“But I didn’t die there, kiddos. I still hoped to hurt the Greek ships, maybe with the Snake’s own heat gun. So I quick tried to outflank them. My two comrades crawled beside me—they are males, but they have courage. Soon we spied the ambushsetters. They were Snakes and they were many, filthily disguised as Cretans.”
There was an indignant murmur at this, for our cutthroat Change War has its code, the Soldiers tell me. Being an Entertainer, I don’t have to say what I think.
“They had seen us when we saw them,” Kaby swept on, “and they loosed a killing volley. Heat- and knife-rays struck about us in a storm of wind and fire, and the Lunan lost a feeler, fighting for Crete’s Triple Goddess. So we dodged behind a sand hill, steered our flight back toward the water. It was awful, what we saw there; Crete’s brave ships all sunk or sinking, blue sky sullied by their death-smoke. Once again the Greeks had licked us!—aided by the filthy Serpents.
“Round our wrecks, their black ships scurried, like black beetles, filth their diet, yet this day they dine on heroes. On the quiet sun-lit beach there, I could feel a Change Gale blowing, working changes deep inside me, aches and pains that were a stranger’s. Half my memories were doubled, half my lifeline crooked and twisted, three new moles upon my swordhand. Goddess, Goddess, Triple Goddess—”
Her voice wavered and Sid reached out a hand, but she straightened her back.
“Triple Goddess, give me courage to tell everything that happened. We ran down into the water, hoping to escape by diving. We had hardly gotten under when the heat-rays hit above us, turning all the cool green surface to a roaring white inferno. But as I believe I told you, I was calling on my Caller, and a Door now opened to us, deep below the deadly steamclouds. We dived in like frightened minnows and a lot of water with us.”
Off Chicago’s Gold Coast, Dave once gave me a lesson in skindiving and, remembering it, I got a flash of Kaby’s Door in the dark depths.
“For a moment all was chaos. Then the Door slammed shut behind us. We’d been picked up in time’s nick by—an Express Room of our Spiders!—sloshing two feet deep in water, much more cramped for space than this Place. It was manned by a magician, an old coot named Benson-Carter. He dispelled the water quickly and reported on his Caller. We’d got dry, were feeling human, Illy here had shed his swimsuit, when we looked at the Maintainer. It was glowing, changing, melting! And when Benson-Carter touched it, he fell backward—death was in him. Then the Void began to darken, narrow, shrink and close around us, so I called upon my Caller—without wasting time, let me tell you!
“We can’t say for sure what was it slowly squeezed that sweet Express Room, but we fear the dirty Snakes have found a way to find our Places and attack outside the cosmos!—found the Spiderweb that links us in the Void’s gray less-than-nothing.”
No murmur this time. This reaction was genuine; we’d been hit where we lived and I could see everybody was scared as sick as I was. Except maybe Bruce and Lili, who were still holding hands and beaming gently. I decided they were the kind that love makes brave, which it doesn’t do to me. It just gives me two people to worry about.
“I can see you dig our feeling,” Kaby continued. “This thing scared the pants off of us. If we could have, we’d have even Introverted the Maintainer, broken all the ties that bind us, chanced it incommunicado. But the little old Maintainer was a seething red-hot puddle filled with bubbles big as handballs. We sat tight and watched the Void close. I kept calling on my Caller.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, but that made it easier to see the three of them with the Void shutting down on them. (Was ours still behaving? Yes, Bibi Miriam.) Poetry or no poetry, it got me.
“Benson-Carter, lying dying, also thought the Snakes had done it. And he knew that death was in him, so he whispered me his mission, giving me precise instructions: how to press the seven death’s hands, starting lockside counterclockwise, one, three, five, six, two, four, seven, then you have a half an hour; after you have pressed the seven, do not monkey with the buttons—get out fast and don’t stop moving.”
I wasn’t getting this part and I couldn’t see that anyone else was, though Bruce was whispering to Lili. I remembered seeing skulls engraved on the bronze chest. I looked at Illy and he nodded a tentacle and spread two to say, I guessed, that yes, Benson-Carter had said something like that, but no, Illy didn’t know much about it.
“All these things and more he whispered,” Kaby went on, “with the last gasps of his life-force, telling all his secret orders—for he’d not been sent to get us, he was on a separate mission, when he heard my SOSs. Sid, it’s you he was to contact, as the first leg of his mission, pick up from you three black hussars, death’s-head Demons, daring Soldiers, then to wait until the Places next match rhythm with the cosmos—matter of two mealtimes, barely—and to tune in northern Egypt in the age of the last Caesar, in the year of Rome’s swift downfall, there to start on operation in a battle near a city named for Thrace’s Alexander, there to change the course of battle, blow sky-high the stinking Serpents, all their agents, all their Zombies!
“Goddess, pardon, now I savvy how you’ve guided my least foot-step, when I thought you’d gone and left me—for I flubbed your three-mole signal. We’ve found Sid’s Place, that’s the first leg, and I see the three black hussars, and we’ve brought with us the weapon and the Parthian disguises, salvaged from the doomed Express Room when your Door appeared in time’s nick, and the Room around us closing spewed us through before it vanished with the corpse of BensonCarter. Triple Goddess, draw the milk now from the womanhood I flaunt here and inject the blackest hatred! Vengeance now upon the Serpents, vengeance sweet in northern Egypt, for your island, Crete, Goddess!—and a victory for the Spiders! Goddess, Goddess, we can swing it!”
The roar that made me try to stop my ears with my shoulders didn’t come from Kaby—she’d spoken her piece—but from Sid. The dear boy was purple enough to make me want to remind him you can die of high blood pressure just as easy in the Change World.
“Dump me with ops! ’Sblood, I’ll not endure it! Is this a battle post? They’ll be mounting operations from field hospitals next. Kabysia Labrys, thou art mad to suggest it. And what’s this prattle of locks, clocks, and death’s heads, buttons and monkeys? This brabble, this farrago, this hocus-pocus! And where’s the weapon you prate of? In that whoreson bronze casket, I suppose.”
She nodded, looking blank and almost a little shy as poetic possession faded from her. Her answer came like its faltering last echo.
“It is nothing but a tiny tactical atomic bomb.”
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 two ETs start yelping at once, me included. It may seem strange that Change People, able to whiz through time and space and roust around outside the cosmos and knowing at least by hearsay of weapons a billion years in the future, like the Mindbomb, should panic at being shut in with a little primitive mid-20th Century gadget. Well, they feel the same as atomic scientists would feel if a Bengal tiger were brought into their laboratory, neither more nor less scared.
I’m a moron at physics, but I do know the Fireball is bigger than the Place. Remember that, besides the bomb, we’d recently been presented with a lot of other fears we hadn’t had time to cope with, especially the business of the Snakes having learned how to get at our Places and melt the Maintainers and collapse them. Not to mention the general impression—first Saint Petersburg, then Crete—that the whole Chan
ge War was going against the Spiders.
Yet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were all panicking. It made me admit what I didn’t like to: that we were all in pretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn’t happen to 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 from the bronze chest. Beau, harking back to what they’d thought of doing in the Express Room when it was too late, hissed, “Sirs, we must Introvert,” and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for the control divan. Erich seconded him with a white-faced “Gott im Himmel, ja! ” from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slim stem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass.
I felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degrees worse than foxholing. It’s supposed not only to keep the Door tight shut, but also to lock it so even the Change Winds can’t get through—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 her apple-green chiton together at the throat. She wrenched my attention away from everyone else for a moment, and I couldn’t help wondering whether the person or Zombie back in the cosmos, from whose lifeline the Ghost has been taken, doesn’t at least have strange dreams or thoughts when something like this happens.
Sid stopped Beau, though he almost got bowled over doing it, and he held the gambler away from the Maintainer in a bear hug and bellowed over his shoulders, “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 was dragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump it through fast when we got one, I guess, while Mark acted as if he were trying 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 scuffle with 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 skulls starting at the lock as plain as if they’d been under a magnifying glass, though ordinarily they’d have been a vague circle to my eyes at the distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the opposite direction, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, and squeaked, “Easy now, Greta girl, don’t you be doing it, too. Hold still or Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you have a mind to.”
My stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but it stopped me and I got my mind back, partly.
“Unhand it, I say!” Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and he released Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler’s shoulder.
Then my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Void and blustered at no one in particular, “ ’Sdeath, think you I’d mutiny against my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent fox and pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggests it? Introversion’s no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervised and sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I’d Introverted ’ere we got Kaby’s call for succor, hey?”
His warrior maid nodded with harsh approval and he noticed it and shook his free hand at her and scolded her, “Not that I say yea to your mad plan for that Devil’s casket, you half-clad clack-wit. And yet to jettison . . . Oh, ye gods, ye gods—” he wiped his hand across his face—“grant me a minute in which I may think!”
Thinking time wasn’t an item even on the strictly limited list at the moment, although Sevensee, squatting dourly on his hairy haunches where Maud 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 and shawl and 19th Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence and said something that sounded like: “Introversh, inversh, glovsh,” and then his enunciation switched to better than perfect as he continued, “I know to an absolute certainty what we must do.”
It showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a church while we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for a poor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves.
He said something like, “Inversh . . . bosh . . .” and held our eyes for a moment 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 started to pour it down his throat without stopping sliding.
Before he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second while our attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top of it, so fast it was almost like he’d popped up from nowhere, though I’d seen him start from behind the piano.
“I’ve a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?” he said in a voice that was very clear and just loud enough. “So it can’t go off,” he went on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk manner putting more heart into me all the time. “What’s more, if it were to be triggered, we’d still have half an hour. I believe you said it had that long a fuse?”
He stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded.
“Right,” he said. “It’d have to be that long for whoever plants it in the 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 he caught Beau’s and Maud’s affirmatives before they had a chance to explain or hedge them and said, “That’s very good. Under certain circumstances, you two’d be the ones to go to work on the chest. But before we consider that, there’s Question Three: Is anyone here an atomics technician?”
That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to explain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power —hadn’t they blasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly craters?—but no, he wasn’t a technician exactly, he was a “thinger” (I thought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?—well, a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly impossible to describe, but no, you couldn’t possibly thing atomics; the idea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn’t be an atomics thinger; the term was worse than a contradiction, well, really!—while Sevensee, from his two-thousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect that his culture didn’t rightly use any kind of power, but just sort of moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling spacetime around, “or think em roun ef we hafta. Can’t think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have—I dunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow.”
“So we don’t have an A-tech,” Bruce summed up, “which makes it worse than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn’t know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question.” He directed it toward Sid. “How long before we can jettison anything?”
Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn’t seem to be taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the word “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 soldierly smile. “So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there’s not a thing 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 and down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn’t seem to notice them and we hardly did either. It was
creepy the way he kept staring from one to another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.
“All right then,” he repeated suddenly. “We’re twelve Spiders and two Ghosts, and we’ve time for a bit of a talk, and we’re all in the same bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we’ll all know what we’re talking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are off !”
Bruce ripped them out of his belt where they’d been tucked and slammed them down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and forth, and it wasn’t funny.
“Because,” he went right on, “I’ve been getting a completely new picture of what this Spiders’ war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it’s jolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged little party outside both of them when the operation’s over. It’s sweet to know there’s no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can’t shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the ultimate insatiable hunger, and it’s great to be Faust, even in a pack of other Fausts.
“It’s sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man’s life or 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 men or carrying off women isn’t in it for glutting the sense of power. It’s sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It’s sweet to wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrectionglow in it and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and decide whether he’ll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.
American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Page 82