The Big Time (9 page)

Kaby nodded, almost absently. “Confine or kill the coward, whichever is easier, whip the woman, andlet’s get on to the Egyptian battle.”

“Indeed, yes,” Mark said. “I died in it. But now perhaps no longer.”

Kaby said to him, “I like you, Roman.”

Bruce was smiling, barely, and his eyes were moving and fixing. “You, Ilhilihis?”

Illy’s squeak box had never sounded mechanical to me before, but it did as he answered, “I’m a lot deeper into borrowed time than the rest of you, tra-la-la, but Papa still loves living. Include me very much out, Brucie.”

“Miss Davies?”

Besides me, Maud said flatly, “Do you think I’m a fool?” Beyond her, I saw Lili and thought, “My God, I might look as proud if I were in her shoes, but I sure as hell wouldn’t look as confident.”

Bruce’s eyes hadn’t quite come to Beau when the gambler spoke up. “I have no cause to like you, sir, rather the opposite. But this Place has come to bore me more than Boston and

I have always found it difficult to resist a long shot. A very long one, I fear. I am with you, sir.”

There was a pain in my chest and a roaring in my ears and through it I heard

Sevensee grunting, “sicka these lousy Spiders. Deal me in.”

And then Doc reared up in front of the bar and he’d lost his hat and his hair was wild and he grabbed an empty fifth by the neck and broke the bottom of it all jagged against the bar and he waved it and screeched, “
Ubivaytye Pauki—i Nyemetzi!
”

And right behind his words, Beau sang out fast the English of it, “Kill the Spiders—

and the Germans!”

And Doc didn’t collapse then, though I could see he was hanging onto the bar tight with his other hand, and the Place got stiller, inside and out, than I’ve ever known it, and

Bruce’s eyes were finally moving back toward Sid.

But the eyes stopped short of Sid and I heard Bruce say, “Miss Forzane?” and I

thought, “That’s funny,” and I started to look around at the Countess, and felt all the eyes and

I realized, “Hey, that’s me! But this can’t happen to me. To the others, yes, but not to me. I

just work here. Not to Greta, no, no, no!”

But it had, and the eyes didn’t let go, and the silence and the feeling of reality were

Godawful, and I said to myself, “Greta, you’ve got to say something, if only a suitable four—

letter word,” and then suddenly I knew what the silence was like. It was like that of a big city if there were some way of shutting off all the noise in one second. It was like Erich’s singing when the piano had deserted him. It was as if the Change Winds should ever die completely .

. . and I knew beforehand what had happened when I turned my back on them all.

The Ghostgirls were gone. The Major Maintainer hadn’t merely been switched to

Introvert. It was gone, too.

“We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed.”

“You looked among D––—‘s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?”

“Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume …”

—Poe

A LOCKED ROOM

Three hours later, Sid and I plumped down on the couch nearest the kitchen, though too tired to want to eat for a while yet. A tighter search that I could ever have cooked up had

shown that the Maintainer was not in the Place.

Of course it had to be in the Place, as we kept telling each other for the first two hours. It had to be, if circumstances and the theories we lived by in the Change World meant anything. A Maintainer is what maintains a Place. The Minor Maintainer takes care of oxygen, temperature, humidity, gravity, and other little life-cycle and matter-cycle things generally, but it’s the Major Maintainer that keeps the walls from buckling and the ceiling from falling in. It is little, but oh my, it does so much.

It doesn’t work by wires or radio or anything complicated like that. It just hooks into local spacetime.

I have been told that its inside working part is made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, each one of which is practically a vest-pocket cosmos in itself. Outside, it looks like a portable radio with a few more dials and some telltales and switches and plug-ins for earphones and a lot of other sensory thingumajigs.

But the Maintainer was gone and the Void hadn’t closed in, yet. By this time, I was so fagged, I didn’t care much whether it did or not.

One thing for sure, the Maintainer had been switched to Introvert before it was spirited away or else its disappearance automatically produced Introversion, take your choice, because we sure were Introverted—real nasty martinet-schoolmaster grip of reality on my thoughts that I knew, without trying, liquor wouldn’t soften, not a breath of Change Wind, absolutely stifling, and the gray of the Void seeming so much inside my head that I think I got a glimmering of what the science boys mean when they explain to me that the Place is a kind of interweaving of the material and the rnenal—a Giant Monad, one of them called it.

Anyway, I said to myself, “Greta, if this is Introversion, I want no part of it. It is not nice to be cut adrift from the cosmos and know it. A lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific and a starship between galaxies are not in it for loneliness.”

I asked myself why the Spiders had ever equipped Maintainers with Introversion switches anyway, when we couldn’t drill with them and weren’t supposed to use them except in an emergency so tight that it was either Introvert or surrender to the Snakes, and for the first time the obvious explanation came to me:

Introversion must be the same as scuttling, its main purpose to withhold secrets and materiel from the enemy. It put a place into a situation from which even the Spider high command couldn’t rescue it, and there was nothing left but to sink down, down (out? up?), down into the Void.

If that was the case, our chances of getting back were about those of my being a kid again playing in the Dunes on the Small Time.

I edged a little closer to Sid and sort of squunched under his shoulder and rubbed my cheek against the smudged, goldworked gray velvet. He looked down and I said, “A long way to Lynn Regis, eh, Siddy?”

“Sweetling, thou spokest a mouthful,” he said. He knows very well what he is doing when he mixes his language that way, the wicked old darling.

“Siddy,” I said, “why this goldwork? It’d be a lot smoother without it.”

“Marry, men must prick themselves out and, ‘faith I know not, but it helps if there’s metal in it.”

“And girls get scratched.” I took a little sniff. “But don’t put this doublet through the cleaner yet. Until we get out of the woods, I want as much around as possible.”

“Marry, and why should I?” he asked blankly, and I think he wasn’t fooling me. The last thing time travelers find out is how they do or don’t smell. Then his face clouded and he looked as though he wanted to squunch under my shoulder. “But ‘faith, sweetling, your forest has a few more trees than Sherwood.”

“Thou saidst it,” I agreed, and wondered about the look. He oughtn’t to be interested in my girlishness now. I knew I was a mess, but he had stuck pretty close to me during the hunt and you never can tell. Then I remembered that he was the other one who hadn’t declared himself when Bruce was putting it to us, and it probably troubled his male vanity. Not me, though—I was still grateful to the Maintainer for getting me out of that spot, whatever other it had got us all into. It seemed ages ago.

We’d all jumped to the conclusion that the two Ghostgirls had run away with the

Maintainer, I don’t know where or why, but it looked so much that way. Maud had started

yiping about how she’d never trusted Ghosts and always known that some day they’d start doing things on their own, and Kaby had got it firmly fixed in her head, right between the horns, that Phryne, being a Greek, was the ringleader and was going to wreak havoc on us all.

But when we were checking Stores the first time, I had noticed that the Ghostgirl envelopes looked flat. Ectoplasm doesn’t take up much space when it’s folded, but I had opened one anyway, then another, and then called for help.

Every last envelope was empty. We had lost over a thousand Ghostgirls, Sid’s whole stock.

Well, at least it proved what none of us had ever seen or heard of being demonstrated:

that there is a spooky link—a sort of Change Wind contact— between a Ghost and its lifeline;

and when that umbilicus, I’ve heard it called, is cut, the part away from the lifeline dies.

Interesting, but what had bothered me was whether we Demons were going to evaporate too, because we are as much Doublegangers as the Ghosts and our apron strings had been cut just as surely. We’re more solid, of course, but that would only mean we’d take a little longer. Very logical.

I remember I had looked up at Lili and Maud—us girls had been checking the envelopes; it’s one of the proprieties we frequently maintain and anyway, if men check them, they’re apt to trot out that old wheeze about “instant women” which I’m sick to death of hearing, thank you.

Anyway, I had looked up and said, “It’s been nice knowing you,” and Lili had said, “Twentythree, skiddoo,” and Maud had said, “Here goes nothing,” and we had shook hands all around.

We figured that Phryne and the Countess had faded at the same time as the other

Ghostgirls, but an idea had been nibbling at me and I said, “Siddy, do you suppose it’s just barely possible that, while we were all looking at Bruce, those two Ghostgirls would have been able to work the Maintainer and get a Door and lam out of here with the thing?”

“Thou speakst my thoughts, sweetling. All weighs against it: Imprimis, ‘tis well known that Ghosts cannot lay plots or act on them. Secundo, the time forbade getting a Door.

Tercio—and here’s the real meat of it—the Place folds without the Maintainer. Quadro, ‘twere folly to depend on not one of—how many of us? ten, elf—not looking around in all the time it would have taken them—”

“I looked around once, Siddy. They were drinking and they had got to the control divan under their own power. Now when was that? Oh, yes, when Bruce was talking about

Zombies.”

“Yes, sweetling. And as I was about to cap my arguement with quinquo when you

‘gan prattle, I could have sworne none could touch the Maintainer, much less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet…”

“Eftsoons yet,” I seconded him.

Somebody must have got a door and walked out with the thing. It certainly wasn’t in the Place. The iunt had been a lulu. Something the size of a portable typewriter is not easy to hide and we had been inside everything from Beau’s piano to the reaewer link of the

Refresher.

We had even fluoroscoped everybody, though it had made Illy writhe like a box of worms, as he’d warned us; he said it tickled terribly and I insisted on smoothing his fur for five minutes afterward, although he was a little standoffish toward me.

Some areas, like the bar, kitchen and Stores, took a long while, but we were thorough.

Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made the Place, she has been stationed in a

Field Hospital (it turns out the Spiders actually are mounting operations from them) and learned a few nice new wrinkles.

However, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course, every check was Observed by at least three people, not including Bruce or Lili. When the Maintainer vanished, Doc had pulled out of his glassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me if I hadn’t seen it happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to the Art

Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out his coat and duck his head and whip out a flask and take a swig and by now he was well on his way toward another peak.

The Art Gallery had taken time too, because there’s such a jumble of strange stuff, and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split a beautiful blue woodcarving of a

Venusian medusa because, although there wasn’t a mark in the paw-polished surface, she claimed it was just big enough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces together and mooning over the other stuff.

After we’d finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling the floor. Beau and

Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a one-sided Place, that there is nothing, but nothing, under the floor; it just gets a lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you get a quarter inch down—that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark was knuckleheaded (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the q.t.) and broke four diamond-plus drills before he was satisfied.

Except for some trick hiding places, that left the Void, and things don’t vanish if you throw them at the Void—they half melt and freeze forever unless you can fish them out. Back of the Refresher, at about eye-level, are three Venusian coconuts that a Hittite strongman threw there during a major brawl. I try not to look at them because they are so much like witch heads they give me the woolies. The parts of the Place right up against the Void have strange spatial properties which one of the gadgets in Surgery makes use of in a way that gives me the worse woolies, but that’s beside the point.

During the hunt, Kaby and Erich had used their Callers as direction finders to point out the Maintainer, just as they’re used in the cosmos to locate the Door—and sometimes in the Big Places, people tell me. But the Callers only went wild—like a compass needle whirling around without stopping—and pobody knew what that meant.

The trick hiding places were the Minor Maintainer, a cute idea, but it is no bigger than the Major and has its own mysterious insides and had obviously kept on doing its own work, so that was out for several reasons, and the bomb chest, though it seemed impossible for anyone to have opened it, granting they know the secret of its lock, even before Erich jumped on it and put it in the limelight double. But when you’ve ruled out everything else, the word impossible changes meaning.

Since time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts of tricks for sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanently or temporarily. But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybody that should know tells me that time traveling