The Change War

by Fritz Leiber

  A flat gray gun, snatched from a breakaway pocket at her right hip, was in her hand. She fired.

  There was no sound, but the insect veered sharply as the tight inertial beam missed it by a centimeter. It whizzed between them across the golden rail.

  The Colonel had his own gun out. He aimed and shot.

  The insect veered downward, striking the floor brightly tessellated with red and gold.

  There was a sharp explosive whisht! A blinding blue stiletto of flame a foot long lanced out.

  Then there was only a fuming narrow groove in the gleaming tiles. Across it, Erica’s eyes met her adversary’s for the first time.

  “An assassination missile,” she said flatly.

  “That’s clear enough,” he agreed. “Shaped charge.”

  From the hall below there came a mutter of questions and hushings—guttural and whistled, musical and atonal. Inhuman dark-clad figures were coming up the ramp.

  “And set to home on me,” she said.

  “I tried to throw you out of the way,” he said.

  “Or hold me still when it struck. My flesh would have muffled the explosion and the flash. Then your fake nurse and stretcher-bearers—” She looked around. The two robots and the bird-woman were gone.

  The dark figures that had mounted the ramp were moving toward them.

  “I can explain—” the Colonel began.

  “You can explain this explosion to the tournament officials!”

  She darted past the arresting arms of a gold-badged multibrach from Wolf 1 to the express elevator, stabbed the button for Floor 88 and jumped into the empty shaft.

  The field seized her and whipped her up. Through the shaft’s transparent back she had quick glimpses of scarlet sea and yellow land between the blurs that were downward-whipping passengers. At Floor 43 there was a squeeze. She wondered, What attack now? A centipede down my back? But the field’s cybernator juggled the crowding passengers with ease.

  At 88 she bounced out. Her door-spy murmured “All clear” so she didn’t search her room with its conventional bed, dresser, micro-viewer, and TV-phone with dangling soft-sheathed metal power-arms, used for long-distance check-signing, handshakes, and anything else.

  She headed for the bathroom, stripping off her uniform. Her Order of Ophidian Merit caught her eye. Her thumbnail dinted the black metal. It was the thinnest shell, all right, holding almost certainly the electronic bug on which the assassination missile had homed. When had the switch been made?—and why had von Hohenwald…? She cut off that speculation.

  She turned the shower to warm needle and hesitated. Then with a shrug she reached behind her back, loosed the narrow straps of her warning plate, quickly swabbed it and the straps with eau de cologne, and hung it on the towel rack.

  Directly the cleansing, mind-clearing tropical rainstorm hit her, the thought about chess she’d been hunting for sprang up crystal clear.

  Next instant the bathroom filled with white light flaring in the dot-dot-dash rhythm of the current Snake identification code. It was the TV-phone call-light, which she’s earlier set to “dazzle.”

  She ran to it eagerly. This time her report would knock back their ears. She switched on voice and—after a glance at her dripping nakedness—caller-to-receiver sight only. She could see, but not be seen.

  With holographic transmission, the TV screen was like a window into another room. Erich von Hohenwald’s scarred face looked through.

  She damned herself for her non-reg removal of warning plate.

  She said, “How did you break our ID code?”

  He grinned, not quite at her. “A stethoscope against the gold rail one hundred feet away. You slipped, Major. Sorry to interrupt your bath—that’s a shower I hear, isn’t it?—but…”

  Two of the three dangling power-arms straightened abruptly, swung blindly sideways, hit and imprisoned her wrists. The third fumbled for the button that turned on receiver-to-caller sight.

  Without pausing to damn herself this time, she jabbed out a foot and toed off the power in the arms. They fell away.

  Rubbing her wrists and glancing down at the water pooling on the expensive carpet, she smiled a bit smugly and said, “I’m glad you called, Colonel. I’ve just had an insight I want to share with you. You were talking about basic games. Well, the chessboard is clearly a spider’s web with crisscross strands—in Go you even put the pieces on the intersections. The object of the game is to hunt down and immobilize the enemy King, just as a spider paralyzes its victim and sometimes wraps it in its silk. But here’s the clincher: the Knight, the piece most characteristic of chess, has exactly eight crooked moves when it stands in the clear—the number of a spider’s crooked legs, and eyes too! This suggests that all chess-playing planets are Spider-infiltrated from way back. It also suggests that all the chessplayers here for the tournament are Spiders—your shock battalion to take over 61 Cygni 5.”

  Colonel von Hohenwald sighed. “I was afraid you’d catch on, dear,” he said softly. “Now you’ve signed your abduction warrant at the very least. You may still be able to warn your HQ, but before they can come to your aid, this planet will be in our hands.”

  He frowned. “But why did you spill this to me, Erica? If you had played dumb—”

  “I spilled it to you,” she said, “because I wanted you to know that your plot’s been blown—and that my side has already taken countermeasures! We’ve made a crooked Knight’s move too. Has the significance of track games never occurred to you, Colonel? The one-dimensional track, sinuously turning, obviously symbolizes the snake. The pieces are the little bugs and animals the snake has swallowed. As for the dice, well, one of the throws is called Snake Eyes. So be assured that all the k’ta’hra players here are Snakes, ready to counter any Spider grab at 61 Cygni 5.”

  The Colonel’s mouth almost gaped. “So you damned Snakes were plotting a takeover too! I must check on this. If you’re lying…But even if you are, I’m forced to admit, Major Weaver, that it’s just about the finest improvised bluff I’ve ever had thrown at me.”

  He hesitated a moment, scowling, then snappily lifted his hand to the edge of the close-cropped hair in a congratulatory salute.

  She smiled. Now that she’d cut him down to size, she could see that he was quite handsome. And he’d done his best to warn her about the homing bug in her O.O.M.

  She said, “It’s no bluff Colonel. And I must admit that this time both you and I, enemies, have worked together to achieve this…stalemate.”

  While saying that, she found her black lace negligee and fastened it closely around her damp body. Now she stooped to the TV and switched on receiver-to-caller sight.

  He smiled at her, a bit foolishly, she thought. A touch of disappointment, a touch of appreciative delight.

  She straightened her shoulders, snappily lifted her hand—to her nose, which she thumbed at him.

  Damnation Morning

  TIME traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”

  It was the sort of question would have suited a religious crackpot of the strong-arm, save-your-soul variety, but she didn’t look like one. And I might very well have answered it—in fact I almost did—with a hangover, one percent humorous, “Good God, no!” Or—a poor second—I could have studied the dark, dust-burnished arabesques of the faded blue carpet for a perversely long time and then countered with a grudging, “Oh, if you insist.”

  But I didn’t, perhaps because there didn’t seem to be anything like one percent of humor in the situation. Point One: I have been blacked out the past half hour or so—this woman might just have opened the door or she might have been watching me for ten minutes. Point Two: I was in the fringes of DTs, trying to come off a big drunk. Point Three: I knew for certain that I had just killed someo
ne or left him or her to die, though I hadn’t the faintest idea of whom or why.

  Let me try to picture my state of mind a little more vividly. My consciousness, the sentient self-aware part of me, was a single quivering point in the center of an endless plane vibrating harshly with misery and menace. I was like a man in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific—or better, I was like a man in a shellhole in the North African desert (I served under Montgomery and any region adjoining the DTs is certainly a No Man’s Land). Around me, in every direction—this is my consciousness I’m describing, remember—miles of flat burning sand, nothing more. Way beyond the horizon were two divorced wives, some estranged children, assorted jobs, and other unexceptional wreckage. Much closer, but still beyond the horizon, were State Hospital (twice) and Psycho (four times). Shallowly buried very near at hand, or perhaps blackening in the open just behind me in the shellhole, was the person I had killed.

  But remember that I knew I had killed a real person. That wasn’t anything allegorical.

  Now for a little more detail on this “Look, Buster,” woman. To begin with, she didn’t resemble any part of the DTs or its outlying kingdoms, though an amateur might have thought differently—especially if he had given too much weight to the sigil on her forehead. But I was no amateur.

  She seemed about my age—forty-five—but I couldn’t be sure. Her body looked younger than that, her face older; both were trim and had seen a lot of use, I got the impression. She was wearing black sandals and a black unbelted tunic with just a hint of the sack dress to it, yet she seemed dressed for the street. It occurred to me even then (off-track ideas can come to you very swiftly and sharply in the DT outskirts) that it was a costume that, except perhaps for the color, would have fitted into any number of historical eras: old Egypt, Greece, maybe the Directoire, World War I, Burma, Yucatan, to name some. (Should I ask her if she spoke Mayathan? I didn’t, but I don’t think the question would have fazed her; she seemed altogether sophisticated, a real cosmopolite—she pronounced “Buster” as if it were part of a curious, somewhat ridiculous jargon she was using for shock purposes.)

  From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious.

  Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.

  The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent.

  Except for the bangs she wore her hair pinned up. Her ears were flat, thin-edged, and nicely shaped, with the long lobes that in Chinese art mark the philosopher. Small square silver flats with rounded corners ornamented them.

  Her face might have been painted by Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas. The skin was webbed with very fine lines; the eyes were darkly shadowed and there was a touch of green on the lids (Egyptian?—I asked myself); her mouth was wide, tolerant, but realistic. Yes, beyond all else, she seemed realistic.

  And as I’ve indicated, I was ready for realism, so when she asked, “Do you want to live?” I somehow managed not to let slip any of the flippant answers that came flocking into my mouth, I realized that this was the one time in a million when a big question is really meant and your answer really counts and there are no second chances, I realized that the line of my life had come to one of those points where there’s a kink in it and the wrong or maybe the right) tug can break it and that as far as I was concerned at the present moment, she knew all about everything.

  So I thought for a bit, not long, and I answered, “Yes.”

  She nodded—not as if she approved my decision, or disapproved it for that matter, but merely as if she accepted it as a basis for negotiations—and she let her bangs fall back across her forehead. Then she gave me a quick dry smile and she said, “In that case you and I have got to get out of here and do some talking.”

  For me that smile was the first break in the shell—the shell around my rancid consciousness or perhaps the dark, star-pricked shell around the space-time continuum.

  “Come on,” she said. “No, just as you are. Don’t stop for anything and—” (She caught the direction of my immediate natural movement) “—don’t look behind you if you meant that about wanting to live.”

  Ordinarily being told not to look behind you is a remarkably silly piece of advice, it makes you think of those “pursuing fiend” horror stories that scare children, and you look around automatically—if only to prove you’re no child. Also in this present case there was my very real and dreadful curiosity: I wanted terribly (yes, terribly) to know whom it was I had just killed—a forgotten third wife? a stray woman? a jealous husband or boyfriend? (though I seemed too cracked up for love affairs) the hotel clerk? a fellow derelict?

  But somehow, as with her “want to live” question, I had the sense to realize that this was one of those times when the usually silly statement is dead serious, that she meant her warning quite literally.

  If I looked behind me, I would die.

  I looked straight ahead as I stepped past the scattered brown empty bottles and the thin fume mounting from the tiny crater in the carpet where I’d dropped a live cigarette.

  As I followed her through the door I caught, from the window behind me, the distant note of a police siren.

  Before we reached the elevator the siren was nearer and it sounded as if the fire department had been called out too.

  I saw a silvery flicker ahead. There was a big mirror facing the elevators.

  “What I told you about not looking behind you goes for mirrors too,” my conductress informed me. “Until I tell you differently.”

  The instant she said that, I knew that I had forgotten what I looked like; I simply could not visualize that dreadful witness (generally inhabiting a smeary bathroom mirror) of so many foggy mornings: my own face. One glance in the mirror…

  But I told myself: realism. I saw a blur of brown shoes and black sandals in the big mirror, nothing more.

  The cage of the right-hand elevator, dark and empty, was stopped at this floor. A cross wise wooden bar held the door open. My conductress removed the bar and we stepped inside. The door closed and she touched the controls. I wondered, “Which way will it go? Sideways?”

  It began to sink normally. I started to touch my face, but didn’t. I started to try to remember my name, but stopped. It would be bad tactics, I thought, to let myself become aware of any more gaps in my knowledge. I knew I was alive. I would stick with that for a while.

  The cage sank two and a half floors and stopped, its doorway blocked by the drab purple wall of the shaft. My conductress switched on the tiny dome light and turned to me.

  “Well?” she said.

  I put my last thought into words.

  “I’m alive,” I said, “and I’m in your hands.”

  She laughed lightly. “You find it a compromising situation? But you’re quite correct. You accepted life from me, or through me, rather. Does that suggest anything to you?”

  My memory may have been lousy, but another, long unused section of my mind was clicking. “When you get anything,” I said, “you have to pay for it and sometimes money isn’t enough, though I’ve only once or twice been in situations where money didn’t help.”

  “Three times now,” she said. “Here is how it stacks up: You’ve bought your way with something other than money, into an organization of which I am an agent. Or perhaps you’d rather go back to the room where I recruited you? We might just be able to manage it.”

  Through the walls of the cage and shaft I could hear the sirens going full blast, underlining her words.

  I shook my head. I said, “I think I knew that—I mean, that I was joining an organization—when I answered your first question.”

  “It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me. “
Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.”

  “I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor.

  She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “The Spiders,” she said.

  That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me—something like that.

  She watched me. “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.”

  “Well, at least you don’t try to prettify your organization,” was all I could think to say.

  She shook her head. “With the really big ones you don’t have to. You never know if the side into which you are born or reborn is ‘right’ or ‘good’—you only know that it’s your side and you try to learn about it and form an opinion as you live and serve.”

  “You talk about sides,” I said. “Is there another?”

  “We won’t go into that now,” she said, “but if you ever meet someone with an S on his forehead, he’s not a friend, no matter what else he may be to you. That S stands for Snakes.”

  I don’t know why that word coming just then, gave me so much worse a scare—crystallized all my fears, as it were—but it did. Maybe it was only some little thing, like Snakes meaning DTs. Whatever it was, I felt myself turning to mush.

  “Maybe we’d better go back to the room where you found me,” I heard myself saying. I don’t think I meant it, though I surely felt it. The sirens had stopped, but I could hear a lot of general hubbub, outside the hotel and inside it too, I thought—noise from the other elevator shaft and it seemed to me, from the floor we’d just left—hurrying footsteps, taut voices, something being dragged. I knew terror here, in this stalled elevator, but that loudness outside would be worse.