by Fritz Leiber
CHAPTER 9
"We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed."
"You looked among D----'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?"
"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume...."
--Poe
A LOCKED ROOM
Three hours later, Sid and I plumped down on the couch nearest thekitchen, though too tired to want to eat for a while yet. A tightersearch than I could ever have cooked up had shown that the Maintainerwas not in the Place.
Of course it had to be in the Place, as we kept telling each other forthe first two hours. It had to be, if circumstances and the theories welived by in the Change World meant anything. A Maintainer is whatmaintains a Place. The Minor Maintainer takes care of oxygen,temperature, humidity, gravity, and other little life-cycle andmatter-cycle things generally, but it's the Major Maintainer that keepsthe walls from buckling and the ceiling from falling in. It is little,but oh my, it does so much.
It doesn't work by wires or radio or anything complicated like that. Itjust hooks into local space-time.
I have been told that its inside working part is made up of vastlytough, vastly hard giant molecules, each one of which is practically avest-pocket cosmos in itself. Outside, it looks like a portable radiowith a few more dials and some telltales and switches and plug-ins forearphones and a lot of other sensory thingumajigs.
But the Maintainer was gone and the Void hadn't closed in, yet. By thistime, I was so fagged, I didn't care much whether it did or not.
One thing for sure, the Maintainer had been switched to Introvert beforeit was spirited away or else its disappearance automatically producedIntroversion, take your choice, because we sure were Introverted--realnasty martinet-schoolmaster grip of reality on my thoughts that I knew,without trying, liquor wouldn't soften, not a breath of Change Wind,absolutely stifling, and the gray of the Void seeming so much inside myhead that I think I got a glimmering of what the science boys mean whenthey explain to me that the Place is a kind of interweaving of thematerial and the mental--a Giant Monad, one of them called it.
Anyway, I said to myself, "Greta, if this is Introversion, I want nopart of it. It is not nice to be cut adrift from the cosmos and know it.A lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific and a starship between galaxiesare not in it for loneliness."
* * * * *
I asked myself why the Spiders had ever equipped Maintainers withIntroversion switches anyway, when we couldn't drill with them andweren't supposed to use them except in an emergency so tight that it waseither Introvert or surrender to the Snakes, and for the first time theobvious explanation came to me:
Introversion must be the same as scuttling, its main purpose to withholdsecrets and materiel from the enemy. It put a place into a situationfrom which even the Spider high command couldn't rescue it, and therewas nothing left but to sink down, down (out? up?), down into the Void.
If that was the case, our chances of getting back were about those of mybeing a kid again playing in the Dunes on the Small Time.
I edged a little closer to Sid and sort of squunched under his shoulderand rubbed my cheek against the smudged, gold-worked gray velvet. Helooked down and I said, "A long way to Lynn Regis, eh, Siddy?"
"Sweetling, thou spokest a mouthful," he said. He knows very well whathe is doing when he mixes his language that way, the wicked olddarling.
"Siddy," I said, "why this gold-work? It'd be a lot smoother withoutit."
"Marry, men must prick themselves out and, 'faith I know not, but ithelps if there's metal in it."
"And girls get scratched." I took a little sniff. "But don't put thisdoublet through the cleaner yet. Until we get out of the woods, I wantas much you around as possible."
"Marry, and why should I?" he asked blankly, and I think he wasn'tfooling me. The last thing time travelers find out is how they do ordon't smell. Then his face clouded and he looked as though he wanted tosquunch under my shoulder. "But 'faith, sweetling, your forest has a fewmore trees than Sherwood."
"Thou saidst it," I agreed, and wondered about the look. He oughtn't tobe interested in my girlishness now. I knew I was a mess, but he hadstuck pretty close to me during the hunt and you never can tell. Then Iremembered that he was the other one who hadn't declared himself whenBruce was putting it to us, and it probably troubled his male vanity.Not me, though--I was still grateful to the Maintainer for getting meout of that spot, whatever other it had got us all into. It seemed agesago.
* * * * *
We'd all jumped to the conclusion that the two Ghostgirls had run awaywith the Maintainer, I don't know where or why, but it looked so muchthat way. Maud had started yipping about how she'd never trusted Ghostsand always known that some day they'd start doing things on their own,and Kaby had got it firmly fixed in her head, right between the horns,that Phryne, being a Greek, was the ringleader and was going to wreakhavoc on us all.
But when we were checking Stores the first time, I had noticed that theGhostgirl envelopes looked flat. Ectoplasm doesn't take up much spacewhen it's folded, but I had opened one anyway, then another, and thencalled for help.
Every last envelope was empty. We had lost over a thousand Ghostgirls,Sid's whole stock.
Well, at least it proved what none of us had ever seen or heard of beingdemonstrated: that there is a spooky link--a sort of Change Windcontact--between a Ghost and its lifeline; and when that umbilicus, I'veheard it called, is cut, the part away from the lifeline dies.
Interesting, but what had bothered me was whether we Demons were goingto evaporate too, because we are as much Doublegangers as the Ghosts andour apron strings had been cut just as surely. We're more solid, ofcourse, but that would only mean we'd take a little longer. Verylogical.
I remember I had looked up at Lili and Maud--us girls had been checkingthe envelopes; it's one of the proprieties we frequently maintain andanyway, if men check them, they're apt to trot out that old wheeze about"instant women" which I'm sick to death of hearing, thank you.
Anyway, I had looked up and said, "It's been nice knowing you," and Lilihad said, "Twenty-three, skiddoo," and Maud had said, "Here goesnothing," and we had shook hands all around.
We figured that Phryne and the Countess had faded at the same time asthe other Ghostgirls, but an idea had been nibbling at me and I said,"Siddy, do you suppose it's just barely possible that, while we were alllooking at Bruce, those two Ghostgirls would have been able to work theMaintainer and get a Door and lam out of here with the thing?"
"Thou speakst my thoughts, sweetling. All weighs against it: Imprimis,'tis well known that Ghosts cannot lay plots or act on them. Secundo,the time forbade getting a Door. Tercio--and here's the real meat ofit--the Place folds without the Maintainer. Quadro, 'twere folly todepend on not one of--how many of us? ten, elf--not looking around inall the time it would have taken them--"
"I looked around once, Siddy. They were drinking and they had got to thecontrol divan under their own power. Now when was that? Oh, yes, whenBruce was talking about Zombies."
"Yes, sweetling. And as I was about to cap my argument with quinquo whenyou 'gan prattle, I could have sworn none could touch the Maintainer,much less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet ..."
"Eftsoons yet," I seconded him.
* * * * *
Somebody must have got a door and walked out with the thing. Itcertainly wasn't in the Place. The hunt had been a lulu. Something thesize of a portable typewriter is not easy to hide and we had been insideeverything from Beau's piano to the renewer link of the Refresher.
We had even fluoroscoped everybody, though it had made Illy writhe likea box of worms, as he'd warned us; he said it tickled terribly and Iinsisted on smoothing his fur for five minutes
afterward, although hewas a little standoffish toward me.
Some areas, like the bar, kitchen and Stores, took a long while, but wewere thorough. Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made thePlace, she has been stationed in a Field Hospital (it turns out theSpiders actually are mounting operations from them) and learned a fewnice new wrinkles.
However, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course,every check was observed by at least three people, not including Bruceor Lili. When the Maintainer vanished, Doc had pulled out of hisglassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me if I hadn't seenit happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to theArt Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out hiscoat and duck his head and whip out a flask and take a swig and by nowhe was well on his way toward another peak.
The Art Gallery had taken time too, because there's such a jumble ofstrange stuff, and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split abeautiful blue woodcarving of a Venusian medusa because, although therewasn't a mark in the paw-polished surface, she claimed it was just bigenough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces togetherand mooning over the other stuff.
After we'd finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling thefloor. Beau and Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a one-sidedPlace, that there is nothing, but nothing, under the floor; it just getsa lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you get a quarterinch down--that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark wasknuckle-headed (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the q.t.) and brokefour diamond-plus drills before he was satisfied.
Except for some trick hiding places, that left the Void, and thingsdon't vanish if you throw them at the Void--they half melt and freezeforever unless you can fish them out. Back of the Refresher, at abouteye-level, are three Venusian coconuts that a Hittite strongman threwthere during a major brawl. I try not to look at them because they areso much like witch heads they give me the woolies. The parts of thePlace right up against the Void have strange spatial properties whichone of the gadgets in Surgery makes use of in a way that gives me theworse woolies, but that's beside the point.
* * * * *
During the hunt, Kaby and Erich had used their Callers as directionfinders to point out the Maintainer, just as they're used in the cosmosto locate the Door--and sometimes in the Big Places, people tell me. Butthe Callers only went wild--like a compass needle whirling aroundwithout stopping--and nobody knew what that meant.
The trick hiding places were the Minor Maintainer, a cute idea, but itis no bigger than the Major and has its own mysterious insides and hadobviously kept on doing its own work, so that was out for severalreasons, and the bomb chest, though it seemed impossible for anyone tohave opened it, granting they knew the secret of its lock, even beforeErich jumped on it and put it in the limelight double. But when you'veruled out everything else, the word impossible changes meaning.
Since time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts oftricks for sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanentlyor temporarily. But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybodythat should know tells me that time traveling _through_ the Big Time isout. It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is thecountryside and we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and asGertie Stein might put it, you can't time travel through the time youtime travel in when you time travel.
I'd also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvioushiding place, maybe something that several people could pass back andforth between them, which would mean a conspiracy, and, of course, ifyou assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, includingthe cosmos itself. Still, I'd got a sort of shell-game idea about theSoldiers' three big black shakos and I hadn't been satisfied until I'dgot the three together and looked in them all at the same time.
"Wake up, Greta, and take something. I can't stand here forever." Maudhad brought us a tray of hearty snacks from then and yon, and I must saythey were tempting; she whips up a mean hors d'oeuvre.
I looked them over and said, "Siddy, I want a hot dog."
"And I want a venison pasty! Out upon you, you finical jill, youo'erscrupulous jade, you whimsic and tyrannous poppet!"
I grabbed a handful and snuggled back against him.
"Go on, call me some more, Siddy," I told him. "Real juicy ones."
