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

her dry little hand on my arm and she whispered out of the side of her mouth, “What do we do now?”

“We listen,” I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her need to be doing something about things.

She cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, “You, too?”

I didn’t get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts!⁠—because just then Bruce’s voice took up again in the faraway range.

“Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of history can stand before it’s all stitches, whether too much Change won’t one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? Change Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you’ve stripped off the paint.

“If that goes on, won’t the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself, then nothing? How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more Doublegangers cut out of it? And there’s another thing about every operation⁠—it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change Winds die, it leaves them a little more disturbed and nightmare-ridden and frazzled. Those of you who have been on operations in heavily worked-over temporal areas will know what I mean⁠—that look they give you out of the sides of their eyes as if to say, ‘You again? For Christ’s sake, go away. We’re the dead. We’re the ones who don’t want to wake up, who don’t want to be Demons and hate to be Ghosts. Stop torturing us.’ ”

I looked around at the Ghostgirls; I couldn’t help it. They’d somehow got together on the control divan, facing us, their backs to the Maintainers. The Countess had dragged along the bottle of wine Erich had fetched her earlier and they were passing it back and forth. The Countess had a big rose splotch across the ruffled white lace of her blouse.

Bruce said, “There’ll come a day when all the Zombies and all the Unborn wake up and go crazy together and figuratively come marching at us in their numberless hordes, saying, ‘We’ve had enough.’ ”

But I didn’t turn back to Bruce right away. Phryne’s chiton had slipped off one shoulder and she and the Countess were sitting sagged forward, elbows on knees, legs spread⁠—at least, as far as the Countess’s hobble skirt would let her⁠—and swayed toward each other a little. They were still surprisingly solid, although they hadn’t had any personal attention for a half hour, and they were looking up over my head with half-shut eyes and they seemed, so help me, to be listening to what Bruce was saying and maybe hearing some of it.

“We make a careful distinction between Zombies and Unborn, between those troubled by our operations whose lifelines lie in the past and those whose lifelines lie in the future. But is there any distinction any longer? Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we’re on, but that’s different and it’s not made for real living.

“The Spiders tell us that the real now is somewhere in the last half of the 20th Century, which means that several of us here are also alive in the cosmos, have lifelines along which the now is traveling. But do you swallow that story quite so easily, Ilhilihis, Sevensee? How does it strike the servants of the Triple Goddess? The Spiders of Octavian Rome? The Demons of Good Queen Bess? The gentlemen Zombies of the Greater South? Do the Unborn man the starships, Maud?

“The Spiders also tell us that, although the fog of battle makes the now hard to pin down precisely, it will return with the unconditional surrender of the Snakes and the establishment of cosmic peace, and roll on as majestically toward the future as before, quickening the continuum with its passage. Do you really believe that? Or do you believe, as I do, that we’ve used up all the future as well as the past, wasted it in premature experience, and that we’ve had the real now smudged out of existence, stolen from us forever, the precious now of true growth, the child-moment in which all life lies, the moment like a newborn baby that is the only home for hope there is?”

He let that start to sink in, then took a couple of quick steps and went on, his voice rising over Erich’s “Bruce, for the last time⁠—” and seeming to pick up a note of hope from the very word he had used, “But although things look terrifyingly black, there remains a chance⁠—the slimmest chance, but still a chance⁠—of saving the cosmos from Change Death and restoring reality’s richness and giving the Ghosts good sleep and perhaps even regaining the real now. We have the means right at hand. What if the power of time traveling were used not for war and destruction, but for healing, for the mutual enrichment of the ages, for quiet communication and growth, in brief, to bring a peace message⁠—”

But my little commandant is quite an actor himself and knows a wee bit about the principles of scene-stealing, and he was not going to let Bruce drown him out as if he were just another extra playing a Voice from the Mob. He darted across our front, between us and the bar, took a running leap, and landed bang on the bloody box of bomb.

A bit later, Maud was silently showing me the white ring above her elbow where I’d grabbed her and Illy was