by Fritz Leiber
CHAPTER 10
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is But what is not.
--Macbeth
MOTIVES AND OPPORTUNITIES
My big bad waif from King's Lynn had set the tray on his knees andstarted to wolf the food down. The others were finishing up. Erich, Markand Kaby were having a quietly furious argument I couldn't overhear atthe end of the bar nearest the bronze chest, and Illy was draped overthe piano like a real octopus, listening in.
Beau and Sevensee were pacing up and down near the control divan andthrowing each other a word now and then. Beyond them, Bruce and Liliwere sitting on the opposite couch from us, talking earnestly aboutsomething. Maud had sat down at the other end of the bar and wasknitting--it's one of the habits like chess and quiet drinking, orlearning to talk by squeak box, that we pick up to pass the time in thePlace in the long stretches between parties. Doc was fiddling around theGallery, picking things up and setting them down, still managing to stayon his feet at any rate.
* * * * *
Lili and Bruce stood up, still gabbing intensely at each other, and Illybegan to pick out with one tentacle a little tune in the high keys thatdidn't sound like anything on God's earth. "Where do they get all theenergy?" I wondered.
As soon as I asked myself that, I knew the answer and I began to feelthe same way myself. It wasn't energy; it was nerves, pure and simple.
Change is like a drug, I realized--you get used to the facts neverstaying the same, and one picture of the past and future dissolving intoanother maybe not very different but still different, and your mindbeing constantly goosed by strange moods and notions, like nightclublights of shifting color with weird shadows between shining right onyour brain.
The endless swaying and jogging is restful, like riding on a train.
You soon get to like the movement and to need it without knowing, andwhen it suddenly stops and you're just you and the facts you think fromand feel from are exactly the same when you go back to them--boy, that'srough, as I found out now.
The instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks intothe Place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing butourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make ofthat, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation.
I decided I felt like I'd been dropped into a swimming pool full ofcement and held under until it hardened.
I could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonderthey didn't hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best; maybeshe'd got a little preparation from the long watches between stars; andthen she is older than all of us, even Sid, though with a small "o" in"older."
* * * * *
The restless work of the search for the Maintainer had masked thefeeling, but now it was beginning to come full force. Before the search,Bruce's speech and Erich's interruptions had done a passable masking jobtoo. I tried to remember when I'd first got the feeling and decided itwas after Erich had jumped on the bomb, about the time he mentionedpoetry. Though I couldn't be sure. Maybe the Maintainer had beenIntroverted even earlier, when I'd turned to look at the Ghostgirls. Iwouldn't have known. Nuts!
Believe me, I could feel that hardened cement on every inch of me. Iremembered Bruce's beautiful picture of a universe without Big Changeand decided it was about the worst idea going. I went on eating, thoughI wasn't so sure now it was a good idea to keep myself strong.
"Does the Maintainer have an Introversion telltale? Siddy!"
"'Sdeath, chit, and you love me, speak lower. Of a sudden, I feel notwell, as if I'd drunk a butt of Rhenish and slept inside it. Marry yes,blue. In short flashes, saith the manual. Why ask'st thou?"
"No reason. God, Siddy, what I'd give for a breath of Change Wind."
"Thou can'st say that eftsoons," he groaned. I must have looked prettymiserable myself, for he put his arm around my shoulders and whisperedgruffly, "Comfort thyself, sweetling, that while we suffer thus sorely,we yet cannot die the Change Death."
"What's that?" I asked him.
I didn't want to bounce around like the others. I had a suspicion I'dcarry it too far. So, to keep myself from going batty, I started torework the business of who had done what to the Maintainer.
During the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossedaround as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat ofSnake science amounting to sorcery; the Spider high command bunkeringthe Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the ExpressRoom, in such a hurry that they hadn't even time to transmit warnings;the hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beingswho are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of theChange War into the future much beyond Sevensee's epoch--unless the LateCosmicians are the ones fighting the Change War.
One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any oneof us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider politicalpolice, agent of--who knows, after Bruce?--a secret Change WorldCommittee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, orstrictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since theMaintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich's and Bruce'sfactions.
Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, butthat didn't apply to what I did with my own thoughts.
* * * * *
Who wanted to escape so bad they'd Introvert the Place, cutting off allpossible contact and communication either way with the cosmos andrunning the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all?
Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred thingsup, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sidcouldn't keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishmentsfor derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, asErich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front ofthe bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainlyhadn't had my eye on him every second.
Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what hesaid counted, so he'd hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not tomention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.
Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, peopleespecially, more than any man or woman I've ever known--he's like abig-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in hismouth--and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from thecosmos.
Maud, Kaby, Mark and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of,though Sevensee's being from the very far future did tie in with thatidea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be somethingdeveloping between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want tobe Introverted together.
"Stick to the facts, Greta," I reminded myself with a private groan.
That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself.
Erich, I thought--now we're getting somewhere. The little commandant hasthe nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and ifhe thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to belocked in with him, he'd do it in a second.
But even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he'd been heckling Brucefrom the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles forhim to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and ... well,that was nine-tenths of the problem.
If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanationof all. Gr-r-r!
Bruce's motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was itimmortal?) danger he'd put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemeda shame he'd been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if theMaintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar, we'd allhave noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I'd havenoticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls--if it worked as Sidclaimed, and he said he had
never seen it in operation, just read in themanual--oh, 'sdeath!
* * * * *
But Bruce didn't need opportunity, as I'm sure all the males inthe Place would have told me right off, because he had Lili topull the job for him and she had as much opportunity as any ofthe rest of us. Myself, I have large reservations to thiswoman-putty-in-the-hands-of-the-man-she-loves-madly theory, but I had toadmit there was something to be said for it in this case, and it hadseemed quite natural to me when the rest of us had decided, by unspokenagreement, that neither Lili's nor Bruce's checks counted when we werehunting for the Maintainer.
That took care of all of us and left only the mysterious stranger,intruding somehow through a Door (how'd he get it without using ourMaintainer?) or from an unimaginable hiding place or straight out of theVoid itself. I know that last is impossible--nothing can step out ofnothing--but if anything ever looked like it was specially built forsomething not at all nice to come looming out of, it's the Void--misty,foggily churning, slimy gray....
"Wait a second," I told myself, "and hang onto this, Greta. It shouldhave smacked you in the face at the start."
Whatever came out of the Void, or, more to the point, whoever slippedback from our crowd to the Maintainer, Bruce would have seen them. Hewas looking at the Maintainer past our heads the whole time, andwhatever happened to it, he saw it.
Erich wouldn't have, even after he was on the bomb, because he'd beenstagewise enough to face Bruce most of the time to build up his role astribune of the people.
But Bruce would have--unless he got so caught up in what he wassaying....
No, kid, a Demon is always an actor, no matter how much he believes inwhat he's saying, and there never was an actor yet who wouldn'tinstantly notice a member of the audience starting to walk out on hisbig scene.
So Bruce knew, which made him a better actor than I'd have been willingto grant, since it didn't look as if anyone else had thought of what hadjust occurred to me, or they'd have gone over and put it to him.
Not me, though--I don't work that way. Besides, I didn't feel up toit--Nervy Anna enfold me, I felt like pure hell.
"Maybe," I told myself encouragingly, "the Place is Hell," but added,"Be your age, Greta--be a real rootless, ruleless, ruthlesstwenty-nine."
