The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (early reader chapter books .txt) 📕

’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.”

VII Time to Think

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

Brother, that was all we needed to make everybody but Kaby and the two E.T.s 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 Change 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 in 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