The Big Time

by Fritz Leiber

  CHAPTER 12

  Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past's mistakes and the future's fears.

  I had to learn to close the front door to tomorrow and the back door to yesterday and settle down to here and now.

  --Anonymous

  A BIG OPPORTUNITY

  Nobody laughed at Erich's screwball sarcasms and still I thought, "Yes,perish his hysterical little gray head, but he's half right--Lili's gotthe big thing now and she wants to serve it up to the rest of us on aplatter, only love doesn't cook and cut that way."

  Those weren't bad ideas she had about the Maintainer, though, especiallythe one about the Ghostgirls doing the Introverting--it would explainwhy there couldn't be Introversion drill, the manual stuff about blueflashes being window-dressing, and something disappearing withoutmovement or transition is the sort of thing that might not catch theattention--and I guess they gave the others something to think abouttoo, for there wasn't any follow-up to Erich's frantic sniping.

  But I honestly didn't see where there was this big opportunity beingstuck away in a gray sack in the Void and I began to wonder and I gotthe strangest feeling and I said to myself, "Hang onto your hat, Greta.It's hope."

  "The dreadful thing about being a Demon is that you have all time torange through," Lili was saying with a smile. "You can never shut theback door to yesterday or the front door to tomorrow and simply live inthe present. But now that's been done for us: the Door is shut, we neednever again rehash the past or the future. The Spiders and Snakes cannever find us, for who ever heard of a Place that was truly lost beingrescued? And as those in the know have told me, Introversion is the endas far as those outside are concerned. So we're safe from the Spidersand Snakes, we need never be slaves or enemies again, and we have aPlace in which to live our new lives, the Place prepared for us from thebeginning."

  She paused. "Surely you understand what I mean? Sidney and Beauregardand Dr. Pyeshkov are the ones who explained it to me. The Place is abalanced aquarium, just like the cosmos. No one knows how many ages ofBig Time it has been in use, without a bit of new material being broughtin--only luxuries and people--and not a bit of waste cast off. No oneknows how many more ages it may not sustain life. I never heard of MinorMaintainers wearing out. We have all the future, all the security,anyone can hope for. We have a Place to live together."

  * * * * *

  You know, she was dead right and I realized that all the time I'd hadthe conviction in the back of my mind that we were going to suffocate orsomething if we didn't get a Door open pretty quick. I should have knowndifferently, if anybody should, because I'd once been in the Placewithout a Door for as long as a hundred sleeps during a foxhole stretchof the Change War and we'd had to start cycling our food and it had beenokay.

  And then, because it is also the way my mind works, I started to picturein a flash the consequences of our living together all by ourselves likeLili said.

  I began to pair people off; I couldn't help it. Let's see, four women,six men, two ETs.

  "Greta," I said, "you're going to be Miss Polly Andry for sure. We'llhave a daily newspaper and folk-dancing classes, we'll shut the barexcept evenings, Bruce'll keep a rhymed history of the Place."

  I even thought, though I knew this part was strictly silly, aboutschools and children. I wondered what Siddy's would look like, or mylittle commandant's. "Don't go near the Void, dears." Of course thatwould be specially hard on the two ETs, but Sevensee at least wasn't sodifferent and the genetics boys had made some wonderful advances andMaud ought to know about them and there were some amazing gadgets inSurgery when Doc sobered up. The patter of little hoofs ...

  "My fiance spoke to you about carrying a peace message to the rest ofthe cosmos," Lili added, "and bringing an end to the Big Change, andhealing all the wounds that have been made in the Little Time."

  I looked at Bruce. His face was set and strained, as will happen to thebest of them when a girl starts talking about her man's business, and Idon't know why, but I said to myself, "She's crucifying him, she'snailing him to his purpose as a woman will, even when there's not muchpoint to it, as now."

  And Lili went on, "It was a wonderful thought, but now we cannot carryor send any message and I believe it is too late in any event for apeace message to do any good. The cosmos is too raveled by change, toofar gone. It will dissolve, fade, 'leave not a rack behind.' We're thesurvivors. The torch of existence has been put in our hands.

  "We may already be all that's left in the cosmos, for have you thoughtthat the Change Winds may have died at their source? We may never reachanother cosmos, we may drift forever in the Void, but who of us has beenIntroverted before and who knows what we can or cannot do? We're a seedfor a new future to grow from. Perhaps all doomed universes cast offseeds like this Place. It's a seed, it's an embryo, let it grow."

  She looked swiftly at Bruce and then at Sid and she quoted, "'Come, myfriends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world'."

  * * * * *

  I squeezed Sid's hand and I started to say something to him, but hedidn't know I was there; he was listening to Lili quote Tennyson withhis eyes entranced and his mouth open, as if he were imagining newthings to put into it--oh, Siddy!

  And then I saw the others were looking at her the same way. Ilhilihiswas seeing finer feather forests than long-dead Luna's grow. Thegreenhouse child Maud ap-Ares Davies was stowing away on a starshipbound for another galaxy, or thinking how different her life might havebeen, the children she might have had, if she'd stayed on the planetsand out of the Change World. Even Erich looked as though he might beblitzing new universes, and Mark subduing them, for an eight-legged_Fuehrer-imperator_. Beau was throbbing up a wider Mississippi in abigger-than-life sidewheeler.

  Even I--well, I wasn't dreaming of a Greater Chicago. "Let's not gohog-wild on this sort of thing," I told myself, but I did look up at theVoid and I got a shiver because I imagined it drawing away and the wholePlace starting to grow.

  "I truly meant what I said about a seed," Lili went on slowly. "I know,as you all do, that there are no children in the Change World, thatthere cannot be, that we all become instantly sterile, that what theycall a curse is lifted from us girls and we are no longer in bondage tothe moon."

  She was right, all right--if there's one thing that's been proved amillion times in the Change World, it's that.

  "But we are no longer in the Change World," Lili said softly, "and itslimitations should no longer apply to us, including that one. I feeldeeply certain of it, but--" she looked around slowly--"we are fourwomen here and I thought one of us might have a surer indication."

  My eyes followed hers around like anybody's would. In fact, everybodywas looking around except Maud, and she had the silliest look ofsurprise on her face and it stayed there, and then, very carefully, shegot down from the bar stool with her knitting. She looked at thehalf-finished pink bra with the long white needles stuck in it and hereyes bugged bigger yet, as if she were expecting it to turn into a babysweater right then and there. Then she walked across the Place to Liliand stood beside her. While she was walking, the look of surprisechanged to a quiet smile. The only other thing she did was throw hershoulders back a little.

  I was jealous of her for a second, but it was a double miracle for her,considering her age, and I couldn't grudge her that. And to tell thetruth, I was a little frightened, too. Even with Dave, I'd been botheredabout this business of having babies.

  * * * * *

  Yet I stood up with Siddy--I couldn't stop myself and I guess hecouldn't either--and hand in hand we walked to the control divan. Beauand Sevensee were there and Bruce, of course, and then, so help me,those Soldiers to the death, Kaby and Mark, started over from the barand I couldn't see anything in their eyes about the greater glory ofCrete and Rome, but something, I think, about each other
, and after amoment Illy slowly detached himself from the piano and followed, lightlytrailing his tentacles on the floor.

  I couldn't exactly see him hoping for little Illies in this company,unless it was true what the jokes said about Lunans, but maybe he wasbeing really disinterested and maybe he wasn't; maybe he was simplyfiguring that Illy ought to be on the side with the biggest battalions.

  I heard dragging footsteps behind us and here came Doc from the Gallery,carrying in his folded arms an abstract sculpture as big as a newbornbaby. It was an agglomeration of perfect shiny gray spheres the size ofgolf balls, shaping up to something like a large brain, but with holesshowing through here and there. He held it out to us like an infant tobe admired and worked his lips and tongue as if he were trying very hardto say something, though not a word came out that you could understand,and I thought, "Maxey Aleksevich may be speechless drunk and have allsorts of holes in his head, but he's got the right instincts, bless hissoulful little Russian heart."

  We were all crowded around the control divan like a football teamhuddling. The Peace Packers, it came to me. Sevensee would be fullbackor center and Illy left end--what a receiver! The right number, too.Erich was alone at the bar, but now even he--"Oh, no, this can't be," Ithought--even he came toward us. Then I saw that his face was workingthe worst ever. He stopped halfway and managed to force a smile, but itwas the worst, too. "That's my little commandant," I thought, "no teamspirit."

  "So now Lili and Bruce--yes, and _Grossmutterchen_ Maud--have theirlittle nest," he said, and he wouldn't have had to push his voice veryhard to get a screech. "But what are the rest of us supposed tobe--cowbirds?"

  * * * * *

  He crooked his neck and flapped his hands and croaked, "Cuc-koo!Cuc-koo!" And I said to myself, "I often thought you were crazy, boy,but now I know."

  "_Teufelsdreck!_--yes, Devil's dirt!--but you all seem to be infectedwith this dream of children. Can't you see that the Change World is thenatural and proper end of evolution?--a period of enjoyment andmeasuring, an ultimate working out of things, which women calldestruction--'Help, I'm being raped!' 'Oh, what are they doing to mychildren?'--but which men know as fulfillment.

  "You're given good parts in _Goetterdaemmerung_ and you go up to theauthor and tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, Herr Wagner, butthis Twilight of the Gods is just a bit morbid. Why don't you write anopera for me about the little ones, the dear little blue-eyedcurly-tops? A plot? Oh, boy meets girl and they settle down to breed,something like that.'

  "Devil's dirt doubled and damned! Have you thought what life willbe like without a Door to go out of to find freedom and adventure,to measure your courage and keenness? Do you want to grow long graybeards hobbling around this asteroid turned inside out? Putter aroundindoors to the end of your days, mooning about little babycosmoses?--incidentally, with a live bomb for company. The cave, thewomb, the little gray home in the nest--is that what you want? It'llgrow? Oh, yes, like the city engulfing the wild wood, a proliferationof _Kinder_, _Kirche_, _Kueche_--I should live so long!

  "Women!--how I hate their bright eyes as they look at me from thefireside, bent-shouldered, rocking, deeply happy to be old, and say,'He's getting weak, he's giving out, soon I'll have to put him to bedand do the simplest things for him.' Your filthy Triple Goddess, Kaby,the birther, bride, and burier of man! Woman, the enfeebler, thefetterer, the crippler! Woman!--and the curly-headed little cancers shewants!"

  He lurched toward us, pointing at Lili. "I never knew one who didn'twant to cripple a man if you gave her the chance. Cripple him, swaddlehim, clip his wings, grind him to sausage to mold another man, hers, adoll man. You hid the Maintainer, you little smother-hen, so you couldhave your nest and your Brucie!"

  He stopped, gasping, and I expected someone to bop him one on theschnozzle, and I think he did, too. I turned to Bruce and he waslooking, I don't know how, sorry, guilty, anxious, angry, shaken,inspired, all at once, and I wished people sometimes had simple suburbanreactions like magazine stories.

  Then Erich made the mistake, if it was one, of turning toward Bruce andslowly staggering toward him, pawing the air with his hands as if hewere going to collapse into his arms, and saying, "Don't let them getyou, Bruce. Don't let them tie you down. Don't let them clip you--yourwords or your deeds. You're a Soldier. Even when you talked about apeace message, you talked about doing some smashing of your own. Nomatter what you think and feel, Bruce, no matter how much lying you doand how much you hide, you're really not on their side."

  That did it.

  * * * * *

  It didn't come soon enough or, I think, in the right spirit to pleaseme, but I will say it for Bruce that he didn't muck it up by tipping orsoftening his punch. He took one step forward and his shoulders spun andhis fist connected sweet and clean.

  As he did it, he said only one word, "Loki!" and darn if that didn'tswitch me back to a campfire in the Indiana Dunes and my mother tellingme out of the Elder Saga about the malicious, sneering, all-spoilingNorse god and how, when the other gods came to trap him in his hideawayby the river, he was on the point of finishing knotting a mysterious netbig enough, I had imagined, to snare the whole universe, and that ifthey'd come a minute later, he would have.

  Erich was stretched on the floor, his head hitched up, rubbing his jawand glaring at Bruce. Mark, who was standing beside me, moved a littleand I thought he was going to do something, maybe even clobber Bruce inthe old spirit of you can't do that to my buddy, but he just shook hishead and said, "_Omnia vincit amor._" I nudged him and said, "Meaning?"and he said, "Love licks everything."

  I'd never have expected it from a Roman, but he was half right at anyrate. Lili had her victory: Bruce clearing the field for the marriage bylaying out the woman-hating boy friend who would be trying to get him togo out nights. At that moment, I think Bruce wanted Lili and a life withher more than he wanted to reform the Change World. Sure, us women haveour little victories--until the legions come or the Little Corporaldraws up his artillery or the Panzers roar down the road.

  Erich scrambled to his feet and stood there in a half-slump,half-crouch, still rubbing his jaw and glaring at Bruce over his hand,but making no move to continue the fight, and I studied his face andsaid to myself, "If he can get a gun, he's going to shoot himself, Iknow."

  Bruce started to say something and hesitated, like I would have in hisshoes, and just then Doc got one of his unpredictable inspirations andwent weaving out toward Erich, holding out the sculpture and makingdeaf-and-dumb noises like he had to us. Erich looked at him as if hewere going to kill him, and then grabbed the sculpture and swung it upover his head and smashed it down on the floor, and for a wonder, itdidn't shatter. It just skidded along in one piece and stopped inchesfrom my feet.

  That thing not breaking must have been the last straw for Erich. I swearI could see the red surge up through his eyes toward his brain. He swungaround into the Stores sector and ran the few steps between him and thebronze bomb chest.

  Everything got very slow motion for me, though I didn't do any moving.Almost every man started out after Erich. Bruce didn't, though, andSiddy turned back after the first surge forward, while Illy squuncheddown for a leap, and it was between Sevensee's hairy shanks and Beau'sscissoring white pants that I saw that under-the-microscope circle ofdeath's heads and watched Erich's finger go down on them in the orderKaby had given: one, three, five, six, two, four, seven. I was able topray seven distinct times that he'd make a mistake.

  He straightened up. Illy landed by the box like a huge silver spider andhis tentacles whipped futilely across its top. The others surged to afrightened halt around them.

  Erich's chest was heaving, but his voice was cool and collected as hesaid, "You mentioned something about our having a future, Miss Foster.Now you can make that more specific. Unless we get back to the cosmosand dump this box, or find a Spider A-tech, or manage to callheadquarters for guidance on disarming the bomb, we have a
futureexactly thirty minutes long."