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

suffragettes and the W.C.T.U.!” Erich cheered. “Beau, will you play us a medley of ‘Hearts and Flowers’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’? I’m deeply moved, Lili. Where do the rest of us queue up for the Great Love Affair of the Century?” XII A Big Opportunity

Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past’s mistakes and the future’s fears.

I had to learn to close the front door to tomorrow and the back door to yesterday and settle down to here and now.

Anonymous

Nobody laughed at Erich’s screwball sarcasms and still I thought, “Yes, perish his hysterical little gray head, but he’s half right⁠—Lili’s got the big thing now and she wants to serve it up to the rest of us on a platter, only love doesn’t cook and cut that way.”

Those weren’t bad ideas she had about the Maintainer, though, especially the one about the Ghostgirls doing the Introverting⁠—it would explain why there couldn’t be Introversion drill, the manual stuff about blue flashes being window-dressing, and something disappearing without movement or transition is the sort of thing that might not catch the attention⁠—and I guess they gave the others something to think about too, for there wasn’t any followup to Erich’s frantic sniping.

But I honestly didn’t see where there was this big opportunity being stuck away in a gray sack in the Void and I began to wonder and I got the strangest feeling and I said to myself, “Hang onto your hat, Greta. It’s hope.”

“The dreadful thing about being a Demon is that you have all time to range through,” Lili was saying with a smile. “You can never shut the back door to yesterday or the front door to tomorrow and simply live in the present. But now that’s been done for us: the Door is shut, we need never again rehash the past or the future. The Spiders and Snakes can never find us, for who ever heard of a Place that was truly lost being rescued? And as those in the know have told me, Introversion is the end as far as those outside are concerned. So we’re safe from the Spiders and Snakes, we need never be slaves or enemies again, and we have a Place in which to live our new lives, the Place prepared for us from the beginning.”

She paused. “Surely you understand what I mean? Sidney and Beauregard and Dr. Pyeshkov are the ones who explained it to me. The Place is a balanced aquarium, just like the cosmos. No one knows how many ages of Big Time it has been in use, without a bit of new material being brought in⁠—only luxuries and people⁠—and not a bit of waste cast off. No one knows how many more ages it may not sustain life. I never heard of Minor Maintainers wearing out. We have all the future, all the security, anyone can hope for. We have a Place to live together.”

You know, she was dead right and I realized that all the time I’d had the conviction in the back of my mind that we were going to suffocate or something if we didn’t get a Door open pretty quick. I should have known differently, if anybody should, because I’d once been in the Place without a Door for as long as a hundred sleeps during a foxhole stretch of the Change War and we’d had to start cycling our food and it had been okay.

And then, because it is also the way my mind works, I started to picture in a flash the consequences of our living together all by ourselves like Lili said.

I began to pair people off; I couldn’t help it. Let’s see, four women, six men, two E.T.s.

“Greta,” I said, “you’re going to be Miss Polly Andry for sure. We’ll have a daily newspaper and folk-dancing classes, we’ll shut the bar except evenings, Bruce’ll keep a rhymed history of the Place.”

I even thought, though I knew this part was strictly silly, about schools and children. I wondered what Siddy’s would look like, or my little commandant’s. “Don’t go near the Void, dears.” Of course that would be specially hard on the two E.T.s, but Sevensee at least wasn’t so different and the genetics boys had made some wonderful advances and Maud ought to know about them and there were some amazing gadgets in Surgery when Doc sobered up. The patter of little hoofs⁠ ⁠…

“My fiancé spoke to you about carrying a peace message to the rest of the cosmos,” Lili added, “and bringing an end to the Big Change, and healing all the wounds that have been made in the Little Time.”

I looked at Bruce. His face was set and strained, as will happen to the best of them when a girl starts talking about her man’s business, and I don’t know why, but I said to myself, “She’s crucifying him, she’s nailing him to his purpose as a woman will, even when there’s not much point to it, as now.”

And Lili went on, “It was a wonderful thought, but now we cannot carry or send any message and I believe it is too late in any event for a peace message to do any good. The cosmos is too raveled by change, too far gone. It will dissolve, fade, ‘leave not a rack behind.’ We’re the survivors. The torch of existence has been put in our hands.

“We may already be all that’s left in the cosmos, for have you thought that the Change Winds may have died at their source? We may never reach another cosmos, we may drift forever in the Void, but who of us has been Introverted before and who knows what we can or cannot do? We’re a seed for a new future to grow from. Perhaps all doomed universes cast off seeds like this Place. It’s a seed, it’s an embryo, let it grow.”

She looked swiftly at Bruce and then