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

idea had been nibbling at me and I said, “Siddy, do you suppose it’s just barely possible that, while we were all looking at Bruce, those two Ghostgirls would have been able to work the Maintainer and get a Door and lam out of here with the thing?”

“Thou speakst my thoughts, sweetling. All weighs against it: Imprimis, ’tis well known that Ghosts cannot lay plots or act on them. Secundo, the time forbade getting a Door. Tercio⁠—and here’s the real meat of it⁠—the Place folds without the Maintainer. Quadro, ’twere folly to depend on not one of⁠—how many of us? ten, elf⁠—not looking around in all the time it would have taken them⁠—”

“I looked around once, Siddy. They were drinking and they had got to the control divan under their own power. Now when was that? Oh, yes, when Bruce was talking about Zombies.”

“Yes, sweetling. And as I was about to cap my argument with quinquo when you ’gan prattle, I could have sworn none could touch the Maintainer, much less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet⁠ ⁠…”

“Eftsoons yet,” I seconded him.

Somebody must have got a door and walked out with the thing. It certainly wasn’t in the Place. The hunt had been a lulu. Something the size of a portable typewriter is not easy to hide and we had been inside everything from Beau’s piano to the renewer link of the Refresher.

We had even fluoroscoped everybody, though it had made Illy writhe like a box of worms, as he’d warned us; he said it tickled terribly and I insisted on smoothing his fur for five minutes afterward, although he was a little standoffish toward me.

Some areas, like the bar, kitchen and Stores, took a long while, but we were thorough. Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made the Place, she has been stationed in a Field Hospital (it turns out the Spiders actually are mounting operations from them) and learned a few nice new wrinkles.

However, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course, every check was observed by at least three people, not including Bruce or Lili. When the Maintainer vanished, Doc had pulled out of his glassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me if I hadn’t seen it happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to the Art Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out his coat and duck his head and whip out a flask and take a swig and by now he was well on his way toward another peak.

The Art Gallery had taken time too, because there’s such a jumble of strange stuff, and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split a beautiful blue woodcarving of a Venusian medusa because, although there wasn’t a mark in the paw-polished surface, she claimed it was just big enough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces together and mooning over the other stuff.

After we’d finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling the floor. Beau and Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a one-sided Place, that there is nothing, but nothing, under the floor; it just gets a lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you get a quarter inch down⁠—that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark was knuckle-headed (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the Q.T.) and broke four diamond-plus drills before he was satisfied.

Except for some trick hiding places, that left the Void, and things don’t vanish if you throw them at the Void⁠—they half melt and freeze forever unless you can fish them out. Back of the Refresher, at about eye-level, are three Venusian coconuts that a Hittite strongman threw there during a major brawl. I try not to look at them because they are so much like witch heads they give me the woolies. The parts of the Place right up against the Void have strange spatial properties which one of the gadgets in Surgery makes use of in a way that gives me the worse woolies, but that’s beside the point.

During the hunt, Kaby and Erich had used their Callers as direction finders to point out the Maintainer, just as they’re used in the cosmos to locate the Door⁠—and sometimes in the Big Places, people tell me. But the Callers only went wild⁠—like a compass needle whirling around without stopping⁠—and nobody knew what that meant.

The trick hiding places were the Minor Maintainer, a cute idea, but it is no bigger than the Major and has its own mysterious insides and had obviously kept on doing its own work, so that was out for several reasons, and the bomb chest, though it seemed impossible for anyone to have opened it, granting they knew the secret of its lock, even before Erich jumped on it and put it in the limelight double. But when you’ve ruled out everything else, the word impossible changes meaning.

Since time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts of tricks for sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanently or temporarily. But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybody that should know tells me that time traveling through the Big Time is out. It’s this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the countryside and we’re on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as Gertie Stein might put it, you can’t time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.

I’d also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvious hiding place, maybe something that several people could pass back and forth between them, which would mean a conspiracy, and, of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.