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

Still, I’d got a sort of shell-game idea about the Soldiers’ three big black shakos and I hadn’t been satisfied until I’d got the three together and looked in them all at the same time.

“Wake up, Greta, and take something. I can’t stand here forever.” Maud had brought us a tray of hearty snacks from then and yon, and I must say they were tempting; she whips up a mean hors d’oeuvre.

I looked them over and said, “Siddy, I want a hot dog.”

“And I want a venison pasty! Out upon you, you finical jill, you o’erscrupulous jade, you whimsic and tyrannous poppet!”

I grabbed a handful and snuggled back against him.

“Go on, call me some more, Siddy,” I told him. “Real juicy ones.”

X Motives and Opportunities

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.

Macbeth

My big bad waif from King’s Lynn had set the tray on his knees and started to wolf the food down. The others were finishing up. Erich, Mark and Kaby were having a quietly furious argument I couldn’t overhear at the end of the bar nearest the bronze chest, and Illy was draped over the piano like a real octopus, listening in.

Beau and Sevensee were pacing up and down near the control divan and throwing each other a word now and then. Beyond them, Bruce and Lili were sitting on the opposite couch from us, talking earnestly about something. Maud had sat down at the other end of the bar and was knitting⁠—it’s one of the habits like chess and quiet drinking, or learning to talk by squeak box, that we pick up to pass the time in the Place in the long stretches between parties. Doc was fiddling around the Gallery, picking things up and setting them down, still managing to stay on his feet at any rate.

Lili and Bruce stood up, still gabbing intensely at each other, and Illy began to pick out with one tentacle a little tune in the high keys that didn’t sound like anything on God’s earth. “Where do they get all the energy?” I wondered.

As soon as I asked myself that, I knew the answer and I began to feel the same way myself. It wasn’t energy; it was nerves, pure and simple.

Change is like a drug, I realized⁠—you get used to the facts never staying the same, and one picture of the past and future dissolving into another maybe not very different but still different, and your mind being constantly goosed by strange moods and notions, like nightclub lights of shifting color with weird shadows between shining right on your brain.

The endless swaying and jogging is restful, like riding on a train.

You soon get to like the movement and to need it without knowing, and when it suddenly stops and you’re just you and the facts you think from and feel from are exactly the same when you go back to them⁠—boy, that’s rough, as I found out now.

The instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks into the Place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing but ourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make of that, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation.

I decided I felt like I’d been dropped into a swimming pool full of cement and held under until it hardened.

I could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonder they didn’t hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best; maybe she’d got a little preparation from the long watches between stars; and then she is older than all of us, even Sid, though with a small “o” in “older.”

The restless work of the search for the Maintainer had masked the feeling, but now it was beginning to come full force. Before the search, Bruce’s speech and Erich’s interruptions had done a passable masking job too. I tried to remember when I’d first got the feeling and decided it was after Erich had jumped on the bomb, about the time he mentioned poetry. Though I couldn’t be sure. Maybe the Maintainer had been Introverted even earlier, when I’d turned to look at the Ghostgirls. I wouldn’t have known. Nuts!

Believe me, I could feel that hardened cement on every inch of me. I remembered Bruce’s beautiful picture of a universe without Big Change and decided it was about the worst idea going. I went on eating, though I wasn’t so sure now it was a good idea to keep myself strong.

“Does the Maintainer have an Introversion telltale? Siddy!”

“ ’Sdeath, chit, and you love me, speak lower. Of a sudden, I feel not well, as if I’d drunk a butt of Rhenish and slept inside it. Marry yes, blue. In short flashes, saith the manual. Why ask’st thou?”

“No reason. God, Siddy, what I’d give for a breath of Change Wind.”

“Thou can’st say that eftsoons,” he groaned. I must have looked pretty miserable myself, for he put his arm around my shoulders and whispered gruffly, “Comfort thyself, sweetling, that while we suffer thus sorely, we yet cannot die the Change Death.”

“What’s that?” I asked him.

I didn’t want to bounce around like the others. I had a suspicion I’d carry it too far. So, to keep myself from going batty, I started to rework the business of who had done what to the Maintainer.

During the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossed around as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat of Snake science amounting to sorcery; the Spider high command bunkering the Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the Express Room, in such a hurry that they hadn’t even time to transmit warnings; the hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beings who are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of the Change War into the future much beyond Sevensee’s epoch⁠—unless the Late