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

the Snakes and establish working relationships with their Demons at our level as one of our first steps.”

That stopped Erich’s jig and got enough of a gasp from some of us to make it seem to come from practically everybody. Erich used it to work a change of pace.

“Bruce! We’ve let you carry this foolery further than we should. You seem to have the idea that because anything goes in the Place⁠—dueling, drunkenness, und so weiter⁠—you can say what you have and it will all be forgotten with the hangover. Not so. It is true that among such a set of monsters and free spirits as ourselves, and working as secret agents to boot, there cannot be the obvious military discipline that would obtain in a Terran army.

“But let me tell you, Bruce, let me grind it home into you⁠—Sid and Kaby and Mark will bear me out in this, as officers of equivalent rank⁠—that the Spider line of command stretches into and through this Place just as surely as the word of der Führer rules Chicago. And as I shouldn’t have to emphasize to you, Bruce, the Spiders have punishments that would make my countrymen in Belsen and Buchenwald⁠—well, pale a little. So while there is still a shadow of justification for our interpreting your remarks as utterly tasteless clowning⁠—”

“Babble on,” Bruce said, giving him a loose downward wave of his hand without looking. “I made you people a proposal.” He paused. “How do you stand, Sidney Lessingham?”

Then I felt my legs getting weak, because Sid didn’t answer right away. The old boy swallowed and started to look around at the rest of us. Then the feeling of reality clamping down got something awful, because he didn’t look around, but straightened his back a little. Just then, Mark cut in fast.

“It grieves me, Bruce, but I think you are possessed. Erich, he must be confined.”

Kaby nodded, almost absently. “Confine or kill the coward, whichever is easier, whip the woman, and let’s get on to the Egyptian battle.”

“Indeed, yes,” Mark said. “I died in it. But now perhaps no longer.”

Kaby said to him, “I like you, Roman.”

Bruce was smiling, barely, and his eyes were moving and fixing. “You, Ilhilihis?”

Illy’s squeak box had never sounded mechanical to me before, but it did as he answered, “I’m a lot deeper into borrowed time than the rest of you, tra-la-la, but Papa still loves living. Include me very much out, Brucie.”

“Miss Davies?”

Beside me, Maud said flatly, “Do you think I’m a fool?” Beyond her, I saw Lili and I thought, “My God, I might look as proud if I were in her shoes, but I sure as hell wouldn’t look as confident.”

Bruce’s eyes hadn’t quite come to Beau when the gambler spoke up. “I have no cause to like you, sir, rather the opposite. But this Place has come to bore me more than Boston and I have always found it difficult to resist a long shot. A very long one, I fear. I am with you, sir.”

There was a pain in my chest and a roaring in my ears and through it I heard Sevensee grunting, “⁠—sicka these lousy Spiders. Deal me in.”

And then Doc reared up in front of the bar and he’d lost his hat and his hair was wild and he grabbed an empty fifth by the neck and broke the bottom of it all jagged against the bar and he waved it and screeched, “Ubivaytye Pauki⁠—i Nyemetzi!”

And right behind his words, Beau sang out fast the English of it, “Kill the Spiders⁠—and the Germans!”

And Doc didn’t collapse then, though I could see he was hanging onto the bar tight with his other hand, and the Place got stiller, inside and out, than I’ve ever known it, and Bruce’s eyes were finally moving back toward Sid.

But the eyes stopped short of Sid and I heard Bruce say, “Miss Forzane?” and I thought, “That’s funny,” and I started to look around at the Countess, and felt all the eyes and I realized, “Hey, that’s me! But this can’t happen to me. To the others, yes, but not to me. I just work here. Not to Greta, no, no, no!”

But it had, and the eyes didn’t let go, and the silence and the feeling of reality were Godawful, and I said to myself, “Greta, you’ve got to say something, if only a suitable four-letter word,” and then suddenly I knew what the silence was like. It was like that of a big city if there were some way of shutting off all the noise in one second. It was like Erich’s singing when the piano had deserted him. It was as if the Change Winds should ever die completely⁠ ⁠… and I knew beforehand what had happened when I turned my back on them all.

The Ghostgirls were gone. The Major Maintainer hadn’t merely been switched to Introvert. It was gone, too.

IX A Locked Room

“We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed.”

“You looked among D⁠⸺’s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?”

“Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume.⁠ ⁠…”

Poe

Three hours later, Sid and I plumped down on the couch nearest the kitchen, though too tired to want to eat for a while yet. A tighter search than I could ever have cooked up had shown that the Maintainer was not in the Place.

Of course it had to be in the Place, as we kept telling each other for the first two hours. It had to be, if circumstances and the theories we lived by in the Change World meant anything. A Maintainer is what maintains a Place. The Minor Maintainer takes care of oxygen, temperature, humidity, gravity, and other little life-cycle and matter-cycle things generally, but it’s the Major Maintainer that keeps the walls from buckling and the ceiling from