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

say, ‘Excuse me, Herr Wagner, but this Twilight of the Gods is just a bit morbid. Why don’t you write an opera for me about the little ones, the dear little blue-eyed curly-tops? A plot? Oh, boy meets girl and they settle down to breed, something like that.’

“Devil’s dirt doubled and damned! Have you thought what life will be like without a Door to go out of to find freedom and adventure, to measure your courage and keenness? Do you want to grow long gray beards hobbling around this asteroid turned inside out? Putter around indoors to the end of your days, mooning about little baby cosmoses?⁠—incidentally, with a live bomb for company. The cave, the womb, the little gray home in the nest⁠—is that what you want? It’ll grow? Oh, yes, like the city engulfing the wild wood, a proliferation of Kinder, Kirche, Küche⁠—I should live so long!

“Women!⁠—how I hate their bright eyes as they look at me from the fireside, bent-shouldered, rocking, deeply happy to be old, and say, ‘He’s getting weak, he’s giving out, soon I’ll have to put him to bed and do the simplest things for him.’ Your filthy Triple Goddess, Kaby, the birther, bride, and burier of man! Woman, the enfeebler, the fetterer, the crippler! Woman!⁠—and the curly-headed little cancers she wants!”

He lurched toward us, pointing at Lili. “I never knew one who didn’t want to cripple a man if you gave her the chance. Cripple him, swaddle him, clip his wings, grind him to sausage to mold another man, hers, a doll man. You hid the Maintainer, you little smother-hen, so you could have your nest and your Brucie!”

He stopped, gasping, and I expected someone to bop him one on the schnozzle, and I think he did, too. I turned to Bruce and he was looking, I don’t know how, sorry, guilty, anxious, angry, shaken, inspired, all at once, and I wished people sometimes had simple suburban reactions like magazine stories.

Then Erich made the mistake, if it was one, of turning toward Bruce and slowly staggering toward him, pawing the air with his hands as if he were going to collapse into his arms, and saying, “Don’t let them get you, Bruce. Don’t let them tie you down. Don’t let them clip you⁠—your words or your deeds. You’re a Soldier. Even when you talked about a peace message, you talked about doing some smashing of your own. No matter what you think and feel, Bruce, no matter how much lying you do and how much you hide, you’re really not on their side.”

That did it.

It didn’t come soon enough or, I think, in the right spirit to please me, but I will say it for Bruce that he didn’t muck it up by tipping or softening his punch. He took one step forward and his shoulders spun and his fist connected sweet and clean.

As he did it, he said only one word, “Loki!” and darn if that didn’t switch me back to a campfire in the Indiana Dunes and my mother telling me out of the Elder Saga about the malicious, sneering, all-spoiling Norse god and how, when the other gods came to trap him in his hideaway by the river, he was on the point of finishing knotting a mysterious net big enough, I had imagined, to snare the whole universe, and that if they’d come a minute later, he would have.

Erich was stretched on the floor, his head hitched up, rubbing his jaw and glaring at Bruce. Mark, who was standing beside me, moved a little and I thought he was going to do something, maybe even clobber Bruce in the old spirit of you can’t do that to my buddy, but he just shook his head and said, “Omnia vincit amor.” I nudged him and said, “Meaning?” and he said, “Love licks everything.”

I’d never have expected it from a Roman, but he was half right at any rate. Lili had her victory: Bruce clearing the field for the marriage by laying out the woman-hating boy friend who would be trying to get him to go out nights. At that moment, I think Bruce wanted Lili and a life with her more than he wanted to reform the Change World. Sure, us women have our little victories⁠—until the legions come or the Little Corporal draws up his artillery or the Panzers roar down the road.

Erich scrambled to his feet and stood there in a half-slump, half-crouch, still rubbing his jaw and glaring at Bruce over his hand, but making no move to continue the fight, and I studied his face and said to myself, “If he can get a gun, he’s going to shoot himself, I know.”

Bruce started to say something and hesitated, like I would have in his shoes, and just then Doc got one of his unpredictable inspirations and went weaving out toward Erich, holding out the sculpture and making deaf-and-dumb noises like he had to us. Erich looked at him as if he were going to kill him, and then grabbed the sculpture and swung it up over his head and smashed it down on the floor, and for a wonder, it didn’t shatter. It just skidded along in one piece and stopped inches from my feet.

That thing not breaking must have been the last straw for Erich. I swear I could see the red surge up through his eyes toward his brain. He swung around into the Stores sector and ran the few steps between him and the bronze bomb chest.

Everything got very slow motion for me, though I didn’t do any moving. Almost every man started out after Erich. Bruce didn’t, though, and Siddy turned back after the first surge forward, while Illy squunched down for a leap, and it was between Sevensee’s hairy shanks and Beau’s scissoring white pants that I saw that under-the-microscope circle of death’s heads and watched Erich’s finger go down on them in