The Big Time (2 page)

do love him and I’m a good lover and as much a Doubledagger as he is.

We had just pulled back from each other to get a breath—his blue eyes looked so sweet in his worn face—when there was a thud behind us. With the snapping of the tension, Doc had fallen off his bar stool and his top hat was over his eyes. As we turned to chuckle at him, Maud squeaked and we saw that the Roman had walked straight up against the Void and was marching along there steadily without gaining a foot, like it does happen, his black uniform melting into that inside-your-head gray.

Maud and Beau rushed over to fish him back, which can be tricky. The thin gambler was all courtly efficiency again. Sid supervised from a distance.

What’s wrong with him?” I asked Erich.

He shrugged. “Overdue for Change Shock. And he was nearest the stun guns. His horse almost threw him.
Mein Gott
, you should have seen Saint Petersburg,
Leibc hen
:

the Nevsky Prospekt, the canals flying by like reception carpets of blue sky, a cavalry troop in blue and gold that blundered across our escape, fine women in furs and ostrich plumes, a monk with a big tripod and his head under a hood—it gave me the horrors seeing all those

Zombies flashing past and staring at me in that sick unawakened way they have, and knowing that some of them, say the photographer, might be Snakes.”

Our side in the Change War is the Spiders, the other side is the Snakes, though all of us—Spiders and Snakes alike—are Doublegangers and Demons too, because we’re cut out of our lifelines in the cosmos. Your lifeline is all of you from birth to death. We’re

Doublegangers because we can operate both in the cosmos and outside of it, and Demons because we act reasonably alive while doing so—which the ghosts don’t. Entertainers and

Soldiers are all Demon-Doublegangers, whichever side they’re on—though they say the Snake

Places are simply ghastly. Zombies are dead people whose lifelines lie in the so-called past.

“What were you doing in Saint Petersburg before the ambush?” I asked Erich. “That is, if you can talk about it.”

“Why not? We were kidnapping the infant Einstein back from the Snakes in 1883.

Yes, the Snakes got him,
Liebchen
, only a few sleeps back, endangering the West’s whole victory over Russia.”

“—which gave your dear little Hitler the world on a platter for fifty years and got me loved to death by your sterling troops in the Liberation of Chicago—”

“—but which leads to the ultimate victory of the Spiders and the West over the Snakes and Communism,
Leibc hen
, remember that. Anyway, our counter-snatch didn’t work. The

Snakes had guards posted—most unusual and we weren’t warned. The whole thing was a great

mess. No wonder Bruce lost his head—not that it excuses him.”

“The New Boy?” I asked. Sid hadn’t got to him and he was still standing with hooded eyes where Erich had left him, a dark pillar of shame and rage.

“
Ja
, a lieutenant from World War One. An Englishman.”

“I gathered that,” I told Erich. “Is he really effeminate?”

“
Weibischer?
” He smiled. “I had to call him something when he said I was a coward. He’ll make a fine Soldier—only needs a little more shaping.”

“You men are so original when you spat.” I lowered my voice. “But you shouldn’t have gone on and called him a Snake, Erich mine.”

“
Schlange?
” The smile got crooked. “Who knows—about any of us? As Saint

Petersburg showed me, the Snakes’ spies are getting cleverer than ours.” The blue eyes didn’t look sweet now. “Are you,
Liebchen
, really nothing more than a good loyal Spider?”

“Erich!”

“All right, I went too fart—with Bruce and with you too. We’re all hacked over these days, riding with one leg over the breaking edge.”

Maud and Beau were supporting the Roman to a couch, Maud taking most of his weight, with Sid stifi supervising and the New Boy still sulking by himself. The New Girl should have been with him, of course, but I couldn’t see her anywhere and I decided she was probably having a nervous breakdown in the Refresher, the little jerk.

“The Roman looks pretty bad, Erich,” I said.

“Ah, Mark’s tough. Got virtue, as his people say. And our little starship girl will bring him back to life if anybody can and if . .

“… you call this living,” I filled in dutifully.

He was right. Maud had fifty-odd years of psychomedical experience, 23rd Century at that. It should have been Doc’s job, but that was fifty drunks back.

“Maud and Mark, that will be an interesting experiment,” Erich said. “Reminiscent of

Goering’s with the frozen men and the naked gypsy girls.”

“You are a filthy Nazi. She’ll be using electrophoresis and deep suggestion, if I know anything.”

“How will you be able to know anything,
Liebchen
, if she switches on the couch curtains, as I perceive she is preparing to do?”

“Filthy Nazi I said and meant.”

“Precisely.” He clicked his heels and bowed a millimeter. “Erich Friederich von

Hohenwald,
Oberleutnant
in the army of the Third Reich. Fell at Narvi, where he was

Recruited by the Spiders. Lifeline strengthened by a Big Change after his first death and at latest report Commandant of Toronto, where he maintains extensive baby farms to provide him with breakfast meat, if you believe the handbills of the
voyageurs
underground. At your service.

“Oh, Erich, it’s all so lousy,” I said, touching his hand, reminded that he was one of the unfortunates Resurrected from a point in their lifeines well before their deaths—in his case, because the date of his death had been shifted forward by a Big Change after his

Resurrection. And as every Demon finds out, if he can’t imagine it beforehand, it is pure hell to remember your future, and the shorter the time between your Resurrection and your death back in the cosmos, the better. Mine, bless Bab-ed-Din, was only an action-packed ten minutes on North Clark Street.

Erick put his other hand lightly over mine. “Fortunes of the Change War,
Liebchen
. At least I’m a Soldier and sometimes assigned to future operations—though why we should have this monomania about our future personalities back there, I don’t know. Mine is a stupid
Oberst
, thin as paper—and frightfully indignant at the
voyageurs!
But it helps me a little if I see him in perspective and at least I get back to the cosmos pretty regularly.

Gott sei Dank
, so I’m better off than you Entertainers.”

I didn’t say aloud that a Changing cosmos is worse than none, but I found myself sending a prayer to the Bonny Dew for my father’s repose, that the Change Winds would blow lightly across the lifeline of Anton A. Forzane, professor of physiology, born in Norway and buried in Chicago. Woodlawn Cemetery is a nice gray spot.

“That’s all right, Erich,” I said. “We Entertainers Cot Mittens too.”

He scowled around at me suspiciously, as if he were wondering whether I had all my

buttons on.

“Mittens?” he said. “What do you mean? I’m not wearing any. Are you trying to say something about Bruce’s gloves—which incidentally seem to annoy him for some reason. No, seriously, Greta, why do you Entertainers need mittens?”

“Because we get cold feet sometimes. At least I do. Got Mittens, as I say.”

A sickly light dawned in his Prussian puss. He muttered, “Got mittens …
Gott mit uns
… God with us,” and roared softly, “Greta, I don’t know how I put up with you the way you murder a great language for cheap laughs.”

“You’ve got to take me as I am,” I told him, “mittens and all, thank the Bonny

Dew—” and hastily explained, “That’s French—_le bon Dieu_—the good God—don’t hit me. I’m not going to tell you any more of my secrets.”

He laughed feebly, like he was dying.

“Cheer up,” I said. “I won’t be here forever, and there are worse places than the

Place.”

He nodded grudgingly, looking around. “You know what, Greta, if you’ll promise not to make some dreadful joke out of it: on operations, I pretend I’ll soon be going backstage to court the world-famous ballerina Greta Forzane.”

He was right about the backstage part. The Place is a regular theater-in-the-round with the Void for an audience, the Void’s gray hardly disturbed by the screens masking

Surgery (Ugh!), Refresher and Stores. Between the last two are the bar and kitchen and

Beau’s piano. Between Surgery and the sector where the Door usually appears are the shelves and taborets of the Art Gallery. The control divan is stage center. Spaced around at a fair distance are six big low couches—one with its curtains now shooting up into the gray—and a few small tables. It is like a ballet set and the crazy costumes and characters that turn up don’t ruin the illusion. By no means. Diaghilev would have hired most of them for the Ballet Russe on first sight, without even asking them whether they could keep time to music.

Last week in Babylon, Last night in Rome, —Hodgson

A RIGHT-HAND GLOVE

Beau had gone behind the bar and was talking quietly at Doc, but with his eyes elsewhere, looking very sallow and professional in his white, and I thought—Damballa!—I’m in the French Quarter. I couldn’t see the New Girl. Sid was at last getting to the New Boy after the fuss about Mark. He threw a sign and I started over with Erich in tow.

“Welcome, sweet lad. Sidney Lessingham’s your host, and a fellow Englishman. Born in King’s Lynn, 1564, schooled at Cambridge, but London was the life and death of me, though I outlasted Bessie, Jimmie, Charlie, and Ollie almost. And what a life! By turns a clerk, a spy, a bawd—the two trades are hand in glove—a poet of no account, a beggar, and a peddler of resurrection tracts. Beau Lassiter, our throats are tinder!”

At the word “poet,” the New Boy looked up, but ‘resentfully, as if he had been tricked into it.

“And to spare your throat for drinking, sweet gallant, I’ll be so bold as to guess and answer one of your questions,” Sid rattled on. “Yes, I knew Will Shakespeare—we were of an age—and he was such a modest, mind-your-business rogue that we all wondered whether he really did write those plays. Your pardon, faith, but that scratch might be looked to.”

Then I saw that the New Girl hadn’t lost her head, but gone to Surgery (Ugh!) for a first-aid tray. She reached a swab toward the New Boy’s sticky cheek, saying rather shrilly, “If I might . .

Her timing was bad. Sid’s last words and Erich’s approach had darkened the look in

the young Soldier’s face and he angrily swept her arm aside without even glancing at her.

Erich squeezed my arm. The tray clattered to the floor—and one of the drinks that Beau was bringing almost followed it. Ever since the New Girl’s arrival, Beau had been figuring that she was his responsibility, though I don’t think the two of them had reached an agreement yet.

Beau was especially set on it because I was thick with Sid at the time and Maud with Doc, she loving tough cases.

“Easy now, lad, and you love me!” Sid thundered, again shooting Beau the “Hold it”

look. “She’s just a poor pagan trying to comfort you. Swallow your bile, you black villain, and perchance it will turn to poetry. Ah, did I touch you there? Confess, you are a poet.”

There isn’t much gets by Sid, though for a second I forgot my psychology and wondered if he knew what he was doing with his insights.

“Yes, I’m a poet, all right,” the New Boy roared. “I’m Bruce Marchant, you bloody

Zombies. I’m a poet in a world where even the lines of the King James and your precious Will whom you use for laughs aren’t safe from Snakes’ slime and the Spiders’ dirty legs. Changing our history, stealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and best intentioned and efficient, and what does it lead to? This bloody SI glove!”

He held up his black-gloved left hand which still held the mate and he shook it.

“What’s wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?” Sid demanded. “And you love us, tell us.” While Erich laughed, “Consider yourself lucky,
Kamerad
. Mark and I

didn’t draw any gloves at all.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Bruce yelled. “The bloody things are both lefts!” He slammed it down on the floor.

We are howled, we couldn’t help it. He turned his back on us and stamped off, though

I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed my arm and said between gasps, “
Mein Gott, Liebchen
, what have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!”

One of us didn’t laugh. Ever since the New Girl heard the name Bruce Merchant, she’d had a look In her eyes like she’d been given the sacrament. I was glad she’d got interested in something, because she’d been pretty much of a snoot and a wet blanket up until now, although she’d come to the Place with the recommendation of having been a real whoopee girl in London and New York in the Twenties. She looked disapprovingly at us as she gathered up the tray and stuff, not forgetting the glove, which she placed on the center of the tray like a holy relic.

Beau cut over and tried to talk to her, but she ghosted past him and once again he couldn’t do anything because of the tray in his hands. He came over and got rid of the drinks quick. I took a big gulp right away because I saw the New Girl stepping through the screen into Surgery and I hate to be reminded we have it and I’m glad Doc is too drunk to use it, some of the Arachnoid surgical techniques being very sickening as I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten.

By that time, Bruce had come back to us, saying in a carefully hard voice, “Look here, it’s not the dashed glove itself, as you very well know, you howling Demons.”

“What is it then, noble heart?” Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard heightening the effect of innocent receptivity.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Bruce said, looking around sharply, but none of us cracked a smile. “It’s this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos—and don’t tell me that isn’t in the cards!— masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders—and we don’t know who they are ultimately; it’s just a name; we see only agents like ourselves—the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of our lif elines—”