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

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 lackwit. 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 deadpan “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 space-time 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