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 nonhuman 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-ProjectEarth-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 barroom epics.
His and Lili’s infatuation wouldn’t die completely, no matter how rancid it looked right now. The real-love angle might go, but Change would magnify the romance angle and it might seem to them like a big thing of a sort if they met again.
Erich had his Kamerad, shaped to suit him, who’d had the guts and cleverness to disarm the bomb he’d had the guts to trigger. You have to hand it to Erich for having the nerve to put us all in a situation where we’d have to find the Maintainer or fry, but I don’t know anything disgusting enough to hand to him.
I had tried a while back. I had gone up behind him and said, “Hey, how’s my wicked little commandant? Forgotten your und so weiter? ” and as he turned, I clawed my nails and slammed him across the cheek. That’s how I got the black eye. Maud wanted to put an electronic leech on it, but I took the old handkerchief in ice water. Well, at any rate Erich had his scratches to match Bruce’s not as deep, but four of them, and I told myself maybe they’d get infected—I hadn’t washed my hands since the hunt. Not that Erich doesn’t love scars.
Mark was the one who helped me up after Erich knocked me down.
“You got any omnias for that?” I snapped at him.
“For what?” Mark asked.
“Oh, for everything that’s been happening to us,” I told him disgustedly.
He seemed to actually think for a moment and then he said, “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.”
“Meaning?” I asked him.
He said, “All things change, but nothing is really lost.”
It would be a wonderful philosophy to stand with against the Change Winds. Also damn silly. I wondered if Mark really believed it. I wished I could. Sometimes I come close to thinking it’s a lot of baloney trying to be any decent kind of Demon, even a good Entertainer. Then I tell myself, “That’s life, Greta. You’ve got to love through it somehow.” But there are times when some of these cookies are not too easy to love.
Something brushed the palm of my hand again. It was Illy’s tentacle, with the tendrils of the tip spread out like a little bush. I started to pull my hand away, but then I realized the Loon was simply lonely. I surrendered my hand to the patterned gossamer pressures of feather-talk.
Right away I got the words, “Feeling lonely, Greta girl?”
It almost floored me, I tell you. Here I was understanding feather-talk, which I just didn’t, and I was understanding it in English, which didn’t make sense at all.
For a second, I thought Illy must have spoken, but I knew he hadn’t and for a couple more seconds I thought he was working telepathy on me, using the feather-talk as cues. Then I tumbled to what was happening: he was playing English on my palm like on the keyboard of his squeakbox, and since I could play English on a squeakbox myself, my mind translated automatically.
Realizing this almost gave my mind stage fright, but I was too fagged to be hocused by self-consciousness. I just lay back and let the thoughts come through. It’s good to have someone talk to you, even an underweight octopus, and without the squeaks Illy didn’t sound so silly; his phrasing was soberer.
“Feeling sad, Greta girl, because you’ll never understand what’s happening to us all,” Illy asked me, “because you’ll never be anything but a shadow fighting shadows—and trying to love shadows in between the battles? It’s time you understood we’re not really fighting a war at all, although it looks that way, but going through a kind of evolution, though not exactly the kind Erich had in mind.
“Your Terran thought has a word for it and a theory for it —a theory that recurs on many worlds. It’s about the four orders of life: Plants, Animals, Men and Demons. Plants are energybinders�
��they can’t move through space or time, but they can clutch energy and transform it. Animals are space-binders— they can move through space. Man (Terran or ET, Lunan or non-Lunan) is a time-binder—he has memory.
“Demons are the fourth order of evolution, possibilitybinders—they can make all of what might be part of what is, and that is their evolutionary function. Resurrection is like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly: a third-order being breaks out of the chrysalis of its lifeline into fourth-order life. The leap from the ripped cocoon of an unchanging reality is like the first animal’s leap when he ceases to be a plant, and the Change World is the core of meaning behind the many myths of immortality.
“All evolution looks like a war at first—octopoids against monopoids, mammals against reptiles. And it has a necessary dialectic: there must be the thesis—we call it Snake—and the antithesis—Spider—before there can be the ultimate synthesis, when all possibilities are fully realized in one ultimate universe. The Change War isn’t the blind destruction it seems.
“Remember that the Serpent is your symbol of wisdom and the Spider your sign for patience. The two names are rightly frightening to you, for all high existence is a mixture of horror and delight. And don’t be surprised, Greta girl, at the range of my words and thoughts; in a way, I’ve had a billion years to study Terra and learn her languages and myths.
“Who are the real Spiders and Snakes, meaning who were the first possibility-binders? Who was Adam, Greta girl? Who was Cain? Who were Eve and Lilith?
“In binding all possibility, the Demons also bind the mental with the material. All fourth-order beings live inside and outside all minds, throughout the whole cosmos. Even this Place is, after its fashion, a giant brain: its floor is the brainpan, the boundary of the Void is the cortex of gray matter—yes, even the Major and Minor Maintainers are analogues of the pineal and pituitary glands, which in some form sustain all nervous systems.
“There’s the real picture, Greta girl.”
The feather-talk faded out and Illy’s tendril tips merged into a soft pad on which I fingered, “Thanks, Daddy Long-legs.”
Chewing over in my mind what Illy had just told me, I looked back at the gang around the piano. The party seemed to be breaking up; at least some of them were chopping away at it. Sid had gone to the control divan and was getting set to tune in Egypt. Mark and Kaby were there with him, all bursting with eagerness and the vision of ranks on ranks of mounted Zombie bowmen going up in a mushroom cloud; I thought of what Illy had told me and I managed a smile—seems we’ve got to win and lose all the battles, every which way.
Mark had just put on his Parthian costume, groaning cheerfully, “Trousers again!” and was striding around under a hat like a fur-lined ice-cream cone and with the sleeves of his metal-stuffed candys flapping over his hands. He waved a short sword with a heart-shaped guard at Bruce and Erich and told them to get a move on.
Kaby was going along on the operation wearing the oldwoman disguise intended for Benson-Carter. I got a halfhearted kick out of knowing she was going to have to cover that chest and hobble.
Bruce and Erich weren’t taking orders from Mark just yet. Erich went over and said something to Bruce at the bar, and Bruce got down and went over with Erich to the piano, and Erich tapped Beau on the shoulder and leaned over and said something to him, and Beau nodded and yanked “Limehouse Blues” to a fast close and started another piece, something slow and nostalgic.
Erich and Bruce waved to Mark and smiled, as if to show him that whether he came over and stood with them or not, the legate and the lieutenant and the commandant were very much together. And while Sevensee hugged Lili with a simple enthusiasm that made me wonder why I’ve wasted so much imagination on genetic treatments for him, Erich and Bruce sang:
“To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
To our brothers in the tunnels outside time,
Sing three Change-resistant Zombies,
raised from death and robot-crammed,
And Commandos of the Spiders—
Here’s to crime!
We’re three blind mice on the wrong time-track,
Hush—hush—hush!
We’ve lost our now and will never get back,
Hush—hush—hush!
Change Commandos out on the spree,
Damned through all possibility,
Ghostgirls, think kindly on such as we,
Hush—hush—hush!”
While they were singing, I looked down at my charcoal skirt and over at Maud and Lili and I thought, “Three gray hustlers for three black hussars, that’s our speed.” Well, I’d never thought of myself as a high-speed job, winning all the races—I wouldn’t feel comfortable that way. Come to think of it, we’ve got to lose and win all the races in the long run, the way the course is laid out.
I fingered to Illy, “That’s the picture, all right, Spider boy.”
Biographical Notes
Robert A. Heinlein Born Robert Anson Heinlein in Butler, Missouri, on July 7, 1907, the third child of Rex Ivar Heinlein, an accountant, and Bam Lyle Heinlein. Moved to Kansas City as an infant; attended Central High School and Kansas City Junior College. In 1925 entered the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Served as a midshipman on the U.S.S. Lexington (1929–32) and on the U.S.S. Roper, later promoted to lieutenant, but was forced to retire in 1934 after contracting tuberculosis. Married Leslyn MacDonald in 1932 (his first marriage, to Elinor Curry in 1929, ending quickly in divorce). Moved to Los Angeles in 1934 and became involved in Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California movement; ran unsuccessfully for California State Assembly as an EPIC candidate in 1938. Published his first story, “Life-Line,” in Astounding Science Fiction in 1939 (also completed a novel, For Us, the Living, published posthumously in 2003). Joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction League, and began hosting gatherings of the Mañana Literary Society—an informal group of science fiction writers including Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, L. Sprague de Camp, Henry Kuttner, and C. L. Moore. Traveled to New York in 1940, meeting John W. Campbell Jr., L. Ron Hubbard, and others, and in 1941—already established as a leading writer for Astounding—was guest of honor at World Science Fiction Convention in Denver. Volunteered for active duty after Pearl Harbor but was turned down; worked as a civil service engineer in the Aeronautical Materials Lab at the Philadelphia Navy Yard (1942–45), recruiting Isaac Asimov and others as coworkers. Returned to Los Angeles and to writing after the war, selling stories to The Saturday Evening Post and beginning a series of juvenile novels for Scribner’s with Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), followed by Space Cadet (1948), Red Planet (1949), and others. Moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1948, after a divorce; married engineer Virginia Gerstenfeld. (Their jointly designed ultramodern house was featured in Popular Mechanics in 1952.) Began work with Alford Van Ronkel on screenplay for Destination Moon (loosely based on Rocket Ship Galileo), filmed in 1949–50. Reworked earlier magazine serials into such novels as Beyond This Horizon (1948) and Sixth Column (1949), and wrote new novels The Puppet Masters (1951), Double Star (1956), The Door into Summer (1957), and Starship Troopers (1959), initially rejected as a juvenile because of its violence. Concentrated exclusively on novels after 1959.
Gained cult following beyond the science fiction community with Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Final juvenile Podkayne of Mars (1963) was followed by Glory Road (1963), Farnham’s Freehold (1964), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Moved to Santa Cruz, California, in 1966. Later novels included I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Time Enough for Love (1973), The Number of the Beast (1980), Friday (1982), Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984), The Cat Who Walks Through Walls: A Comedy of Manners (1985), and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987). Moved for last time to Carmel, California, in 1987; died there on May 8, 1988, of emphysema and congestive heart failure. Was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1998.
Alfred Bester Born Alfred M. Bester in New York City
on December 18, 1913, the second child of James J. Bester, who owned a shoe store, and Belle Bester (née Silverman), a Russian immigrant. Graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he played on the football team, in 1935; studied law at Columbia for two years. In 1936 married Rolly Goulko, an actress and later advertising executive. Published his first story, “The Broken Axiom,” in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1939, winning a prize for best amateur contribution. Wrote thirteen more stories for the magazine by 1942, when he followed his editors Jack Schiff and Mort Weisinger to DC Comics; contributed scripts and outlines for Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and Captain Marvel, also working on the Lee Falk comic strips The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician. In 1946, began writing radio scripts for The Shadow, Charlie Chan, Nick Carter, Nero Wolfe, and other programs, shifting to television in 1948, most notably with Tom Corbett: Space Cadet. Returned to science fiction beginning in 1950, publishing stories in Astounding Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and his first novel, The Demolished Man, in Galaxy magazine in 1952 (book, 1953); it won the first Hugo Award. Attended gatherings of the Hydra Club, meeting Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Anthony Boucher, Avram Davidson, Judith Merril, Theodore Sturgeon, and others. In 1953 published “Who He? ” (later reprinted as The Rat Race), a novel about the television industry. With the proceeds of the film rights, moved with Rolly to England and then Italy, where he wrote articles on European television for Holiday magazine, and finished The Stars My Destination, his third novel (first published in England as Tiger! Tiger!, 1956, then in the U.S. in 1957; adapted as a graphic novel in 1979 and 1992). In 1957, delivered lecture “Science Fiction and the Renaissance Man” at the University of Chicago. Published Starburst, a collection of stories, in 1958 (later collections included The Dark Side of the Earth, 1964, and Starlight, 1976). Adapted his story “Fondly Fahrenheit” for television as Murder and the Android (1959). Became a regular contributor to Holiday and then senior editor from 1963 to 1971, when the magazine folded. Went on to write novels The Computer Connection (1975; serialized as The Indian Giver and published in the United Kingdom as Extro), Golem100 (1980), and The Deceivers (1981). Moved to Ottsville, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s; died of complications from a broken hip on September 30, 1987, in nearby Doylestown. His unpublished early thriller Tender Loving Rage appeared posthumously in 1991, followed in 1998 by an unfinished novel, Psychoshop (completed by Roger Zelazny). In 2001 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
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