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

One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one of us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political police, agent of⁠—who knows, after Bruce?⁠—a secret Change World Committee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, or strictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the Maintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich’s and Bruce’s factions.

Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but that didn’t apply to what I did with my own thoughts.

Who wanted to escape so bad they’d Introvert the Place, cutting off all possible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and running the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all?

Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things up, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid couldn’t keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments for derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as Erich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of the bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly hadn’t had my eye on him every second.

Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he said counted, so he’d hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.

Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people especially, more than any man or woman I’ve ever known⁠—he’s like a big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his mouth⁠—and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the cosmos.

Maud, Kaby, Mark and the two E.T.s? None of them had any motive I knew of, though Sevensee’s being from the very far future did tie in with that idea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something developing between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to be Introverted together.

“Stick to the facts, Greta,” I reminded myself with a private groan.

That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself.

Erich, I thought⁠—now we’re getting somewhere. The little commandant has the nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if he thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be locked in with him, he’d do it in a second.

But even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he’d been heckling Bruce from the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for him to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and⁠ ⁠… well, that was nine-tenths of the problem.

If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanation of all. Gr-r-r!

Bruce’s motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it immortal?) danger he’d put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed a shame he’d been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the Maintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar, we’d all have noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I’d have noticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls⁠—if it worked as Sid claimed, and he said he had never seen it in operation, just read in the manual⁠—oh, ’sdeath!

But Bruce didn’t need opportunity, as I’m sure all the males in the Place would have told me right off, because he had Lili to pull the job for him and she had as much opportunity as any of the rest of us. Myself, I have large reservations to this woman-putty-in-the-hands-of-the-man-she-loves-madly theory, but I had to admit there was something to be said for it in this case, and it had seemed quite natural to me when the rest of us had decided, by unspoken agreement, that neither Lili’s nor Bruce’s checks counted when we were hunting for the Maintainer.

That took care of all of us and left only the mysterious stranger, intruding somehow through a Door (how’d he get it without using our Maintainer?) or from an unimaginable hiding place or straight out of the Void itself. I know that last is impossible⁠—nothing can step out of nothing⁠—but if anything ever looked like it was specially built for something not at all nice to come looming out of, it’s the Void⁠—misty, foggily churning, slimy gray.⁠ ⁠…

“Wait a second,” I told myself, “and hang onto this, Greta. It should have smacked you in the face at the start.”

Whatever came out of the Void, or, more to the point, whoever slipped back from our crowd to the Maintainer, Bruce would have seen them. He was looking at the Maintainer past our heads the whole time, and whatever happened to it, he saw it.

Erich wouldn’t have, even after he was on the bomb, because he’d been stagewise enough to face Bruce most of the time to build up his role as tribune of the people.

But Bruce would have⁠—unless he got so caught up in what he was saying.⁠ ⁠…

No, kid, a Demon is always an actor, no matter how much he believes in what he’s saying, and there never was an actor yet who wouldn’t instantly notice a member of the audience starting to walk out on his big scene.

So Bruce knew, which made him a better actor than I’d have been willing to grant, since it didn’t look as if anyone else had thought of what had just occurred to me, or they’d have gone over and put it to him.

Not me, though⁠—I don’t work that way. Besides, I didn’t feel up to it⁠—Nervy Anna enfold me, I felt like pure hell.

“Maybe,” I told myself encouragingly, “the Place is Hell,” but added, “Be your age, Greta⁠—be a real rootless, ruleless, ruthless twenty-nine.”