by Fritz Leiber
CHAPTER 7
After about 0.1 millisecond (one ten-thousandth part of a second) has elapsed, the radius of the ball of fire is some 45 feet, and the temperature is then in the vicinity of 300,000 degrees Centigrade. At this instant, the luminosity, as observed at a distance of 100,000 yards (5.7 miles), is approximately 100 times that of the sun as seen at the earth's surface ... the ball of fire expands very rapidly to its maximum radius of 450 feet within less than a second from the explosion.
--Los Alamos
TIME TO THINK
Brother, that was all we needed to make everybody but Kaby and the twoETs start yelping at once, me included. It may seem strange that ChangePeople, able to whiz through time and space and roust around outside thecosmos and knowing at least by hearsay of weapons a billion years in thefuture, like the Mindbomb, should panic at being shut in with a littleprimitive mid-20th Century gadget. Well, they feel the same as atomicscientists would feel if a Bengal tiger were brought into theirlaboratory, neither more nor less scared.
I'm a moron at physics, but I do know the Fireball is bigger than thePlace. Remember that, besides the bomb, we'd recently been presentedwith a lot of other fears we hadn't had time to cope with, especiallythe business of the Snakes having learned how to get at our Places andmelt the Maintainers and collapse them. Not to mention the generalimpression--first Saint Petersburg, then Crete--that the whole ChangeWar was going against the Spiders.
Yet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were allpanicking. It made me admit what I didn't like to: that we were all inpretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn't happento be our out.
And had the rest of us been controlling our drinking so well lately?
Maud yelled, "Jettison it!" and pulled away from the satyr and ran fromthe bronze chest. Beau, harking back to what they'd thought of doing inthe Express Room when it was too late, hissed, "Sirs, we mustIntrovert," and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for thecontrol divan. Erich seconded him with a white-faced "_Gott in Himmel,ja!_" from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slimstem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass.
I felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degreesworse than foxholing. It's supposed not only to keep the Door tightshut, but also to lock it so even the Change Winds can't getthrough--cut the Place loose from the cosmos altogether.
I'd never talked with anyone from a Place that had been Introverted.
* * * * *
Mark dumped Phryne off his lap and ran after Maud. The Greek Ghostgirl,quite solid now, looked around with sleepy fear and fumbled herapple-green chiton together at the throat. She wrenched my attentionaway from everyone else for a moment, and I couldn't help wonderingwhether the person or Zombie back in the cosmos, from whose lifeline theGhost has been taken, doesn't at least have strange dreams or thoughtswhen something like this happens.
Sid stopped Beau, though he almost got bowled over doing it, and he heldthe gambler away from the Maintainer in a bear hug and bellowed over hisshoulders, "Masters, are you mad? Have you lost your wits? Maud! Mark!Marcus! Magdalene! On your lives, unhand that casket!"
Maud had swept the clothes and bows and quivers and stuff off it and wasdragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump itthrough fast when we got one, I guess, while Mark acted as if he weretrying to help her and wrestle it away from her at the same time.
They kept on as if they hadn't heard a word Sid said, with Mark yelling,"Let go, _meretrix_! This holds Rome's answer to Parthia on the Nile."
Kaby watched them as if she wanted to help Mark but scorned to scufflewith a mere--well, Mark had said it in Latin, I guess--call girl.
Then, on the top of the bronze chest, I saw those seven lousy skullsstarting at the lock as plain as if they'd been under a magnifyingglass, though ordinarily they'd have been a vague circle to my eyes atthe distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the oppositedirection, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, andsqueaked, "Easy now, Greta girl, don't you be doing it, too. Hold stillor Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you havea mind to."
My stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but itstopped me and I got my mind back, partly.
"Unhand it, I say!" Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and hereleased Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler's shoulder.
Then my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Voidand blustered at no one in particular, "'Sdeath, think you I'd mutinyagainst my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent foxand pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggestsit? Introversion's no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervisedand sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I'd Introverted ere we gotKaby's call for succor, hey?"
* * * * *
His warrior maid nodded with harsh approval and he noticed it and shookhis free hand at her and scolded her, "Not that I say yea to your madplan for that Devil's casket, you half-clad lackwit. And yet tojettison.... Oh, ye gods, ye gods--" he wiped his hand across hisface--"grant me a minute in which I may think!"
Thinking time wasn't an item even on the strictly limited list at themoment, although Sevensee, squatting dourly on his hairy haunches whereMaud had left him, threw in a dead-pan "Thas tellin em, Gov."
Then Doc at the bar stood up tall as Abe Lincoln in his top hat andshawl and 19th Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence andsaid something that sounded like: "Introversh, inversh, glovsh," andthen his enunciation switched to better than perfect as he continued, "Iknow to an absolute certainty what we must do."
It showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a churchwhile we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for apoor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves.
He said something like, "Inversh ... bosh ..." and held our eyes for amoment longer. Then the light went out of his and he slobbered out a"_Nichevo_" and slid an arm far along the bar for a bottle and startedto pour it down his throat without stopping sliding.
Before he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second whileour attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top ofit, so fast it was almost like he'd popped up from nowhere, though I'dseen him start from behind the piano.
"I've a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?" he said in avoice that was very clear and just loud enough. "So it can't go off," hewent on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk mannerputting more heart into me all the time. "What's more, if it were to betriggered, we'd still have half an hour. I believe you said it had thatlong a fuse?"
He stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded.
"Right," he said. "It'd have to be that long for whoever plants it inthe Parthian camp to get away. There's another safety margin.
"Second question. Is there a locksmith in the house?"
* * * * *
For all Bruce's easiness, he was watching us like a golden eagle and hecaught Beau's and Maud's affirmatives before they had a chance toexplain or hedge them and said, "That's very good. Under certaincircumstances, you two'd be the ones to go to work on the chest. Butbefore we consider that, there's Question Three: Is anyone here anatomics technician?"
That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having toexplain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power--hadn't theyblasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastlycraters?--but no, he wasn't a technician exactly, he was a "thinger" (Ithought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?--well,a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was trulyimpossible to describe, but no, you couldn't possibly thing atomics; theidea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn't be an atomics thinger; theterm was worse than a contradiction, well, really!--w
hile Sevensee, fromhis two-thousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effectthat his culture didn't rightly use any kind of power, but just sort ofmoved satyrs and stuff by wrastling space-time around, "or think em rounef we hafta. Can't think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have--Idunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow."
"So we don't have an A-tech," Bruce summed up, "which makes it worsethan useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn'tknow what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question." Hedirected it toward Sid. "How long before we can jettison anything?"
Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce hadcalmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn't seem to betaking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to theword "rhythm," he pulled the answer away from him.
"In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again.Thank you, Master Lessingham. That's at least five hours--two mealtimes,as the Cretan officer put it," and he threw Kaby a quick soldierlysmile. "So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there's not athing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!"
His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up anddown the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktailglasses sailed off and popped, but he didn't seem to notice them and wehardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one toanother of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straightgolden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.
"All right then," he repeated suddenly. "We're twelve Spiders and twoGhosts, and we've time for a bit of a talk, and we're all in the samebloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we'll all know what we'retalking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed upabout a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves areoff!"
* * * * *
Bruce ripped them out of his belt where they'd been tucked and slammedthem down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back andforth, and it wasn't funny.
"Because," he went right on, "I've been getting a completely new pictureof what this Spiders' war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it'sjolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a ruggedlittle party outside both of them when the operation's over. It's sweetto know there's no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimateor sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can'tshoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust orgluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, theultimate insatiable hunger, and it's great to be Faust, even in a packof other Fausts.
"It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's lifeor a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one,and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes--hah! killing menor carrying off women isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It'ssweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the paststhat were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet towield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline andlook the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in itand Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks anddecide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.
"Or he can't stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you've gotto decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams,only they'll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, orwhether, if she's got that tantalizing something, to bring her shellalong for a Ghostgirl--that's sweet, too. It's even sweet to have ChangeDeath poised over your neck, to know that the past isn't the preciousindestructible thing you've been taught it was, to know that there's nocertainty about the future either, whether there'll even be one, to knowthat no part of reality is holy, that the cosmos itself may wink outlike a flicked switch and God be not and nothing left but nothing!"
He threw out his arms against the Void. "And knowing all that, it'sdoubly sweet to come through the Door into the Place and be out of theworst of the Change Winds and enjoy a well-earned Recuperation and sharethe memories of all these sweetnesses I've been talking about, and workout all the fascinating feelings you've been accumulating back in thecosmos, layer by black layer, in the company of and with the help of thebest bloody little band of fellow Fausts and Faustines going!
"Oh, it's a sweet life, all right, but I'm asking you--" and here hiseyes stabbed us again, one by one, fast--"I'm asking you what it's doneto us. I've been getting a completely new picture, as I said, of what mylife was and what it could have been if there'd been changes of the sortthat even we Demons can't make, and what my life is. I've been watchinghow we've all been responding to things just now, to the news of SaintPetersburg and to what the Cretan officer told beautifully--only itwasn't beautiful what she had to tell--and mostly to that bloody box ofbomb. And I'm simply asking each one of you, what's happened to you?"
* * * * *
He stopped his pacing and stuck his thumbs in his belt and seemed to belistening to the wheels turning in at least eleven other heads--only Istopped mine pretty quick, with Dave and Father and the Rape of Chicagocoming up out of the dark on the turn and Mother and the Indiana Dunesand Jazz Limited just behind them, followed by the unthinkable thingthe Spider doctor had flicked into existence when I flopped as a nurse,because I can't stand that to be done to my mind by anybody but myself.
I stopped them by using the old infallible Entertainers' gimmick, a fastsurvey of the most interesting topic there is--other people's troubles.
* * * * *
Offhand, Beau looked as if he had most troubles, shamed by his boss andhis girl given her heart to a Soldier; he was hugging them to himselfvery quiet.
I didn't stop for the two ETs--they're too hard to figure--or for Doc;nobody can tell whether a fallen-down drunk's at the black or bright endof his cycle; you just know it's cycling.
Maud ought to be suffering as much as Beau, called names and caught outin a panic, which always hurts her because she's plus three hundredyears more future than the rest of us and figures she ought to be thatmuch wiser, which she isn't always--not to mention she's over fiftyyears old, though her home-century cosmetic science keeps her lookingand acting teenage most of the time. She'd backed away from the bronzechest so as not to stand out, and now Lili came from behind the pianoand stood beside her.
Lili had the opposite of troubles, a great big glow for Bruce, proud asa promised princess watching her betrothed. Erich frowned when he sawher, for he seemed proud too, proud of the way his _Kamerad_ had takencommand of us panicky whacks _Fuehrer_-fashion. Sid still looked mostlygrateful and inclined to let Bruce keep on talking.
Even Kaby and Mark, those two dragons hot for battle, standing a littlein front and to one side of us by the bronze chest, like its guardians,seemed willing to listen. They made me realize one reason Sid had forletting Bruce run on, although the path his talk was leading us down wasflashing with danger signals: When it was over, there'd still be theproblem of what to do with the bomb, and a real opposition shaping upbetween Soldiers and Entertainers, and Sid was hoping a solution wouldturn up in the meantime or at least was willing to put off the evil day.
But beyond all that, and like the rest of us, I could tell from the waySid was squinting his browy eyes and chewing his beardy lip that he wasshaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped intoour hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of uscould have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had tothink of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs wewere--well, we wanted to keep on listening.
