by Fritz Leiber
I could tell it was hitting the others the same way. Even battered, tight-lipped Lili seemed to be saying, you’re making me drink the stuff and I hate you for it, but I do love it. I guess we’d all had the worry that even finding and Extroverting the Maintainer wouldn’t put us back in touch with the cosmos and give us those Winds we hate and love.
The thing that cut through to us as we stood there glowing was not the thought of the bomb, though that would have come in a few seconds more, but Sid’s voice. He was still standing in the screen, except that now his face was out the other side and we could just see parts of his gray-doubleted back, but, of course, his “Jesu!” came through the screen as if it weren’t there.
At first I couldn’t figure out who he could be talking to, but I swear I never heard his voice so courtly obsequious before, so strong and yet so filled with awe and an under-note of, yes, sheer terror.
“Lord, I am filled from top to toe with confusion that you should so honor my poor Place,” he said. “Poor say I and mine, when I mean that I have ever busked it faithfully for you, not dreaming that you would ever condescend…yet knowing that your eye was certes ever upon me…though I am but as a poor pinch of dust adrift between the suns…I abase myself. Prithee, how may I serve thee, sir? I know not e’en how most suitably to address thee, Lord…King…Emperor Spider!”
* * * *
I felt like I was getting very small, but not a bit less visible, worse luck, and even with the Change Winds inside me to give me courage, I thought this was really too much, coming on top of everything else; it was simply unfair.
At the same time, I realized it was to be expected that the big bosses would have been watching us with their unblinking beady black eyes ever since we had Introverted waiting to pounce if we should ever come out of it. I tried to picture what was on the other side of the screen and I didn’t like the assignment.
But in spite of being petrified, I had a hard time not giggling, like the zany at graduation exercises, at the way the other ones in Surgery were taking it.
I mean the Soldiers. They each stiffened up like they had the old ramrod inside them, and their faces got that important look, and they glanced at each other and the floor without lowering their heads, as if they were measuring the distance between their feet and mentally chalking alternate sets of footprints to step into. The way Erich and Kaby held the Major and Minor Maintainers became formal; the way they checked their Callers and nodded reassuringly was positively esoteric. Even Illy somehow managed to look as if he were on parade.
Then from beyond the screen came what was, under the circumstances, the worst noise I’ve ever heard, a seemingly wordless distant-sounding howling and wailing, with a note of menace that made me shake, although it also had a nasty familiarity about it I couldn’t place. Sid’s voice broke into it, loud, fast and frightened.
“Your pardon, Lord, I did not think…certes, the gravity…I’ll attend to it on the instant.” He whipped a hand and half a head back through the screen, but without looking back and snapped his fingers, and before I could blink, Kaby had put the Minor Maintainer in his hand.
Sid went completely out of sight then and the howling stopped, and I thought that if that was the way a Lord Spider expressed his annoyance at being subjected to incorrect gravity, I hoped the bosses wouldn’t start any conversations with me.
Erich pursed his lips and threw the other Soldiers a nod and the four of them marched through the screen as if they’d drilled a lifetime for this moment. I had the wild idea that Erich might give me his arm, but he strode past me as if I were…an Entertainer.
I hesitated a moment then, but I had to see what was happening outside, even if I got eaten up for it. Besides, I had a bit of the thought that if these formalities went on much longer, even a Lord Spider was going to discover just how immune he was to confined atomic blast.
I walked through the screen with Lili beside me.
* * * *
The Soldiers had stopped a few feet in front of it. I looked around ahead for whatever it was going to turn out to be, prepared to drop a curtsy or whatever else, bar nothing, that seemed expected of me.
I had a hard time spotting the beast. Some of the others seemed to be having trouble too. I saw Doc weaving around foolishly by the control divan, and Bruce and Beau and Sevensee and Maud on their feet beyond it, and I wondered whether we were dealing with an invisible monster; ought to be easy enough for the bosses to turn a simple trick like invisibility.
Then I looked sharply left where everyone else, even glassy-eyed Doc, was coming to look, into the Door sector, only there wasn’t any monster there or even a Door, but just Siddy holding the Minor Maintainer and grinning like when he is threatening to tickle me, only more fiendishly.
“Not a move, masters,” he cried, his eyes dancing, “or I’ll pin the pack of you down, marry and amen I will. It is my firm purpose to see the Place blasted before I let this instrument out of my hands again.”
My first thought was, “’Sblood but Siddy is a real actor! I don’t care if he didn’t study under anyone later than Burbage, that just proves how good Burbage is.”
Sid had convinced us not only that the real Spiders had arrived, but earlier that the gravity in the edge of Stores had been a lot heavier than it actually was. He completely fooled all those Soldiers, including my swelled-headed victorious little commandant, and I kind of filed away the timing of that business of reaching out the hand and snapping the fingers without looking, it was so good.
“Beauregard!” Sid called. “Get to the Major Maintainer and call headquarters. But don’t come through Door, marry go by Refresher. I’ll not trust a single Demon of you in this sector with me until much more has been shown and settled.”
“Siddy, you’re wonderful,” I said, starting toward him. “As soon as I got the Maintainer unsnarled and looked around and saw your sweet old face—”
“Back, tricksy trull! Not the breadth of one scarlet toenail nearer me, you Queen of Sleights and High Priestess of Deception!” he bellowed. “You least of all do I trust. Why you hid the Maintainer, I know not, faith, but later you’ll discover the truth to me or I’ll have your gizzard.”
I could see there was going to have to be a little explaining.
* * * *
Doc, touched off, I guess, by Sid waving his hand at me, threw back his head and let off one of those shuddery Siberian wolf-howls he does so blamed well. Sid waved toward him sharply and he shut up, beaming toothily, but at least I knew who was responsible for the Spider wail of displeasure that Sid had either called for or more likely got as a gift of the gods and used in his act.
Beau came circling around fast and Erich shoved the Major Maintainer into his hands without making any fuss. The four Soldiers were looking pretty glum after losing their grand review.
Beau dumped some junk off one of the Art Gallery’s sturdy taborets and set the Major Maintainer on it carefully but fast, and quickly knelt in front of it and whipped on some earphones and started to tune. The way he did it snatched away from me my inward glory at my big Inversion brainwave so fast, I might never have had it, and there was nothing in my mind again but the bronze bomb chest.
I wondered if I should suggest Inverting the thing, but I said to myself, “Uh-uh, Greta, you got no diploma to show them and there probably isn’t time to try two things, anyway.”
Then Erich for once did something I wanted him to, though I didn’t care for its effect on my nerves, by looking at his Caller and saying quietly, “Nine minutes to go, if Place time and cosmic time are synching.”
Beau was steady as a rock and working adjustments so fine that I couldn’t even see his fingers move.
Then, at the other end of the Place, Bruce took a few steps toward us. Sevensee and Maud followed a bit behind him. I remembered Bruce was another of our nuts with a private program for blowing up the place.
“Sidney,” he called, and then, when he’d got Sid’s attention, “Remember, Sidney, you and I both came down to London from Peterhouse.”
I didn’t get it. Then Bruce looked toward Erich with a devil-may-care challenge and toward Lili as if he were asking her forgiveness for something. I couldn’t read her expression; the bruises were blue on her throat and her cheek was puffy.
Then Bruce once more shot Erich that look of challenge and he spun and grabbed Sevensee by a wrist and stuck out a foot—even half-horses aren’t too sharp about infighting, I guess, and the satyr had every right to feel at least as confused as I felt—and sent him stumbling into Maud, and the two of them tumbled to the floor in a jumble of hairy legs and pearl-gray frock. Bruce raced to the bomb chest.
Most of us yelled, “Stop him, Sid, pin him down,” or something like that—I know I did because I was suddenly sure that he’d been asking Lili’s pardon for blowing the two of them up—and all the rest of us too, the love-blinded stinker.
Sid had been watching him all the time and now he lifted his hand to the Minor Maintainer, but then he didn’t touch any of the dials, just watched and waited, and I thought, “Shaitan shave us! Does Siddy want in on death, too? Ain’t he satisfied with all he knows about life?”
Bruce had knelt and was twisting some things on the front of the chest, and it was all as bright as if he were under a bank of Klieg lights, and I was telling myself I wouldn’t know anything when the fireball fired, and not believing it, and Sevensee and Maud had got unscrambled and were starting for Bruce, and the rest of us were yelling at Sid, except that Erich was just looking at Bruce very happily, and Sid was still not doing anything, and it was unbearable except just then I felt the little arteries start to burst in my brain like a string of fire-crackers and the old aorta pop, and for good measure, a couple of valves come unhinged in my ticker, and I was thinking, “Well, now I know what it’s like to die of heart failure and high blood pressure,” and having a last quiet smile at having cheated the bomb, when Bruce jumped up and back from the chest.
“That does it!” he announced cheerily. “She’s as safe as the Bank of England.”
Sevensee and Maud stopped themselves just short of knocking him down and I said to myself, “Hey, let’s get a move on! I thought heart attacks were fast.”
Before anyone else could speak, Beau did. He had turned around from the Major Maintainer and pulled aside one of the earphones.
“I got headquarters,” he said crisply. “They told me how to disarm the bomb—I merely said I thought we ought to know. What did you do, sir?” he called to Bruce.
“There’s a row of four ankhs just below the lock. The first to your left you give a quarter turn to the right, the second a quarter turn to the left, same for the fourth, and you don’t touch the third.”
“That is it, sir,” Beau confirmed.
The long silence was too much for me; I guess I must have the shortest span for unspoken relief going. I drew some nourishment out of my restored arteries into my brain cells and yelled, “Siddy, I know I’m a tricksy trull and the High Vixen of all Foxes, but what the Hell is Peterhouse?”
“The oldest college at Cambridge,” he told me rather coolly.
CHAPTER 16
“Familiar with infinite universe sheafs and open-ended postulate systems?—the notion that everything is possible—and I mean everything—and everything has happened. Everything.”
—Heinlein
THE POSSIBILITY-BINDERS
An hour later, I was nursing a weak highball and a black eye in the sleepy-time darkness on the couch farthest from the piano, half watching the highlighted party going on around it and the bar, while the Place waited for rendezvous with Egypt and the Battle of Alexandria.
Sid had swept all our outstanding problems into one big bundle and, since his hand held the joker of the Minor Maintainer, he had settled them all as high-handedly as if they’d been those of a bunch of schoolkids.
It amounted to this:
We’d been Introverted when most of the damning things had happened, so presumably only we knew about them, and we were all in so deep one way or another that we’d all have to keep quiet to protect our delicate complexions.
Well, Erich’s triggering the bomb did balance rather neatly Bruce’s incitement to mutiny, and there was Doc’s drinking, while everybody who had declared for the peace message had something to hide. Mark and Kaby I felt inclined to trust anywhere, Maud for sure, and Erich in this particular matter, damn him. Illy I didn’t feel at all easy about, but I told myself there always has to be a fly in the ointment—a darn big one this time, and furry.
Sid didn’t mention his own dirty linen, but he knew we knew he’d flopped badly as boss of the Place and only recouped himself by that last-minute flimflam.
Remembering Sid’s trick made me think for a moment about the real Spiders. Just before I snuck out of Surgery, I’d had a vivid picture of what they must look like, but now I couldn’t get it again. It depressed me, not being able to remember—oh, I probably just imagined I’d had a picture, like a hophead on a secret-of-the-universe kick. Me ever find out anything about the Spiders?—except for nervous notions like I’d had during the recent fracas?—what a laugh!
The funniest thing (ha-ha!) was that I had ended up the least-trusted person. Sid wouldn’t give me time to explain how I’d deduced what had happened to the Maintainer, and even when Lili spoke up and admitted hiding it, she acted so bored I don’t think everybody believed her—although she did spill the realistic detail that she hadn’t used partial Inversion on the glove; she’d just turned it inside out to make it a right and then done a full Inversion to get the lining back inside.
* * * *
I tried to get Doc to confirm that he’d reasoned the thing out the same way I had, but he said he had been blacked out the whole time, except during the first part of the hunt, and he didn’t remember having any bright ideas at all. Right now, he was having Maud explain to him twice, in detail, everything that had happened. I decided that it was going to take a little more work before my reputation as a great detective was established.
I looked over the edge of the couch and just made out in the gloom one of Bruce’s black gloves. It must have been kicked there. I fished it up. It was the right-hand one. My big clue, and was I sick of it! Got mittens, God forbid! I slung it away and, like a lurking octopus, Illy shot up a tentacle from the next couch, where I hadn’t known he was resting, and snatched the glove like it was a morsel of underwater garbage. These ETs can seem pretty shuddery non-human at times.
I thought of what a cold-blooded, skin-saving louse Illy had been, and about Sid and his easy suspicions, and Erich and my black eye, and how, as usual, I’d got left alone in the end. My men!
Bruce had explained about being an A-tech. Like a lot of us, he’d had several widely different jobs during his first weeks in the Change World and one of them had been as secretary to a group of the minor atomics boys from the Manhattan-Project-Earth-Satellite days. I gathered he’d also absorbed some of his bothersome ideas from them. I hadn’t quite decided yet what species of heroic heel he belonged to, but he was thick with Mark and Erich again. Everybody’s men!
Sid didn’t have to argue with anybody; all the wild compulsions and mighty resolves were dead now, anyway until they’d had a good long rest. I sure could use one myself, I knew.
The party at the piano was getting wilder. Lili had been dancing the black bottom on top of it and now she jumped down into Sid’s and Sevensee’s arms, taking a long time about it. She’d been drinking a lot and her little gray dress looked about as innocent on her as diapers would on Nell Gwyn. She continued her dance, distributing her marks of favor equally between Sid, Erich and the satyr. Beau didn’t mind a bit, but serenely pounded out “Tonight’s the Night”—which she’d practically shouted to him not two minutes ago.
I was glad to be out of the party. Who can compete with a highly experienced, utterly disillusioned seventeen-year-old really throwing herself away for the first time?
* * * *
Something touched my hand. Illy had stretched a tentacle into a furry wire to return me the black glove, although he ought to have known I didn’t want it. I pushed it away, privately calling Illy a washed-out moronic tarantula, and right away I felt a little guilty. What right had I to be critical of Illy? Would my own character have shown to advantage if I’d been locked in with eleven octopoids a billion years away? For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?
Still, I was glad to be out of the party, though I kept on watching it. Bruce was drinking alone at the bar. Once Sid had gone over to him and they’d had one together and I’d heard Bruce reciting from Rupert Brooke those deliberately corny lines, “For England’s the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; and Cambridgeshire, of all England, The Shire for Men who Understand;” and I’d remembered that Brooke too had died young in World War One and my ideas had got fuzzy. But mostly Bruce was just calmly drinking by himself. Every once in a while Lili would look at him and stop dead in her dancing and laugh.
I’d figured out this Bruce-Lili-Erich business as well as I cared to. Lili had wanted the nest with all her heart and nothing else would ever satisfy her, and now she’d go to hell her own way and probably die of Bright’s disease for a third time in the Change World. Bruce hadn’t wanted the nest or Lili as much as he wanted the Change World and the chances it gave for Soldierly cavorting and poetic drunks; Lili’s seed wasn’t his idea of healing the cosmos; maybe he’d make a real mutiny some day, but more likely he’d stick to bar-room epics.
