Fritz Leiber - The Big Time

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THE BIG TIME

by Fritz Leiber

Magazine version copyright, 1958, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

When shall we three meet again

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

When the hurlyburly's done.

When the battle's lost and won.

--Macbeth

ENTER THESE HUSSARS

My name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me. I was

born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time--

not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know

either. I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star who also bears my first

name, but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own. I need it, for my job is to nurse back to

health and kid back to sanity Soldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going. This war is

the Change War, a war of time travelers--in fact, our private names for being in this war is

being on the Big Time. Our Soldiers fight by going back to change the past, or even ahead to

change the future, in ways to help our side win the final victory a billion or more years from

now. A long killing business, believe me.

You don't know about the Change War, but it's influencing your lives all the time and

maybe you've had hints of it without realizing.

Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be bringing

you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid

that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control?

Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you

ever been scared of Ghosts--not the storybook kind, but the billions of beings who were once

so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever

wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons--spirits able to range through all

time ana space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the

galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream?

If you have, you've had hints of the Change War.

How I got recruited into the Change War, how it's conducted, what the two sides are,

why you don't consciously know about it, what I really think about it--you'll learn in due

course. The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call

the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from

raids into time. In fact, my normal title is Entertainer and I've got my sffly side, as you'll find

out. My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of times and

places. We're a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run a pretty good Recuperation

Station, though we have our family troubles. But most of our troubles come slamming into

the Place with the beat-up Soldiers, who've generally just been going through hell and want to

raise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived Soldiers who started

this thing I'm going to tell you about, this thing that showed me so much about myself and

everything.

When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and two thousand

nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one thousand. This two-nightmares

routine every time you lay down your dizzy little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to

it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it.

The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub where the

Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated for a party, though a Zeppelin is

one thing we haven't had yet. You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and

if you are an Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with anything from

the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look strangely similar except for size.

Solely on doctor's orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since coming to work

at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if you care to call them that, for believe

me they are busman's holidays, considering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last

one I spent in Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got over it.

Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be fitted by the Spiders into serious

operations of the Change War, and you can imagine how restful that makes them.

"See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don't go too far up

front, though, but don't wander off either. Relax and enjoy yourself."

Ha! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they come to the Place is a horse

of a far brighter color, simply dazzling by comparison. Entertainment is our business and we

give them a bang-up time and send them staggering happily back into action, though once in a

great while something may happen to throw a wee shadow on the party.

I am dead in some ways, but don't let that bother you--I am lively enough in others. If

you met in the cosmos, you would be more apt to yak with me or try to pick me up than to ask

a cop to do same or a father to douse me with holy water, unless you are one of those hard-

boiled reformer types. But you are not likely to meet me in the cosmos, because (bar Basin

Street and the Prater) 15th Century Italy and Augustan Rome--until they spoiled it-- are my

favorite (Ha!) vacation spots and, as I have said, I stick as close to the Place as I can. It is

really the nicest Place in the whole Change World. (Crisis! I even _think_ of it capitalized!)

Anyhoo, when this thing started, I was twiddling my thumbs on the couch nearest the

piano and thinking it was too late to do my fingernails and whoever came in probably

wouldn't notice them anyway.

The Place was jumpy like it always is on an approach and the gray velvet of the Void

around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when you close your eyes in the dark.

Sid was tuning the Maintainers for the pickup and the right shoulder of his gold-

worked gray doublet was streaked where he'd been wiping his face on it with quick ducks of

his head.

Beauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid's other shoulder, one white-

trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control divan, and he wasn't missing a

single flicker of Sid's old fingers on the dials; Beau's copilot besides piano player. Beau's face

had that dead blank look it must have had when every double eagle he owned and more he

didn't were riding on the next card to be turned in the gambling saloon on one of those

wedding-cake Mississippi steamboats.

Doc was soused as usual, sitting at the bar with his top hat pushed back and his

knitted shawl pulled around him, his wide eyes seeing whatever horrors a life in Nazi-

occupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk Demon in the Change World.

Maud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili--the New Girl, of course--were telling the big

heads of their identical pearl necklaces.

You might say that all us Entertainers were a bit edgy; being Demons doesn't

automatically make us brave.

Then the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door began to darken

in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds blowing hard and my heart missed

a couple of beats, and the next thing three Soldiers had stepped out of the cosmos and into the

Place, their first three steps hitting the floor hard as they changed times and weights.

They were dressed as officers of hussars, as we'd been advised, and--praise the Bonny

Dew!--I saw that the first of them was Erich, my own dear little commandant, the pride of the

von Hohenwalds and the Terror of the Snakes. Behind him was some hard-faced Roman or

other, and beside Reich and shouldering into him as they stamped forward was a new boy,

blond, with a face like a Greek god who's just been touring a Christian hell.

They were uniformed exactly alike in black--shakos, furedged pelisses, boots, and so

forth--with white skull emblems on the shakos. The only difference between them was that

Erich had a Caller on his wrist and the New Boy had a black-gauntleted glove on his left hand

and was clenching the mate in it, his right hand being bare like both of Erich's and the

Roman's.

"You've made it, lads, hearts of gold," Ski boomed at them, and Beau twitched a

smile and murmured something courtly and Maud began to chant, "Shut the Door!" and the

New Girl copied her and I joined in because the Change Winds do blow like crazy when the

Door is open, even though it can't ever be shut tight enough to keep them from leaking

through."Shut it before it blows wrinides in our faces," Maud called in her gamin voice to

break the ice, looking like a skinny teen-ager in the tight, kneelength frock she'd copied from

the New Girl

But the three Soldiers weren't paying attention. The Roman--I remembered his name

was Mark-- was blundering forward stiffly as if there were something wrong with his eyes,

while Erich and the New Boy were yelling at each other about a kid and Einstein and a

summer palace and a bloody glove and the Snakes having booby-trapped Saint Petersburg.

Erich had that taut sadistic smile he gets when he wants to hit me.

The New Boy was in a tearing rage. "Why'd you pull us out so bloody fast? We fair

chewed the Nevsky Prospekt to pieces galloping away."

"Didn't you feel their stun guns, _Dummkopf_, when, they sprung the trap--too soon,

_Gott sei Dank?_" Erich demanded.

"I did," the New Boy told him. "Not enough to numb a cat. Why didn't you show us

action?""Shut up. I'm your leader. I'll show you action enough."

"You won't. You're a filthy Nazi coward."

"_Weibischer Englander!_"

"_Schlange!_"

The blond lad knew enough German to understand that last crack. He threw back his

sable-edged pelisse to clear his sword arm and he swung away from Erich, which bumped

him into Beau. At the first sign of the quarrel, Beau had raised himself from the divan as

quickly and silently as a--no, I won't use that word--and slithered over to them.

"Sirs, you forget yourselves," he said sharply, off balance, supporting himself on the

New Boy's upraised arm. "This is Sidney Lessingham's Place of Entertainment and

Recuperation. There are ladies--"

With a contemptuous snarl, the New Boy shoved him off and snatched with his bare

hand for his saber. Beau reeled against the divan, it caught him in the shins and he fell toward

the Maintainers. Sid whisked them out of the way as if they were a couple of beach radios--

simply nothing in the Place is nailed down--and had them back on the coffee table before

Beau hit the floor. Meanwhile, Erich had his saber out and had parried the New Boy's first

wild slash and lunged in return, and I heard the scream of steel and the rutch of his boot on

the diamond-studded pavement.

Beau rolled over and came up pulling from the rues of his shirt bosom a derringer I

knew was some other weapon in disguise--a stun gun or even an Atropos. Besides scaring me

damp for Erich and everybody, that brought me up short: us Entertainers' nerves must be

getting as naked as the Soldiers', probably starting when the Spiders canceled all cosmic

leaves twenty sleeps back.

Sid shot Beau his look of command, rapped out, "I'll handle this, you whoreson

firebrand," and turned to the Minor Maintainer. I noticed that the telltale on the Major was

glowing a reassuring red again, and I found a moment to thank Mamma Devi that the Door

was shut.

Maud was jumping up and down, cheering I don't know which--nor did she, I bet--

and the New Girl was white and I saw that the sabers were working more businesslike. Erich's

flicked, ificked, flicked again and came away from the blond lad's cheek spilling a couple of

red drops. The blond lad lunged fiercely, Erich jumped back, and the next moment they were

both floating helplessly in the air, twisting like they had cramps.

I realized quick enough that Sid had shut off gravity in the Door and Stores sectors of

the Place, leaving the rest of us firm on our feet in the Refresher and Surgery sectors. The

Place has sectional gravity to suit our Extraterrestrial buddies--those crazy ETs sometimes

come whooping in for recuperation in very mixed batches.

From his central position, Sid called out, kindly enough but taking no nonsense, "All

right, lads, you've had your fun. Now sheathe those swords."

For a second or so, the two black hussars drifted and contorted. Erich laughed harshly

and neatly obeyed--the commandant is used to free fall. The blond had stopped writhing,

hesitated while he glared upside down at Erich and managed to get his saber into its scabbard,

although he turned a slow somersault doing it. Then Sid switched on their gravity, slow

enough so they wouldn't get sprained landing.

Erich laughed, lightly this time, and stepped out briskly toward us. He stopped to clap

the New Boy firmly on the shoulder and look him in the face.

"So, now you get a good scar," he said.

The other didn't pull away, but he didn't look up and Erich came on. Sid was hurrying

toward the New Boy, and as he passed Erich, he wagged a finger at him and gayly said, "You

rogue." Next thing I was giving Erich my "Man, you're home" hug and he was kissing me and

cracking my ribs and saying, "_Liebc hen! Doppchen!_"--which was fine with me because I

do love him and I'm a good lover and as much a Doubledagger as he is.

We had just pulled back from each other to get a breath--his blue eyes looked so

sweet in his worn face--when there was a thud behind us. With the snapping of the tension,

Doc had fallen off his bar stool and his top hat was over his eyes. As we turned to chuckle at

him, Maud squeaked and we saw that the Roman had walked straight up against the Void and

was marching along there steadily without gaining a foot, like it does happen, his black

uniform melting into that inside-your-head gray.

Maud and Beau rushed over to fish him back, which can be tricky. The thin gambler

was all courtly efficiency again. Sid supervised from a distance.

What's wrong with him?" I asked Erich.

He shrugged. "Overdue for Change Shock. And he was nearest the stun guns. His

horse almost threw him. _Mein Gott_, you should have seen Saint Petersburg, _Leibc hen_:

the Nevsky Prospekt, the canals flying by like reception carpets of blue sky, a cavalry troop in

blue and gold that blundered across our escape, fine women in furs and ostrich plumes, a

monk with a big tripod and his head under a hood--it gave me the horrors seeing all those

Zombies flashing past and staring at me in that sick unawakened way they have, and knowing

that some of them, say the photographer, might be Snakes."

Our side in the Change War is the Spiders, the other side is the Snakes, though all of

us--Spiders and Snakes alike--are Doublegangers and Demons too, because we're cut out of

our lifelines in the cosmos. Your lifeline is all of you from birth to death. We're

Doublegangers because we can operate both in the cosmos and outside of it, and Demons

because we act reasonably alive while doing so--which the ghosts don't. Entertainers and

Soldiers are all Demon-Doublegangers, whichever side they're on--though they say the Snake

Places are simply ghastly. Zombies are dead people whose lifelines lie in the so-called past.

"What were you doing in Saint Petersburg before the ambush?" I asked Erich. "That

is, if you can talk about it."

"Why not? We were kidnapping the infant Einstein back from the Snakes in 1883.

Yes, the Snakes got him, _Liebchen_, only a few sleeps back, endangering the West's whole

victory over Russia."

"--which gave your dear little Hitler the world on a platter for fifty years and got me

loved to death by your sterling troops in the Liberation of Chicago--"

"--but which leads to the ultimate victory of the Spiders and the West over the Snakes

and Communism, _Leibc hen_, remember that. Anyway, our counter-snatch didn't work. The

Snakes had guards posted--most unusual and we weren't warned. The whole thing was a great

mess. No wonder Bruce lost his head--not that it excuses him."

"The New Boy?" I asked. Sid hadn't got to him and he was still standing with hooded

eyes where Erich had left him, a dark pillar of shame and rage.

"_Ja_, a lieutenant from World War One. An Englishman."

"I gathered that," I told Erich. "Is he really effeminate?"

"_Weibischer?_" He smiled. "I had to call him something when he said I was a

coward. He'll make a fine Soldier--only needs a little more shaping."

"You men are so original when you spat." I lowered my voice. "But you shouldn't

have gone on and called him a Snake, Erich mine."

"_Schlange?_" The smile got crooked. "Who knows--about any of us? As Saint

Petersburg showed me, the Snakes' spies are getting cleverer than ours." The blue eyes didn't

look sweet now. "Are you, _Liebchen_, really nothing more than a good loyal Spider?"

"Erich!"

"All right, I went too fart--with Bruce and with you too. We're all hacked over these

days, riding with one leg over the breaking edge."

Maud and Beau were supporting the Roman to a couch, Maud taking most of his

weight, with Sid stifi supervising and the New Boy still sulking by himself. The New Girl

should have been with him, of course, but I couldn't see her anywhere and I decided she was

probably having a nervous breakdown in the Refresher, the little jerk.

"The Roman looks pretty bad, Erich," I said.

"Ah, Mark's tough. Got virtue, as his people say. And our little starship girl will bring

him back to life if anybody can and if . .

". . . you call this living," I filled in dutifully.

He was right. Maud had fifty-odd years of psychomedical experience, 23rd Century

at that. It should have been Doc's job, but that was fifty drunks back.

"Maud and Mark, that will be an interesting experiment," Erich said. "Reminiscent of

Goering's with the frozen men and the naked gypsy girls."

"You are a filthy Nazi. She'll be using electrophoresis and deep suggestion, if I know

anything."

"How will you be able to know anything, _Liebchen_, if she switches on the couch

curtains, as I perceive she is preparing to do?"

"Filthy Nazi I said and meant."

"Precisely." He clicked his heels and bowed a millimeter. "Erich Friederich von

Hohenwald, _Oberleutnant_ in the army of the Third Reich. Fell at Narvi, where he was

Recruited by the Spiders. Lifeline strengthened by a Big Change after his first death and at

latest report Commandant of Toronto, where he maintains extensive baby farms to provide

him with breakfast meat, if you believe the handbills of the _voyageurs_ underground. At

your service.

"Oh, Erich, it's all so lousy," I said, touching his hand, reminded that he was one of

the unfortunates Resurrected from a point in their lifeines well before their deaths--in his case,

because the date of his death had been shifted forward by a Big Change after his

Resurrection. And as every Demon finds out, if he can't imagine it beforehand, it is pure hell

to remember your future, and the shorter the time between your Resurrection and your death

back in the cosmos, the better. Mine, bless Bab-ed-Din, was only an action-packed ten

minutes on North Clark Street.

Erick put his other hand lightly over mine. "Fortunes of the Change War,

_Liebchen_. At least I'm a Soldier and sometimes assigned to future operations--though why

we should have this monomania about our future personalities back there, I don't know. Mine

is a stupid _Oberst_, thin as paper--and frightfully indignant at the _voyageurs!_ But it helps

me a little if I see him in perspective and at least I get back to the cosmos pretty regularly.

_Gott sei Dank_, so I'm better off than you Entertainers."

I didn't say aloud that a Changing cosmos is worse than none, but I found myself

sending a prayer to the Bonny Dew for my father's repose, that the Change Winds would

blow lightly across the lifeline of Anton A. Forzane, professor of physiology, born in Norway

and buried in Chicago. Woodlawn Cemetery is a nice gray spot.

"That's all right, Erich," I said. "We Entertainers Cot Mittens too."

He scowled around at me suspiciously, as if he were wondering whether I had all my

buttons on.

"Mittens?" he said. "What do you mean? I'm not wearing any. Are you trying to say

something about Bruce's gloves--which incidentally seem to annoy him for some reason. No,

seriously, Greta, why do you Entertainers need mittens?"

"Because we get cold feet sometimes. At least I do. Got Mittens, as I say."

A sickly light dawned in his Prussian puss. He muttered, "Got mittens . . . _Gott mit

uns_ . . . God with us," and roared softly, "Greta, I don't know how I put up with you the way

you murder a great language for cheap laughs."

"You've got to take me as I am," I told him, "mittens and all, thank the Bonny

Dew--" and hastily explained, "That's French--_le bon Dieu_--the good God--don't hit me. I'm

not going to tell you any more of my secrets."

He laughed feebly, like he was dying.

"Cheer up," I said. "I won't be here forever, and there are worse places than the

Place." He nodded grudgingly, looking around. "You know what, Greta, if you'll promise not

to make some dreadful joke out of it: on operations, I pretend I'll soon be going backstage to

court the world- famous ballerina Greta Forzane."

He was right about the backstage part. The Place is a regular theater-in-the-round

with the Void for an audience, the Void's gray hardly disturbed by the screens masking

Surgery (Ugh!), Refresher and Stores. Between the last two are the bar and kitchen and

Beau's piano. Between Surgery and the sector where the Door usually appears are the shelves

and taborets of the Art Gallery. The control divan is stage center. Spaced around at a fair

distance are six big low couches--one with its curtains now shooting up into the gray--and a

few small tables. It is like a ballet set and the crazy costumes and characters that turn up don't

ruin the illusion. By no means. Diaghilev would have hired most of them for the Ballet Russe

on first sight, without even asking them whether they could keep time to music.

Last week in Babylon,

Last night in Rome,

--Hodgson

A RIGHT-HAND GLOVE

Beau had gone behind the bar and was talking quietly at Doc, but with his eyes

elsewhere, looking very sallow and professional in his white, and I thought--Damballa!--I'm

in the French Quarter. I couldn't see the New Girl. Sid was at last getting to the New Boy

after the fuss about Mark. He threw a sign and I started over with Erich in tow.

"Welcome, sweet lad. Sidney Lessingham's your host, and a fellow Englishman. Born

in King's Lynn, 1564, schooled at Cambridge, but London was the life and death of me,

though I outlasted Bessie, Jimmie, Charlie, and Ollie almost. And what a life! By turns a

clerk, a spy, a bawd--the two trades are hand in glove--a poet of no account, a beggar, and a

peddler of resurrection tracts. Beau Lassiter, our throats are tinder!"

At the word "poet," the New Boy looked up, but 'resentfully, as if he had been tricked

into it. "And to spare your throat for drinking, sweet gallant, I'll be so bold as to guess and

answer one of your questions," Sid rattled on. "Yes, I knew Will Shakespeare--we were of an

age--and he was such a modest, mind-your-business rogue that we all wondered whether he

really did write those plays. Your pardon, faith, but that scratch might be looked to."

Then I saw that the New Girl hadn't lost her head, but gone to Surgery (Ugh!) for a

first-aid tray. She reached a swab toward the New Boy's sticky cheek, saying rather shrilly,

"If I might . .

Her timing was bad. Sid's last words and Erich's approach had darkened the look in

the young Soldier's face and he angrily swept her arm aside without even glancing at her.

Erich squeezed my arm. The tray clattered to the floor--and one of the drinks that Beau was

bringing almost followed it. Ever since the New Girl's arrival, Beau had been figuring that she

was his responsibility, though I don't think the two of them had reached an agreement yet.

Beau was especially set on it because I was thick with Sid at the time and Maud with Doc, she

loving tough cases.

"Easy now, lad, and you love me!" Sid thundered, again shooting Beau the "Hold it"

look. "She's just a poor pagan trying to comfort you. Swallow your bile, you black villain,

and perchance it will turn to poetry. Ah, did I touch you there? Confess, you are a poet."

There isn't much gets by Sid, though for a second I forgot my psychology and

wondered if he knew what he was doing with his insights.

"Yes, I'm a poet, all right," the New Boy roared. "I'm Bruce Marchant, you bloody

Zombies. I'm a poet in a world where even the lines of the King James and your precious Will

whom you use for laughs aren't safe from Snakes' slime and the Spiders' dirty legs. Changing

our history, stealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and best

intentioned and efficient, and what does it lead to? This bloody SI glove!"

He held up his black-gloved left hand which still held the mate and he shook it.

"What's wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?" Sid demanded. "And

you love us, tell us." While Erich laughed, "Consider yourself lucky, _Kamerad_. Mark and I

didn't draw any gloves at all."

"What's wrong with it?" Bruce yelled. "The bloody things are both lefts!" He

slammed it down on the floor.

We are howled, we couldn't help it. He turned his back on us and stamped off, though

I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed my arm and said between gasps,

"_Mein Gott, Liebchen_, what have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe,

the smaller the cause! It is infallible!"

One of us didn't laugh. Ever since the New Girl heard the name Bruce Merchant,

she'd had a look In her eyes like she'd been given the sacrament. I was glad she'd got

interested in something, because she'd been pretty much of a snoot and a wet blanket up until

now, although she'd come to the Place with the recommendation of having been a real

whoopee girl in London and New York in the Twenties. She looked disapprovingly at us as

she gathered up the tray and stuff, not forgetting the glove, which she placed on the center of

the tray like a holy relic.

Beau cut over and tried to talk to her, but she ghosted past him and once again he

couldn't do anything because of the tray in his hands. He came over and got rid of the drinks

quick. I took a big gulp right away because I saw the New Girl stepping through the screen

into Surgery and I hate to be reminded we have it and I'm glad Doc is too drunk to use it,

some of the Arachnoid surgical techniques being very sickening as I know only too well from

a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten.

By that time, Bruce had come back to us, saying in a carefully hard voice, "Look

here, it's not the dashed glove itself, as you very well know, you howling Demons."

"What is it then, noble heart?" Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard heightening the

effect of innocent receptivity.

"It's the principle of the thing," Bruce said, looking around sharply, but none of us

cracked a smile. "It's this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos--and don't tell me that

isn't in the cards!-- masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders--and we don't

know who they are ultimately; it's just a name; we see only agents like ourselves--the Spiders

pluck us from the quiet graves of our lif elines--"

"Is that bad, lad?" Sid murmured, innocently straightfaced.

"--and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another time-traveling

power called the Snakes--just a name, too--which is bent on perverting and enslaving the

whole cosmos, past, present and future."

"And isn't it, lad?"

"Before we're properly awake, we're Recruited into the Big Time and hustled into

tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserable closets, gray sacks, puss

pockets--no offense to this Place--that the Spiders have created, maybe by gigantic

implosions, but no one knows for certain, and then we're sent off on all sorts of missions into

the past and future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart the Snakes."

"True, lad."

"And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks come so fast, our

emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public and private metaphysics distorted so

insanely, the deepest thread of reality we cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can

get things straight."

"We've all felt that way, lad," Ski said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek death's head;

"You should have seen me, _Kamerad_, my first fifty sleeps," Erich put in; while I added,

"Us girl's, too, Bruce."

"Oh, I know I'll get hardened to it, and don't think I can't. It's not that," Bruce said

harshly. "And I wouldn't mind the personal confusion, the mess it's made of my spirit, I

wouldn't even mind remaking history and destroying priceless, oncecalled imperishable

beauties of the past, if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart the

Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the East. But what have they done to

achieve this? I'll give you some beautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early

Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a

ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key."

"You got time for culture?" I heard myself say and I clapped my hand over my mouth

in gentle reproof.

"But _you_ remember the dialogues, lad," Sid observed. "And rail not as Crete--I

have a sweet Keftian friend."

"For how long will I remember Plato's dialogues? And who after me?" Bruce

challenged. "Here's another. The Spiders want Rome powerful and, to date, they've helped

Rome so much that she collapses in a blaze of German and Parthian invasions a few years

after the death of Julius Caesar."

This time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place loves these bull

sessions. "You omit to mention, sir, that Rome's newest downfall is directly due to the

Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes have fomented between the Eastern Classical World,

Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power

futurewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever letting it pass into the

hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is the Snakes' Three-Thousand-Year Plan which we are

fighting against, striving to revive Rome's glories."

"Striving is the word for it," Bruce snapped. "Here's yet another example. To beat

Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out of World War Two, thereby ensuring a

German invasion of the New World and creating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines

of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!"

He stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chanting in a weird

spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow.

"_Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Kein' Peitsch', gnadige Herren. Salz, Salz, Salz_."

I turned and there was Doc waltzing toward us with little tiny steps, bent over so low

that the ends of his shawl touched the floor, his head crooked up sideways and looking

through us.

I knew then, but Erich translated softly. "'Salt, salt, I bring salt. No whip, merciful

sirs.' He is speaking to my countrymen in their language." Doc had spent his last months in a

Nazi-operated salt mine.

He saw us and got up, straightening his top hat very carefully. He frowned hard while

my heart thumped half a dozen times. Then his face slackened, he shrugged his shoulders and

muttered, "_Nichevo_."

"And it does not matter, sir," Beau translated, but directing his remark at Bruce.

"True, great civilizations have been dwarfed or broken by the Change War. But others, once

crushed in the bud, have bloomed. In the 1870's, I traveled a Mississippi that had never

known Grant's gunboats. I studied piano, languages, and the laws of chance under the greatest

European masters at the University of Vicksburg."

"And you think your pipsqueak steamboat culture is compensation for--" Bruce began

but, "Prithee none of that, lad," Sid interrupted smartly. "Nations are as equal as so many

madmen or drunkards, and I'll drink dead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason:

nations are not so puny as to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no, nor

with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and nerves of brass. Waste not

your pity on them."

"True indeed, sir," Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack on his Greater

South. "Most of us enter the Change World with the false metaphysic that the slightest change

in the past--a grain of dust misplaced--will transform the whole future. It is a long while

before we accept with our minds as well as our intellects the law of the Conservation of

Reality: that when the past is changed, the future changes barely enough to adjust, barely

enough to admit the new data. The Change Winds meet maximum resistance always.

Otherwise the first operation in Babylonia would have wiped out New Orleans, Sheffield,

Stuttgart, and Maud Davies' birthplace on Ganymede!

"Note how the gap left by Rome's collapse was filled by the imperialistic and

Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historian can tell the difference in most ages

between the former Latin and the present Gothic Catholic Church. As you yourself, sir, said

of Greece, it is as if an old melody were shifted into a slightly different key. In the wake of a

Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it's true, yet in the main they continue

much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless

accidents."

"All right, you bloody savants--maybe I pushed my point too far," Bruce growled.

"But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methods we use In our wonderful

Change War. Poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra. Kidnapping Einstein when he's a baby."

"The Snakes did it first," I reminded him.

"Yes, and we copied them. How resourceful does that make us?" he retorted arguing

like a woman. "If we need Einstein, why don't we Resurrect him, deal with him as a man?"

Beau said, serving his culture in slightly thicker slices, "_Pardonnez-moi_, but when

you have enjoyed your status as Doubleganger a _soupcon_ longer, you will understand that

great men can rarely be Resurrected. Their beings are too crystalized, sir, their lifelines too

tough." "Pardon me, but I think that's rot. I believe that most great men refuse to make the

bargain with the Snakes, or with us Spiders either. They scorn Resurrection at the price

demanded."

"Brother, they ain't that great," I whispered, while Beau glided on with, "However

that may be, you have accepted Resurrection, sir, and so incurred an obligation which you as

a gentleman must honor."

"I accepted Resurrection all right," Bruce said, a glare coming into his eyes. "When

they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '17 ten minutes before I died, I grabbed at

the offer of life like a drunkard grabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I

was also seizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace." His voice was getting

wilder all the time. Just beyond our circle, I noticed the New Girl watching him worshipfully.

"But what did I find the Spiders wanted me for? Only to fight more wars, over and over

again, make them crueler and stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each Big

Change, work our way a little closer to the death of the cosmos."

Sid touched my wrist and, as Bruce raved on, he whispered to me, "What kind of ball,

think you, will please and so quench this fire-brained rogue? And you love me, discover it."

I whispered back without taking my eyes off Bruce either, "I know somebody who'll

be happy to put on any kind of ball he wants, if he'll just notice her."

"The New Girl, sweetling? 'Tis well. This rogue speaks like an angry angel. It touches

my heart and I like it not."

Bruce was saying hoarsely but loudly, "And so we're sent on operations in the past

and from each of those operations the Change Winds blow futurewards, swiftly or slowly

according to the opposition they breast, sometimes rippling into each other, and any one of

those Winds may shift the date of our own death ahead of the date of our Resurrection, so that

in an instant--even here, outside the cosmos--we may molder and rot or crumble to dust and

vanish away. The wind with our name in it may leak through the Door."

Faces hardened at that, because it's bad form to mention Change Death, and Erich

flared out with, "_Halt's Maul, Kamerad!_ There's always another Resurrection."

But Bruce didn't keep his mouth shut. He said, "Is there? I know the Spiders promise

it, but even if they do go back and cut another Doubleganger from my lifeline, is he me?" He

slapped his chest with his bare hand. "I don't think so. And even if he Is me, with unbroken

consciousness, why's he been Resurrected again? Just to refight more wars and face more

Change Death for the sake of an almighty power--" his voice was rising to a climax--an

almighty power so bloody ineffectual, it can't furnish one poor Soldier pulled out of the mud

of Passchendaele, one miserable Change Commando, one Godforsaken Recuperee a proper

issue of equipment!"

And he held out his bare right hand toward us, fingers spread a little, as if it were the

most amazing object and most deserving of outraged sympathy in the whole world.

And he held out his bare right hand toward us, fingers spread a little, as if it were the

most amazing object and most deserving of outraged sympathy in the whole world.

The New Girl's timing was perfect. She whisked through us, and before he could so

much as wiggle the fingers, she whipped a black gauntleted glove on it and anyone could see

that it fitted his hand perfectly.

This time our laughing beat 'the other. We collapsed and slopped our drinks and

pounded each other on the back and then started all over.

"_Ach, der Handschuh, Liebchen!_ Where'd she get it?" Erich gasped in my ear.

"Probably just turned the other one inside out-- that turns a left into a right--I've done

it myself," I wheezed, collapsing again at the idea.

"That would put the lining outside," he objected.

"Then I don't know," I said. "We get all sorts of junk in Stores."

"It doesn't matter, _Lie bc hen_," he assured me. "_Ach, der Hand schuh!_"

All through It, Bruce just stood there admiring the glove, moving the fingers a little

now and then, and the New Girl stood watching him as if he were eating a cake she'd baked.

When the hysteria quieted down, he looked up at her with a big smile. "What did you

say your name was?"

"Lili," she said, and believe you me, she was Lili to me even in my thoughts from

then on, for the way she'd handled that lunatic.

"Lilian Foster," she explained. "I'm English also. Mr. Marchant, I've read _A Young

Man's Fancy_ I don't know how many times."

"You have? It's wretched stuff. From the Dark Ages--I mean my Cambridge days. In

the trenches, I was working up some poems that were rather better."

"I won't hear you say that. But I'd be terribly thrilled to hear the new ones. Oh, Mr.

Marchant, it was so strange to hear you call it Passiondale."

"Why, if I may ask?"

"Because that's the way I pronounce it to myself. But I looked it up and it's more like

Pas-ken-DAIuh."

"Bless you! All the Tommies called it Passiondale, just as they called Ypres Wipers."

"How interesting. You know, Mr. Marchant, I'll wager we were Recruited in the same

operation, summer of 1917. I'd got to France as a Red Cross nurse, but they found out my age

and were going to send me back."

"How old were you--are you? Same thing, I mean to say."

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen in '17," Bruce murmured, his blue eyes glassy.

It was real corny dialogue and I couldn't resent the humorous leer Erich gave me as

we listened to them, as if to say, "Ain't it nice, _Liebchen_, Bruce has a silly little English

schoolgirl to occupy him between operations?"

Just the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklace and tight little

gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Bruce huildng over her tenderly in his snazzy

hussar's rig, I knew that I was seeing the start of something that hadn't been part of me since

Dave died fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort of thing that almost

made me wish there could be children in the Change World. I wondered why I'd never

thought of trying to work things so that Dave got Resurrected and I told myself: no, it's all

changed, I've changed, better the Change Winds don't disturb Dave or I know about it.

"No, I didn't die in 1917--I was merely Recruited then," Lili was telling Bruce. "I

lived all through the Twenties, as you can see from the way I dress. But let's not talk about

that, shall we? Oh, Mr. Marchant, do you think you can possibly remember any of those

poems you started in the trenches? I can't fancy them bettering your sonnet that concludes

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THEBIGTIMEbyFritzLeiberCopyright1961,byAceBooks,Inc.AllRightsReservedMagazineversioncopyright,1958,byGalaxyPublishingCorp.1WhenshallwethreemeetagainInthunder,lightning,orinrain?Whenthehurlyburly'sdone.Whenthebattle'slostandwon.--MacbethENTERTHESEHUSSARSMynameisGretaForzane.Twenty-nineandapartygirlwo...

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Fritz Leiber - The Big Time

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