell me that isn't in the\ncards!--masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders--and we\ndon't know who they are ultimately; it's just a name; we see only agents\nlike ourselves--the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of our\nlifelines--\"\n\n\"Is that bad, lad?\" Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced.\n\n\"--and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another\ntime-traveling power called the Snakes--just a name, too--which is bent\non perverting and enslaving the whole cosmos, past, present and future.\"\n\n\"And isn't it, lad?\"\n\n\"Before we're properly awake, we're Recruited into the Big Time and\nhustled into tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserable\nclosets, gray sacks, puss pockets--no offense to this Place--that the\nSpiders have created, maybe by gigantic implosions, but no one knows for\ncertain, and then we're sent off on all sorts of missions into the past\nand future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart the\nSnakes.\"\n\n\"True, lad.\"\n\n\"And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks come\nso fast, our emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public and\nprivate metaphysics distorted so insanely, the deepest thread of reality\nwe cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can get things\nstraight.\"\n\n\"We've all felt that way, lad,\" Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek\ndeath's head; \"You should have seen me, _Kamerad_, my first fifty\nsleeps,\" Erich put in; while I added, \"Us girls, too, Bruce.\"\n\n\"Oh, I know I'll get hardened to it, and don't think I can't. It's not\nthat,\" Bruce said harshly. \"And I wouldn't mind the personal confusion,\nthe mess it's made of my spirit, I wouldn't even mind remaking history\nand destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past,\nif I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart\nthe Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the\nEast. But what have they done to achieve this? I'll give you some\nbeautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world,\nthey have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost\ncity, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor\nkey.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\"You got time for culture?\" I heard myself say and I clapped my hand\nover my mouth in gentle reproof.\n\n\"But _you_ remember the dialogues, lad,\" Sid observed. \"And rail not at\nCrete--I have a sweet Keftian friend.\"\n\n\"For how long will I remember Plato's dialogues? And who after me?\"\nBruce challenged. \"Here's another. The Spiders want Rome powerful and,\nto date, they've helped Rome so much that she collapses in a blaze of\nGerman and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of Julius\nCaesar.\"\n\nThis time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place loves\nthese bull sessions. \"You omit to mention, sir, that Rome's newest\ndownfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes have\nfomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized\nChristianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power\nfuturewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever\nletting it pass into the hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is the\nSnakes' Three-Thousand-Year Plan which we are fighting against, striving\nto revive Rome's glories.\"\n\n\"Striving is the word for it,\" Bruce snapped. \"Here's yet another\nexample. To beat Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out of\nWorld War Two, thereby ensuring a German invasion of the New World and\ncreating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines of Siberia to the\nplantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!\"\n\nHe stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chanting\nin a weird spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow.\n\n\"_Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Kein' Peitsch', gnädige Herren. Salz, Salz,\nSalz._\"\n\nI turned and there was Doc waltzing toward us with little tiny steps,\nbent over so low that the ends of his shawl touched the floor, his head\ncrooked up sideways and looking through us.\n\nI knew then, but Erich translated softly. \"'Salt, salt, I bring salt. No\nwhip, merciful sirs.' He is speaking to my countrymen in their\nlanguage.\" Doc had spent his last months in a Nazi-operated salt mine.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nHe saw us and got up, straightening his top hat very carefully. He\nfrowned hard while my heart thumped half a dozen times. Then his face\nslackened, he shrugged his shoulders and muttered, \"_Nichevo_.\"\n\n\"And it does not matter, sir,\" Beau translated, but directing his remark\nat Bruce. \"True, great civilizations have been dwarfed or broken by the\nChange War. But others, once crushed in the bud, have bloomed. In the\n1870s, I traveled a Mississippi that had never known Grant's gunboats. I\nstudied piano, languages, and the laws of chance under the greatest\nEuropean masters at the University of Vicksburg.\"\n\n\"And you think your pipsqueak steamboat culture is compensation for--\"\nBruce began but, \"Prithee none of that, lad,\" Sid interrupted smartly.\n\"Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards, and I'll drink\ndead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so puny\nas to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no,\nnor with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and\nnerves of brass. Waste not your pity on them.\"\n\n\"True indeed, sir,\" Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack on\nhis Greater South. \"Most of us enter the Change World with the false\nmetaphysic that the slightest change in the past--a grain of dust\nmisplaced--will transform the whole future. It is a long while before we\naccept with our minds as well as our intellects the law of the\nConservation of Reality: that when the past is changed, the future\nchanges barely enough to adjust, barely enough to admit the new data.\nThe Change Winds meet maximum resistance always. Otherwise the first\noperation in Babylonia would have wiped out New Orleans, Sheffield,\nStuttgart, and Maud Davies' birthplace on Ganymede!\n\n\"Note how the gap left by Rome's collapse was filled by the\nimperialistic and Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historian\ncan tell the difference in most ages between the former Latin and the\npresent Gothic Catholic Church. As you yourself, sir, said of Greece, it\nis as if an old melody were shifted into a slightly different key. In\nthe wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it's\ntrue, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the\nusual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless\naccidents.\"\n\n\"All right, you bloody savants--maybe I pushed my point too far,\" Bruce\ngrowled. \"But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methods\nwe use in our wonderful Change War. Poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra.\nKidnapping Einstein when he's a baby.\"\n\n\"The Snakes did it first,\" I reminded him.\n\n\"Yes, and we copied them. How resourceful does that make us?\" he\nretorted, arguing like a woman. \"If we need Einstein, why don't we\nResurrect him, deal with him as a man?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBeau said, serving his culture in slightly thicker slices,\n\"_Pardonnez-moi_, but when you have enjoyed your status as Doubleganger\na _soupcon_ longer, you will understand that great men can rarely be\nResurrected. Their beings are too crystallized, sir, their lifelines too\ntough.\"\n\n\"Pardon me, but I think that's rot. I believe that most great men refuse\nto make the bargain with the Snakes, or with us Spiders either. They\nscorn Resurrection at the price demanded.\"\n\n\"Brother, they ain't that great,\" I whispered, while Beau glided on\nwith, \"However that may be, you have accepted Resurrection, sir, and so\nincurred an obligation which you as a gentleman must honor.\"\n\n\"I accepted Resurrection all right,\" Bruce said, a glare coming into his\neyes. \"When they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '17 ten\nminutes before I died, I grabbed at the offer of life like a drunkard\ngrabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I was also\nseizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace.\" His voice was\ngetting wilder all the time. Just beyond our circle, I noticed the New\nGirl watching him worshipfully. \"But what did I find the Spiders wanted\nme for? Only to fight more wars, over and over again, make them crueler\nand stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each Big\nChange, work our way a little closer to the death of the cosmos.\"\n\nSid touched my wrist and, as Bruce raved on, he whispered to me, \"What\nkind of ball, think you, will please and so quench this fire-brained\nrogue? And you love me, discover it.\"\n\nI whispered back without taking my eyes off Bruce either, \"I know\nsomebody who'll be happy to put on any kind of ball he wants, if he'll\njust notice her.\"\n\n\"The New Girl, sweetling? 'Tis well. This rogue speaks like an angry\nangel. It touches my heart and I like it not.\"\n\nBruce was saying hoarsely but loudly, \"And so we're sent on operations\nin the past and from each of those operations the Change Winds blow\nfuturewards, swiftly or slowly according to the opposition they breast,\nsometimes rippling into each other, and any one of those Winds may shift\nthe date of our own death ahead of the date of our Resurrection, so that\nin an instant--even here, outside the cosmos--we may molder and rot or\ncrumble to dust and vanish away. The wind with our name in it may leak\nthrough the Door.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nFaces hardened at that, because it's bad form to mention Change Death,\nand Erich flared out with, \"_Halt's Maul, Kamerad!_ There's always\nanother Resurrection.\"\n\nBut Bruce didn't keep his mouth shut. He said, \"Is there? I know the\nSpiders promise it, but even if they do go back and cut another\nDoubleganger from my lifeline, is he me?\" He slapped his chest with his\nbare hand. \"I don't think so. And even if he is me, with unbroken\nconsciousness, why's he been Resurrected again? Just to refight more\nwars and face more Change Death for the sake of an almighty power--\" his\nvoice was rising to a climax--\"an almighty power so bloody ineffectual,\nit can't furnish one poor Soldier pulled out of the mud of\nPasschendaele, one miserable Change Commando, one Godforsaken Recuperee\na proper issue of equipment!\"\n\nAnd he held out his bare right hand toward us, fingers spread a little,\nas if it were the most amazing object and most deserving of outraged\nsympathy in the whole world.\n\nThe New Girl's timing was perfect. She whisked through us, and before he\ncould so much as wiggle the fingers, she whipped a black gauntleted\nglove on it and anyone could see that it fitted his hand perfectly.\n\nThis time our laughing beat the other. We collapsed and slopped our\ndrinks and pounded each other on the back and then started all over.\n\n\"_Ach, der Handschuh, Liebchen!_ Where'd she get it?\" Erich gasped in my\near.\n\n\"Probably just turned the other one inside out--that turns a left into a\nright--I've done it myself,\" I wheezed, collapsing again at the idea.\n\n\"That would put the lining outside,\" he objected.\n\n\"Then I don't know,\" I said. \"We got all sorts of junk in Stores.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter, _Liebchen_,\" he assured me. \"_Ach, der Handschuh!_\"\n\nAll through it, Bruce just stood there admiring the glove, moving the\nfingers a little now and then, and the New Girl stood watching him as if\nhe were eating a cake she'd baked.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWhen the hysteria quieted down, he looked up at her with a big smile.\n\"What did you say your name was?\"\n\n\"Lili,\" she said, and believe you me, she was Lili to me even in my\nthoughts from then on, for the way she'd handled that lunatic.\n\n\"Lilian Foster,\" she explained. \"I'm English also. Mr. Marchant, I've\nread _A Young Man's Fancy_ I don't know how many times.\"\n\n\"You have? It's wretched stuff. From the Dark Ages--I mean my Cambridge\ndays. In the trenches, I was working up some poems that were rather\nbetter.\"\n\n\"I won't hear you say that. But I'd be terribly thrilled to hear the new\nones. Oh, Mr. Marchant, it was so strange to hear you call it\nPassiondale.\"\n\n\"Why, if I may ask?\"\n\n\"Because that's the way I pronounce it to myself. But I looked it up and\nit's more like Pas-ken-DA-luh.\"\n\n\"Bless you! All the Tommies called it Passiondale, just as they called\nYpres Wipers.\"\n\n\"How interesting. You know, Mr. Marchant, I'll wager we were Recruited\nin the same operation, summer of 1917. I'd got to France as a Red Cross\nnurse, but they found out my age and were going to send me back.\"\n\n\"How old were you--are you? Same thing, I mean to say.\"\n\n\"Seventeen.\"\n\n\"Seventeen in '17,\" Bruce murmured, his blue eyes glassy.\n\nIt was real corny dialogue and I couldn't resent the humorous leer Erich\ngave me as we listened to them, as if to say, \"Ain't it nice,\n_Liebchen_, Bruce has a silly little English schoolgirl to occupy him\nbetween operations?\"\n\nJust the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklace\nand tight little gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Bruce\nhulking over her tenderly in his snazzy hussar's rig, I knew that I was\nseeing the start of something that hadn't been part of me since Dave\ndied fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort of\nthing that almost made me wish there could be children in the Change\nWorld. I wondered why I'd never thought of trying to work things so that\nDave got Resurrected and I told myself: no, it's all changed, I've\nchanged, better the Change Winds don't disturb Dave or I know about it.\n\n\"No, I didn't die in 1917--I was merely Recruited then,\" Lili was\ntelling Bruce. \"I lived all through the Twenties, as you can see from\nthe way I dress. But let's not talk about that, shall we? Oh, Mr.\nMarchant, do you think you can possibly remember any of those poems you\nstarted in the trenches? I can't fancy them bettering your sonnet that\nconcludes with, 'The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep; Look\nat the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.'\"\n\nThat one almost made me whoop--what monkeys we are, I thought--though\nI'd be the first to admit that the best line to use on a poet is one of\nhis own--in fact, as many as possible. I decided I could safely forget\nour little Britons and devote myself to Erich or whatever needed me.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 3\n\n    Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine churchmen, and the\n    fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave\n    soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go. There go\n    also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside\n    their lord. There go the gold and the silver, the sables and ermine.\n    There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth.\n\n                                                              --Aucassin\n\nNINE FOR A PARTY\n\n\nI exchanged my drink for a new one from another tray Beau was bringing\naround. The gray of the Void was beginning to look real pleasant, like\nwarm thick mist with millions of tiny diamonds floating in it. Doc was\nsitting grandly at the bar with a steaming tumbler of tea--a chaser, I\nguess, since he was just putting down a shot glass. Sid was talking to\nErich and laughing at the same time and I said to myself it begins to\nfeel like a party, but something's lacking.\n\nIt wasn't anything to do with the Major Maintainer; its telltale was\nglowing a steady red like a nice little home fire amid the tight cluster\nof dials that included all the controls except the lonely and\nfrightening Introversion switch that was never touched. Then Maud's\ncouch curtains winked out and there were she and the Roman sitting\nquietly side by side.\n\nHe looked down at his shiny boots and the rest of his black duds like he\nwas just waking up and couldn't believe it all, and he said, \"_Omnia\nmutantur, nos et mutamur in illis_,\" and I raised my eyebrows at Beau,\nwho was taking the tray back, and he did proud by old Vicksburg by\ntranslating: \"All things change and we change with them.\"\n\nThen Mark slowly looked around at us, and I can testify that a Roman\nsmile is just as warm as any other nationality, and he finally said, \"We\nare nine, the proper number for a party. The couches, too. It is good.\"\n\nMaud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, \"Welcome back from the Void,\n_Kamerad_,\" and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to\nbe noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced,\n\"_Herren und Damen_, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them\nall, Marcus Vipsaius Niger, legate to Nero Claudius (called Germanicus\nin a former time stream) and who in 763 A.U.C. (Correct, Mark? It means\n10 A.D., you meatheads!) died bravely fighting the Parthians and the\nSnakes in the Battle of Alexandria. _Hoch, hoch, hoch!_\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe all swung our glasses and cheered with him and Sid yelled at Erich,\n\"Keep your feet off the furniture, you unschooled rogue,\" and grinned\nand boomed at all three hussars, \"Take your ease, Recuperees,\" and Maud\nand Mark got their drinks, the Roman paining Beau by refusing Falernian\nwine in favor of scotch and soda, and right away everyone was talking a\nmile a minute.\n\nWe had a lot to catch up on. There was the usual yak about the war--\"The\nSnakes are laying mine fields in the Void,\" \"I don't believe it, how can\nyou mine nothing?\"--and the shortages--bourbon, bobby pins, and the\nstabilitin that would have brought Mark out of it faster--and what had\nbecome of people--\"Marcia? Oh, she's not around any more,\" (She'd been\ncaught in a Change Gale and green and stinking in five seconds, but I\nwasn't going to say that)--and Mark had to be told about Bruce's glove,\nwhich convulsed us all over again, and the Roman remembered a legionary\nwho had carried a gripe all the way to Octavius because he'd\naccidentally been issued the unbelievable luxury item sugar instead of\nthe usual salt, and Erich asked Sid if he had any new Ghostgirls in\nstock and Sid sucked his beard like the old goat he is. \"Dost thou ask\nme, lusty Allemand? Nay, there are several great beauties, amongst them\nan Austrian countess from Strauss's Vienna, and if it were not for\nsweetling here ... Mnnnn.\"\n\nI poked a finger in Erich's chest between two of the bright buttons with\ntheir tiny death's heads. \"You, my little von Hohenwald, are a menace to\nus real girls. You have too much of a thing about the unawakened, ghost\nkind.\"\n\nHe called me his little Demon and hugged me a bit too hard to prove it\nwasn't so, and then he suggested we show Bruce the Art Gallery. I\nthought this was a real brilliant idea, but when I tried to argue him\nout of it, he got stubborn. Bruce and Lili were willing to do anything\nanyone wanted them to, though not so willing to pay any attention while\ndoing it. The saber cut was just a thin red line on his cheek; she'd\nwashed away all the dried blood.\n\nThe Gallery gets you, though. It's a bunch of paintings and sculptures\nand especially odd knick-knacks, all made by Soldiers recuperating here,\nand a lot of them telling about the Change War from the stuff they're\nmade of--brass cartridges, flaked flint, bits of ancient pottery glued\ninto futuristic shapes, mashed-up Incan gold rebeaten by a Martian,\nwhorls of beady Lunan wire, a picture in tempera on a crinkle-cracked\nthick round of quartz that had filled a starship porthole, a Sumerian\ninscription chiseled into a brick from an atomic oven.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThere are a lot of things in the Gallery and I can always find some I\nhaven't ever seen before. It gets you, as I say, thinking about the guys\nthat made them and their thoughts and the far times and places they came\nfrom, and sometimes, when I'm feeling low, I'll come and look at them so\nI'll feel still lower and get inspired to kick myself back into a good\ntemper. It's the only history of the Place there is and it doesn't\nchange a great deal, because the things in it and the feelings that went\ninto them resist the Change Winds better than anything else.\n\nRight now, Erich's witty lecture was bouncing off the big ears I hide\nunder my pageboy bob and I was thinking how awful it is that for us that\nthere's not only change but Change. You don't know from one minute to\nthe next whether a mood or idea you've got is really new or just welling\nup into you because the past has been altered by the Spiders or Snakes.\n\nChange Winds can blow not only death but anything short of it, down to\nthe featheriest fancy. They blow thousands of times faster than time\nmoves, but no one can say how much faster or how far one of them will\ntravel or what damage it'll do or how soon it'll damp out. The Big Time\nisn't the little time.\n\nAnd then, for the Demons, there's the fear that our personality will\njust fade and someone else climb into the driver's seat and us not even\nknow. Of course, we Demons are supposed to be able to remember through\nChange and in spite of it; that's why we are Demons and not Ghosts like\nthe other Doublegangers, or merely Zombies or Unborn and nothing more,\nand as Beau truly said, there aren't any great men among us--and blamed\nfew of the masses, either--we're a rare sort of people and that's why\nthe Spiders have to Recruit us where they find us without caring about\nour previous knowledge and background, a Foreign Legion of time, a\nstrange kind of folk, bright but always in the background, with built-in\nnostalgia and cynicism, as adaptable as Centaurian shape-changers but\nwith memories as long as a Lunan's six arms, a kind of Change People,\nyou might say, the cream of the damned.\n\nBut sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are\nand if the whole past wasn't once entirely different from anything we\nremember, and we've forgotten that we forgot.\n\nAs I say, the Gallery gets you feeling real low, and so now I said to\nmyself, \"Back to your lousy little commandant, kid,\" and gave myself a\nstiff boot.\n\nErich was holding up a green bowl with gold dolphins or spaceships on it\nand saying, \"And, to my mind, this proves that Etruscan art is derived\nfrom Egyptian. Don't you agree, Bruce?\"\n\nBruce looked up, all smiles from Lili, and said, \"What was that, dear\nchap?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nErich's forehead got dark as the Door and I was glad the hussars had\nparked their sabers along with their shakos, but before he could even\nget out a Jerry cussword, Doc breezed up in that plateau-state of\ndrunkenness so like hypnotized sobriety, moving as if he were on a\ndolly, ghosted the bowl out of Erich's hand, said, \"A beautiful specimen\nof Middle Systemic Venusian. When Eightaitch finished it, he told me you\ncouldn't look at it and not feel the waves of the Northern Venusian\nShallows rippling around your hoofs. But it might look better inverted.\nI wonder. Who are you, young officer? _Nichevo_,\" and he carefully put\nthe bowl back on its shelf and rolled on.\n\nIt's a fact that Doc knows the Art Gallery better than any of us, really\nby heart, he being the oldest inhabitant, though he maybe picked a bad\ntime to show off his knowledge. Erich was going to take out after him,\nbut I said, \"Nix, _Kamerad_, remember gloves and sugar,\" and he\ncontented himself with complaining, \"That _nichevo_--it's so gloomy and\nhopeless, _ungeheuerlich_. I tell you, _Liebchen_, they shouldn't have\nRussians working for the Spiders, not even as Entertainers.\"\n\nI grinned at him and squeezed his hand. \"Not much entertainment in Doc\nthese days, is there?\" I agreed.\n\nHe grinned back at me a shade sheepishly and his face smoothed and his\nblue eyes looked sweet again for a second and he said, \"I shouldn't want\nto claw out at people that way, Greta, but at times I am just a jealous\nold man,\" which is not entirely true, as he isn't a day over\nthirty-three, although his hair is nearly white.\n\nOur lovers had drifted on a few steps until they were almost fading into\nthe Surgery screen. It was the last spot I would have picked for the\nformal preliminaries to a little British smooching, but Lili probably\ndidn't share my prejudices, though I remembered she'd told me she'd\nserved a brief hitch in an Arachnoid Field Hospital before being\ntransferred to the Place.\n\nBut she couldn't have had anything like the experience I'd had during my\nshort and sour career as a Spider nurse, when I'd acquired my best-hated\nnightmare and flopped completely (jobwise, but on the floor, too) at\nseeing a doctor flick a switch and a being, badly injured but human,\nturn into a long cluster of glistening strange fruit--ugh, it always\nmakes me want to toss my cookies and my buttons. And to think that dear\nold Daddy Anton wanted his Greta chile to be a doctor.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWell, I could see this wasn't getting me anywhere I wanted to go, and\nafter all there was a party going on.\n\nDoc was babbling something at a great rate to Sid--I just hoped Doc\nwouldn't get inspired to go into his animal imitations, which sound\npretty fierce and once seriously offended some recuperating ETs.\n\nMaud was demonstrating to Mark a 23rd Century two-step and Beau sat down\nat the piano and improvised softly on her rhythm.\n\nAs the deep-thrumming relaxing notes hit us, Erich's face brightened and\nhe dragged me over. Pleasantly soon I had my feet off the diamond-rough\nfloor, which we don't carpet because most of the ETs, the dear boys,\nlike it hard, and I was shouldering back deep into the couch nearest the\npiano, with cushions all around me and a fresh drink in my hand, while\nmy Nazi boy friend was getting ready to discharge his _Weltschmerz_ as\nsong, which didn't alarm me too much, as his baritone is passable.\n\nThings felt real good, like the Maintainer was just idling to keep the\nPlace in existence and moored to the cosmos, not exerting itself at all\nor at most taking an occasional lazy paddle stroke. At times the Place's\nloneliness can be happy and comfortable.\n\nThen Beau raised an eyebrow at Erich, who nodded, and next thing they\nwere launched into a song we all know, though I've never found out where\nit originally came from. This time it made me think of Lili, and I\nwondered why--and why it's a tradition at Recuperation Stations to call\nthe new girl Lili, though in this case it happened to be her real name.\n\n    _Standing in the Doorway just outside of space,\n    Winds of Change blow 'round you but don't touch your face;\n    You smile as you whisper tenderly,\n    \"Please cross to me, Recuperee;\n    The operation's over, come in and close the Door.\"_\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 4\n\n    De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled\n    Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear\n    In fractured atoms.\n\n                                       --Eliot\n\nSOS FROM NOWHERE\n\n\nI realized the piano had deserted Erich and I cranked my head up and saw\nBeau, Maud and Sid streaking for the control divan. The Major Maintainer\nwas blinking emergency-green and fast, but the code was plain enough for\neven me to recognize the Spider distress call and for a second I felt\njust sick. Then Erich blew out his reserve breath in the middle of\n\"Door\" and I gave myself another of those helpful mental boots at the\nbase of the spine and we hurried after them toward the center of the\nPlace along with Mark.\n\nThe blinks faded as we got there and Sid told us not to move because we\nwere making shadows. He glued an eye to the telltale and we held still\nas statues as he caressed the dials like he was making love.\n\nOne sensitive hand flicked out past the Introversion switch over to the\nMinor Maintainer and right away the Place was dark as your soul and\nthere was nothing for me but Erich's arm and the knowledge that Sid was\nnursing a green light I couldn't even see, although my eyes had plenty\ntime to accommodate.\n\nThen the green light finally came back very slowly and I could see the\ndear reliable old face--the green-gold beard making him look like a\nmerman--and then the telltale flared bright and Sid flicked on the Place\nlights and I leaned back.\n\n\"That nails them, lads, whoever and whenever they may be. Get ready for\na pick-up.\"\n\nBeau, who was closest of course, looked at him sharply. Sid shrugged\nuneasily. \"Meseemed at first it was from our own globe a thousand years\nbefore our Lord, but that indication flickered and faded like witchfire.\nAs it is, the call comes from something smaller than the Place and\ncertes adrift from the cosmos. Meseemed too at one point I knew the fist\nof the caller--an antipodean atomicist named Benson-Carter--but that\nlikewise changed.\"\n\nBeau said, \"We're not in the right phase of the cosmos-Places rhythm for\na pick-up, are we, sir?\"\n\nSid answered, \"Ordinarily not, boy.\"\n\nBeau continued, \"I didn't think we had any pick-ups scheduled. Or\nstand-by orders.\"\n\nSid said, \"We haven't.\"\n\nMark's eyes glowed. He tapped Erich on the shoulder. \"An octavian\ndenarius against ten Reichsmarks it is a Snake trap.\"\n\nErich's grin showed his teeth. \"Make it first through the Door next\noperation and I'm on.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIt didn't take that to tell me things were serious, or the thought that\nthere's always a first time for bumping into something from really\noutside the cosmos. The Snakes have broken our code more than once. Maud\nwas quietly serving out weapons and Doc was helping her. Only Bruce and\nLili stood off. But they were watching.\n\nThe telltale brightened. Sid reached toward the Maintainer, saying, \"All\nright, my hearties. Remember, through this Doorway pass the fishiest\nfinaglers in and out of the cosmos.\"\n\nThe Door appeared to the left and above where it should be and darkened\nmuch too fast. There was a gust of stale salt seawind, if that makes\nsense, but no stepped-up Change Winds I could tell--and I had been\nbracing myself against them. The Door got inky and there was a flicker\nof gray fur whips and a flash of copper flesh and gilt and something\ndark and a clump of hoofs and Erich was sighting a stun gun across his\nleft forearm, and then the Door had vanished like that and a tentacled\nsilvery Lunan and a Venusian satyr were coming straight toward us.\n\nThe Lunan was hugging a pile of clothes and weapons. The satyr was\nhelping a wasp-waisted woman carry a heavy-looking bronze chest. The\nwoman was wearing a short skirt and high-collared bolero jacket of\nleather so dark brown it was almost black. She had a two-horned\n_petsofa_ hairdress and she was boldly gilded here and there and wore\nsandals and copper anklets and wristlets--one of them a copper-plated\nCaller--and from her wide copper belt hung a short-handled double-headed\nax. She was dark-complexioned and her forehead and chin receded, but the\neffect was anything but weak; she had a face like a beautiful\narrowhead--and a familiar one, by golly!\n\nBut before I could say, \"Kabysia Labrys,\" Maud shrilly beat me to it\nwith, \"It's Kaby with two friends. Break out a couple of Ghostgirls.\"\n\nAnd then I saw it really was old-home week because I recognized my Lunan\nboy friend Ilhilihis, and in the midst of all the confusion I got a nice\nkick out of knowing I was getting so I could tell the personality of one\nsilver-furred muzzle from another.\n\nThey reached the control divan and Illy dumped his load and the others\nlet down the chest, and Kaby staggered but shook off the two ETs when\nthey started to support her, and she looked daggers at Sid when he tried\nto do the same, although she's his \"sweet Keftian friend\" he'd mentioned\nto Bruce.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nShe leaned straight-armed on the divan and took two gasping breaths so\ndeep that the ridges of her spine showed through her brown-skinned\nwaist, and then she threw up her head and commanded, \"Wine!\"\n\nWhile Beau was rushing it, Sid tried to take her hand again, saying,\n\"Sweetling, I'd never heard you call before and knew not this pretty\nlittle fist,\" but she ripped out, \"Save your comfort for the Lunan,\" and\nI looked and saw--Hey, Zeus!--that one of Ilhilihis' six tentacles was\nlopped off halfway.\n\nThat was for me, and, going to him, I fast briefed myself: \"Remember, he\nonly weighs fifty pounds for all he's seven feet high; he doesn't like\nlow sounds or to be grabbed; the two legs aren't tentacles and don't act\nthe same; uses them for long walks, tentacles for leaps; uses tentacles\nfor close vision too and for manipulation, of course; extended, they\nmean he's at ease; retracted, on guard or nervous; sharply retracted,\ndisgusted; greeting--\"\n\nJust then, one of them swept across my face like a sweet-smelling\nfeather duster and I said, \"Illy, man, it's been a lot of sleeps,\" and\nbrushed my fingers across his muzzle. It still took a little\nself-control not to hug him, and I did reach a little cluckingly for\nhis lopped tentacle, but he wafted it away from me and the little\nvoice-box belted to his side squeaked, \"Naughty, naughty. Papa will fix\nhis little old self. Greta girl, ever bandaged even a Terra octopus?\"\n\nI had, an intelligent one from around a quarter billion A.D., but I\ndidn't tell him so. I stood and let him talk to the palm of my hand with\none of his tentacles--I don't savvy feather-talk but it feels good,\nthough I've often wondered who taught him English--and watched him use a\ncouple others to whisk a sort of Lunan band-aid out of his pouch and cap\nhis wound with it.\n\nMeanwhile, the satyr knelt over the bronze chest, which was decorated\nwith little death's heads and crosses with hoops at the top and\nswastikas, but looking much older than Nazi, and the satyr said to Sid,\n\"Quick thinkin, Gov, when ya saw the Door comin in high n soffened up\ngravty unner it, but cud I hav sum hep now?\"\n\nSid touched the Minor Maintainer and we all got very light and my\nstomach did a flip-flop while the satyr piled on the chest the clothes\nand weapons that Illy had been carrying and pranced off with it all and\ncarefully put it down at the end of the bar. I decided the satyr's\nEnglish instructor must have been quite a character, too. Wish I'd met\nhim--her--it.\n\nSid thought to ask Illy if he wanted Moon-normal gravity in one sector,\nbut my boy likes to mix, and being such a lightweight, Earth-normal\ngravity doesn't bother him. As he said to me once, \"Would Jovian gravity\nbother a beetle, Greta girl?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI asked Illy about the satyr and he squeaked that his name was Sevensee\nand that he'd never met him before this operation. I knew the satyrs\nwere from a billion years in the future, just as the Loonies were from a\nbillion in the past, and I thought--Kreesed us!--but it must have been\na real big or emergency-like operation to have the Spiders using those\ntwo for it, with two billion years between them--a time-difference that\ngives you a feeling of awe for a second, you know.\n\n[Illustration]\n\nI started to ask Illy about it, but just then Beau came scampering back\nfrom the bar with a big red-and-black earthenware goblet of wine--we try\nto keep a variety of drinking tools in stock so folks will feel more at\nhome. Kaby grabbed it from him and drained most of it in one swallow and\nthen smashed it on the floor. She does things like that, though Sid's\ntried to teach her better. Then she stared at what she was thinking\nabout until the whites showed all around her eyes and her lips pulled\nway back from her teeth and she looked a lot less human than the two\nETs, just like a fury. Only a time traveler knows how like the wild\nmurals and engravings of them some of the ancients can look.\n\nMy hair stood up at the screech she let out. She smashed a fist into the\ndivan and cried, \"Goddess! Must I see Crete destroyed, revived, and now\ndestroyed again? It is too much for your servant.\"\n\nPersonally, I thought she could stand anything.\n\nThere was a rush of questions at what she said about Crete--I asked one\nof them, for the news certainly frightened me--but she shot up her arm\nstraight for silence and took a deep breath and began.\n\n\"In the balance hung the battle. Rowing like black centipedes, the\nDorian hulls bore down on our outnumbered ships. On the bright beach,\nmasked by rocks, Sevensee and I stood by the needle gun, ready to give\nthe black hulls silent wounds. Beside us was Ilhilihis, suited as a sea\nmonster. But then ... then ...\"\n\nThen I saw she wasn't altogether the iron babe, for her voice broke and\nshe started to shake and to sob rackingly, although her face was still a\nmask of rage, and she threw up the wine. Sid stepped in and made her\nstop, which I think he'd been wanting to do all along.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 5\n\n    Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts\n    creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world.\n    They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to\n    me.\n\n                                                                 --Ibsen\n\nSID INSISTS ON GHOSTGIRLS\n\n\nMy Elizabethan boy friend put his fists on his hips and laid down the\nlaw to us as if we were a lot of nervous children who'd been playing too\nhard.\n\n\"Look you, masters, this is a Recuperation Station and I am running it\nas such. A plague of all operations! I care not if the frame of things\ndisjoints and the whole Change World goes to ruin, but you, warrior\nmaid, are going to rest and drink more wine slowly before you tell your\ntale and your colleagues are going to be properly companioned. No\nquestions, anyone. Beau, and you love us, give us a lively tune.\"\n\nKaby relaxed a little and let him put his hand carefully against her\nback in token of support and she said grudgingly, \"All right, Fat\nBelly.\"\n\nThen, so help me, to the tune of the Muskrat Ramble, which I'd taught\nBeau, we got girls for those two ETs and everybody properly paired up.\n\nRight here I want to point out that a lot of the things they say in the\nChange World about Recuperation Stations simply aren't so--and anyway\nthey always leave out nine-tenths of it. The Soldiers that come through\nthe Door are looking for a good time, sure, but they're hurt real bad\ntoo, every one of them, deep down in their minds and hearts, if not\nalways in their bodies or so you can see it right away.\n\nBelieve me, a temporal operation is no joke, and to start with, there\nisn't one person in a hundred who can endure to be cut from his lifeline\nand become a really wide-awake Doubleganger--a Demon, that is--let alone\na Soldier. What does a badly hurt and mixed-up creature need who's been\nfighting hard? _One individual_ to look out for him and feel for him and\npatch him up, and it helps if the one is of the opposite sex--that's\nsomething that goes beyond species.\n\nThere's your basis for the Place and the wild way it goes about its\nwork, and also for most other Recuperation Stations or Entertainment\nSpots. The name Entertainer can be misleading, but I like it. She's got\nto be a lot more than a good party girl--or boy--though she's got to be\nthat too. She's got to be a nurse and a psychologist and an actress and\na mother and a practical ethnologist and a lot of things with longer\nnames--and a reliable friend.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nNone of us are all those things perfectly or even near it. We just try.\nBut when the call comes, Entertainers have to forget grudges and gripes\nand envies and jealousies--and remember, they're lively people with\nsharp emotions--because there isn't any time then for anything but _help\nand don't ask who_!\n\nAnd, deep inside her, a good Entertainer doesn't care who. Take the way\nit shaped up this time. It was pretty clear to me I ought to shift to\nIlly, although I wasn't quite easy in my mind about leaving Erich,\nbecause the Lunan was a long time from home and, after all, Erich was\namong anthropoids. Ilhilihis needed someone who was _simpatico_.\n\nI like Illy and not just because he is a sort of tall cross between a\nspider monkey and a persian cat--though that is a handsome combo when\nyou come to think of it. I like him for himself. So when he came in all\nlopped and shaky after a mean operation, I was the right person to look\nout for him. Now I've made my little speech and know-nothings in the\nChange World can go on making their bum jokes. But I ask you, how could\nan arrangement between Illy and me be anything but Platonic?\n\nWe might have had some octopoid girls and nymphs in stock--Sid couldn't\nbe sure until he checked--but Ilhilihis and Sevensee voted for real\npeople and I knew Sid saw it their way. Maud squeezed Mark's hand and\ntripped over to Sevensee (\"Those are sharp hoofs you got, man\"--she's\npicked up some of my language, like she has everything else), though\nBeau did frown over his shoulder at Lili from the piano, maybe to argue\nthat she ought to take on the ET, as Mark had been a real casualty and\ncould use live nursing. But it was plain as day to anybody but Beau that\nBruce and Lili were a big thing and the last to be disturbed.\n\nErich acted stiffly hurt at losing me, but I knew he wasn't. He thinks\nhe has a great technique with Ghostgirls and he likes to show it off,\nand he really is pretty slick at it, if you go for that sort of thing\nand--yang my yin!--who doesn't at times?\n\nAnd when Sid formally wafted the Countess out of Stores--a real blonde\nstunner in a white satin hobble skirt with a white egret swaying up from\nher tiny hat, way ahead of Maud and Lili and me when it came to looks,\nthough transparent as cigarette smoke--and when Erich clicked his heels\nand bowed over her hand and proudly conducted her to a couch, black\nSvengali to her Trilby, and started to German-talk some life into her\nwith much head cocking and toothy smiling and a flow of witty flattery,\nand when she began to flirt back and the dream look in her eyes\nsharpened hungrily and focused on him--well, then I knew that Erich was\nhappy and felt he was doing proud by the _Reichswehr_. No, my little\ncommandant wasn't worrying me on that score.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nMark had drawn a Greek hetaera, name of Phryne; I suppose not the one\nwho maybe still does the famous courtroom striptease back in Athens, and\nhe was waking her up with little sips of his scotch and soda, though,\nfrom some looks he'd flashed, I got the idea Kaby was the kid he really\nwent for. Sid was coaxing the fighting gal to take some high-energy\nbread and olives along with the wine, and, for a wonder, Doc seemed to\nbe carrying on an animated and rational conversation with Sevensee and\nMaud, maybe comparing notes on the Northern Venusian Shallows, and Beau\nhad got on to Panther Rag, and Bruce and Lili were leaning on the piano,\nsmiling very appreciatively, but talking to each other a mile a minute.\n\nIlly turned back from inspecting them all and squeaked, \"Animals with\nclothes are so refreshing, dahling! Like you're all carrying banners!\"\n\nMaybe he had something there, though my banners were kind of Ash\nWednesday, a charcoal gray sweater and skirt. He looked at my mouth with\na tentacle to see how I was smiling and he squeaked softly, \"Do I seem\ndull and commonplace to you, Greta girl, because I haven't got banners?\nJust another Zombie from a billion years in your past, as gray and\nlifeless as Luna is today, not as when she was a real dreamy sister\nplanet simply bursting with air and water and feather forests. Or am I\nas strangely interesting to you as you are to me, girl from a billion\nyears in my future?\"\n\n\"Illy, you're sweet,\" I told him, giving him a little pat. I noticed his\nfur was still vibrating nervously and I decided the heck with Sid's\norders, I'm going to pump him about what he was doing with Kaby and the\nsatyr. Couldn't have him a billion years from home and bottled up, too.\nBesides, I was curious.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 6\n\n    Maiden, Nymph, and Mother are the eternal royal Trinity of the\n    island, and the Goddess, who is worshipped there in each of these\n    aspects, as New Moon, Full Moon, and Old Moon, is the sovereign\n    Deity.\n\n                                                             --Graves\n\nCRETE CIRCA 1300 B.C.\n\n\nKaby pushed back at Sid some seconds of bread and olives, and, when he\nraised his bushy eyebrows, gave him a curt nod that meant she knew what\nshe was doing. She stood up and sort of took a position. All the talk\nquieted down fast, even Bruce's and Lili's. Kaby's face and voice\nweren't strained now, but they weren't relaxed either.\n\n\"Woe to Spider! Woe to Cretan! Heavy is the news I bring you. Bear it\nbravely, like strong women. When we got the gun unlimbered, I heard\nseaweed fry and crackle. We three leaped behind the rock wall, saw our\ngun grow white as sunlight in a heat-ray of the Serpents! Natch, we\nfeared we were outnumbered and I called upon my Caller.\"\n\n[Illustration]\n\nI don't know how she does it, but she does--in English too. That is,\nwhen she figures she's got something important to report, and maybe she\nneeds a little time to get ready.\n\nBeau claims that all the ancients fit their thoughts into measured lines\nas naturally as we pick a word that will do, but I'm not sure how good\nthe Vicksburg language department is. Though why I should wonder about\nthings like that when I've got Kaby spouting the stuff right in front of\nme, I don't know.\n\n\"But I didn't die there, kiddos. I still hoped to hurt the Greek ships,\nmaybe with the Snake's own heat gun. So I quick tried to outflank them.\nMy two comrades crawled beside me--they are males, but they have\ncourage. Soon we spied the ambush-setters. They were Snakes and they\nwere many, filthily disguised as Cretans.\"\n\nThere was an indignant murmur at this, for our cutthroat Change War has\nits code, the Soldiers tell me. Being an Entertainer, I don't have to\nsay what I think.\n\n\"They had seen us when we saw them,\" Kaby swept on, \"and they loosed a\nkilling volley. Heat- and knife-rays struck about us in a storm of wind\nand fire, and the Lunan lost a feeler, fighting for Crete's Triple\nGoddess. So we dodged behind a sand hill, steered our flight back toward\nthe water. It was awful, what we saw there: Crete's brave ships all sunk\nor sinking, blue sky sullied by their death-smoke. Once again the Greeks\nhad licked us!--aided by the filthy Serpents.\n\n\"Round our wrecks, their black ships scurried, like black beetles, filth\ntheir diet, yet this day they dine on heroes. On the quiet sunlit beach\nthere, I could feel a Change Gale blowing, working changes deep inside\nme, aches and pains that were a stranger's. Half my memories were\ndoubled, half my lifeline crooked and twisted, three new moles upon my\nsword-hand. Goddess, Goddess, Triple Goddess--\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nHer voice wavered and Sid reached out a hand, but she straightened her\nback.\n\n\"Triple Goddess, give me courage to tell everything that happened. We\nran down into the water, hoping to escape by diving. We had hardly\ngotten under when the heat-rays hit above us, turning all the cool green\nsurface to a roaring white inferno. But as I believe I told you, I was\ncalling on my Caller, and a Door now opened to us, deep below the deadly\nsteam-clouds. We dived in like frightened minnows and a lot of water\nwith us.\"\n\nOff Chicago's Gold Coast, Dave once gave me a lesson in skin-diving and,\nremembering it, I got a flash of Kaby's Door in the dark depths.\n\n\"For a moment, all was chaos. Then the Door slammed shut behind us. We'd\nbeen picked up in time's nick by--an Express Room of our\nSpiders!--sloshing two feet deep in water, much more cramped for space\nthan this Place. It was manned by a magician, an old coot named\nBenson-Carter. He dispelled the water quickly and reported on his\nCaller. We'd got dry, were feeling human, Illy here had shed his\nswimsuit, when we looked at the Maintainer. It was glowing, changing,\nmelting! And when Benson-Carter touched it, he fell backward--death was\nin him. Then the Void began to darken, narrow, shrink and close around\nus, so I called upon my Caller--without wasting time, let me tell you!\n\n\"We can't say for sure what was it slowly squeezed that sweet Express\nRoom, but we fear the dirty Snakes have found a way to find our Places\nand attack outside the cosmos!--found the Spiderweb that links us in the\nVoid's gray less-than-nothing.\"\n\nNo murmur this time. This reaction was genuine; we'd been hit where we\nlived and I could see everybody was scared as sick as I was. Except\nmaybe Bruce and Lili, who were still holding hands and beaming gently. I\ndecided they were the kind that love makes brave, which it doesn't do to\nme. It just gives me two people to worry about.\n\n\"I can see you dig our feelings,\" Kaby continued. \"This thing scared the\npants off of us. If we could have, we'd have even Introverted the\nMaintainer, broken all the ties that bind us, chanced it incommunicado.\nBut the little old Maintainer was a seething red-hot puddle filled with\nbubbles big as handballs. We sat tight and watched the Void close. I\nkept calling on my Caller.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI squeezed my eyes shut, but that made it easier to see the three of\nthem with the Void shutting down on them. (Was ours still behaving? Yes,\nBibi Miriam.) Poetry or no poetry, it got me.\n\n\"Benson-Carter, lying dying, also thought the Snakes had done it. And he\nknew that death was in him, so he whispered me his mission, giving me\nprecise instructions: how to press the seven death's hands, starting\nlockside counterclockwise, one, three, five, six, two, four, seven, then\nyou have a half an hour; after you have pressed the seven, do not monkey\nwith the buttons--get out fast and don't stop moving.\"\n\nI wasn't getting this part and I couldn't see that anyone else was,\nthough Bruce was whispering to Lili. I remembered seeing skulls engraved\non the bronze chest. I looked at Illy and he nodded a tentacle and\nspread two to say, I guessed, that yes, Benson-Carter had said something\nlike that, but no, Illy didn't know much about it.\n\n\"All these things and more he whispered,\" Kaby went on, \"with the last\ngasps of his life-force, telling all his secret orders--for he'd not\nbeen sent to get us, he was on a separate mission, when he heard my\nSOSs. Sid, it's you he was to contact, as the first leg of his mission,\npick up from you three black hussars, death's-head Demons, daring\nSoldiers, then to wait until the Places next match rhythm with the\ncosmos--matter of two mealtimes, barely--and to tune in northern Egypt\nin the age of the last Caesar, in the year of Rome's swift downfall,\nthere to start an operation in a battle near a city named for Thrace's\nAlexander, there to change the course of battle, blow sky-high the\nstinking Serpents, all their agents, all their Zombies!\n\n\"Goddess, pardon, now I savvy how you've guided my least footstep, when\nI thought you'd gone and left me--for I flubbed your three-mole signal.\nWe've found Sid's Place, that's the first leg, and I see the three black\nhussars, and we've brought with us the weapon and the Parthian\ndisguises, salvaged from the doomed Express Room when your Door appeared\nin time's nick, and the Room around us closing spewed us through before\nit vanished with the corpse of Benson-Carter. Triple Goddess, draw the\nmilk now from the womanhood I flaunt here and inject the blackest\nhatred! Vengeance now upon the Serpents, vengeance sweet in northern\nEgypt, for your island, Crete, Goddess!--and a victory for the Spiders!\nGoddess, Goddess, we can swing it!\"\n\nThe roar that made me try to stop my ears with my shoulders didn't come\nfrom Kaby--she'd spoken her piece--but from Sid. The dear boy was purple\nenough to make me want to remind him you can die of high blood pressure\njust as easy in the Change World.\n\n\"Dump me with ops! 'Sblood, I'll not endure it! Is this a battle post?\nThey'll be mounting operations from field hospitals next. Kabysia\nLabrys, thou art mad to suggest it. And what's this prattle of locks,\nclocks, and death's heads, buttons and monkeys? This brabble, this\nfarrago, this hocus-pocus! And where's the weapon you prate of? In that\nwhoreson bronze casket, I suppose.\"\n\nShe nodded, looking blank and almost a little shy as poetic possession\nfaded from her. Her answer came like its faltering last echo.\n\n\"It is nothing but a tiny tactical atomic bomb.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 7\n\n    After about 0.1 millisecond (one ten-thousandth part of a second)\n    has elapsed, the radius of the ball of fire is some 45 feet, and the\n    temperature is then in the vicinity of 300,000 degrees Centigrade.\n    At this instant, the luminosity, as observed at a distance of\n    100,000 yards (5.7 miles), is approximately 100 times that of the\n    sun as seen at the earth's surface ... the ball of fire expands very\n    rapidly to its maximum radius of 450 feet within less than a second\n    from the explosion.\n\n                                                            --Los Alamos\n\nTIME TO THINK\n\n\nBrother, that was all we needed to make everybody but Kaby and the two\nETs start yelping at once, me included. It may seem strange that Change\nPeople, able to whiz through time and space and roust around outside the\ncosmos and knowing at least by hearsay of weapons a billion years in the\nfuture, like the Mindbomb, should panic at being shut in with a little\nprimitive mid-20th Century gadget. Well, they feel the same as atomic\nscientists would feel if a Bengal tiger were brought into their\nlaboratory, neither more nor less scared.\n\nI'm a moron at physics, but I do know the Fireball is bigger than the\nPlace. Remember that, besides the bomb, we'd recently been presented\nwith a lot of other fears we hadn't had time to cope with, especially\nthe business of the Snakes having learned how to get at our Places and\nmelt the Maintainers and collapse them. Not to mention the general\nimpression--first Saint Petersburg, then Crete--that the whole Change\nWar was going against the Spiders.\n\nYet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were all\npanicking. It made me admit what I didn't like to: that we were all in\npretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn't happen\nto be our out.\n\nAnd had the rest of us been controlling our drinking so well lately?\n\nMaud yelled, \"Jettison it!\" and pulled away from the satyr and ran from\nthe bronze chest. Beau, harking back to what they'd thought of doing in\nthe Express Room when it was too late, hissed, \"Sirs, we must\nIntrovert,\" and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for the\ncontrol divan. Erich seconded him with a white-faced \"_Gott in Himmel,\nja!_\" from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slim\nstem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass.\n\nI felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degrees\nworse than foxholing. It's supposed not only to keep the Door tight\nshut, but also to lock it so even the Change Winds can't get\nthrough--cut the Place loose from the cosmos altogether.\n\nI'd never talked with anyone from a Place that had been Introverted.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nMark dumped Phryne off his lap and ran after Maud. The Greek Ghostgirl,\nquite solid now, looked around with sleepy fear and fumbled her\napple-green chiton together at the throat. She wrenched my attention\naway from everyone else for a moment, and I couldn't help wondering\nwhether the person or Zombie back in the cosmos, from whose lifeline the\nGhost has been taken, doesn't at least have strange dreams or thoughts\nwhen something like this happens.\n\nSid stopped Beau, though he almost got bowled over doing it, and he held\nthe gambler away from the Maintainer in a bear hug and bellowed over his\nshoulders, \"Masters, are you mad? Have you lost your wits? Maud! Mark!\nMarcus! Magdalene! On your lives, unhand that casket!\"\n\nMaud had swept the clothes and bows and quivers and stuff off it and was\ndragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump it\nthrough fast when we got one, I guess, while Mark acted as if he were\ntrying to help her and wrestle it away from her at the same time.\n\nThey kept on as if they hadn't heard a word Sid said, with Mark yelling,\n\"Let go, _meretrix_! This holds Rome's answer to Parthia on the Nile.\"\n\nKaby watched them as if she wanted to help Mark but scorned to scuffle\nwith a mere--well, Mark had said it in Latin, I guess--call girl.\n\nThen, on the top of the bronze chest, I saw those seven lousy skulls\nstarting at the lock as plain as if they'd been under a magnifying\nglass, though ordinarily they'd have been a vague circle to my eyes at\nthe distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the opposite\ndirection, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, and\nsqueaked, \"Easy now, Greta girl, don't you be doing it, too. Hold still\nor Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you have\na mind to.\"\n\nMy stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but it\nstopped me and I got my mind back, partly.\n\n\"Unhand it, I say!\" Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and he\nreleased Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler's shoulder.\n\nThen my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Void\nand blustered at no one in particular, \"'Sdeath, think you I'd mutiny\nagainst my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent fox\nand pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggests\nit? Introversion's no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervised\nand sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I'd Introverted ere we got\nKaby's call for succor, hey?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nHis warrior maid nodded with harsh approval and he noticed it and shook\nhis free hand at her and scolded her, \"Not that I say yea to your mad\nplan for that Devil's casket, you half-clad lackwit. And yet to\njettison.... Oh, ye gods, ye gods--\" he wiped his hand across his\nface--\"grant me a minute in which I may think!\"\n\nThinking time wasn't an item even on the strictly limited list at the\nmoment, although Sevensee, squatting dourly on his hairy haunches where\nMaud had left him, threw in a dead-pan \"Thas tellin em, Gov.\"\n\nThen Doc at the bar stood up tall as Abe Lincoln in his top hat and\nshawl and 19th Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence and\nsaid something that sounded like: \"Introversh, inversh, glovsh,\" and\nthen his enunciation switched to better than perfect as he continued, \"I\nknow to an absolute certainty what we must do.\"\n\nIt showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a church\nwhile we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for a\npoor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves.\n\nHe said something like, \"Inversh ... bosh ...\" and held our eyes for a\nmoment longer. Then the light went out of his and he slobbered out a\n\"_Nichevo_\" and slid an arm far along the bar for a bottle and started\nto pour it down his throat without stopping sliding.\n\nBefore he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second while\nour attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top of\nit, so fast it was almost like he'd popped up from nowhere, though I'd\nseen him start from behind the piano.\n\n\"I've a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?\" he said in a\nvoice that was very clear and just loud enough. \"So it can't go off,\" he\nwent on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk manner\nputting more heart into me all the time. \"What's more, if it were to be\ntriggered, we'd still have half an hour. I believe you said it had that\nlong a fuse?\"\n\nHe stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded.\n\n\"Right,\" he said. \"It'd have to be that long for whoever plants it in\nthe Parthian camp to get away. There's another safety margin.\n\n\"Second question. Is there a locksmith in the house?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nFor all Bruce's easiness, he was watching us like a golden eagle and he\ncaught Beau's and Maud's affirmatives before they had a chance to\nexplain or hedge them and said, \"That's very good. Under certain\ncircumstances, you two'd be the ones to go to work on the chest. But\nbefore we consider that, there's Question Three: Is anyone here an\natomics technician?\"\n\nThat one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to\nexplain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power--hadn't they\nblasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly\ncraters?--but no, he wasn't a technician exactly, he was a \"thinger\" (I\nthought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?--well,\na thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly\nimpossible to describe, but no, you couldn't possibly thing atomics; the\nidea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn't be an atomics thinger; the\nterm was worse than a contradiction, well, really!--while Sevensee, from\nhis two-thousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect\nthat his culture didn't rightly use any kind of power, but just sort of\nmoved satyrs and stuff by wrastling space-time around, \"or think em roun\nef we hafta. Can't think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have--I\ndunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow.\"\n\n\"So we don't have an A-tech,\" Bruce summed up, \"which makes it worse\nthan useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn't\nknow what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question.\" He\ndirected it toward Sid. \"How long before we can jettison anything?\"\n\nSid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had\ncalmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn't seem to be\ntaking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the\nword \"rhythm,\" he pulled the answer away from him.\n\n\"In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again.\nThank you, Master Lessingham. That's at least five hours--two mealtimes,\nas the Cretan officer put it,\" and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly\nsmile. \"So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there's not a\nthing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!\"\n\nHis smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and\ndown the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail\nglasses sailed off and popped, but he didn't seem to notice them and we\nhardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to\nanother of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight\ngolden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.\n\n\"All right then,\" he repeated suddenly. \"We're twelve Spiders and two\nGhosts, and we've time for a bit of a talk, and we're all in the same\nbloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we'll all know what we're\ntalking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up\nabout a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are\noff!\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBruce ripped them out of his belt where they'd been tucked and slammed\nthem down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and\nforth, and it wasn't funny.\n\n\"Because,\" he went right on, \"I've been getting a completely new picture\nof what this Spiders' war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it's\njolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged\nlittle party outside both of them when the operation's over. It's sweet\nto know there's no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate\nor sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can't\nshoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or\ngluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the\nultimate insatiable hunger, and it's great to be Faust, even in a pack\nof other Fausts.\n\n\"It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's life\nor a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one,\nand be the only one to know and gloat over the changes--hah! killing men\nor carrying off women isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It's\nsweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts\nthat were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to\nwield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and\nlook the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it\nand Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and\ndecide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.\n\n\"Or he can't stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you've got\nto decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams,\nonly they'll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, or\nwhether, if she's got that tantalizing something, to bring her shell\nalong for a Ghostgirl--that's sweet, too. It's even sweet to have Change\nDeath poised over your neck, to know that the past isn't the precious\nindestructible thing you've been taught it was, to know that there's no\ncertainty about the future either, whether there'll even be one, to know\nthat no part of reality is holy, that the cosmos itself may wink out\nlike a flicked switch and God be not and nothing left but nothing!\"\n\nHe threw out his arms against the Void. \"And knowing all that, it's\ndoubly sweet to come through the Door into the Place and be out of the\nworst of the Change Winds and enjoy a well-earned Recuperation and share\nthe memories of all these sweetnesses I've been talking about, and work\nout all the fascinating feelings you've been accumulating back in the\ncosmos, layer by black layer, in the company of and with the help of the\nbest bloody little band of fellow Fausts and Faustines going!\n\n\"Oh, it's a sweet life, all right, but I'm asking you--\" and here his\neyes stabbed us again, one by one, fast--\"I'm asking you what it's done\nto us. I've been getting a completely new picture, as I said, of what my\nlife was and what it could have been if there'd been changes of the sort\nthat even we Demons can't make, and what my life is. I've been watching\nhow we've all been responding to things just now, to the news of Saint\nPetersburg and to what the Cretan officer told beautifully--only it\nwasn't beautiful what she had to tell--and mostly to that bloody box of\nbomb. And I'm simply asking each one of you, what's happened to you?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nHe stopped his pacing and stuck his thumbs in his belt and seemed to be\nlistening to the wheels turning in at least eleven other heads--only I\nstopped mine pretty quick, with Dave and Father and the Rape of Chicago\ncoming up out of the dark on the turn and Mother and the Indiana Dunes\nand Jazz Limited just behind them, followed by the unthinkable thing\nthe Spider doctor had flicked into existence when I flopped as a nurse,\nbecause I can't stand that to be done to my mind by anybody but myself.\n\nI stopped them by using the old infallible Entertainers' gimmick, a fast\nsurvey of the most interesting topic there is--other people's troubles.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nOffhand, Beau looked as if he had most troubles, shamed by his boss and\nhis girl given her heart to a Soldier; he was hugging them to himself\nvery quiet.\n\nI didn't stop for the two ETs--they're too hard to figure--or for Doc;\nnobody can tell whether a fallen-down drunk's at the black or bright end\nof his cycle; you just know it's cycling.\n\nMaud ought to be suffering as much as Beau, called names and caught out\nin a panic, which always hurts her because she's plus three hundred\nyears more future than the rest of us and figures she ought to be that\nmuch wiser, which she isn't always--not to mention she's over fifty\nyears old, though her home-century cosmetic science keeps her looking\nand acting teenage most of the time. She'd backed away from the bronze\nchest so as not to stand out, and now Lili came from behind the piano\nand stood beside her.\n\nLili had the opposite of troubles, a great big glow for Bruce, proud as\na promised princess watching her betrothed. Erich frowned when he saw\nher, for he seemed proud too, proud of the way his _Kamerad_ had taken\ncommand of us panicky whacks _Führer_-fashion. Sid still looked mostly\ngrateful and inclined to let Bruce keep on talking.\n\nEven Kaby and Mark, those two dragons hot for battle, standing a little\nin front and to one side of us by the bronze chest, like its guardians,\nseemed willing to listen. They made me realize one reason Sid had for\nletting Bruce run on, although the path his talk was leading us down was\nflashing with danger signals: When it was over, there'd still be the\nproblem of what to do with the bomb, and a real opposition shaping up\nbetween Soldiers and Entertainers, and Sid was hoping a solution would\nturn up in the meantime or at least was willing to put off the evil day.\n\nBut beyond all that, and like the rest of us, I could tell from the way\nSid was squinting his browy eyes and chewing his beardy lip that he was\nshaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped into\nour hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of us\ncould have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had to\nthink of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs we\nwere--well, we wanted to keep on listening.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 8\n\n    Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.\n\n                                            --Archimedes\n\nA PLACE TO STAND\n\n\nBruce's voice had a faraway touch and he was looking up left at the Void\nas he said, \"Have you ever really wondered why the two sides of this war\nare called the Snakes and the Spiders? Snakes may be clear enough--you\nalways call the enemy something dirty. But Spiders--our name for\nourselves? Bear with me, Ilhilihis; I know that no being is created\ndirty or malignant by Nature, but this is a matter of anthropoid\nfeelings and folkways. Yes, Mark, I know that some of your legions have\nnicknames like the Drunken Lions and the Snails, and that's about as\ninsulting as calling the British Expeditionary Force the Old\nContemptibles.\n\n\"No, you'd have to go to bands of vicious youths in cities slated for\nruin to find a habit of naming like ours, and even they would try to\nbrighten up the black a bit. But simply--Spiders. And Snakes, for that's\ntheir name for themselves too, you know. Spiders and Snakes. What are\nour masters, that we give them names like that?\"\n\nIt gave me the shivers and set my mind working in a dozen directions and\nI couldn't stop it, although it made the shivers worse.\n\nIlly beside me now--I'd never given it a thought before, but he did have\neight legs of a sort, and I remembered thinking of him as a spider\nmonkey, and hadn't the Lunans had wisdom and atomic power and a billion\nyears in which to get the Change War rolling?\n\nOr suppose, in the far future, Terra's own spiders evolved intelligence\nand a cruel cannibal culture. They'd be able to keep their existence\nsecret. I had no idea of who or what would be on Earth in Sevensee's\nday, and wouldn't it be perfect black hairy poisoned spider-mentality to\nspin webs secretly through the world of thought and all of space and\ntime?\n\nAnd Beau--wasn't there something real Snaky about him, the way he moved\nand all?\n\nSpiders and Snakes. _Spinne und Schlange_, as Erich called them. S & S.\nBut SS stood for the Nazi _Schutzstaffel_, the Black Shirts, and what if\nsome of those cruel, crazy Jerries had discovered time travel and--I\nbrought myself up with a jerk and asked myself, \"Greta, how nuts can you\nget?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nFrom where he was on the floor, the front of the bar his sounding board,\nDoc shrieked up at Bruce like one of the damned from the pit, \"Don't\nspeak against the Spiders! Don't blaspheme! They can hear the Unborn\nwhisper. Others whip only the skin, but they whip the naked brain and\nheart,\" and Erich called out, \"That's enough, Bruce!\"\n\nBut Bruce didn't spare him a look and said, \"But whatever the Spiders\nare and no matter how much whip they use, it's plain as the telltale on\nthe Maintainer that the Change War is not only going against them, but\ngetting away from them. Dwell for a bit on the current flurry of stupid\nslugging and panicky anachronism, when we all know that anachronism is\nwhat gets the Change Winds out of control. This punch-drunk pounding on\nthe Cretan-Dorian fracas as if it were the only battle going and the\nonly way to work things. Whisking Constantine from Britain to the\nBosporus by rocket, sending a pocket submarine back to sail with the\nArmada against Drake's woodensides--I'll wager you hadn't heard those!\nAnd now, to save Rome, an atomic bomb.\n\n\"Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a\nfission weapon.... I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will\nmake in what's left of history--the smothering of Greece and the\nvanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy's Irish\nCaptivity won't be in it!\"\n\nThe cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he\ndidn't pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned\nin irony and he said, \"But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and\nthat the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of\nplanets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're\njust one little world--one little solar system, Sevensee--and we can\nhardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing\npreoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially\nunderstanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and\ncenturies, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about\npreserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.\n\n\"Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever\nthan go on living in a world without the _Summa_, the Field Equations,\n_Process and Reality_, _Hamlet_, Matthew, Keats, and the _Odyssey_, but\nour masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those\nrugged souls who want to go on living no matter what.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nErich's \"Bruce, I'm telling you that's enough,\" was lost in the\nquickening flow of the New Boy's words. \"I won't spend much time on the\nminor signs of our major crack-up--the canceling of leaves, the sharper\nshortages, the loss of the Express Room, the use of Recuperation\nStations for ops and all the other frantic patchwork--last operation\nbut one, we were saddled with three Soldiers from outside the Galaxy\nand, no fault of theirs, they were no earthly use. Such little things\nmight happen at a bad spot in any war and are perhaps only local. But\nthere's a big thing.\"\n\nHe paused again, to let us wonder, I guess. Maud must have worked her\nway over to me, for I felt her dry little hand on my arm and she\nwhispered out of the side of her mouth, \"What do we do now?\"\n\n\"We listen,\" I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her\nneed to be doing something about things.\n\nShe cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, \"You, too?\"\n\nI didn't get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts!--because\njust then Bruce's voice took up again in the faraway range.\n\n\"Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of\nhistory can stand before it's all stitches, whether too much Change\nwon't one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too,\nthe whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality\nany more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians?\nChange Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every\noperation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more\nmakeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that\nare our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you've\nstripped off the paint.\n\n\"If that goes on, won't the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself,\nthen nothing? How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more\nDoublegangers cut out of it? And there's another thing about every\noperation--it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change\nWinds die, it leaves them a little more disturbed and nightmare-ridden\nand frazzled. Those of you who have been on operations in heavily\nworked-over temporal areas will know what I mean--that look they give\nyou out of the sides of their eyes as if to say, 'You again? For\nChrist's sake, go away. We're the dead. We're the ones who don't want to\nwake up, who don't want to be Demons and hate to be Ghosts. Stop\ntorturing us.'\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI looked around at the Ghostgirls; I couldn't help it. They'd somehow\ngot together on the control divan, facing us, their backs to the\nMaintainers. The Countess had dragged along the bottle of wine Erich had\nfetched her earlier and they were passing it back and forth. The\nCountess had a big rose splotch across the ruffled white lace of her\nblouse.\n\nBruce said, \"There'll come a day when all the Zombies and all the Unborn\nwake up and go crazy together and figuratively come marching at us in\ntheir numberless hordes, saying, 'We've had enough.'\"\n\nBut I didn't turn back to Bruce right away. Phryne's chiton had slipped\noff one shoulder and she and the Countess were sitting sagged forward,\nelbows on knees, legs spread--at least, as far as the Countess's hobble\nskirt would let her--and swayed toward each other a little. They were\nstill surprisingly solid, although they hadn't had any personal\nattention for a half hour, and they were looking up over my head with\nhalf-shut eyes and they seemed, so help me, to be listening to what\nBruce was saying and maybe hearing some of it.\n\n\"We make a careful distinction between Zombies and Unborn, between those\ntroubled by our operations whose lifelines lie in the past and those\nwhose lifelines lie in the future. But is there any distinction any\nlonger? Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can\nwe any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places\nhave their own nows, the now of the Big Time we're on, but that's\ndifferent and it's not made for real living.\n\n\"The Spiders tell us that the real now is somewhere in the last half of\nthe 20th Century, which means that several of us here are also alive in\nthe cosmos, have lifelines along which the now is traveling. But do you\nswallow that story quite so easily, Ilhilihis, Sevensee? How does it\nstrike the servants of the Triple Goddess? The Spiders of Octavian Rome?\nThe Demons of Good Queen Bess? The gentlemen Zombies of the Greater\nSouth? Do the Unborn man the starships, Maud?\n\n\"The Spiders also tell us that, although the fog of battle makes the now\nhard to pin down precisely, it will return with the unconditional\nsurrender of the Snakes and the establishment of cosmic peace, and roll\non as majestically toward the future as before, quickening the continuum\nwith its passage. Do you really believe that? Or do you believe, as I\ndo, that we've used up all the future as well as the past, wasted it in\npremature experience, and that we've had the real now smudged out of\nexistence, stolen from us forever, the precious now of true growth, the\nchild-moment in which all life lies, the moment like a newborn baby that\nis the only home for hope there is?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nHe let that start to sink in, then took a couple of quick steps and went\non, his voice rising over Erich's \"Bruce, for the last time--\" and\nseeming to pick up a note of hope from the very word he had used, \"But\nalthough things look terrifyingly black, there remains a chance--the\nslimmest chance, but still a chance--of saving the cosmos from Change\nDeath and restoring reality's richness and giving the Ghosts good sleep\nand perhaps even regaining the real now. We have the means right at\nhand. What if the power of time traveling were used not for war and\ndestruction, but for healing, for the mutual enrichment of the ages, for\nquiet communication and growth, in brief, to bring a peace message--\"\n\nBut my little commandant is quite an actor himself and knows a wee bit\nabout the principles of scene-stealing, and he was not going to let\nBruce drown him out as if he were just another extra playing a Voice\nfrom the Mob. He darted across our front, between us and the bar, took a\nrunning leap, and landed bang on the bloody box of bomb.\n\nA bit later, Maud was silently showing me the white ring above her elbow\nwhere I'd grabbed her and Illy was teasing a clutch of his tentacles out\nof my other hand and squeaking reproachfully, \"Greta girl, don't ever do\nthat.\"\n\nErich was standing on the chest and I noticed that his boots carefully\nstraddled the circle of skulls, and I should have known anyway you could\nhardly push them in the right order by jumping on them, and he was\npointing at Bruce and saying, \"--and that means mutiny, my young sir.\n_Um Gottes willen_, Bruce, listen to me and step down before you say\nanything worse. I'm older than you, Bruce. Mark's older. Trust in your\n_Kameraden_. Guide yourself by their knowledge.\"\n\nHe had got my attention, but I had much rather have him black my eye.\n\n\"You older than me?\" Bruce was grinning. \"When your twelve-years'\nadvantage was spent in soaking up the wisdom of a race of sadistic\ndreamers gone paranoid, in a world whose thought-stream had already been\nmuddied by one total war? Mark older than me? When all his ideas and\nloyalties are those of a wolf pack of unimaginative sluggers two\nthousand years younger than I am? Either of you older because you have\nmore of the killing cynicism that is all the wisdom the Change World\never gives you? Don't make me laugh!\n\n\"I'm an Englishman, and I come from an epoch when total war was still a\ndesecration and the flowers and buds of thoughts not yet whacked off or\nblighted. I'm a poet and poets are wiser than anyone because they're the\nonly people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time. Right,\nSid? When I talk to all of you about a peace message, I want you to\nthink about it concretely in terms of using the Places to bring help\nacross the mountains of time when help is really needed, not to bring\nhelp that's undeserved or knowledge that's premature or contaminating,\nsometimes not to bring anything at all, but just to check with infinite\ntenderness and concern that everything's safe and the glories of the\nuniverse unfolding as they were intended to--\"\n\n\"Yes, you are a poet, Bruce,\" Erich broke in. \"You can tootle soulfully\non the flute and make us drip tears. You can let out the stops on the\nbig organ pipes and make us tremble as if at Jehovah's footsteps. For\nthe last twenty minutes, you have been giving us some very _charmante_\npoetry. But what are you? An Entertainer? Or are you a Soldier?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nRight then--I don't know what it was, maybe Sid clearing his throat--I\ncould sense our feelings beginning to turn against Bruce. I got the\nstrangest feeling of reality clamping down and bright colors going dull\nand dreams vanishing. Yet it was only then I also realized how much\nBruce had moved us, maybe some of us to the verge of mutiny, even. I was\nmad at Erich for what he was doing, but I couldn't help admiring his\ncockiness.\n\nI was still under the spell of Bruce's words and the more-than-words\nbehind them, but then Erich would shift around a bit and one of his\nheels would kick near the death's-head pushbuttons and I wanted to stamp\nwith spike heels on every death's-head button on his uniform. I didn't\nknow exactly what I felt yet.\n\n\"Yes, I'm a Soldier,\" Bruce told him, \"and I hope you won't ever have to\nworry about my courage, because it's going to take more courage than any\noperation we've ever planned, ever dreamed of, to carry the peace\nmessage to the other Places and to the wound-spots of the cosmos.\nPerhaps it will be a fast wicket and we'll be bowled down before we\nscore a single run, but who cares? We may at least see our real masters\nwhen they come to smash us, and for me that will be a deep satisfaction.\nAnd we may do some smashing of our own.\"\n\n\"So you're a Soldier,\" Erich said, his smile showing his teeth. \"Bruce,\nI'll admit that the half-dozen operations you've been on were rougher\nthan anything I drew in my first hundred sleeps. For that, I am all\nhonest sympathy. But that you should let them get you into such a state\nthat love and a girl can turn you upside down and start you babbling\nabout peace messages--\"\n\n\"Yes, by God, love and a girl have changed me!\" Bruce shouted at him,\nand I looked around at Lili and I remembered Dave saying, \"I'm going to\nSpain,\" and I wondered if anything would ever again make my face flame\nlike that. \"Or, rather, they've made me stand up for what I've believed\nin all along. They've made me--\"\n\n\"_Wunderbar_,\" Erich called and began to do a little sissy dance on the\nbomb that set my teeth on edge. He bent his wrists and elbows at arty\nangles and stuck out a hip and ducked his head simperingly and blinked\nhis eyes very fast. \"Will you invite me to the wedding, Bruce? You'll\nhave to get another best man, but I will be the flower girl and throw\npretty little posies to all the distinguished guests. Here, Mark. Catch,\nKaby. One for you, Greta. _Danke schön. Ach, zwei Herzen in\ndreivierteltakt ... ta-ta ... ta-ta ... ta-ta-ta-ta-ta ..._\"\n\n\"What the hell do you think a woman is?\" Bruce raged. \"Something to mess\naround with in your spare time?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nErich kept on humming \"Two Hearts in Waltz Time\"--and jigging around to\nit, damn him--but he slipped in a nod to Bruce and a \"Precisely.\" So I\nknew where I stood, but it was no news to me.\n\n\"Very well,\" Bruce said, \"let's leave this Brown Shirt _maricón_ to\namuse himself and get down to business. I made all of you a proposal and\nI don't have to tell you how serious it is or how serious Lili and I are\nabout it. We not only must infiltrate and subvert other Places, which\nluckily for us are made for infiltration, we also must make contact with\nthe Snakes and establish working relationships with their Demons at our\nlevel as one of our first steps.\"\n\nThat stopped Erich's jig and got enough of a gasp from some of us to\nmake it seem to come from practically everybody. Erich used it to work a\nchange of pace.\n\n\"Bruce! We've let you carry this foolery further than we should. You\nseem to have the idea that because anything goes in the Place--dueling,\ndrunkenness, _und so weiter_--you can say what you have and it will all\nbe forgotten with the hangover. Not so. It is true that among such a set\nof monsters and free spirits as ourselves, and working as secret agents\nto boot, there cannot be the obvious military discipline that would\nobtain in a Terran army.\n\n\"But let me tell you, Bruce, let me grind it home into you--Sid and Kaby\nand Mark will bear me out in this, as officers of equivalent rank--that\nthe Spider line of command stretches into and through this Place just as\nsurely as the word of _der Führer_ rules Chicago. And as I shouldn't\nhave to emphasize to you, Bruce, the Spiders have punishments that\nwould make my countrymen in Belsen and Buchenwald--well, pale a little.\nSo while there is still a shadow of justification for our interpreting\nyour remarks as utterly tasteless clowning--\"\n\n\"Babble on,\" Bruce said, giving him a loose downward wave of his hand\nwithout looking. \"I made you people a proposal.\" He paused. \"How do you\nstand, Sidney Lessingham?\"\n\nThen I felt my legs getting weak, because Sid didn't answer right away.\nThe old boy swallowed and started to look around at the rest of us. Then\nthe feeling of reality clamping down got something awful, because he\ndidn't look around, but straightened his back a little. Just then, Mark\ncut in fast.\n\n\"It grieves me, Bruce, but I think you are possessed. Erich, he must be\nconfined.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nKaby nodded, almost absently. \"Confine or kill the coward, whichever is\neasier, whip the woman, and let's get on to the Egyptian battle.\"\n\n\"Indeed, yes,\" Mark said. \"I died in it. But now perhaps no longer.\"\n\nKaby said to him, \"I like you, Roman.\"\n\nBruce was smiling, barely, and his eyes were moving and fixing. \"You,\nIlhilihis?\"\n\nIlly's squeak box had never sounded mechanical to me before, but it did\nas he answered, \"I'm a lot deeper into borrowed time than the rest of\nyou, tra-la-la, but Papa still loves living. Include me very much out,\nBrucie.\"\n\n\"Miss Davies?\"\n\nBeside me, Maud said flatly, \"Do you think I'm a fool?\" Beyond her, I\nsaw Lili and I thought, \"My God, I might look as proud if I were in her\nshoes, but I sure as hell wouldn't look as confident.\"\n\nBruce's eyes hadn't quite come to Beau when the gambler spoke up. \"I\nhave no cause to like you, sir, rather the opposite. But this Place has\ncome to bore me more than Boston and I have always found it difficult to\nresist a long shot. A very long one, I fear. I am with you, sir.\"\n\nThere was a pain in my chest and a roaring in my ears and through it I\nheard Sevensee grunting, \"--sicka these lousy Spiders. Deal me in.\"\n\nAnd then Doc reared up in front of the bar and he'd lost his hat and his\nhair was wild and he grabbed an empty fifth by the neck and broke the\nbottom of it all jagged against the bar and he waved it and screeched,\n\"_Ubivaytye Pauki--i Nyemetzi!_\"\n\nAnd right behind his words, Beau sang out fast the English of it, \"Kill\nthe Spiders--and the Germans!\"\n\nAnd Doc didn't collapse then, though I could see he was hanging onto\nthe bar tight with his other hand, and the Place got stiller, inside and\nout, than I've ever known it, and Bruce's eyes were finally moving back\ntoward Sid.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBut the eyes stopped short of Sid and I heard Bruce say, \"Miss Forzane?\"\nand I thought, \"That's funny,\" and I started to look around at the\nCountess, and felt all the eyes and I realized, \"Hey, that's me! But\nthis can't happen to me. To the others, yes, but not to me. I just work\nhere. Not to Greta, no, no, no!\"\n\nBut it had, and the eyes didn't let go, and the silence and the feeling\nof reality were Godawful, and I said to myself, \"Greta, you've got to\nsay something, if only a suitable four-letter word,\" and then suddenly I\nknew what the silence was like. It was like that of a big city if there\nwere some way of shutting off all the noise in one second. It was like\nErich's singing when the piano had deserted him. It was as if the Change\nWinds should ever die completely ... and I knew beforehand what had\nhappened when I turned my back on them all.\n\nThe Ghostgirls were gone. The Major Maintainer hadn't merely been\nswitched to Introvert. It was gone, too.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration]\n\n\nCHAPTER 9\n\n    \"We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed.\"\n\n    \"You looked among D----'s papers, of course, and into the books of\n    the library?\"\n\n    \"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened\n    every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume....\"\n\n                                                                   --Poe\n\nA LOCKED ROOM\n\n\nThree hours later, Sid and I plumped down on the couch nearest the\nkitchen, though too tired to want to eat for a while yet. A tighter\nsearch than I could ever have cooked up had shown that the Maintainer\nwas not in the Place.\n\nOf course it had to be in the Place, as we kept telling each other for\nthe first two hours. It had to be, if circumstances and the theories we\nlived by in the Change World meant anything. A Maintainer is what\nmaintains a Place. The Minor Maintainer takes care of oxygen,\ntemperature, humidity, gravity, and other little life-cycle and\nmatter-cycle things generally, but it's the Major Maintainer that keeps\nthe walls from buckling and the ceiling from falling in. It is little,\nbut oh my, it does so much.\n\nIt doesn't work by wires or radio or anything complicated like that. It\njust hooks into local space-time.\n\nI have been told that its inside working part is made up of vastly\ntough, vastly hard giant molecules, each one of which is practically a\nvest-pocket cosmos in itself. Outside, it looks like a portable radio\nwith a few more dials and some telltales and switches and plug-ins for\nearphones and a lot of other sensory thingumajigs.\n\nBut the Maintainer was gone and the Void hadn't closed in, yet. By this\ntime, I was so fagged, I didn't care much whether it did or not.\n\nOne thing for sure, the Maintainer had been switched to Introvert before\nit was spirited away or else its disappearance automatically produced\nIntroversion, take your choice, because we sure were Introverted--real\nnasty martinet-schoolmaster grip of reality on my thoughts that I knew,\nwithout trying, liquor wouldn't soften, not a breath of Change Wind,\nabsolutely stifling, and the gray of the Void seeming so much inside my\nhead that I think I got a glimmering of what the science boys mean when\nthey explain to me that the Place is a kind of interweaving of the\nmaterial and the mental--a Giant Monad, one of them called it.\n\nAnyway, I said to myself, \"Greta, if this is Introversion, I want no\npart of it. It is not nice to be cut adrift from the cosmos and know it.\nA lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific and a starship between galaxies\nare not in it for loneliness.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI asked myself why the Spiders had ever equipped Maintainers with\nIntroversion switches anyway, when we couldn't drill with them and\nweren't supposed to use them except in an emergency so tight that it was\neither Introvert or surrender to the Snakes, and for the first time the\nobvious explanation came to me:\n\nIntroversion must be the same as scuttling, its main purpose to withhold\nsecrets and materiel from the enemy. It put a place into a situation\nfrom which even the Spider high command couldn't rescue it, and there\nwas nothing left but to sink down, down (out? up?), down into the Void.\n\nIf that was the case, our chances of getting back were about those of my\nbeing a kid again playing in the Dunes on the Small Time.\n\nI edged a little closer to Sid and sort of squunched under his shoulder\nand rubbed my cheek against the smudged, gold-worked gray velvet. He\nlooked down and I said, \"A long way to Lynn Regis, eh, Siddy?\"\n\n\"Sweetling, thou spokest a mouthful,\" he said. He knows very well what\nhe is doing when he mixes his language that way, the wicked old\ndarling.\n\n\"Siddy,\" I said, \"why this gold-work? It'd be a lot smoother without\nit.\"\n\n\"Marry, men must prick themselves out and, 'faith I know not, but it\nhelps if there's metal in it.\"\n\n\"And girls get scratched.\" I took a little sniff. \"But don't put this\ndoublet through the cleaner yet. Until we get out of the woods, I want\nas much you around as possible.\"\n\n\"Marry, and why should I?\" he asked blankly, and I think he wasn't\nfooling me. The last thing time travelers find out is how they do or\ndon't smell. Then his face clouded and he looked as though he wanted to\nsquunch under my shoulder. \"But 'faith, sweetling, your forest has a few\nmore trees than Sherwood.\"\n\n\"Thou saidst it,\" I agreed, and wondered about the look. He oughtn't to\nbe interested in my girlishness now. I knew I was a mess, but he had\nstuck pretty close to me during the hunt and you never can tell. Then I\nremembered that he was the other one who hadn't declared himself when\nBruce was putting it to us, and it probably troubled his male vanity.\nNot me, though--I was still grateful to the Maintainer for getting me\nout of that spot, whatever other it had got us all into. It seemed ages\nago.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWe'd all jumped to the conclusion that the two Ghostgirls had run away\nwith the Maintainer, I don't know where or why, but it looked so much\nthat way. Maud had started yipping about how she'd never trusted Ghosts\nand always known that some day they'd start doing things on their own,\nand Kaby had got it firmly fixed in her head, right between the horns,\nthat Phryne, being a Greek, was the ringleader and was going to wreak\nhavoc on us all.\n\nBut when we were checking Stores the first time, I had noticed that the\nGhostgirl envelopes looked flat. Ectoplasm doesn't take up much space\nwhen it's folded, but I had opened one anyway, then another, and then\ncalled for help.\n\nEvery last envelope was empty. We had lost over a thousand Ghostgirls,\nSid's whole stock.\n\nWell, at least it proved what none of us had ever seen or heard of being\ndemonstrated: that there is a spooky link--a sort of Change Wind\ncontact--between a Ghost and its lifeline; and when that umbilicus, I've\nheard it called, is cut, the part away from the lifeline dies.\n\nInteresting, but what had bothered me was whether we Demons were going\nto evaporate too, because we are as much Doublegangers as the Ghosts and\nour apron strings had been cut just as surely. We're more solid, of\ncourse, but that would only mean we'd take a little longer. Very\nlogical.\n\nI remember I had looked up at Lili and Maud--us girls had been checking\nthe envelopes; it's one of the proprieties we frequently maintain and\nanyway, if men check them, they're apt to trot out that old wheeze about\n\"instant women\" which I'm sick to death of hearing, thank you.\n\nAnyway, I had looked up and said, \"It's been nice knowing you,\" and Lili\nhad said, \"Twenty-three, skiddoo,\" and Maud had said, \"Here goes\nnothing,\" and we had shook hands all around.\n\nWe figured that Phryne and the Countess had faded at the same time as\nthe other Ghostgirls, but an idea had been nibbling at me and I said,\n\"Siddy, do you suppose it's just barely possible that, while we were all\nlooking at Bruce, those two Ghostgirls would have been able to work the\nMaintainer and get a Door and lam out of here with the thing?\"\n\n\"Thou speakst my thoughts, sweetling. All weighs against it: Imprimis,\n'tis well known that Ghosts cannot lay plots or act on them. Secundo,\nthe time forbade getting a Door. Tercio--and here's the real meat of\nit--the Place folds without the Maintainer. Quadro, 'twere folly to\ndepend on not one of--how many of us? ten, elf--not looking around in\nall the time it would have taken them--\"\n\n\"I looked around once, Siddy. They were drinking and they had got to the\ncontrol divan under their own power. Now when was that? Oh, yes, when\nBruce was talking about Zombies.\"\n\n\"Yes, sweetling. And as I was about to cap my argument with quinquo when\nyou 'gan prattle, I could have sworn none could touch the Maintainer,\nmuch less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet ...\"\n\n\"Eftsoons yet,\" I seconded him.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nSomebody must have got a door and walked out with the thing. It\ncertainly wasn't in the Place. The hunt had been a lulu. Something the\nsize of a portable typewriter is not easy to hide and we had been inside\neverything from Beau's piano to the renewer link of the Refresher.\n\nWe had even fluoroscoped everybody, though it had made Illy writhe like\na box of worms, as he'd warned us; he said it tickled terribly and I\ninsisted on smoothing his fur for five minutes afterward, although he\nwas a little standoffish toward me.\n\nSome areas, like the bar, kitchen and Stores, took a long while, but we\nwere thorough. Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made the\nPlace, she has been stationed in a Field Hospital (it turns out the\nSpiders actually are mounting operations from them) and learned a few\nnice new wrinkles.\n\nHowever, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course,\nevery check was observed by at least three people, not including Bruce\nor Lili. When the Maintainer vanished, Doc had pulled out of his\nglassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me if I hadn't seen\nit happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to the\nArt Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out his\ncoat and duck his head and whip out a flask and take a swig and by now\nhe was well on his way toward another peak.\n\nThe Art Gallery had taken time too, because there's such a jumble of\nstrange stuff, and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split a\nbeautiful blue woodcarving of a Venusian medusa because, although there\nwasn't a mark in the paw-polished surface, she claimed it was just big\nenough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces together\nand mooning over the other stuff.\n\nAfter we'd finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling the\nfloor. Beau and Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a one-sided\nPlace, that there is nothing, but nothing, under the floor; it just gets\na lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you get a quarter\ninch down--that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark was\nknuckle-headed (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the q.t.) and broke\nfour diamond-plus drills before he was satisfied.\n\nExcept for some trick hiding places, that left the Void, and things\ndon't vanish if you throw them at the Void--they half melt and freeze\nforever unless you can fish them out. Back of the Refresher, at about\neye-level, are three Venusian coconuts that a Hittite strongman threw\nthere during a major brawl. I try not to look at them because they are\nso much like witch heads they give me the woolies. The parts of the\nPlace right up against the Void have strange spatial properties which\none of the gadgets in Surgery makes use of in a way that gives me the\nworse woolies, but that's beside the point.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nDuring the hunt, Kaby and Erich had used their Callers as direction\nfinders to point out the Maintainer, just as they're used in the cosmos\nto locate the Door--and sometimes in the Big Places, people tell me. But\nthe Callers only went wild--like a compass needle whirling around\nwithout stopping--and nobody knew what that meant.\n\nThe trick hiding places were the Minor Maintainer, a cute idea, but it\nis no bigger than the Major and has its own mysterious insides and had\nobviously kept on doing its own work, so that was out for several\nreasons, and the bomb chest, though it seemed impossible for anyone to\nhave opened it, granting they knew the secret of its lock, even before\nErich jumped on it and put it in the limelight double. But when you've\nruled out everything else, the word impossible changes meaning.\n\nSince time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts of\ntricks for sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanently\nor temporarily. But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybody\nthat should know tells me that time traveling _through_ the Big Time is\nout. It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the\ncountryside and we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as\nGertie Stein might put it, you can't time travel through the time you\ntime travel in when you time travel.\n\nI'd also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvious\nhiding place, maybe something that several people could pass back and\nforth between them, which would mean a conspiracy, and, of course, if\nyou assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including\nthe cosmos itself. Still, I'd got a sort of shell-game idea about the\nSoldiers' three big black shakos and I hadn't been satisfied until I'd\ngot the three together and looked in them all at the same time.\n\n\"Wake up, Greta, and take something. I can't stand here forever.\" Maud\nhad brought us a tray of hearty snacks from then and yon, and I must say\nthey were tempting; she whips up a mean hors d'oeuvre.\n\nI looked them over and said, \"Siddy, I want a hot dog.\"\n\n\"And I want a venison pasty! Out upon you, you finical jill, you\no'erscrupulous jade, you whimsic and tyrannous poppet!\"\n\nI grabbed a handful and snuggled back against him.\n\n\"Go on, call me some more, Siddy,\" I told him. \"Real juicy ones.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 10\n\n    My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,\n    Shakes so my single state of man that function\n    Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is\n    But what is not.\n\n                                           --Macbeth\n\nMOTIVES AND OPPORTUNITIES\n\n\nMy big bad waif from King's Lynn had set the tray on his knees and\nstarted to wolf the food down. The others were finishing up. Erich, Mark\nand Kaby were having a quietly furious argument I couldn't overhear at\nthe end of the bar nearest the bronze chest, and Illy was draped over\nthe piano like a real octopus, listening in.\n\nBeau and Sevensee were pacing up and down near the control divan and\nthrowing each other a word now and then. Beyond them, Bruce and Lili\nwere sitting on the opposite couch from us, talking earnestly about\nsomething. Maud had sat down at the other end of the bar and was\nknitting--it's one of the habits like chess and quiet drinking, or\nlearning to talk by squeak box, that we pick up to pass the time in the\nPlace in the long stretches between parties. Doc was fiddling around the\nGallery, picking things up and setting them down, still managing to stay\non his feet at any rate.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nLili and Bruce stood up, still gabbing intensely at each other, and Illy\nbegan to pick out with one tentacle a little tune in the high keys that\ndidn't sound like anything on God's earth. \"Where do they get all the\nenergy?\" I wondered.\n\nAs soon as I asked myself that, I knew the answer and I began to feel\nthe same way myself. It wasn't energy; it was nerves, pure and simple.\n\nChange is like a drug, I realized--you get used to the facts never\nstaying the same, and one picture of the past and future dissolving into\nanother maybe not very different but still different, and your mind\nbeing constantly goosed by strange moods and notions, like nightclub\nlights of shifting color with weird shadows between shining right on\nyour brain.\n\nThe endless swaying and jogging is restful, like riding on a train.\n\nYou soon get to like the movement and to need it without knowing, and\nwhen it suddenly stops and you're just you and the facts you think from\nand feel from are exactly the same when you go back to them--boy, that's\nrough, as I found out now.\n\nThe instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks into\nthe Place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing but\nourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make of\nthat, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation.\n\nI decided I felt like I'd been dropped into a swimming pool full of\ncement and held under until it hardened.\n\nI could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonder\nthey didn't hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best; maybe\nshe'd got a little preparation from the long watches between stars; and\nthen she is older than all of us, even Sid, though with a small \"o\" in\n\"older.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe restless work of the search for the Maintainer had masked the\nfeeling, but now it was beginning to come full force. Before the search,\nBruce's speech and Erich's interruptions had done a passable masking job\ntoo. I tried to remember when I'd first got the feeling and decided it\nwas after Erich had jumped on the bomb, about the time he mentioned\npoetry. Though I couldn't be sure. Maybe the Maintainer had been\nIntroverted even earlier, when I'd turned to look at the Ghostgirls. I\nwouldn't have known. Nuts!\n\nBelieve me, I could feel that hardened cement on every inch of me. I\nremembered Bruce's beautiful picture of a universe without Big Change\nand decided it was about the worst idea going. I went on eating, though\nI wasn't so sure now it was a good idea to keep myself strong.\n\n\"Does the Maintainer have an Introversion telltale? Siddy!\"\n\n\"'Sdeath, chit, and you love me, speak lower. Of a sudden, I feel not\nwell, as if I'd drunk a butt of Rhenish and slept inside it. Marry yes,\nblue. In short flashes, saith the manual. Why ask'st thou?\"\n\n\"No reason. God, Siddy, what I'd give for a breath of Change Wind.\"\n\n\"Thou can'st say that eftsoons,\" he groaned. I must have looked pretty\nmiserable myself, for he put his arm around my shoulders and whispered\ngruffly, \"Comfort thyself, sweetling, that while we suffer thus sorely,\nwe yet cannot die the Change Death.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" I asked him.\n\nI didn't want to bounce around like the others. I had a suspicion I'd\ncarry it too far. So, to keep myself from going batty, I started to\nrework the business of who had done what to the Maintainer.\n\nDuring the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossed\naround as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat of\nSnake science amounting to sorcery; the Spider high command bunkering\nthe Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the Express\nRoom, in such a hurry that they hadn't even time to transmit warnings;\nthe hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beings\nwho are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of the\nChange War into the future much beyond Sevensee's epoch--unless the Late\nCosmicians are the ones fighting the Change War.\n\nOne thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one\nof us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political\npolice, agent of--who knows, after Bruce?--a secret Change World\nCommittee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, or\nstrictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the\nMaintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich's and Bruce's\nfactions.\n\nGood group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but\nthat didn't apply to what I did with my own thoughts.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nWho wanted to escape so bad they'd Introvert the Place, cutting off all\npossible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and\nrunning the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all?\n\nLeaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things\nup, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid\ncouldn't keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments\nfor derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as\nErich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of\nthe bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly\nhadn't had my eye on him every second.\n\nBeau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he\nsaid counted, so he'd hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to\nmention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.\n\nSid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people\nespecially, more than any man or woman I've ever known--he's like a\nbig-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his\nmouth--and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the\ncosmos.\n\nMaud, Kaby, Mark and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of,\nthough Sevensee's being from the very far future did tie in with that\nidea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something\ndeveloping between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to\nbe Introverted together.\n\n\"Stick to the facts, Greta,\" I reminded myself with a private groan.\n\nThat left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself.\n\nErich, I thought--now we're getting somewhere. The little commandant has\nthe nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if\nhe thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be\nlocked in with him, he'd do it in a second.\n\nBut even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he'd been heckling Bruce\nfrom the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for\nhim to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and ... well,\nthat was nine-tenths of the problem.\n\nIf I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanation\nof all. Gr-r-r!\n\nBruce's motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it\nimmortal?) danger he'd put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed\na shame he'd been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the\nMaintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar, we'd all\nhave noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I'd have\nnoticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls--if it worked as Sid\nclaimed, and he said he had never seen it in operation, just read in the\nmanual--oh, 'sdeath!\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBut Bruce didn't need opportunity, as I'm sure all the males in\nthe Place would have told me right off, because he had Lili to\npull the job for him and she had as much opportunity as any of\nthe rest of us. Myself, I have large reservations to this\nwoman-putty-in-the-hands-of-the-man-she-loves-madly theory, but I had to\nadmit there was something to be said for it in this case, and it had\nseemed quite natural to me when the rest of us had decided, by unspoken\nagreement, that neither Lili's nor Bruce's checks counted when we were\nhunting for the Maintainer.\n\nThat took care of all of us and left only the mysterious stranger,\nintruding somehow through a Door (how'd he get it without using our\nMaintainer?) or from an unimaginable hiding place or straight out of the\nVoid itself. I know that last is impossible--nothing can step out of\nnothing--but if anything ever looked like it was specially built for\nsomething not at all nice to come looming out of, it's the Void--misty,\nfoggily churning, slimy gray....\n\n\"Wait a second,\" I told myself, \"and hang onto this, Greta. It should\nhave smacked you in the face at the start.\"\n\nWhatever came out of the Void, or, more to the point, whoever slipped\nback from our crowd to the Maintainer, Bruce would have seen them. He\nwas looking at the Maintainer past our heads the whole time, and\nwhatever happened to it, he saw it.\n\nErich wouldn't have, even after he was on the bomb, because he'd been\nstagewise enough to face Bruce most of the time to build up his role as\ntribune of the people.\n\nBut Bruce would have--unless he got so caught up in what he was\nsaying....\n\nNo, kid, a Demon is always an actor, no matter how much he believes in\nwhat he's saying, and there never was an actor yet who wouldn't\ninstantly notice a member of the audience starting to walk out on his\nbig scene.\n\nSo Bruce knew, which made him a better actor than I'd have been willing\nto grant, since it didn't look as if anyone else had thought of what had\njust occurred to me, or they'd have gone over and put it to him.\n\nNot me, though--I don't work that way. Besides, I didn't feel up to\nit--Nervy Anna enfold me, I felt like pure hell.\n\n\"Maybe,\" I told myself encouragingly, \"the Place is Hell,\" but added,\n\"Be your age, Greta--be a real rootless, ruleless, ruthless\ntwenty-nine.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 11\n\n    The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed\n    With bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear,\n    Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.\n    Lines of gray, muttering faces, masked with fear,\n    They leave their trenches, going over the top,\n    While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists\n\n                                            --Sassoon\n\nTHE WESTERN FRONT, 1917\n\n\n\"Please don't, Lili.\"\n\n\"I shall, my love.\"\n\n\"Sweetling, wake up! Hast the shakes?\"\n\nI opened my eyes a little and lied to Siddy with a smile and locked my\nhands together tight and watched Bruce and Lili quarrel nobly near the\ncontrol divan and wished I had a great love to blur my misery and\nprovide me with a passable substitute for Change Winds.\n\nLili won the argument, judging from the way she threw her head back and\nstepped away from Bruce's arms while giving him a proud, tender smile.\nHe walked off a few steps; praise be, he didn't shrug his shoulders at\nus like an old husband, though his nerves were showing and he didn't\nseem to be standing Introversion well at all, as who of us were?\n\nLili rested a hand on the head of the control divan and pressed her lips\ntogether and looked around at us, mostly with her eyes. She'd wound a\ngray silk bandeau around her bangs. Her short gray silk dress without a\nwaistline made her look, not so much like a flapper, though she looked\nlike that all right, as like a little girl, except the neckline was\nscooped low enough to show she wasn't.\n\nHer gaze hesitated and then stopped at me and I got a sunk feeling of\nwhat was coming, because women are always picking on me for an audience.\nBesides, Sid and I were the centrist party of two in our\nfresh-out-of-the-shell Place politics.\n\nShe took a deep breath and stuck out her chin and said in a voice that\nwas even a little higher and Britisher than she usually uses, \"We girls\nhave often cried, 'Shut the Door!' But now the Door is jolly well shut\nfor keeps!\"\n\nI knew I'd guessed right and I felt crawly with embarrassment, because I\nknow about this love business of thinking you're the other person and\ntrying to live their life--and grab their glory, though you don't know\nthat--and carry their message for them, and how it can foul things up.\nStill, I couldn't help admitting what she said wasn't too bad a\nstart--unpleasantly apt to be true, at any rate.\n\n\"My fiance believes we may yet be able to open the Door. I do not. He\nthinks it is a bit premature to discuss the peculiar pickle in which we\nall find ourselves. I do not.\"\n\nThere was a rasp of laughter from the bar. The militarists were\nreacting. Erich stepped out, looking very happy. \"So now we have to\nlisten to women making speeches,\" he called. \"What is this Place,\nanyhow? Sidney Lessingham's Saturday Evening Sewing Circle?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBeau and Sevensee, who'd stopped their pacing halfway between the bar\nand the control divan, turned toward Erich, and Sevensee looked a little\nburlier, a little more like half a horse, than satyrs in mythology book\nillustrations. He stamped--medium hard, I'd say--and said, \"Ahh, go flya\nkite.\" I'd found out he'd learned English from a Demon who'd been a\nlongshoreman with syndicalist-anarchist sympathies. Erich shut up for a\nmoment and stood there grinning, his hands on his hips.\n\nLili nodded to the satyr and cleared her throat, looking scared. But she\ndidn't speak; I could see she was thinking and feeling something, and\nher face got ugly and haggard, as if she were in a Change Wind that\nhadn't reached me yet, and her mouth went into a snarl to fight tears,\nbut some spurted out, and when she did speak her voice was an octave\nlower and it wasn't just London talking but New York too.\n\n\"I don't know how Resurrection felt to you people, because I'm new and I\nloathe asking questions, but to me it was pure torture and I wished only\nI'd had the courage to tell Suzaku, 'I wish to remain a Zombie, if you\ndon't mind. I'd rather the nightmares.' But I accepted Resurrection\nbecause I've been taught to be polite and because there is the Demon in\nme I don't understand that always wishes to live, and I found that I\nstill felt like a Zombie, although I could flit about, and that I still\nhad the nightmares, except they'd grown a deal vivider.\n\n\"I was a young girl again, seventeen, and I suppose every woman wishes\nto be seventeen, but I wasn't seventeen inside my head--I was a woman\nwho had died of Bright's disease in New York in 1929 and also, because a\nBig Change blew my lifeline into a new drift, a woman who had died of\nthe same disease in Nazi-occupied London in 1955, but rather more slowly\nbecause, as you can fancy, the liquor was in far shorter supply. I had\nto live with both those sets of memories and the Change World didn't\nblot them out any more than I'm told it does those of any Demon, and it\ndidn't even push them into the background as I'd hoped it would.\n\n\"When some Change Fellow would say to me, 'Hallo, beautiful, how about a\nsmile?' or 'That's a posh frock, kiddo,' I'd be back at Bellevue looking\ndown at my swollen figure and the light getting like spokes of ice, or\nin that dreadful gin-steeped Stepney bedroom with Phyllis coughing\nherself to death beside me, or at best, for a moment, a little girl in\nGlamorgan looking at the Roman road and wondering about the wonderful\nlife that lay ahead.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI looked at Erich, remembering he had a long nasty future back in the\ncosmos himself, and at any rate he wasn't smiling, and I thought maybe\nhe's getting a little humility, knowing someone else has two of those\nfutures, but I doubted it.\n\n\"Because, you see,\" Lili kept forcing it out, \"all my three lives I'd\nbeen a girl who fell in love with a great young poet she'd never met,\nthe voice of the new youth and all youth, and she'd told her first big\nlie to get in the Red Cross and across to France to be nearer him, and\nit was all danger and dark magics and a knight in armor, and she\npictured how she'd find him wounded but not seriously, with a little\nbandage around his head, and she'd light a fag for him and smile\nlightly, never letting him guess what she felt, but only being her best\nself and watching to see if that made something happen to him....\n\n\"And then the Boche machine guns cut him down at Passchendaele and there\ncouldn't ever have been bandages big enough and the girl stayed\nseventeen inside and messed about and tried to be wicked, though she\nwasn't very good at that, and to drink, and she had a bit more talent\nthere, though drinking yourself to death is not nearly as easy as it\nsounds, even with a kidney weakness to help. But she turned the trick.\n\n\"Then a cock crows. She wakes with a tearing start from the gray dreams\nof death that fill her lifeline. It's cold daybreak. There's the smell\nof a French farm. She feels her ankles and they're not at all like huge\nrubber boots filled with water. They're not swollen the least bit.\nThey're young legs.\n\n\"There's a little window and the tops of a row of trees that may be\npoplars when there's more light, and what there is shows cots like her\nown and heads under blankets, and hanging uniforms make large shadows\nand a girl is snoring. There's a very distant rumble and it moves the\nwindow a bit. Then she remembers they're Red Cross girls many, many\nkilometers from Passchendaele and that Bruce Marchant is going to die at\ndawn today.\n\n\"In a few more minutes, he's going over the top where there's a\ncrop-headed machine-gunner in field gray already looking down the sights\nand swinging the gun a bit. But she isn't going to die today. She's\ngoing to die in 1929 and 1955.\n\n\"And just as she's going mad, there's a creaking and out of the shadows\ntiptoes a Jap with a woman's hairdo and the whitest face and the\nblackest eyebrows. He's wearing a rose robe and a black sash which belts\nto his sides two samurai swords, but in his right hand he has a strange\nsilver pistol. And he smiles at her as if they were brother and sister\nand lovers at the same time and he says, '_Voulez-vous vivre,\nmademoiselle?_' and she stares and he bobs his head and says, 'Missy\nwish live, yes, no?'\"\n\n[Illustration]\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nSid's paw closed quietly around my shaking hands. It always gets me to\nhear about anyone's Resurrection, and although mine was crazier, it also\nhad the Krauts in it. I hoped she wouldn't go through the rest of the\nformula and she didn't.\n\n\"Five minutes later, he's gone down a stairs more like a ladder to wait\nbelow and she's dressing in a rush. Her clothes resist a little, as if\nthey were lightly gummed to the hook and the stained wall, and she hates\nto touch them. It's getting lighter and her cot looks as if someone were\nstill sleeping there, although it's empty, and she couldn't bring\nherself to put her hand on the place if her new life depended on it.\n\n\"She climbs down and her long skirt doesn't bother her because she knows\nhow to swing it. Suzaku conducts her past a sentry who doesn't see them\nand a puffy-faced farmer in a smock coughing and spitting the night out\nof his throat. They cross the farmyard and it's filled with rose light\nand she sees the sun is up and she knows that Bruce Marchant has just\nbled to death.\n\n\"There's an empty open touring car chugging loudly, waiting for someone;\nit has huge muddy wheels with wooden spokes and a brass radiator that\nsays 'Simplex.' But Suzaku leads her past it to a dunghill and bows\napologetically and she steps through a Door.\"\n\nI heard Erich say to the others at the bar, \"How touching! Now shall I\ntell everyone about my operation?\" But he didn't get much of a laugh.\n\n\"That's how Lilian Foster came into the Change World with its\nsteel-engraved nightmares and its deadly pace and deadlier lassitudes. I\nwas more alive than I ever had been before, but it was the kind of life\na corpse might get from unending electrical shocks and I couldn't summon\nany purpose or hope and Bruce Marchant seemed farther away than ever.\n\n\"Then, not six hours ago, a Soldier in a black uniform came through the\nDoor and I thought, 'It can't be, but it does look like his\nphotographs,' and then I thought I heard someone say the name Bruce, and\nthen he shouted as if to all the world that he was Bruce Marchant, and I\nknew there was a Resurrection beyond Resurrection, a true resurrection.\nOh, Bruce--\"\n\nShe looked at him and he was crying and smiling and all the young beauty\nflooded back into her face, and I thought, \"It has to be Change Winds,\nbut it can't be. Face it without slobbering, Greta--there's something\nthat works bigger miracles than Change.\"\n\nAnd she went on, \"And then the Change Winds died when the Snakes\nvaporized the Maintainer or the Ghostgirls Introverted it and all three\nof them vanished so swiftly and silently that even Bruce didn't\nnotice--those are the best explanations I can summon and I fancy one of\nthem is true. At all events, the Change Winds died and my past and even\nmy futures became something I could bear lightly, because I have someone\nto bear them with me, and because at last I have a true future\nstretching out ahead of me, an unknown future which I shall create by\nliving. Oh, don't you see that all of us have it now, this big\nopportunity?\"\n\n\"_Hussa_ for Sidney's suffragettes and the W.C.T.U.!\" Erich cheered.\n\"Beau, will you play us a medley of 'Hearts and Flowers' and 'Onward,\nChristian Soldiers'? I'm deeply moved, Lili. Where do the rest of us\nqueue up for the Great Love Affair of the Century?\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 12\n\n    Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight\n    of the past's mistakes and the future's fears.\n\n    I had to learn to close the front door to tomorrow and the back door\n    to yesterday and settle down to here and now.\n\n                                                             --Anonymous\n\nA BIG OPPORTUNITY\n\n\nNobody laughed at Erich's screwball sarcasms and still I thought, \"Yes,\nperish his hysterical little gray head, but he's half right--Lili's got\nthe big thing now and she wants to serve it up to the rest of us on a\nplatter, only love doesn't cook and cut that way.\"\n\nThose weren't bad ideas she had about the Maintainer, though, especially\nthe one about the Ghostgirls doing the Introverting--it would explain\nwhy there couldn't be Introversion drill, the manual stuff about blue\nflashes being window-dressing, and something disappearing without\nmovement or transition is the sort of thing that might not catch the\nattention--and I guess they gave the others something to think about\ntoo, for there wasn't any follow-up to Erich's frantic sniping.\n\nBut I honestly didn't see where there was this big opportunity being\nstuck away in a gray sack in the Void and I began to wonder and I got\nthe strangest feeling and I said to myself, \"Hang onto your hat, Greta.\nIt's hope.\"\n\n\"The dreadful thing about being a Demon is that you have all time to\nrange through,\" Lili was saying with a smile. \"You can never shut the\nback door to yesterday or the front door to tomorrow and simply live in\nthe present. But now that's been done for us: the Door is shut, we need\nnever again rehash the past or the future. The Spiders and Snakes can\nnever find us, for who ever heard of a Place that was truly lost being\nrescued? And as those in the know have told me, Introversion is the end\nas far as those outside are concerned. So we're safe from the Spiders\nand Snakes, we need never be slaves or enemies again, and we have a\nPlace in which to live our new lives, the Place prepared for us from the\nbeginning.\"\n\nShe paused. \"Surely you understand what I mean? Sidney and Beauregard\nand Dr. Pyeshkov are the ones who explained it to me. The Place is a\nbalanced aquarium, just like the cosmos. No one knows how many ages of\nBig Time it has been in use, without a bit of new material being brought\nin--only luxuries and people--and not a bit of waste cast off. No one\nknows how many more ages it may not sustain life. I never heard of Minor\nMaintainers wearing out. We have all the future, all the security,\nanyone can hope for. We have a Place to live together.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nYou know, she was dead right and I realized that all the time I'd had\nthe conviction in the back of my mind that we were going to suffocate or\nsomething if we didn't get a Door open pretty quick. I should have known\ndifferently, if anybody should, because I'd once been in the Place\nwithout a Door for as long as a hundred sleeps during a foxhole stretch\nof the Change War and we'd had to start cycling our food and it had been\nokay.\n\nAnd then, because it is also the way my mind works, I started to picture\nin a flash the consequences of our living together all by ourselves like\nLili said.\n\nI began to pair people off; I couldn't help it. Let's see, four women,\nsix men, two ETs.\n\n\"Greta,\" I said, \"you're going to be Miss Polly Andry for sure. We'll\nhave a daily newspaper and folk-dancing classes, we'll shut the bar\nexcept evenings, Bruce'll keep a rhymed history of the Place.\"\n\nI even thought, though I knew this part was strictly silly, about\nschools and children. I wondered what Siddy's would look like, or my\nlittle commandant's. \"Don't go near the Void, dears.\" Of course that\nwould be specially hard on the two ETs, but Sevensee at least wasn't so\ndifferent and the genetics boys had made some wonderful advances and\nMaud ought to know about them and there were some amazing gadgets in\nSurgery when Doc sobered up. The patter of little hoofs ...\n\n\"My fiance spoke to you about carrying a peace message to the rest of\nthe cosmos,\" Lili added, \"and bringing an end to the Big Change, and\nhealing all the wounds that have been made in the Little Time.\"\n\nI looked at Bruce. His face was set and strained, as will happen to the\nbest of them when a girl starts talking about her man's business, and I\ndon't know why, but I said to myself, \"She's crucifying him, she's\nnailing him to his purpose as a woman will, even when there's not much\npoint to it, as now.\"\n\nAnd Lili went on, \"It was a wonderful thought, but now we cannot carry\nor send any message and I believe it is too late in any event for a\npeace message to do any good. The cosmos is too raveled by change, too\nfar gone. It will dissolve, fade, 'leave not a rack behind.' We're the\nsurvivors. The torch of existence has been put in our hands.\n\n\"We may already be all that's left in the cosmos, for have you thought\nthat the Change Winds may have died at their source? We may never reach\nanother cosmos, we may drift forever in the Void, but who of us has been\nIntroverted before and who knows what we can or cannot do? We're a seed\nfor a new future to grow from. Perhaps all doomed universes cast off\nseeds like this Place. It's a seed, it's an embryo, let it grow.\"\n\nShe looked swiftly at Bruce and then at Sid and she quoted, \"'Come, my\nfriends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world'.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI squeezed Sid's hand and I started to say something to him, but he\ndidn't know I was there; he was listening to Lili quote Tennyson with\nhis eyes entranced and his mouth open, as if he were imagining new\nthings to put into it--oh, Siddy!\n\nAnd then I saw the others were looking at her the same way. Ilhilihis\nwas seeing finer feather forests than long-dead Luna's grow. The\ngreenhouse child Maud ap-Ares Davies was stowing away on a starship\nbound for another galaxy, or thinking how different her life might have\nbeen, the children she might have had, if she'd stayed on the planets\nand out of the Change World. Even Erich looked as though he might be\nblitzing new universes, and Mark subduing them, for an eight-legged\n_Führer-imperator_. Beau was throbbing up a wider Mississippi in a\nbigger-than-life sidewheeler.\n\nEven I--well, I wasn't dreaming of a Greater Chicago. \"Let's not go\nhog-wild on this sort of thing,\" I told myself, but I did look up at the\nVoid and I got a shiver because I imagined it drawing away and the whole\nPlace starting to grow.\n\n\"I truly meant what I said about a seed,\" Lili went on slowly. \"I know,\nas you all do, that there are no children in the Change World, that\nthere cannot be, that we all become instantly sterile, that what they\ncall a curse is lifted from us girls and we are no longer in bondage to\nthe moon.\"\n\nShe was right, all right--if there's one thing that's been proved a\nmillion times in the Change World, it's that.\n\n\"But we are no longer in the Change World,\" Lili said softly, \"and its\nlimitations should no longer apply to us, including that one. I feel\ndeeply certain of it, but--\" she looked around slowly--\"we are four\nwomen here and I thought one of us might have a surer indication.\"\n\nMy eyes followed hers around like anybody's would. In fact, everybody\nwas looking around except Maud, and she had the silliest look of\nsurprise on her face and it stayed there, and then, very carefully, she\ngot down from the bar stool with her knitting. She looked at the\nhalf-finished pink bra with the long white needles stuck in it and her\neyes bugged bigger yet, as if she were expecting it to turn into a baby\nsweater right then and there. Then she walked across the Place to Lili\nand stood beside her. While she was walking, the look of surprise\nchanged to a quiet smile. The only other thing she did was throw her\nshoulders back a little.\n\nI was jealous of her for a second, but it was a double miracle for her,\nconsidering her age, and I couldn't grudge her that. And to tell the\ntruth, I was a little frightened, too. Even with Dave, I'd been bothered\nabout this business of having babies.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nYet I stood up with Siddy--I couldn't stop myself and I guess he\ncouldn't either--and hand in hand we walked to the control divan. Beau\nand Sevensee were there and Bruce, of course, and then, so help me,\nthose Soldiers to the death, Kaby and Mark, started over from the bar\nand I couldn't see anything in their eyes about the greater glory of\nCrete and Rome, but something, I think, about each other, and after a\nmoment Illy slowly detached himself from the piano and followed, lightly\ntrailing his tentacles on the floor.\n\nI couldn't exactly see him hoping for little Illies in this company,\nunless it was true what the jokes said about Lunans, but maybe he was\nbeing really disinterested and maybe he wasn't; maybe he was simply\nfiguring that Illy ought to be on the side with the biggest battalions.\n\nI heard dragging footsteps behind us and here came Doc from the Gallery,\ncarrying in his folded arms an abstract sculpture as big as a newborn\nbaby. It was an agglomeration of perfect shiny gray spheres the size of\ngolf balls, shaping up to something like a large brain, but with holes\nshowing through here and there. He held it out to us like an infant to\nbe admired and worked his lips and tongue as if he were trying very hard\nto say something, though not a word came out that you could understand,\nand I thought, \"Maxey Aleksevich may be speechless drunk and have all\nsorts of holes in his head, but he's got the right instincts, bless his\nsoulful little Russian heart.\"\n\nWe were all crowded around the control divan like a football team\nhuddling. The Peace Packers, it came to me. Sevensee would be fullback\nor center and Illy left end--what a receiver! The right number, too.\nErich was alone at the bar, but now even he--\"Oh, no, this can't be,\" I\nthought--even he came toward us. Then I saw that his face was working\nthe worst ever. He stopped halfway and managed to force a smile, but it\nwas the worst, too. \"That's my little commandant,\" I thought, \"no team\nspirit.\"\n\n\"So now Lili and Bruce--yes, and _Grossmutterchen_ Maud--have their\nlittle nest,\" he said, and he wouldn't have had to push his voice very\nhard to get a screech. \"But what are the rest of us supposed to\nbe--cowbirds?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nHe crooked his neck and flapped his hands and croaked, \"Cuc-koo!\nCuc-koo!\" And I said to myself, \"I often thought you were crazy, boy,\nbut now I know.\"\n\n\"_Teufelsdreck!_--yes, Devil's dirt!--but you all seem to be infected\nwith this dream of children. Can't you see that the Change World is the\nnatural and proper end of evolution?--a period of enjoyment and\nmeasuring, an ultimate working out of things, which women call\ndestruction--'Help, I'm being raped!' 'Oh, what are they doing to my\nchildren?'--but which men know as fulfillment.\n\n\"You're given good parts in _Götterdämmerung_ and you go up to the\nauthor and tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, Herr Wagner, but\nthis Twilight of the Gods is just a bit morbid. Why don't you write an\nopera for me about the little ones, the dear little blue-eyed\ncurly-tops? A plot? Oh, boy meets girl and they settle down to breed,\nsomething like that.'\n\n\"Devil's dirt doubled and damned! Have you thought what life will\nbe like without a Door to go out of to find freedom and adventure,\nto measure your courage and keenness? Do you want to grow long gray\nbeards hobbling around this asteroid turned inside out? Putter around\nindoors to the end of your days, mooning about little baby\ncosmoses?--incidentally, with a live bomb for company. The cave, the\nwomb, the little gray home in the nest--is that what you want? It'll\ngrow? Oh, yes, like the city engulfing the wild wood, a proliferation\nof _Kinder_, _Kirche_, _Küche_--I should live so long!\n\n\"Women!--how I hate their bright eyes as they look at me from the\nfireside, bent-shouldered, rocking, deeply happy to be old, and say,\n'He's getting weak, he's giving out, soon I'll have to put him to bed\nand do the simplest things for him.' Your filthy Triple Goddess, Kaby,\nthe birther, bride, and burier of man! Woman, the enfeebler, the\nfetterer, the crippler! Woman!--and the curly-headed little cancers she\nwants!\"\n\nHe lurched toward us, pointing at Lili. \"I never knew one who didn't\nwant to cripple a man if you gave her the chance. Cripple him, swaddle\nhim, clip his wings, grind him to sausage to mold another man, hers, a\ndoll man. You hid the Maintainer, you little smother-hen, so you could\nhave your nest and your Brucie!\"\n\nHe stopped, gasping, and I expected someone to bop him one on the\nschnozzle, and I think he did, too. I turned to Bruce and he was\nlooking, I don't know how, sorry, guilty, anxious, angry, shaken,\ninspired, all at once, and I wished people sometimes had simple suburban\nreactions like magazine stories.\n\nThen Erich made the mistake, if it was one, of turning toward Bruce and\nslowly staggering toward him, pawing the air with his hands as if he\nwere going to collapse into his arms, and saying, \"Don't let them get\nyou, Bruce. Don't let them tie you down. Don't let them clip you--your\nwords or your deeds. You're a Soldier. Even when you talked about a\npeace message, you talked about doing some smashing of your own. No\nmatter what you think and feel, Bruce, no matter how much lying you do\nand how much you hide, you're really not on their side.\"\n\nThat did it.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIt didn't come soon enough or, I think, in the right spirit to please\nme, but I will say it for Bruce that he didn't muck it up by tipping or\nsoftening his punch. He took one step forward and his shoulders spun and\nhis fist connected sweet and clean.\n\nAs he did it, he said only one word, \"Loki!\" and darn if that didn't\nswitch me back to a campfire in the Indiana Dunes and my mother telling\nme out of the Elder Saga about the malicious, sneering, all-spoiling\nNorse god and how, when the other gods came to trap him in his hideaway\nby the river, he was on the point of finishing knotting a mysterious net\nbig enough, I had imagined, to snare the whole universe, and that if\nthey'd come a minute later, he would have.\n\nErich was stretched on the floor, his head hitched up, rubbing his jaw\nand glaring at Bruce. Mark, who was standing beside me, moved a little\nand I thought he was going to do something, maybe even clobber Bruce in\nthe old spirit of you can't do that to my buddy, but he just shook his\nhead and said, \"_Omnia vincit amor._\" I nudged him and said, \"Meaning?\"\nand he said, \"Love licks everything.\"\n\nI'd never have expected it from a Roman, but he was half right at any\nrate. Lili had her victory: Bruce clearing the field for the marriage by\nlaying out the woman-hating boy friend who would be trying to get him to\ngo out nights. At that moment, I think Bruce wanted Lili and a life with\nher more than he wanted to reform the Change World. Sure, us women have\nour little victories--until the legions come or the Little Corporal\ndraws up his artillery or the Panzers roar down the road.\n\nErich scrambled to his feet and stood there in a half-slump,\nhalf-crouch, still rubbing his jaw and glaring at Bruce over his hand,\nbut making no move to continue the fight, and I studied his face and\nsaid to myself, \"If he can get a gun, he's going to shoot himself, I\nknow.\"\n\nBruce started to say something and hesitated, like I would have in his\nshoes, and just then Doc got one of his unpredictable inspirations and\nwent weaving out toward Erich, holding out the sculpture and making\ndeaf-and-dumb noises like he had to us. Erich looked at him as if he\nwere going to kill him, and then grabbed the sculpture and swung it up\nover his head and smashed it down on the floor, and for a wonder, it\ndidn't shatter. It just skidded along in one piece and stopped inches\nfrom my feet.\n\nThat thing not breaking must have been the last straw for Erich. I swear\nI could see the red surge up through his eyes toward his brain. He swung\naround into the Stores sector and ran the few steps between him and the\nbronze bomb chest.\n\nEverything got very slow motion for me, though I didn't do any moving.\nAlmost every man started out after Erich. Bruce didn't, though, and\nSiddy turned back after the first surge forward, while Illy squunched\ndown for a leap, and it was between Sevensee's hairy shanks and Beau's\nscissoring white pants that I saw that under-the-microscope circle of\ndeath's heads and watched Erich's finger go down on them in the order\nKaby had given: one, three, five, six, two, four, seven. I was able to\npray seven distinct times that he'd make a mistake.\n\nHe straightened up. Illy landed by the box like a huge silver spider and\nhis tentacles whipped futilely across its top. The others surged to a\nfrightened halt around them.\n\nErich's chest was heaving, but his voice was cool and collected as he\nsaid, \"You mentioned something about our having a future, Miss Foster.\nNow you can make that more specific. Unless we get back to the cosmos\nand dump this box, or find a Spider A-tech, or manage to call\nheadquarters for guidance on disarming the bomb, we have a future\nexactly thirty minutes long.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 13\n\n    But whence he was, or of what wombe ybore,\n    Of beasts, or of the earth, I have not red:\n    But certes was with milke of wolves and tygres fed.\n\n                                              --Spenser\n\nTHE TIGER IS LOOSE\n\n\nI guess when they really push the button or throw the switch or spring\nthe trap or focus the beam or what have you, you don't faint or go crazy\nor anything else convenient. I didn't. Everything, everybody, every move\nthat was made, every word that was spoken, was painfully real to me,\nlike a hand twisting and squeezing things deep inside me, and I saw\nevery least detail spotlighted and magnified like I had the seven\nskulls.\n\nErich was standing beyond the bomb chest; little smiles were ruffling\nhis lips. I'd never seen him look so sharp. Illy was beside him, but not\non his side, you understand. Mark, Sevensee and Beau were around the\nchest to the nearer side. Beau had dropped to a knee and was scanning\nthe chest minutely, terror-under-control making him bend his head a\nlittle closer than he needed to for clear vision, but with his hands\nlocked together behind his back, I guess to restrain the impulse to push\nany and everything that looked like a disarming button.\n\nDoc was sprawled face down on the nearest couch, out like a light, I\nsuppose.\n\nUs four girls were still by the control divan. With Kaby, that surprised\nme, because she didn't look scared or frozen, but almost as intensely\nalive as Erich.\n\nSid had turned back, as I'd said, and had one hand stretched out toward\nbut not touching the Minor Maintainer, and a look on his beardy face as\nif he were calling down death and destruction on every boozy rogue who\nhad ever gone up from King's Lynn to Cambridge and London, and I\nrealized why: if he'd thought of the Minor Maintainer a second sooner,\nhe could have pinned Erich down with heavy gravity before he could touch\nthe buttons.\n\nBruce was resting one hand on the head of the control divan and was\nlooking toward the group around the chest, toward Erich, I think, as if\nErich had done something rather wonderful for him, though I can't\nimagine myself being tickled at being included in anybody's suicide\nsurprise party. Bruce looked altogether too dreamy, Brahma blast him,\nfor someone who must have the same steel-spiked thought in his head that\nI know darn well the rest of us had: that in twenty-nine minutes or so,\nthe Place would be a sun in a bag.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nErich was the first to get down to business, as I'd have laid any odds\nhe would be. He had the jump on us and he wasn't going to lose it.\n\n\"Well, when are you going to start getting Lili to tell us where she hid\nthe Maintainer? It has to be her--she was too certain it was gone\nforever when she talked. And Bruce must have seen from the bar who took\nthe Maintainer, and who would he cover up for but his girl?\"\n\nThere he was plagiarizing my ideas, but I guess I was willing to sign\nthem over to him in full if he got us the right pail of water for that\ntime-bomb.\n\nHe glanced at his wrist. \"According to my Caller, you have twenty-nine\nand a half minutes, including the time it will take to get a Door or\ncontact headquarters. When are you going to get busy on the girl?\"\n\nBruce laughed a little--deprecatingly, so help me--and started toward\nhim. \"Look here, old man,\" he said, \"there's no need to trouble Lili, or\nto fuss with headquarters, even if you could. Really not at all. Not to\nmention that your surmises are quite unfounded, old chap, and I'm a bit\nsurprised at your advancing them. But that's quite all right because, as\nit happens, I'm an atomics technician and I even worked on that very\nbomb. To disarm it, you just have to fiddle a bit with some of the\nankhs, those hoopy little crosses. Here, let me--\"\n\nAllah il allah, but it must have struck everybody as it did me as being\njust too incredible an assertion, too bloody British a bare-faced bluff,\nfor Erich didn't have to say a word; Mark and Sevensee grabbed Bruce by\nthe arms, one on each side, as he stooped toward the bronze chest, and\nthey weren't gentle about it. Then Erich spoke.\n\n\"Oh, no, Bruce. Very sporting of you to try to cover up for your girl\nfriend, but we aren't going to let ourselves be blown to stripped atoms\ntwenty-eight minutes too soon while you monkey with the buttons, the\nvery thing Benson-Carter warned against, and pray for a guesswork\nmiracle. It's too thin, Bruce, when you come from 1917 and haven't been\non the Big Time for a hundred sleeps and were calling for an A-tech\nyourself a few hours ago. Much too thin. Bruce, something is going to\nhappen that I'm afraid you won't like, but you're going to have to put\nup with it. That is, unless Miss Foster decides to be cooperative.\"\n\n\"I say, you fellows, let me go,\" Bruce demanded, struggling\nexperimentally. \"I know it's a bit thick to swallow and I did give you\nthe wrong impression calling for an A-tech, but I just wanted to capture\nyour attention then; I didn't want to have to work on the bomb. Really,\nErich, would they have ordered Benson-Carter to pick us up unless one of\nus were an A-tech? They'd be sure to include one in the bally\noperation.\"\n\n\"When they're using patchwork tactics?\" Erich grinningly quoted back at\nhim.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nKaby spoke up beside me and said, \"Benson-Carter was a magician of\nmatter and he was going on the operation disguised as an old woman. We\nhave the cloak and hood with the other garments,\" and I wondered how\nthis cold fish of a she-officer could be the same girl who was giving\nMark slurpy looks not ten minutes ago.\n\n\"Well?\" Erich asked, glancing at his Caller and then swinging his eyes\naround at us as if there must be some of the old _Wehrmacht_ iron\nsomewhere. We all found ourselves looking at Lili and she was looking so\nsharp herself, so ready to jump and so at bay, that it was all _I_\nneeded, at any rate, to make Erich's theory about the Maintainer a\nrock-bottom certainty.\n\nBruce must have realized the way our minds were working, for he started\nto struggle in earnest and at the same time called, \"For God's sake,\ndon't do anything to Lili! Let me loose, you idiots! Everything's true I\ntold you--I can save you from that bomb. Sevensee, you took my side\nagainst the Spiders; you've nothing to lose. Sid, you're an Englishman.\nBeau, you're a gentleman and you love her, too--for God's sake, stop\nthem!\"\n\nBeau glanced up over his shoulder at Bruce and the others surging around\nclose to his ankles and he had on his poker face. Sid I could tell was\nonce more going through the purgatory of decision. Beau reached his own\ndecision first and I'll say it for him that he acted on it fast and\nintelligently. Right from his kneeling position and before he'd even\nturned his head quite back, he jumped Erich.\n\nBut other things in this cosmos besides Man can pick sides and act fast.\nIlly landed on Beau midway and whipped his tentacles around him tight\nand they went wobbling around like a drunken white-and-silver barber\npole. Beau got his hands each around a tentacle, and at the same time\nhis face began to get purple, and I winced at what they were both going\nthrough.\n\nMaybe Sevensee had a hoof in Sid's purgatory, because Bruce shook loose\nfrom the satyr and tried to knock out Mark, but the Roman twisted his\narm and kept him from getting in a good punch.\n\nErich didn't make a move to mix into either fight, which is my little\ncommandant all over. Using his fists on anybody but me is beneath him.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThen Sid made his choice, but there was no way for me to tell what it\nwas, for, as he reached for the Minor Maintainer, Kaby contemptuously\nsnatched it away from his hands and gave him a knee in the belly that\ndoubled me up in sympathy and sent him sprawling on his knees toward the\nfighters. On the return, Kaby gave Lili, who'd started to grab too, an\neffortless backhand smash that set her down on the divan.\n\nErich's face lit up like an electric sign and he kept his eyes fixed on\nKaby.\n\nShe crouched a little, carrying her weight on the balls of her feet and\nfirmly cradling the Minor Maintainer in her left arm, like a basketball\ncaptain planning an offensive. Then she waved her free hand decisively\nto the right. I didn't get it, but Erich did and Mark too, for Erich\njumped for the Refresher sector and Mark let go of Bruce and followed\nhim, ducking around Sevensee's arms, who was coming back into the fight\non which side I don't know. Illy un-whipped from Beau and copied Erich\nand Mark with one big spring.\n\nThen Kaby twisted a dial as far as it would go and Bruce, Beau, Sevensee\nand poor Siddy were slammed down and pinned to the floor by about eight\ngravities.\n\nIt should have been lighter near us--I hoped it was, but you couldn't\ntell from watching Siddy; he went flat on his face, spread-eagled, one\nhand stretched toward me so close, I could have touched it (but not let\ngo!), and his mouth was open against the floor and he was gasping\nthrough a corner of it and I could see his spine trying to sink through\nhis belly. Bruce just managed to get his head and one shoulder up a bit,\nand they all made me think of a Dore illustration of the _Inferno_ where\nthe cream of the damned are frozen up to their necks in ice in the\ninnermost circle of Hell.\n\nThe gravity didn't catch me, although I could feel it in my left arm. I\nwas mostly in the Refresher sector, but I dropped down flat too, partly\nout of a crazy compassion I have, but mostly because I didn't want to\ntake a chance of having Kaby knock me down.\n\nErich, Mark and Illy had got clear and they headed toward us. Maud\npicked the moment to make her play; she hadn't much choice of times, if\nshe wanted to make one. The Old Girl was looking it for once, but I\nguess the thought of her miracle must have survived alongside the fear\nof sacked sun and must have meant a lot to her, for she launched out\nfast, all set to straight-arm Kaby into the heavy gravity and grab the\nMinor Maintainer with the other hand.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 14\n\n    Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.\n\n                                       --Webster\n\n\"NOW WILL YOU TALK?\"\n\n\nCretans have eyes under their back hair, or let's face it, Entertainers\naren't Soldiers. Kaby weaved to one side and flicked a helpful hand and\npoor old Maud went where she'd been going to send Kaby. It sickened me\nto see the gravity take hold and yank her down.\n\nI could have jumped up and made it four in a row for Kaby, but I'm not a\nbit brave when things like my life are at stake.\n\nLili was starting to get up, acting a little dazed. Kaby gently pushed\nher down again and quietly said, \"Where is it?\" and then hauled off and\nslapped her across the face. What got me was the matter-of-fact way Kaby\ndid it. I can understand somebody getting mad and socking someone, or\neven deliberately working up a rage so as to be able to do something\nnasty, but this cold-blooded way turns my stomach.\n\nLili looked as if half her face were about to start bleeding, but she\ndidn't look dazed any more and her jaw set. Kaby grabbed Lili's pearl\nnecklace and twisted it around her neck and it broke and the pearls went\nbouncing around like ping-pong balls, so Kaby yanked down Lili's gray\nsilk bandeau until it was around the neck and tightened that. Lili\nstarted to choke through her tight-pressed lips. Erich, Mark and Illy\nhad come up and crowded around, but they seemed to be content with the\njob Kaby was doing.\n\n\"Listen, slut,\" she said, \"we have no time. You have a healing room in\nthis place. I can work the things.\"\n\n\"Here it comes,\" I thought, wishing I could faint. On top of everything,\non top of death even, they had to drag in the nightmare personally\nstylized for me, the horror with my name on it. I wasn't going to be\nallowed to blow up peacefully. They weren't satisfied with an A-bomb.\nThey had to write my private hell into the script.\n\n\"There is a thing called an Invertor,\" Kaby said exactly as I'd known\nshe would, but as I didn't really hear it just then--a mental split I'll\nexplain in a moment. \"It opens you up so they can cure your insides\nwithout cutting your skin or making you bleed anywhere. It turns the big\nparts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin--your\neyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it--becoming the lining of a little hole\nthat's half-filled with your hair.\n\n\"Meantime, your insides are exposed for whatever the healer wants to do\nto them. You live for a while on the air inside the hole. First the\nhealer gives you an air that makes you sleep, or you go mad in about\nfifty heartbeats. We'll see what ten heartbeats do to you without the\nsleepy air. Now will you talk?\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI hadn't been listening to her, though, not the real me, or I'd have\ngone mad without getting the treatment. I once heard Doc say your liver\nis more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, because\nalthough you live with your liver all your life, you never see it or\nlearn to point to it instinctively, and the thought of someone messing\naround with that intimate yet unknown part of you is just too awful.\n\nI knew I had to do something quick. Hell, at the first hint of\nIntroversion, before Kaby had even named it, Illy had winced so that his\ntentacles were all drawn up like fat feather-sausages. Erich had looked\nat him questioningly, but that lousy Looney had un-endeared himself to\nme by squeaking, \"Don't mind me, I'm just sensitive. Get on with the\ngirl. Make her tell.\"\n\nYes, I knew I had to do something, and here on the floor that meant\nthinking hard and in high gear about something else. The screwball\nsculpture Erich had tried to smash was a foot from my nose and I saw a\nfaint trail of white stuff where it had skidded. I reached out and\ntouched the trail; it was finely gritty, like powdered glass. I tipped\nup the sculpture and the part on which it had skidded wasn't marred at\nall, not even dulled; the gray spheres were as glisteningly bright as\never. So I knew the trail was diamond dust rubbed off the diamonds in\nthe floor by something even harder.\n\nThat told me the sculpture was something special and maybe Doc had had a\nreal idea in his pickled brain when he'd been pushing the thing at all\nof us and trying to tell us something. He hadn't managed to say anything\nthen, but he had earlier when he'd been going to tell us what to do\nabout the bomb, and maybe there was a connection.\n\nI twisted my memory hard and let it spring back and I got \"Inversh ...\nbosh ...\" Bosh, indeed! Bosh and inverse bosh to all boozers, Russki or\notherwise.\n\nSo I quick tried the memory trick again and this time I got \"glovsh\" and\nthen I grasped and almost sneezed on diamond dust as I watched the\npieces fit themselves together in my mind like a speeded-up movie reel.\n\nIt all hung on that black right-hand hussar's glove Lili had produced\nfor Bruce. Only she couldn't have found it in Stores, because we'd\nsearched every fractional pigeonhole later on and there hadn't been any\ngloves there, not even the left-hand mate there would have been. Also,\nBruce had had two left-hand gloves to start with, and we had been\nthrough the whole Place with a fine-tooth comb, and there had been only\nthe two black gloves on the floor where Bruce had kicked them off the\nbar--those two and those two only, the left-hand glove he'd brought from\noutside and the right-hand glove Lili had produced for him.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nSo a left-hand glove had disappeared--the last I'd seen of it, Lili had\nbeen putting it on her tray--and a right-hand glove had appeared. Which\ncould only add up to one thing: Lili had turned the left-hand glove into\nan identical right. She couldn't have done it by turning it inside out\nthe ordinary way, because the lining was different.\n\nBut as I knew only too sickeningly well, there was an extraordinary way\nto turn things inside out, things like human beings. You merely had to\nput them on the Invertor in Surgery and flick the switch for full\nInversion.\n\nOr you could flick it for partial Inversion and turn something into a\nperfect three-dimensional mirror image of itself, just what a right-hand\nglove is of a left. Rotation through the fourth dimension, the science\nboys call it; I've heard of it being used in surgery on the highly\nasymmetric Martians, and even to give a socially impeccable right hand\nto a man who'd lost one, by turning an amputated right arm into an\namputated left.\n\nOrdinarily, nothing but live things are ever Inverted in Surgery and you\nwouldn't think of doing it to an inanimate object, especially in a Place\nwhere the Doc's a drunk and the Surgery hasn't been used for hundreds of\nsleeps.\n\nBut when you've just fallen in love, you think of wonderful crazy things\nto do for people. Drunk with love, Lili had taken Bruce's extra\nleft-hand glove into Surgery, partially Inverted it, and got a\nright-hand glove to give him.\n\nWhat Doc had been trying to say with his \"Inversh ... bosh ...\" was\n\"Invert the box,\" meaning we should put the bronze chest through full\nInversion to get at the bomb inside to disarm it. Doc too had got the\nidea from Lili's trick with the glove. What an inside-out tactical\natomic bomb would look like, I could not imagine and did not\nparticularly care to see. I might have to, though, I realized.\n\nBut the fast-motion film was still running in my head. Later on, Lili\nhad decided like I had that her lover was going to lose out in his plea\nfor mutiny unless she could give him a really captive audience--and\nmaybe, even then, she had been figuring on creating the nest for Bruce's\nchicks and ... all those other things we'd believed in for a while. So\nshe'd taken the Major Maintainer and remembered the glove, and not many\nseconds later, she had set down on a shelf of the Art Gallery an object\nthat no one would think of questioning--except someone who knew the\nGallery by heart.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI looked at the abstract sculpture a foot from my nose, at the clustered\ngray spheres the size of golf balls. I had known that the inside of the\nMaintainer was made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, but\nI hadn't realized they were quite _that_ big.\n\nI said to myself, \"Greta, this is going to give you a major psychosis,\nbut you're the one who has to do it, because no one is going to listen\nto your deductions when they're all practically living on negative time\nalready.\"\n\nI got up as quietly as if I were getting out of a bed I shouldn't have\nbeen in--there are some things Entertainers are good at--and Kaby was\njust saying \"you go mad in about fifty heartbeats.\" Everybody on their\nfeet was looking at Lili. Sid seemed to have moved, but I had no time\nfor him except to hope he hadn't done anything that might attract\nattention to me.\n\nI stepped out of my shoes and walked rapidly to Surgery--there's one\ngood thing about this hardest floor anywhere, it doesn't creak. I walked\nthrough the Surgery screen that is like a wall of opaque, odorless\ncigarette smoke and I concentrated on remembering my snafued nurse's\ntraining, and before I had time to panic, I had the sculpture positioned\non the gleaming table of the Invertor.\n\nI froze for a moment when I reached for the Inversion switch, thinking\nof the other time and trying to remember what it had been that bothered\nme so much about an inside-out brain being bigger and not having eyes,\nbut then I either thumbed my nose at my nightmare or kissed my sanity\ngood-by, I don't know which, and twisted the switch all the way over,\nand there was the Major Maintainer winking blue about three times a\nsecond as nice as you could want it.\n\nIt must have been working as sweet and steady as ever, all the time it\nwas Inverted, except that, being inside out, it had hocused the\ndirection finders.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 15\n\n    black legged spiders\n    with red hearts of hell\n\n                  --marquis\n\nLORD SPIDER\n\n\n\"Jesu!\" I turned and Sid's face was sticking through the screen like a\ntinted bas-relief hanging on a gray wall and I got the impression he had\npeered unexpectedly through a slit in an arras into Queen Elizabeth's\nbedroom.\n\nHe didn't have any time to linger on the sensation, even if he'd wanted\nto, for an elbow with a copper band thrust through the screen and dug\nhis ribs and Kaby marched Lili in by the neck. Erich, Mark and Illy were\nright behind. They caught the blue flashes and stopped dead, staring at\nthe long-lost. Erich spared me one look which seemed to say, so you did\nit, not that it matters. Then he stepped forward and picked it up and\nheld it solidly to his left side in the double right-angle made by\nfingers, forearm and chest, and reached for the Introversion switch with\na look on his face as if he were opening a fifth of whisky.\n\nThe blue light died and Change Winds hit me like a stiff drink that had\nbeen a long, long time in coming, like a hot trumpet note out of\nnowhere.\n\nI felt the changing pasts blowing through me, and the uncertainties\nwhistling past, and ice-stiff reality softening with all its duties and\nnecessities, and the little memories shredding away and dancing off like\nautumn leaves, leaving maybe not even ghosts behind, and all the crazy\nmoods like Mardi Gras dancers pouring down an evening street, and\nsomething inside me had the nerve to say it didn't care whether Greta\nForzane's death was riding in those Winds because they felt so good.\n\nI could tell it was hitting the others the same way. Even battered,\ntight-lipped Lili seemed to be saying, you're making me drink the stuff\nand I hate you for it, but I do love it. I guess we'd all had the worry\nthat even finding and Extroverting the Maintainer wouldn't put us back\nin touch with the cosmos and give us those Winds we hate and love.\n\nThe thing that cut through to us as we stood there glowing was not the\nthought of the bomb, though that would have come in a few seconds more,\nbut Sid's voice. He was still standing in the screen, except that now\nhis face was out the other side and we could just see parts of his\ngray-doubleted back, but, of course, his \"Jesu!\" came through the screen\nas if it weren't there.\n\nAt first I couldn't figure out who he could be talking to, but I swear I\nnever heard his voice so courtly obsequious before, so strong and yet so\nfilled with awe and an under-note of, yes, sheer terror.\n\n\"Lord, I am filled from top to toe with confusion that you should so\nhonor my poor Place,\" he said. \"Poor say I and mine, when I mean that I\nhave ever busked it faithfully for you, not dreaming that you would ever\ncondescend ... yet knowing that your eye was certes ever upon me ...\nthough I am but as a poor pinch of dust adrift between the suns ... I\nabase myself. Prithee, how may I serve thee, sir? I know not e'en how\nmost suitably to address thee, Lord ... King ... Emperor Spider!\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI felt like I was getting very small, but not a bit less visible, worse\nluck, and even with the Change Winds inside me to give me courage, I\nthought this was really too much, coming on top of everything else; it\nwas simply unfair.\n\nAt the same time, I realized it was to be expected that the big bosses\nwould have been watching us with their unblinking beady black eyes ever\nsince we had Introverted waiting to pounce if we should ever come out of\nit. I tried to picture what was on the other side of the screen and I\ndidn't like the assignment.\n\nBut in spite of being petrified, I had a hard time not giggling, like\nthe zany at graduation exercises, at the way the other ones in Surgery\nwere taking it.\n\nI mean the Soldiers. They each stiffened up like they had the old ramrod\ninside them, and their faces got that important look, and they glanced\nat each other and the floor without lowering their heads, as if they\nwere measuring the distance between their feet and mentally chalking\nalternate sets of footprints to step into. The way Erich and Kaby held\nthe Major and Minor Maintainers became formal; the way they checked\ntheir Callers and nodded reassuringly was positively esoteric. Even Illy\nsomehow managed to look as if he were on parade.\n\nThen from beyond the screen came what was, under the circumstances, the\nworst noise I've ever heard, a seemingly wordless distant-sounding\nhowling and wailing, with a note of menace that made me shake, although\nit also had a nasty familiarity about it I couldn't place. Sid's voice\nbroke into it, loud, fast and frightened.\n\n\"Your pardon, Lord, I did not think ... certes, the gravity ... I'll\nattend to it on the instant.\" He whipped a hand and half a head back\nthrough the screen, but without looking back and snapped his fingers,\nand before I could blink, Kaby had put the Minor Maintainer in his hand.\n\nSid went completely out of sight then and the howling stopped, and I\nthought that if that was the way a Lord Spider expressed his annoyance\nat being subjected to incorrect gravity, I hoped the bosses wouldn't\nstart any conversations with me.\n\nErich pursed his lips and threw the other Soldiers a nod and the four of\nthem marched through the screen as if they'd drilled a lifetime for this\nmoment. I had the wild idea that Erich might give me his arm, but he\nstrode past me as if I were ... an Entertainer.\n\nI hesitated a moment then, but I had to see what was happening outside,\neven if I got eaten up for it. Besides, I had a bit of the thought that\nif these formalities went on much longer, even a Lord Spider was going\nto discover just how immune he was to confined atomic blast.\n\nI walked through the screen with Lili beside me.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe Soldiers had stopped a few feet in front of it. I looked around\nahead for whatever it was going to turn out to be, prepared to drop a\ncurtsy or whatever else, bar nothing, that seemed expected of me.\n\nI had a hard time spotting the beast. Some of the others seemed to be\nhaving trouble too. I saw Doc weaving around foolishly by the control\ndivan, and Bruce and Beau and Sevensee and Maud on their feet beyond it,\nand I wondered whether we were dealing with an invisible monster; ought\nto be easy enough for the bosses to turn a simple trick like\ninvisibility.\n\nThen I looked sharply left where everyone else, even glassy-eyed Doc,\nwas coming to look, into the Door sector, only there wasn't any monster\nthere or even a Door, but just Siddy holding the Minor Maintainer and\ngrinning like when he is threatening to tickle me, only more fiendishly.\n\n\"Not a move, masters,\" he cried, his eyes dancing, \"or I'll pin the pack\nof you down, marry and amen I will. It is my firm purpose to see the\nPlace blasted before I let this instrument out of my hands again.\"\n\nMy first thought was, \"'Sblood but Siddy is a real actor! I don't care\nif he didn't study under anyone later than Burbage, that just proves how\ngood Burbage is.\"\n\nSid had convinced us not only that the real Spiders had arrived, but\nearlier that the gravity in the edge of Stores had been a lot heavier\nthan it actually was. He completely fooled all those Soldiers, including\nmy swelled-headed victorious little commandant, and I kind of filed away\nthe timing of that business of reaching out the hand and snapping the\nfingers without looking, it was so good.\n\n\"Beauregard!\" Sid called. \"Get to the Major Maintainer and call\nheadquarters. But don't come through Door, marry go by Refresher. I'll\nnot trust a single Demon of you in this sector with me until much more\nhas been shown and settled.\"\n\n\"Siddy, you're wonderful,\" I said, starting toward him. \"As soon as I\ngot the Maintainer unsnarled and looked around and saw your sweet old\nface--\"\n\n\"Back, tricksy trull! Not the breadth of one scarlet toenail nearer me,\nyou Queen of Sleights and High Priestess of Deception!\" he bellowed.\n\"You least of all do I trust. Why you hid the Maintainer, I know not,\n'faith, but later you'll discover the truth to me or I'll have your\ngizzard.\"\n\nI could see there was going to have to be a little explaining.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nDoc, touched off, I guess, by Sid waving his hand at me, threw back his\nhead and let off one of those shuddery Siberian wolf-howls he does so\nblamed well. Sid waved toward him sharply and he shut up, beaming\ntoothily, but at least I knew who was responsible for the Spider wail of\ndispleasure that Sid had either called for or more likely got as a gift\nof the gods and used in his act.\n\nBeau came circling around fast and Erich shoved the Major Maintainer\ninto his hands without making any fuss. The four Soldiers were looking\npretty glum after losing their grand review.\n\nBeau dumped some junk off one of the Art Gallery's sturdy taborets and\nset the Major Maintainer on it carefully but fast, and quickly knelt in\nfront of it and whipped on some earphones and started to tune. The way\nhe did it snatched away from me my inward glory at my big Inversion\nbrainwave so fast, I might never have had it, and there was nothing in\nmy mind again but the bronze bomb chest.\n\nI wondered if I should suggest Inverting the thing, but I said to\nmyself, \"Uh-uh, Greta, you got no diploma to show them and there\nprobably isn't time to try two things, anyway.\"\n\nThen Erich for once did something I wanted him to, though I didn't care\nfor its effect on my nerves, by looking at his Caller and saying\nquietly, \"Nine minutes to go, if Place time and cosmic time are\nsynching.\"\n\nBeau was steady as a rock and working adjustments so fine that I\ncouldn't even see his fingers move.\n\nThen, at the other end of the Place, Bruce took a few steps toward us.\nSevensee and Maud followed a bit behind him. I remembered Bruce was\nanother of our nuts with a private program for blowing up the place.\n\n\"Sidney,\" he called, and then, when he'd got Sid's attention, \"Remember,\nSidney, you and I both came down to London from Peterhouse.\"\n\nI didn't get it. Then Bruce looked toward Erich with a devil-may-care\nchallenge and toward Lili as if he were asking her forgiveness for\nsomething. I couldn't read her expression; the bruises were blue on her\nthroat and her cheek was puffy.\n\nThen Bruce once more shot Erich that look of challenge and he spun and\ngrabbed Sevensee by a wrist and stuck out a foot--even half-horses\naren't too sharp about infighting, I guess, and the satyr had every\nright to feel at least as confused as I felt--and sent him stumbling\ninto Maud, and the two of them tumbled to the floor in a jumble of hairy\nlegs and pearl-gray frock. Bruce raced to the bomb chest.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nMost of us yelled, \"Stop him, Sid, pin him down,\" or something like\nthat--I know I did because I was suddenly sure that he'd been asking\nLili's pardon for blowing the two of them up--and all the rest of us\ntoo, the love-blinded stinker.\n\nSid had been watching him all the time and now he lifted his hand to the\nMinor Maintainer, but then he didn't touch any of the dials, just\nwatched and waited, and I thought, \"Shaitan shave us! Does Siddy want in\non death, too? Ain't he satisfied with all he knows about life?\"\n\nBruce had knelt and was twisting some things on the front of the chest,\nand it was all as bright as if he were under a bank of Klieg lights, and\nI was telling myself I wouldn't know anything when the fireball fired,\nand not believing it, and Sevensee and Maud had got unscrambled and were\nstarting for Bruce, and the rest of us were yelling at Sid, except that\nErich was just looking at Bruce very happily, and Sid was still not\ndoing anything, and it was unbearable except just then I felt the little\narteries start to burst in my brain like a string of fire-crackers and\nthe old aorta pop, and for good measure, a couple of valves come\nunhinged in my ticker, and I was thinking, \"Well, now I know what it's\nlike to die of heart failure and high blood pressure,\" and having a last\nquiet smile at having cheated the bomb, when Bruce jumped up and back\nfrom the chest.\n\n\"That does it!\" he announced cheerily. \"She's as safe as the Bank of\nEngland.\"\n\nSevensee and Maud stopped themselves just short of knocking him down and\nI said to myself, \"Hey, let's get a move on! I thought heart attacks\nwere fast.\"\n\nBefore anyone else could speak, Beau did. He had turned around from the\nMajor Maintainer and pulled aside one of the earphones.\n\n\"I got headquarters,\" he said crisply. \"They told me how to disarm the\nbomb--I merely said I thought we ought to know. What did you do, sir?\"\nhe called to Bruce.\n\n\"There's a row of four ankhs just below the lock. The first to your left\nyou give a quarter turn to the right, the second a quarter turn to the\nleft, same for the fourth, and you don't touch the third.\"\n\n\"That is it, sir,\" Beau confirmed.\n\nThe long silence was too much for me; I guess I must have the shortest\nspan for unspoken relief going. I drew some nourishment out of my\nrestored arteries into my brain cells and yelled, \"Siddy, I know I'm a\ntricksy trull and the High Vixen of all Foxes, but what the Hell is\nPeterhouse?\"\n\n\"The oldest college at Cambridge,\" he told me rather coolly.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER 16\n\n    \"Familiar with infinite universe sheafs and open-ended postulate\n    systems?--the notion that everything is possible--and I mean\n    everything--and everything has happened. _Everything._\"\n\n                                                          --Heinlein\n\nTHE POSSIBILITY-BINDERS\n\n\nAn hour later, I was nursing a weak highball and a black eye in the\nsleepy-time darkness on the couch farthest from the piano, half watching\nthe highlighted party going on around it and the bar, while the Place\nwaited for rendezvous with Egypt and the Battle of Alexandria.\n\nSid had swept all our outstanding problems into one big bundle and,\nsince his hand held the joker of the Minor Maintainer, he had settled\nthem all as high-handedly as if they'd been those of a bunch of\nschoolkids.\n\nIt amounted to this:\n\nWe'd been Introverted when most of the damning things had happened, so\npresumably only we knew about them, and we were all in so deep one way\nor another that we'd all have to keep quiet to protect our delicate\ncomplexions.\n\nWell, Erich's triggering the bomb did balance rather neatly Bruce's\nincitement to mutiny, and there was Doc's drinking, while everybody who\nhad declared for the peace message had something to hide. Mark and Kaby\nI felt inclined to trust anywhere, Maud for sure, and Erich in this\nparticular matter, damn him. Illy I didn't feel at all easy about, but I\ntold myself there always has to be a fly in the ointment--a darn big\none this time, and furry.\n\nSid didn't mention his own dirty linen, but he knew we knew he'd flopped\nbadly as boss of the Place and only recouped himself by that last-minute\nflimflam.\n\nRemembering Sid's trick made me think for a moment about the real\nSpiders. Just before I snuck out of Surgery, I'd had a vivid picture of\nwhat they must look like, but now I couldn't get it again. It depressed\nme, not being able to remember--oh, I probably just imagined I'd had a\npicture, like a hophead on a secret-of-the-universe kick. Me ever find\nout anything about the Spiders?--except for nervous notions like I'd had\nduring the recent fracas?--what a laugh!\n\nThe funniest thing (ha-ha!) was that I had ended up the least-trusted\nperson. Sid wouldn't give me time to explain how I'd deduced what had\nhappened to the Maintainer, and even when Lili spoke up and admitted\nhiding it, she acted so bored I don't think everybody believed\nher--although she did spill the realistic detail that she hadn't used\npartial Inversion on the glove; she'd just turned it inside out to make\nit a right and then done a full Inversion to get the lining back inside.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nI tried to get Doc to confirm that he'd reasoned the thing out the same\nway I had, but he said he had been blacked out the whole time, except\nduring the first part of the hunt, and he didn't remember having any\nbright ideas at all. Right now, he was having Maud explain to him twice,\nin detail, everything that had happened. I decided that it was going to\ntake a little more work before my reputation as a great detective was\nestablished.\n\nI looked over the edge of the couch and just made out in the gloom one\nof Bruce's black gloves. It must have been kicked there. I fished it up.\nIt was the right-hand one. My big clue, and was I sick of it! Got\nmittens, God forbid! I slung it away and, like a lurking octopus, Illy\nshot up a tentacle from the next couch, where I hadn't known he was\nresting, and snatched the glove like it was a morsel of underwater\ngarbage. These ETs can seem pretty shuddery non-human at times.\n\nI thought of what a cold-blooded, skin-saving louse Illy had been, and\nabout Sid and his easy suspicions, and Erich and my black eye, and how,\nas usual, I'd got left alone in the end. My men!\n\nBruce had explained about being an A-tech. Like a lot of us, he'd had\nseveral widely different jobs during his first weeks in the Change World\nand one of them had been as secretary to a group of the minor atomics\nboys from the Manhattan-Project-Earth-Satellite days. I gathered he'd\nalso absorbed some of his bothersome ideas from them. I hadn't quite\ndecided yet what species of heroic heel he belonged to, but he was thick\nwith Mark and Erich again. Everybody's men!\n\nSid didn't have to argue with anybody; all the wild compulsions and\nmighty resolves were dead now, anyway until they'd had a good long rest.\nI sure could use one myself, I knew.\n\nThe party at the piano was getting wilder. Lili had been dancing the\nblack bottom on top of it and now she jumped down into Sid's and\nSevensee's arms, taking a long time about it. She'd been drinking a lot\nand her little gray dress looked about as innocent on her as diapers\nwould on Nell Gwyn. She continued her dance, distributing her marks of\nfavor equally between Sid, Erich and the satyr. Beau didn't mind a bit,\nbut serenely pounded out \"Tonight's the Night\"--which she'd practically\nshouted to him not two minutes ago.\n\nI was glad to be out of the party. Who can compete with a highly\nexperienced, utterly disillusioned seventeen-year-old really throwing\nherself away for the first time?\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nSomething touched my hand. Illy had stretched a tentacle into a furry\nwire to return me the black glove, although he ought to have known I\ndidn't want it. I pushed it away, privately calling Illy a washed-out\nmoronic tarantula, and right away I felt a little guilty. What right had\nI to be critical of Illy? Would my own character have shown to advantage\nif I'd been locked in with eleven octopoids a billion years away? For\nthat matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?\n\nStill, I was glad to be out of the party, though I kept on watching it.\nBruce was drinking alone at the bar. Once Sid had gone over to him and\nthey'd had one together and I'd heard Bruce reciting from Rupert Brooke\nthose deliberately corny lines, \"For England's the one land, I know,\nWhere men with Splendid Hearts may go; and Cambridgeshire, of all\nEngland, The Shire for Men who Understand;\" and I'd remembered that\nBrooke too had died young in World War One and my ideas had got fuzzy.\nBut mostly Bruce was just calmly drinking by himself. Every once in a\nwhile Lili would look at him and stop dead in her dancing and laugh.\n\nI'd figured out this Bruce-Lili-Erich business as well as I cared to.\nLili had wanted the nest with all her heart and nothing else would ever\nsatisfy her, and now she'd go to hell her own way and probably die of\nBright's disease for a third time in the Change World. Bruce hadn't\nwanted the nest or Lili as much as he wanted the Change World and the\nchances it gave for Soldierly cavorting and poetic drunks; Lili's seed\nwasn't his idea of healing the cosmos; maybe he'd make a real mutiny\nsome day, but more likely he'd stick to bar-room epics.\n\nHis and Lili's infatuation wouldn't die completely, no matter how rancid\nit looked right now. The real-love angle might go, but Change would\nmagnify the romance angle and it might seem to them like a big thing of\na sort if they met again.\n\nErich had his _Kamerad_, shaped to suit him, who'd had the guts and\ncleverness to disarm the bomb he'd had the guts to trigger. You have to\nhand it to Erich for having the nerve to put us all in a situation where\nwe'd have to find the Maintainer or fry, but I don't know anything\ndisgusting enough to hand to him.\n\nI had tried a while back. I had gone up behind him and said, \"Hey, how's\nmy wicked little commandant? Forgotten your _und so weiter_?\" and as he\nturned, I clawed my nails and slammed him across the cheek. That's how I\ngot the black eye. Maud wanted to put an electronic leech on it, but I\ntook the old handkerchief in ice water. Well, at any rate Erich had his\nscratches to match Bruce's, not as deep, but four of them, and I told\nmyself maybe they'd get infected--I hadn't washed my hands since the\nhunt. Not that Erich doesn't love scars.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nMark was the one who helped me up after Erich knocked me down.\n\n\"You got any omnias for that?\" I snapped at him.\n\n\"For what?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"Oh, for everything that's been happening to us,\" I told him\ndisgustedly.\n\nHe seemed to actually think for a moment and then he said, \"_Omnia\nmutantur, nihil interit._\"\n\n\"Meaning?\" I asked him.\n\nHe said, \"All things change, but nothing is really lost.\"\n\nIt would be a wonderful philosophy to stand with against the Change\nWinds. Also damn silly. I wondered if Mark really believed it. I wished\nI could. Sometimes I come close to thinking it's a lot of baloney trying\nto be any decent kind of Demon, even a good Entertainer. Then I tell\nmyself, \"That's life, Greta. You've got to love through it somehow.\" But\nthere are times when some of these cookies are not too easy to love.\n\nSomething brushed the palm of my hand again. It was Illy's tentacle,\nwith the tendrils of the tip spread out like a little bush. I started to\npull my hand away, but then I realized the Loon was simply lonely. I\nsurrendered my hand to the patterned gossamer pressures of\nfeather-talk.\n\n[Illustration]\n\nRight away I got the words, \"Feeling lonely, Greta girl?\"\n\nIt almost floored me, I tell you. Here I was understanding feather-talk,\nwhich I just didn't, and I was understanding it in English, which didn't\nmake sense at all.\n\nFor a second, I thought Illy must have spoken, but I knew he hadn't, and\nfor a couple more seconds I thought he was working telepathy on me,\nusing the feather-talk as cues. Then I tumbled to what was happening: he\nwas playing English on my palm like on the keyboard of his squeakbox,\nand since I could play English on a squeakbox myself, my mind translated\nautomatically.\n\nRealizing this almost gave my mind stage fright, but I was too fagged to\nbe hocused by self-consciousness. I just lay back and let the thoughts\ncome through. It's good to have someone talk to you, even an underweight\noctopus, and without the squeaks Illy didn't sound so silly; his\nphrasing was soberer.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\"Feeling sad, Greta girl, because you'll never understand what's\nhappening to us all,\" Illy asked me, \"because you'll never be anything\nbut a shadow fighting shadows--and trying to love shadows in between the\nbattles? It's time you understood we're not really fighting a war at\nall, although it looks that way, but going through a kind of evolution,\nthough not exactly the kind Erich had in mind.\n\n\"Your Terran thought has a word for it and a theory for it--a theory\nthat recurs on many worlds. It's about the four orders of life: Plants,\nAnimals, Men and Demons. Plants are energy-binders--they can't move\nthrough space or time, but they can clutch energy and transform it.\nAnimals are space-binders--they can move through space. Man (Terran or\nET, Lunan or non-Lunan) is a time-binder--he has memory.\n\n\"Demons are the fourth order of evolution, possibility-binders--they can\nmake all of what might be part of what is, and that is their\nevolutionary function. Resurrection is like the metamorphosis of a\ncaterpillar into a butterfly: a third-order being breaks out of the\nchrysalis of its lifeline into fourth-order life. The leap from the\nripped cocoon of an unchanging reality is like the first animal's leap\nwhen he ceases to be a plant, and the Change World is the core of\nmeaning behind the many myths of immortality.\n\n\"All evolution looks like a war at first--octopoids against monopoids,\nmammals against reptiles. And it has a necessary dialectic: there must\nbe the thesis--we call it Snake--and the antithesis--Spider--before\nthere can be the ultimate synthesis, when all possibilities are fully\nrealized in one ultimate universe. The Change War isn't the blind\ndestruction it seems.\n\n\"Remember that the Serpent is your symbol of wisdom and the Spider your\nsign for patience. The two names are rightly frightening to you, for all\nhigh existence is a mixture of horror and delight. And don't be\nsurprised, Greta girl, at the range of my words and thoughts; in a way,\nI've had a billion years to study Terra and learn her languages and\nmyths.\n\n\"Who are the real Spiders and Snakes, meaning who were the first\npossibility-binders? Who was Adam, Greta girl? Who was Cain? Who were\nEve and Lilith?\n\n\"In binding all possibility, the Demons also bind the mental with the\nmaterial. All fourth-order beings live inside and outside all minds,\nthroughout the whole cosmos. Even this Place is, after its fashion, a\ngiant brain: its floor is the brainpan, the boundary of the Void is the\ncortex of gray matter--yes, even the Major and Minor Maintainers are\nanalogues of the pineal and pituitary glands, which in some form sustain\nall nervous systems.\n\n\"There's the real picture, Greta girl.\"\n\nThe feather-talk faded out and Illy's tendril tips merged into a soft\npad on which I fingered, \"Thanks, Daddy Longlegs.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nChewing over in my mind what Illy had just told me, I looked back at the\ngang around the piano. The party seemed to be breaking up; at least some\nof them were chopping away at it. Sid had gone to the control divan and\nwas getting set to tune in Egypt. Mark and Kaby were there with him, all\nbursting with eagerness and the vision of tanks on ranks of mounted\nZombie bowmen going up in a mushroom cloud; I thought of what Illy had\ntold me and I managed a smile--seems we've got to win and lose all the\nbattles, every which way.\n\nMark had just put on his Parthian costume, groaning cheerfully,\n\"Trousers again!\" and was striding around under a hat like a fur-lined\nice-cream cone and with the sleeves of his metal-stuffed candys flapping\nover his hands. He waved a short sword with a heart-shaped guard at\nBruce and Erich and told them to get a move on.\n\nKaby was going along on the operation wearing the old-woman disguise\nintended for Benson-Carter. I got a half-hearted kick out of knowing she\nwas going to have to cover that chest and hobble.\n\nBruce and Erich weren't taking orders from Mark just yet. Erich went\nover and said something to Bruce at the bar, and Bruce got down and\nwent over with Erich to the piano, and Erich tapped Beau on the shoulder\nand leaned over and said something to him, and Beau nodded and yanked\n\"Limehouse Blues\" to a fast close and started another piece, something\nslow and nostalgic.\n\nErich and Bruce waved to Mark and smiled, as if to show him that whether\nhe came over and stood with them or not, the legate and the lieutenant\nand the commandant were very much together. And while Sevensee hugged\nLili with a simple enthusiasm that made me wonder why I've wasted so\nmuch imagination on genetic treatments for him, Erich and Bruce sang:\n\n    \"_To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,\n    To our brothers in the tunnels outside time,\n    Sing three Change-resistant Zombies, raised from death and\n              robot-crammed,\n    And Commandos of the Spiders--\n    Here's to crime!\n    We're three blind mice on the wrong time-track,\n            Hush--hush--hush!\n    We've lost our now and will never get back,\n            Hush--hush--hush!\n    Change Commandos out on the spree,\n    Damned through all possibility,\n    Ghostgirls, think kindly on such as we,\n            Hush--hush--hush!_\"\n\nWhile they were singing, I looked down at my charcoal skirt and over at\nMaud and Lili and I thought, \"Three gray hustlers for three black\nhussars, that's our speed.\" Well, I'd never thought of myself as a\nhigh-speed job, winning all the races--I wouldn't feel comfortable that\nway. Come to think of it, we've got to lose and win all the races in the\nlong run, the way the course is laid out.\n\nI fingered to Illy, \"That's the picture, all right, Spider boy.\"\n\n                                                          --FRITZ LEIBER"