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

at Sid and she quoted, “ ‘Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.’ ”

I squeezed Sid’s hand and I started to say something to him, but he didn’t know I was there; he was listening to Lili quote Tennyson with his eyes entranced and his mouth open, as if he were imagining new things to put into it⁠—oh, Siddy!

And then I saw the others were looking at her the same way. Ilhilihis was seeing finer feather forests than long-dead Luna’s grow. The greenhouse child Maud ap-Ares Davies was stowing away on a starship bound for another galaxy, or thinking how different her life might have been, the children she might have had, if she’d stayed on the planets and out of the Change World. Even Erich looked as though he might be blitzing new universes, and Mark subduing them, for an eight-legged Führer-imperator. Beau was throbbing up a wider Mississippi in a bigger-than-life sidewheeler.

Even I⁠—well, I wasn’t dreaming of a Greater Chicago. “Let’s not go hog-wild on this sort of thing,” I told myself, but I did look up at the Void and I got a shiver because I imagined it drawing away and the whole Place starting to grow.

“I truly meant what I said about a seed,” Lili went on slowly. “I know, as you all do, that there are no children in the Change World, that there cannot be, that we all become instantly sterile, that what they call a curse is lifted from us girls and we are no longer in bondage to the moon.”

She was right, all right⁠—if there’s one thing that’s been proved a million times in the Change World, it’s that.

“But we are no longer in the Change World,” Lili said softly, “and its limitations should no longer apply to us, including that one. I feel deeply certain of it, but⁠—” she looked around slowly⁠—“we are four women here and I thought one of us might have a surer indication.”

My eyes followed hers around like anybody’s would. In fact, everybody was looking around except Maud, and she had the silliest look of surprise on her face and it stayed there, and then, very carefully, she got down from the bar stool with her knitting. She looked at the half-finished pink bra with the long white needles stuck in it and her eyes bugged bigger yet, as if she were expecting it to turn into a baby sweater right then and there. Then she walked across the Place to Lili and stood beside her. While she was walking, the look of surprise changed to a quiet smile. The only other thing she did was throw her shoulders back a little.

I was jealous of her for a second, but it was a double miracle for her, considering her age, and I couldn’t grudge her that. And to tell the truth, I was a little frightened, too. Even with Dave, I’d been bothered about this business of having babies.

Yet I stood up with Siddy⁠—I couldn’t stop myself and I guess he couldn’t either⁠—and hand in hand we walked to the control divan. Beau and Sevensee were there and Bruce, of course, and then, so help me, those Soldiers to the death, Kaby and Mark, started over from the bar and I couldn’t see anything in their eyes about the greater glory of Crete and Rome, but something, I think, about each other, and after a moment Illy slowly detached himself from the piano and followed, lightly trailing his tentacles on the floor.

I couldn’t exactly see him hoping for little Illies in this company, unless it was true what the jokes said about Lunans, but maybe he was being really disinterested and maybe he wasn’t; maybe he was simply figuring that Illy ought to be on the side with the biggest battalions.

I heard dragging footsteps behind us and here came Doc from the Gallery, carrying in his folded arms an abstract sculpture as big as a newborn baby. It was an agglomeration of perfect shiny gray spheres the size of golf balls, shaping up to something like a large brain, but with holes showing through here and there. He held it out to us like an infant to be admired and worked his lips and tongue as if he were trying very hard to say something, though not a word came out that you could understand, and I thought, “Maxey Aleksevich may be speechless drunk and have all sorts of holes in his head, but he’s got the right instincts, bless his soulful little Russian heart.”

We were all crowded around the control divan like a football team huddling. The Peace Packers, it came to me. Sevensee would be fullback or center and Illy left end⁠—what a receiver! The right number, too. Erich was alone at the bar, but now even he⁠—“Oh, no, this can’t be,” I thought⁠—even he came toward us. Then I saw that his face was working the worst ever. He stopped halfway and managed to force a smile, but it was the worst, too. “That’s my little commandant,” I thought, “no team spirit.”

“So now Lili and Bruce⁠—yes, and Grossmutterchen Maud⁠—have their little nest,” he said, and he wouldn’t have had to push his voice very hard to get a screech. “But what are the rest of us supposed to be⁠—cowbirds?”

He crooked his neck and flapped his hands and croaked, “Cuc-koo! Cuc-koo!” And I said to myself, “I often thought you were crazy, boy, but now I know.”

“Teufelsdreck!⁠—yes, Devil’s dirt!⁠—but you all seem to be infected with this dream of children. Can’t you see that the Change World is the natural and proper end of evolution?⁠—a period of enjoyment and measuring, an ultimate working out of things, which women call destruction⁠—‘Help, I’m being raped!’ ‘Oh, what are they doing to my children?’⁠—but which men know as fulfillment.

“You’re given good parts in Götterdämmerung and you go up to the author and tap him on the shoulder and