Morte villana, di pietà nemica, di dolor madre antica, giudicio incontastabile gravoso, poi che hai data matera al cor doglioso ond'io vado pensoso, di te blasmar la lingua s'affatica. E s'io di grazia ti voi far mendica, convenesi ch'eo dica lo tuo fallar d'onni torto tortoso, non però ch'a la gente sia nascoso, ma per farne cruccioso chi d'amor per innanzi si notrica. Dal secolo hai partita cortesia e ciò ch'è in donna da pregiar vertute: in gaia gioventute distrutta hai l'amorosa leggiadria. Più non voi discovrir qual donna sia che per le propietà sue canosciute. Chi non merta salute non speri mai d'aver sua compagnia.Piangete, amanti, poi che piange Amore, udendo qual cagion lui fa plorare. Amor sente a Pietà donne chiamare, mostrando amaro duol per li occhi fore, perché villana Morte in gentil core ha miso il suo crudele adoperare, guastando ciò che al mondo è da laudare in gentil donna sovra de l'onore. Audite quanto Amor le fece orranza, ch'io 'l vidi lamentare in forma vera sovra la morta imagine avvenente; e riguardava ver lo ciel sovente, ove l'alma gentil già locata era, che donna fu di sì gaia sembianza.

Io mi senti' svegliar dentro a lo core

Un spirito amoroso che dormia:

E poi vidi venir da lungi Amore

Allegro sì, che appena il conoscia,

Dicendo: "Or pensa pur di farmi onore";

E 'n ciascuna parola sua ridia.

E poco stando meco il mio segnore,

Guardando in quella parte onde venia,

Io vidi monna Vanna e monna Bice

Venire inver lo loco là 'v'io era,

L'una appresso de l'altra miriviglia;

E sì come la mente mi ridice,

Amor mi disse: "Quell'è Primavera,

E quell'ha nome Amor, sì mi somiglia.

Canto o zelo do Génio, a quem Minerva Deu a guarda da Athenas Lusitana. Musa minha, tu desce, tu conserva Em minha alma essa fúria soberana, Que ateaste na mente de Cervantes, Que tanto pede a raça dos pedantes. 158 POEMAS HERÓI-COMICOS Fervia a papelada, que inspirava O Rancor, e Inveja a vates pobres, E sem rebuço impávida atacava Illustres almas, e talentos nobres, Das batinas, das becas, do Prelado Querendo ver o crédito offuscado Já o invicto Marquez com regia pompa Da risonha Cidade avista os muros. Já toca a larga ponte em áureo coche. Entre os apóstatas da sciência avulta, como prota- gonista, certo estudante de nome Gonçalo, que vai procurar as sopas de um tio, em Mioselha. O êxodo realiza-se no meio de complicações inte- ressantes. A màe de uma tricana, enganada pelo estu- dante Gonçalo, prega a revolta contra os fugitivos e logra reunir gente com que lhes aparece no caminho a pedir contas ao sedutor da filha. Trava-se combate rijo. Gonçalo fica derreado neste prélio, mas, sem querer ouvir os conselhos do tio, continua a madracear em devoto culto à ralaça Ignorância Sendo caixeiro da casa comercial de j. P. Chasse- seau, cujo gerente era William Vright, mas dedicado à literatura, António Aires malquistou-se com Camilo Castelo Branco, parece que por causa de rivalidades entre os partidários das cantoras Beloni e Dabedeille. Apareceram no Eco Popular alusões desagradáveis a Camilo, que escrevia no Jornal do Povo com o pseu- dónimo de «Anastácio das Lombrigas» e que em despique atacou o poema As Comendas, o qual havia produzido escândalo.

Mais tolo que o Moniz, e até que o Costa, 

Menos patife é Couto, e é menos asno. 

Tu, Bernardo, ó sandeu, tu rei dos tolos, 

Não és tão besta, como o besta Anselmo. 

Se dos Burros te fiz protogonista, 

Foi porque soube que o cantor dos burros 

Tinha escolhido Anselmo, e o tinha feito 

Heroe de outro poema a Correiada, 

Em que os feitos de Anselmo, e as manhas suas, 

I>esde o bastardo berço em versos canta: 

De eterno opprobrio alli será coberto, 

Dando ao diabo a estólida baforada , 

Qual nunca os doidos do hospital disseram». 

Mais adiante volta ao assunto: 

SEPTEMBER 5, 1919.—W. H. Hudson points the way to an interesting field of speculation in one of the early chapters of Far Away and Long Ago, in which he speaks of his mother. "When I think of her," he writes, "I remember with gratitude that our parents seldom punished us, and never, unless we went too far in our domestic dissensions or tricks, even chided us. This, I am convinced, is the right attitude for parents to observe, modestly to admit that nature is wiser than they are, and to let their little ones follow, as far as possible, the bent of their own minds, or whatever it is that they have in place of minds. It is the attitude of the sensible hen toward her ducklings, when she has had frequent experience of their incongruous ways, and is satisfied that they know best what is good for them; though, of course, their ways seem peculiar to her, and she can never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going into the water. I need not be told that the hen is, after all, only stepmother to her ducklings, since I am contending that the civilized woman—the artificial product of our self-imposed conditions—cannot have the same relation to her offspring as the uncivilized woman really has to hers. The comparison, therefore, holds good, the mother with us being practically stepmother to children of another race; and if she is sensible, and amenable to nature's teaching, she will attribute their seemingly unsuitable ways and appetites to the right cause, and not to a hypothetical perversity or inherent depravity of heart, about which many authors will have spoken to her in many books: "But though they wrote it all by rote They did not write it right." The very dim race memory of old tribal and even primitive life which is in all of us is much stronger in children than in grown-ups. They are closer to the past than their elders, and although we hear a great deal about maternal instinct, it is probable that it is a much slighter and more limited thing than the instinct of a young child. I have noticed, for instance, that without any help from me H. 3rd has learned to fall with amazing skill. He can trip over the edge of the carpet, do a somersault ending on the point of his nose and come up smiling, unless some grown-up makes him aware of his danger by crying out in horror. He did not copy it from me. I have never even undertaken to teach him by precept or illustration. The difficult trick of relaxing in midair is his own contribution. He cannot be said to have learned it. He seems always to have had it. At the age of eight months he pitched headlong out of his carriage and landed on top of his head without so much as ruffling his feelings. It may be fantastic, but I rather think that his skill in preparing for the bump by a complete relaxation of every muscle is a legacy from some ancestor back in the days when knowing how to fall was of vital importance, since even the best of us might, upon special occasions, miscalculate the distance from branch to branch. So strong is my faith in the child's superior memory of primitive life that if the hallboy were to call me up on the telephone to-morrow to say that there was an ichthyosaurus downstairs who wanted to see me, I would not think of deciding what to do about it without first consulting H. 3rd. Curiously enough, Hudson relates one incident which might well be cited in support of the theory that the child is equipped at birth with certain protective instincts, but he passes it over with a different explanation. He says that on a certain afternoon his baby sister, who could scarcely walk, was left alone in a room, and suddenly came toddling to the door shrieking "ku-ku," an Argentine word for danger, which was almost her single articulate possession. Her parents rushed into the room and found a huge snake coiled up in the middle of the rug. The child had never seen a snake before, and there was much speculation as to how she knew it was dangerous. "It was conjectured," writes Hudson, "that she had made some gesture to push it away when it came onto the rug, and that it had reared its head and struck viciously at her." It seems to us that a much more plausible explanation lies in the theory that this child who had never seen a snake profited from some old racial memory of the danger of serpents. Unfortunately, under modern conditions some restrictions must be put on the liberty of small children. I have been told that a child knows instinctively that he must not put his hand into a fire, but he has no age-grounded instinct not to touch a radiator. Still, it might be fair to say that in most New York apartment houses none of them would be hot enough to hurt him much. I can testify that children of less than two years of age are not equipped with any inherited protective knowledge about matches, pins, cigarette stubs, $5 bills, or even those of larger denominations; bits of glass, current newspapers or magazines, safety razor blades (for which, of course, there is an excuse, since the adjective may well mislead a child), watches or carving knives. But all these articles are too recent to come within the scope of inherited primitive knowledge.

DECEMBER 17, 1919.—We read Floyd Dell's Were You Ever a Child? to-day and found him remarking: "People talk about children being hard to teach and in the next breath deplore the facility with which they acquire the 'vices.' That seems strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the best map of the North Atlantic states? And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day."
Most of this is true. The only trouble with all the new theories about bringing up children is that it leaves the job just as hard as ever.
We believe in the new theories for all that. They work, we think, but, like most worth while things, they are not always easy. For instance, H. 3rd came into the parlor the other day carrying the carving knife. Twenty years ago I could have taken it away and spanked him, but then along came the psychologists with their talk of breaking the child's will, and sensible people stopped spanking. Ten years ago I could have said, "Put down that carving knife or you'll make God feel very badly. In fact, you'll make dada feel very badly. You'll make dada cry if you don't obey him." But then the psychoanalysts appeared and pointed out that there was danger in that. In trying to punish the child by making him feel that his evil acts directly caused suffering to the parent there was an unavoidable tendency to make the child identify himself with the parent subconsciously. That might lead to all sorts of ructions later on. The child might identify himself so completely with his father that in later life he would use his shirts and neckties as if they were his own.
Of course, I might have gone over to H. 3rd and, after a short struggle, taken the carving knife away from him by main force, but that would have made him mad. He would at length have suppressed his anger and right away a complex would begin in his little square head.
Picture him now at thirty—he has neuralgia. Somebody mentions the theory of blind abscesses and he has all his teeth pulled out. No good comes of it. He goes to a psychoanalyst and the doctor begins to ask questions. He asks a great many over a long period of time. Eventually he gets a clue. He finds that when H. 3rd was eight years old he dreamed three nights in succession of stepping on a June bug.
"Was it a large, rather fat June bug?" asks the doctor carelessly, as if the answer was not important.
"Yes," says H. 3rd, "it was."
"That June bug," says the doctor, "was a symbol of your father. When you were twenty months old he took a Carving knife away from you and you have had a suppressed anger at him ever since. Now that you know about it your neuralgia will disappear."
And the neuralgia would go at that. But by that time I'd be gone and nothing could be done about this suppressed feud of so many years' standing. My mind went through all these possibilities and I decided it would be simpler and safer to let H. 3rd keep the carving knife as long as he attempted nothing aggressive. A wound is not so dangerous as a complex.
"And, anyhow," I thought, "if he can make that carving knife cut anything he's the best swordsman in the flat."

---

DECEMBER 20, 1919.—Our attitude toward H. 3rd and the carving knife turns out to have been all wrong. We received a letter from Floyd Dell to-day in which he points out that no Freudian could possibly approve our policy of non-interference. Mr. Dell says we should have used force to the utmost.
"Psychoanalytically speaking," he writes, "I think you were wrong about H. 3rd and the carving knife. There is really no Freudian reason why, when he came carrying it into the parlor, you should not have gone over to him and, 'after a short struggle,' taken it away from him by main force. Of course, that would have made him mad. But what harm would that have done?... Unless, of course, you had previously represented yourself to him as a Divine and Perfect Being. In that case his new conception of you as a big bully would have had to struggle with his other carefully implanted and nourished emotions—and his sense of the injustice of your behavior might have been 'repressed.'
"But you know quite well that you are not a Divine and Perfect Being, and, if you consider it for a moment from the child's point of view, you will concede that his emotional opinion of you under such circumstances, highly colored as it is, has its justification. When you yourself want something very much (whether you are entitled to it or not) and when some one (however righteously) keeps you from getting it, how do you feel? But you know that you live in a world in which such things happen. H. 3rd has still to learn it, and if he learns it at his father's knee he is just that much ahead. The boys at school will teach it to him, anyway. The fact is, parents are unwilling that their children should hate them, however briefly, healthily and harmlessly.
"The Victorian parent spanked his offspring and commanded them to love him any way. The modern parent refrains from spanking (for good reasons) and hopes the child will love him. The Freudian parent does not mind if his children do hate him once or twice a day, so long as they are not ashamed of doing so. If H. 3rd swats his father in an enraged struggle to keep possession of the precious carving knife he is expressing and not repressing his emotions. And so long as he has done his best to win he is fairly well content to lose. What a child doesn't like is to have to struggle with a big bully that he mustn't (for mysterious reasons) even try to lick! The privilege of fighting with one's father, even if it does incidentally involve getting licked, is all that a healthy child asks for. Never fear, the time will come when he can lick you; and awaiting that happy time will give him an incentive for growing up. Quite possibly you don't want him to grow up; but that is only another of the well-known weaknesses of parents!"

---

DECEMBER 22, 1919.—Concerning H. 3rd and the carving knife I am gratified to find support for my position from Dr. Edward Hiram Reede, the well-known Washington neurologist, who finds that from the point of view of H. 3rd there was soundness in my policy of non-interference.
"Speaking for him," he writes, "I commend your action. Urged as he is by the two chief traits of childhood, at the present time—curiosity and imitation—I see no reason for direct coercion. So long as the modern child is environed by a museum, as the modern home appears, his curiosity must always be on edge, and if each new goal of curiosity is wrested from him by the usual 'Don't!' or the more ancient struggle for possession instead of by a transference of interest, then the contest will be interminable.
"H. 3rd by right of experience looks upon the armamentarium of the kitchen as his indisputable possessions and can hardly be expected to except a carver. The deification of the parent occurs in accord with the ancestor worship of primitive forebears, and the father will remain the god to the child so long as observation daily reveals the parent as a worker of miracles. Parental self-canonization is not at all necessary to produce this."

no tempo em que JoSo de Deus andava em Coimbra, havia na Lusa-Athenas, que é terra de mulheres bonitas, duas se- nhoras muito formosas, que eram irmãs, — uma chamada Rachel e a outra Cândida. A Rachel, princi- palmente, diz que era uma divindade; e a mocidade da Academia, sobretudo os poetas, bebiam os ares por ella ! Não era branca nem morena : tinha uma côr de bronze, de uma suavidade encantadora, nariz grego, e então uns olhos extraordinários, avelhi- dados, muito brilhantes e pestanudos, que eram a perdição da rapaziada ! Os pretendentes eram assim — aos cardumes... E cabeça de rapaz sobre a qual esses olhos admiráveis pousassem por um instante, mesmo casualmente, era cabeça perdida; porque en- trava logo de andar á roda, como se fosse uma ven- toinha, e o menos que lhe acontecia era rebentar n'uma catadupa de versos — que nem sempre, diga-se a verdade, eram condignos da inspiradora...Ora o João de Deus pertencia á ala dos namorados d'essa divindade, se bem que nunca lhe fallasse ; e tanto que a mng^estosa Rachel ficou seodo para elle uma espécie de Musa. como para o Camões a Catha- rina, para o Dante a Bea- triz, a Laura para o Pe- Irarcha, para Miguel Angelo Victoria Golonna, etc, etc. Fez-Uie muitos versos, e aquelta poesia a vida que a n^o ha mais linda em todo o mundo ; e fcz-lhe depois, quando ella moi^ reu, aquella elegia que tem uma das mell)ores coisas que o génio Immano tem produzido, e que Joflo de Deus, por signnl, improvi- sou n'uma toirada, alheio, vário, absorto, estranho ao mais foi'midavel chinfrim que se tem desencadeado n'uma praça de toiros ! Soubera a noticia da morte quando ia para lá; chegou O Secretario e amodorrou - se a um canto ; e quando se deu fé que a praça de toiros tinha desabado, revolvida, de- baixo para cima, pelo furacão da rapaziada, foi dar com elle o JoSo Vilhena, o seu fiel Achates, no mesmo logar onde o deixara, e que por milagre tinha escapado ! Pegou-lhe por um braço e levou-o d'alli. como se estivesse doido ou a dormir.. RESURREXIT NON EST HICNão vira nada; não ouvira coisa nenhuma; desa- bara a praça e elle a sonhar! Mas depois, chegado a casa, dictou d um jacto a soberba elegia, qiie o João Vilhena, absorto deante de tal maravilha, escreveu sem o perturbar, com os olhos vidrados de lagri- mas... Despe o luto da tua soledade E vem junto de mim, lírio esquecido Do orvalho do céo ! Tens nos meus olhos pranto de piedade, E se és, mulher, irmã dos que hão sofrido, . . Mulher, sou irmão teu. Até ao fim !Ora mas até me parece que foi por causa d'essa mulher, da sublima e divina Rachel, que João de Deus nunca atremou com a vida de Coimbra, le- vando a formar-se dez annos, — « tantos quantos durou o cerco de Troya », como elle dizia ! Segundo a melhor versão, que era ainda a delle, João de Deus chegou de Messines a Coinibra em Março de 1849. Não levava exame nenhum, porque só tinha aprendido Latim com um padre do Algarve, e não sabia mais nada ! Mas passado um mez, eil-o que faz no lyceu de Coimbra o seu exame de instruc- ção primaria onde lhe perguntaram o Padre-Nosso, e na primeira epocha de exames, não está lá com meias medidas : — faz d uma assentada os preparatórios todos, e em Outubro entra para a Universidade— Tu que andas aqui a fazer, á João ? — pergun- tou-lhe o rapaz. — Perdeste alguma coisa ? — Perdi o anno. Ando a vêr se o encontro — respondeu-lhe o João. O outro ofereceu-se : — Homem, se tu queres eu digo a meu tio que te abone as faltas, quando se reunir a congregação !

como queiras. O anno foi o que sabes. 

O Rodrigo (era o Rodrigo da Fonseca, então ministro do 
reino) até mandou dizer para a Universidade que 
não apertassem nos actos este anno, — e eu assim 
talvez passasse ! Mas o diabo são as faltas ! 

— Deixa ! Eu fallo a meu tio. 

Mas as coisas complicaram-se I Aquelle visconde, 
que regia Direito Gommercial, não exigia dos rapazes 
grande applicação, mas queria-os muito sérios dentro 
da aula, ou ao menos que fingissem de sérios... 

Por desgraça, um dos discípulos do visconde, um 
Folhadella do Porto, era um cábula como não havia 
segundo ! Não estudava palavra, nem estava com 
ceremonias : entrava com o bedel quando o bedel ia 
marcar as faltas, e sahia logo atraz do bedel ! Isto 
todos os dias, infallivelmente, sem falhar um ! O vis- 
conde fazia vista grossa; mas lá por dentro, azoava 
com a historia, e tinha-a ferrada de não deixar ir o 
rapaz a acto, no fim do anno ! 
 

E debaixo um ratão de mitra e becca 
Empunhando com geito uma caneca. 

O régio pregador do primeiro anno 
Vae pregando um sermão a São Magano : 

Leva ao lado o chaguitas caganitas(1)

 ou o Fogaça (2) 
A tocar-lhe ao ouvido uma cabaça. 

Vão também com o traje dos anginhos 
Os novatos mais bellos e tenrinhos. 

Um conduz uma táboa veina ao peito 
como emblema das aulas de Direito. 

Mais atraz como symbUo da sebenta 
Leva um outro uma chave ferrugenta. 

P'ra levar a tesoura do Paixão (3) 
Vae um anjo maior : vae o Simão. 

O Papá e a Mamã, muito abraçados, 
Vão fallando dos seus amor's passados. 

-- Segue então toda a musica Zé-P'reira 
Disposta tal e qual d'esta maneira : 

Um musico no centro a tocar bombo 
c'uma c'roa e um manto régio ao lombo. 

Em redor mais alguns de capacetes ou cacetes
com tambor's, cornetins e clarinetes. 



Mário Pinheiro Chagas, agora advogado em Lisboa. 

 António Fogaça, o poeta das Orações do Amor, 

que falleceu sendo estudante... 

O célebre alfaiate da rua Larga, 

regenerador, de bigode com 
pêra e grande fallador.. 

And I might see the youth intent, Guard every pass with crossbow bent ; And through the brake the rangers stalk, And falc'ners hold the ready hawk ; And foresters in green-wood trim, Lead in the leash the gazehounds grim, Attentive, as the bratchet's bay, From the dark covert drove the prey, To slip them as he broke away. The startled quarry bounds amain, As fast the gallant greyhounds strain ; Whistles the arrow from the bow, Answers the harquebuss below ; While all the rocking hills reply, To hoof clang, hound, and hunter's cry, And bugles ringing lightsomely." Nor dull, between each merry chase, Pass'd by the intermitted space ; For we had fair resource in store, In Classic, and in Gothic lore: We mark'd each memorable scene, And held poetic talk between ; Nor hill, nor brook, we paced along, But had its legend, or its song. All silent now for now are still Thy bowers, untenanted Bowhill ! No longer, from thy mountains dun, The yeoman hears the well-known gun, And, while his honest heart glows warm, At thought of his paternal farm, Round to his mates a brimmer fills, And drinks " The Chieftain of the Hills !" No fairy forms, in Yarrow's bowers, Trip o'er the walks, or tend the flowers, Fair as the elves whom Janet saw, By moonlight, dance on Carterhaugh ; No youthful Baron's left to grace The Forest-Sheriff's lonely chase, And ape, in manly step and tone, The majesty of Oberon : And she is gone, whose lovely face Is but her least and lowest grace ; Though if to Sylphid Queen 'twere given, To show our earth the charms of heaven, She could not glide along the air, With form more light, or face more fair. From Yair, which hills so closely bind, Scarce can the Tweed his passage find, Though much he fret, and chafe, and toil, Till all his eddying currents boil, Her long-descended lord is gone, And left us by the stream alone. And much I miss those sportive boys, Companions of my mountain joys, Just at the age 'twixt boy and youth, When thought is speech, and speech is truth. Close to my side, with what delight They press 'd to hear of Wallace wight, When, pointing to his airy mound, I call'd his ramparts holy ground! Kindled their brows to hear me speak ; And I have smiled, to feel my cheek, Despite the difference of our years, Return again the glow of theirs. Ah, happy boys I such feelings pure, They will not, cannot, long endure ;

The rapt One of the god-like forehead, 
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth ; 

And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, 
Has vanished from his lonely hearth. 

Like clouds that rake the mountain summits, 
Or waves that own no curbing hand, 

How fast has brother followed brother 
From sunshine to the sunless land ! 

Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber 
Were earlier raised, remain to hear 

A timid voice, that asks in whispers, 
" Who next will droop and disappear ? " 

Our haughty lifejis crowned with darkness, 
Like London, with its own black wreath, 

On which with thee, O ! Crabbe, forth-looking 
I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath. 

As if but yesterday departed, 
Thou too art gone before ; but why 

O'er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered 
Should frail survivors heave a sigh. 

Mourn rather for that holy Spirit. 

Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep; 
For Her who, ere her summer faded, 

Has sunk into a breathless sleep. 

No more of old romantic sorrows. 

For slaughtered youth or love-lorn maid ! 
With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten, 

And Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead. 



DESCRIPTION OF MOUNT BENGER. 

Oft from yon height I loved to mark, 

Soon as the morning roused the lark, 

And woodlands raised their raptured hymn, 

That land of glory spreading dim ; 

While slowly up the awakening dale 

The mists withdrew their fleecy veil, 

And tower, and wood, and winding stream, 



BY A BUSH. 113 

Were brightening in the golden beam. 
Yet where the westward shadows fell, 
My eye with fonder gaze would dwell, 
Though wild the view, and brown and bare ; 
Nor castled halls, nor hamlets fair, 
Nor range of sheltering woods, were there, 
Nor river's sweeping pride between, 
To give expression to the scene. 
There stood a simple home, where swells 
The meady sward to moory fells, 
A rural dwelling thatched and warm, 
Such as might suit the upland farm. 
A honeysuckle clasped the sash, 
Half shaded by the giant ash ; 
And there the wall-spread apple-tree 
Gave its white blossoms to the bee, 
Beside yon sheltering clump of ash, 
Which screens below the boiling pool 
With pebbled bottom clear and cool, 
Where often, from the shelving brim, 
We launched on sedgy sheaf to swim. 



BY A BUSH. 

By a bush on yonder brae 

Where the airy Benger rises, 
Sandy tuned his artless lay ; 
Thus he sung the lee-lang day : 



H4 JAMES HOGG. 

" Thou shalt ever be my theme, 

Yarrow, winding down the hollow, 
With thy bonny sister stream 

Sweeping through the broom so yellow. 
On these banks thy waters lave, 
Oft the warrior found a grave. 



" Oft on thee the silent wain 

Saw the Douglas' banners streaming 
Oft on thee the hunter train 
Sought the shelter'd deer in vain ; 
Oft, in thy green dells and bowers 

Swains have seen the fairies riding ; 
Oft the snell and sleety showers 
Found in thee the warrior hiding. 
Many a wild and bloody scene 
On thy bonnie banks have been. 



" Now the days of discord gane, 

Henry's kindness keeps us cheery ; 
While his heart shall warm remain, 
Dule will beg a hauld in vain. 
Bloodless now in many hues, 

Flow'rets bloom, our hills adorning ; 
There my Jenny milks her ewes, 
Fresh an' ruddy as the morning, 
Mary Scott could ne'er outvie 
Jenny's hue an' glancing eye. 



WILL AND DA VIE. 115 

" Wind, my Yarrow, down the howe, 

Forming bows o' dazzling siller ; 
Meet thy titty yont the knowe ; 
Wi' my love I'll join like you. 
Flow my Ettrick, it was thee, 

Into life wha first did drap me. 
Thee I've sung, an' when I dee 
Thou wilt lend a sod to hap me : 
Passing swains shall say, and weep, 
Here our Shepherd lies asleep." 



WILL AND DA VIE 



A SCOTTISH PASTORAL. 



Where Yarrow pours her silver billow 
Through bowers of birch, and brakes of willow ; 
Where loud the grouse crows on the fell, 
And sweet the thrush sings in the dell ; 
Where milk-white flocks unnumbered lie, 
And mirth laughs keen in every eye ; 
And plenty smiles from day to day, 
Beneath Buccleuch's indulgent sway ; 
Two friendly shepherds, blithe and young. 
Oft on the greensward sat and sung, 
Or scoured the lofty fells together, 
And brushed the red flower from the heather. 

12 



u6 JAMES HOGG. 

One morn they tuned, by dawn of day, 
On Bowerhope Law the rural lay ; 
For such a scene that lay was meet 
As wildly gay, as simply sweet; 
The great may even lend an ear 
Wild Yarrow's mountain strains to hear. 

DAVIE. 

Ah, Will, these purple heather blooms, 
That round us shed their light perfumes, 
These sparkling gems of crystal dew, 
That morning sky so mild and blue, 
Have raised my heart to such a height, 
I breathe so pure, I feel so light, 
'Gainst all the reasons you can bring 
I must and will my matin sing. 
Cheer up your heart, for once be gay ; 
Screw on your flute and join the lay. 

WILL. 

Ah, Shepherd, cease ; your idle strain 
Adds sharpness to my bosom's pain. 
How can ye pour that strain so airy, 
That trifling, idle, wild vagary ; 
Nor sadly once reflect with me 
On what has been, and what may be ? 

" As little heeds the lark on high, 
The watchful falcon hovering nigh, 
But flickering his kind mate above, 
He trills his matin song of love. 



WILL AND DA VIE. 117 

Ah, reckless bird, that lively strain 
Thy mate shall never hear again ! 
The spoiler tears thy panting breast, 
And all forsaken is thy nest." 

Cease, Shepherd, cease the case is yours ; 
The sky of Britain threatening lowers ! 
Else, let your strain be soft and slow, 
And every fall a note of woe. 



DAVIE. 

How can I strike one plaintive sound 
While nature smiles so sweet around ? 
See how our lambs, in many a skein, 
Are dancing on the daisied green ; 
Their pliant limbs they keenly brace, 
Strained in the unambitious race ; 
Till gruff old wedders, blithe to see 
The young things skip so merrily, 
With motley antics join the throng, 
And bob and caper them among. 

The plover whistles in the glen, 
The tewit tilts above the fen ; 
Even the hoarse curlew strains her throat, 
And yelps her loudest, liveliest note : 
The rural joy then must I shun, 
So ripened by the rising sun ? 



Ii8 JAMES HOGG. 

No while my bosom beats so high, 
Responsive to a lovely eye 
That pierced it with a gilded arrow, 
I'll sing of love, of joy, and Yarrow. 

I'll sing that rural scene before me ; 
That shady world of placid glory. 
See how the afer vibrates o'er 
The lofty front of brown Clockmore ; 
Beyond Carlevon's rocky crest 
The drowsy moon sinks pale to rest ; 
An angel shade of silken green 
O'erveils the cliffs of wild Loch Skene ; 
While Border Cheviot, blue and high, 
Melts like a shadow on the sky. 

From proud Mount Benger's top, the sun 
His airy course has scarce begun ; 
His orient cheek is resting still 
Upon the grey cairn on the hill. 
The scarlet curtain of the sky, 
A wreathed and waving canopy, 
Sweels like the dew on mountain flower 
Or frost-work on the southland shower. 

The Yarrow, like a baldrick thrown 
Loose on the vale, lies bent and lone ; 
A silver snake of every dye 
That gilds the mountain, tincts the sky ; 
And slowly o'er her verdant vales 
A cobweb veil of vapour sails. 



WILL AND DA VIE. 119 

Saint Mary holds her mirror sheen, 
To moorland gray and mountain green ; 
To speckled schell-fowl hovering nigh, 
To milky swan and morning sky : 
Their phantom cliffs hang trembling low, 
And hoary thorns inverted grow. 

Her purple bosom sleeps as still 
As sunbeam on the silent hill, 
No curling breeze across it strays, 
No sportful eddy o'er it plays, 
Save where the wild duck wanders slow, 
Or dark trout spreads his waxing O. 

Look to the east 'tis shadow all, 
Crowned by yon broad and dazzling ball. 
Turn westward mountain, glen, and wold, 
Are all one blaze of burning gold ! 

Ah, God of nature ! such a scene, 
So grand, so lovely, so serene, 
Bears the free soul on rapture's wing, 
Before thy diamond throne to sing ; 
Above yon sky's celestial blue, 
To gaze on glories ever new ; 
And list the strains of angel song 
From angel harps that pour along, 
By fragrant breezes softly driven 
O'er suns that sand the floors of heaven. 



JAMES HOGG. 

The enraptured youth now ceased to sing ; 
But still on ether's waving wing, 
From echo's cave was borne along 
Thy dying measures of the song : 
With eye entranced, and head declined, 
They listened to the waving wind 
Hung on the cliff-born fairly lay, 
Till the last quaver died away. 



THE LASSIE OF YARROW. 

" What makes my heart beat high, 
What makes me heave the sigh, 
When yon green den I spy, 

Lonely and narrow ? 
Sure on your bracken lea, 
Under the hawthorn tree, 
Thou hast bewitched me, 

Lassie of Yarrow !" 



" Yon bracken den so lone, 
Rueful I ponder on ; 
Lad, though my vow ye won, 

'Twas to deceive thee. 
Sore, sore I rue the day 
When in your arms I lay, 
And swore by the hawthorn gray, 

Never to leave thee." 



WILL AND DAVIE. 

" Mary, thy will is free ; 
All my fond vows to thee 
Were but in jest and glee ; 

Could'st thou believe me ? 
I have another love 
Kind as the woodland dove ; 
False to that maid to prove, 

Oh, it would grieve me !" 

Mary's full eye so blue, 
Mild as the evening dew, 
Quick from his glance withdrew, 

Soft was her sighing ; 
Keen he the jest renewed, 
Hard for his freedom sued 
When her sweet face he viewed, 

Mary was crying. 

" Cheer thee," the lover said, 
" Now thy sharp scorn repaid, 
Never shall other maid 

Call me her marrow. 
Far sweeter than sun or sea, 
Or aught in this world I see, 
Is thy love-smile to me, 

Lassie of Yarrow!" 



122 JAMES HOGG. 



ST. MARY OF THE LOWES. 

O lone St. Mary of the waves, 
In ruin lies thine ancient aisle, 

While o'er thy green and lowly graves, 
The moorcocks bay, and plovers wail : 
But mountain spirits on the gale, 

Oft o'er thee sound the requiem dread ; 
And warrior shades, and spectres pale, 

Still linger by the quiet dead. 

Yes, many a chief of ancient days 

Sleeps in thy cold and hallow'd soil ; 
Hearts that would thread the forest maze, 

Alike for spousal or for spoil ; 

That wist not, ween'd not, to recoil 
Before the might of mortal foe, 

But thirsted for the Border broil, 
The shout, the clang, the overthrow. 

Here lie those who, o'er flood and field, 
Were hunted as the osprey's brood, 

Who braved the power of man, and seal'd 
Their testimonies with their blood : 
But long as waves that wilder'd flood, 

Their sacred memory shall be dear, 
And all the virtuous and the good 

O'er their low graves shall drop the tear. 



ST. MARY OF THE LOWES. 123 

Here sleeps the last of all the race 

Of these old heroes of the hill, 
Stern as the storm in heart and face : 

Gainsaid in faith or principle. 

Then would the fire of heaven fill 
The orbit of his faded eye ; 

Yet all within was kindness still, 
Benevolence and simplicity. 

GRIEVE, thou shall hold a sacred cell 

In hearts with sin and sorrow toss'd ; 
While thousands, with their funeral knell, 

Roll down the tide of darkness, lost ; 

For thou wert Truth's and Honour's boast, 
Firm champion of Religion's sway ! 

Who knew thee best revered thee most, 
Thou emblem of a former day ! 

Here lie old Border bowmen good ; 

Ranger and stalker sleep together, 
Who for the red-deer's stately brood 

Watch'd, in despite of want and weather, 

Beneath the hoary hills of heather ; 
Even Scotts, and Kerrs, and Pringles, blended 

In peaceful slumbers, rest together, 
Whose fathers there to death contended. 

Here lie the peaceful, simple race, 

The first old tenants of the wild, 
Who stored the mountains of the chase 

With flocks and herds whose manners mild 



124 JAMES HOGG. 

Changed the baronial castles, piled 
In every glen, into the cot, 

And the rude mountaineer beguiled, 
Indignant, to his peaceful lot. 

Here rural beauty low reposes ; 

The blushing cheek, and beaming eye, 
The dimpling smile, the lip of roses, 

Attracters of the burning sigh, 

And love's delicious pangs, that lie 
Enswathed in pleasure's mellow mine : 

Maid, lover, parent, low and high, 
Are mingled in thy lonely shrine. 

And here lies one here I must turn 
From all the noble and sublime, 

And, o'er thy new but sacred urn, 

Shed the heath flower and mountain-thyme, 
And floods of sorrow, while I chime 

Above thy dust one requiem. 

Love was thine error, not thy crime, 

Thou mildest, sweetest, mortal gem ! 

For ever hallow'd be thy bed, 

Beneath the dark and hoary steep ; 

Thy breast may flowerets overspread, 
And angels of the morning weep 
In sighs of heaven above thy sleep, 

And tear-drops of embalming dew ; 
Thy vesper hymn be from the deep, 

Thy matin from the ether blue ! 

I assumed a Law of the Conservation of Reality, meaning that the past would resist change (temporal reluctance) and tend to work back quickly into its old course, and you'd have to go back and make many little changes, sometimes over and over again, before you could get a really big change going [. . .:] It still seems to me a plausible assumption, reflecting the tenacity of events and the difficulty of achieving anything of real significance in this cosmos -- a measure of the strength of the powers that be. (p3) Into The Place, which has something of the Blue Angel about it, tumble one day three weary temporal soldiers -- a Nazi officer, Erich (who is Greta's occasional lover and who beats her), a Roman legionnaire (whom she also knows) and a stranger, an English poet who met his death in WWI. While they are still settling in for their R&R, another trio arrives: a centaur, a creature from the moon when the moon was civilized millions of years ago, and a Minoan warrior princess . . . bearing with them what proves to be a 1950s atom bomb. One of Greta's fellow-Entertainers falls in love with the poet, whose work she has adored all her life and whose tragically early death in the trenches has always made him seem yet more romantic. While the principals are discussing various surprisingly interesting existential matters ("Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos?" -- p 65), one of their number switches off and hides the Major Maintainer, the gadget that maintains The Place in its correct relationship with not just the rest of the Big Time but the rest of all reality. The cast (a term I use because the novel reads in some ways like a stage play) could be trapped here in isolation forever. Yet, since The Place is only one big room and a couple of secondary ones, where -- and how -- could the Major Maintainer have been hidden in such a fashion that even the most painstaking search fails to reveal it? Minds are concentrated when Erich, the sociopathic Nazi, arms the atom bomb so that it'll detonate within half an hour. The only way to escape the blast would seem to be to locate the Major Maintainer and then, reconnected to the rest of reality once more, sling the device out of The Place before it can explode. In other words, the characters' survival depends on their ability to solve what's a fairly distinguished locked-room mystery. (The solution, when it finally appears, is one that John Dickson Carr would have been pleased with.) As noted above, the Change War is being waged between the Spiders and the Snakes. No one knows what the purpose of the war is, or what result could possibly constitute victory for one side of the other. None of the cast, although their nominal allegiance is with the Spiders, have ever met a Spider, and certainly they've never met a Snake; they have no idea, in fact, who or what the Spiders and Snakes are. To most of the characters, especially the soldiers, this barely matters: they loudly detest the Snakes, have great loyalty toward the Spiders. Exceptions are Greta herself, with whose thoughts we grow most acquainted since she's our narrator, and the poet, Bruce, who is likewise, as a poet, introspective. It's Bruce who, in an impassioned oration to the others, spells out the reality of war as it affects ordinary soldiers and civilians: But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world -- one little solar system [. . .:] -- and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear. (p63) Now, of course, I have to try to lay hands on Leiber's spinoff shorter Change War pieces: "Try and Change the Past", "Damnation Morning", "The Oldest Soldier", "Knight to Move" and "No Great Magic"

You can't know there's a war on—for the Snakes coil and Spiders weave to keep you from knowing it's being fought over your live and dead body!

CHAPTER 1

When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

When the hurlyburly's done. When the battle's lost and won.

—Macbeth

ENTER THREE HUSSARS

My name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me. I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time—not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either.

I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star who also bears my first name, but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own. I need it, for my job is to nurse back to health and kid back to sanity Soldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going. This war is the Change War, a war of time travelers—in fact, our private name for being in this war is being on the Big Time. Our Soldiers fight by going back to change the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help our side win the final victory a billion or more years from now. A long killing business, believe me.
You don't know about the Change War, but it's influencing your lives all the time and maybe you've had hints of it without realizing.
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints of the Change War.
How I got recruited into the Change War, how it's conducted, what the two sides are, why you don't consciously know about it, what I really think about it—you'll learn in due course.

---

The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer and I've got my silly side, as you'll find out.

My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of times and places. We're a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run a pretty good Recuperation Station, though we have our family troubles. But most of our troubles come slamming into the Place with the beat-up Soldiers, who've generally just been going through hell and want to raise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived Soldiers who started this thing I'm going to tell you about, this thing that showed me so much about myself and everything.
When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and two thousand nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one thousand. This two-nightmares routine every time you lay down your dizzy little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it.
The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub where the Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated for a party, though a Zeppelin is one thing we haven't had yet. You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with anything from the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look strangely similar except for size.
Solely on doctor's orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since coming to work at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if you care to call them that, for believe me they are busman's holidays, considering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last one I spent in Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got over it. Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be fitted by the Spiders into serious operations of the Change War, and you can imagine how restful that makes them.
"See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don't go too far up front, though, but don't wander off either. Relax and enjoy yourself."
Ha! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they come to the Place is a horse of a far brighter color, simply dazzling by comparison. Entertainment is our business and we give them a bang-up time and send them staggering happily back into action, though once in a great while something may happen to throw a wee shadow on the party.

---

I am dead in some ways, but don't let that bother you—I am lively enough in others. If you met me in the cosmos, you would be more apt to yak with me or try to pick me up than to ask a cop to do same or a father to douse me with holy water, unless you are one of those hard-boiled reformer types. But you are not likely to meet me in the cosmos, because (bar Basin Street and the Prater) 15th Century Italy and Augustan Rome—until they spoiled it—are my favorite (Ha!) vacation spots and, as I have said, I stick as close to the Place as I can. It is really the nicest Place in the whole Change World. (Crisis! I even think of it capitalized!)

Anyhoo, when this thing started, I was twiddling my thumbs on the couch nearest the piano and thinking it was too late to do my fingernails and whoever came in probably wouldn't notice them anyway.
The Place was jumpy like it always is on an approach and the gray velvet of the Void around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when you close your eyes in the dark.
Sid was tuning the Maintainers for the pick-up and the right shoulder of his gold-worked gray doublet was streaked where he'd been wiping his face on it with quick ducks of his head.
Beauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid's other shoulder, one white-trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control divan, and he wasn't missing a single flicker of Sid's old fingers on the dials; Beau's co-pilot besides piano player. Beau's face had that dead blank look it must have had when every double eagle he owned and more he didn't were riding on the next card to be turned in the gambling saloon on one of those wedding-cake Mississippi steamboats.
Doc was soused as usual, sitting at the bar with his top hat pushed back and his knitted shawl pulled around him, his wide eyes seeing whatever horrors a life in Nazi-occupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk Demon in the Change World.
Maud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili—the New Girl, of course—were telling the big beads of their identical pearl necklaces.
You might say that all us Entertainers were a bit edgy; being Demons doesn't automatically make us brave.
Then the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door began to darken in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds blowing hard and my heart missed a couple of beats, and the next thing three Soldiers had stepped out of the cosmos and into the Place, their first three steps hitting the floor hard as they changed times and weights.

---

They were dressed as officers of hussars, as we'd been advised, and—praise the Bonny Dew!—I saw that the first of them was Erich, my own dear little commandant, the pride of the von Hohenwalds and the Terror of the Snakes. Behind him was some hard-faced Roman or other, and beside Erich and shouldering into him as they stamped forward was a new boy, blond, with a face like a Greek god who's just been touring a Christian hell.

They were uniformed exactly alike in black—shakos, fur-edged pelisses, boots, and so forth—with white skull emblems on the shakos. The only difference between them was that Erich had a Caller on his wrist and the New Boy had a black-gauntleted glove on his left hand and was clenching the mate in it, his right hand being bare like both of Erich's and the Roman's.
"You've made it, lads, hearts of gold," Sid boomed at them, and Beau twitched a smile and murmured something courtly and Maud began to chant, "Shut the Door!" and the New Girl copied her and I joined in because the Change Winds do blow like crazy when the Door is open, even though it can't ever be shut tight enough to keep them from leaking through.
"Shut it before it blows wrinkles in our faces," Maud called in her gamin voice to break the ice, looking like a skinny teen-ager in the tight, knee-length frock she'd copied from the New Girl.
But the three Soldiers weren't paying attention. The Roman—I remembered his name was Mark—was blundering forward stiffly as if there were something wrong with his eyes, while Erich and the New Boy were yelling at each other about a kid and Einstein and a summer palace and a bloody glove and the Snakes having booby-trapped Saint Petersburg. Erich had that taut sadistic smile he gets when he wants to hit me.
The New Boy was in a tearing rage. "Why'd you pull us out so bloody fast? We fair chewed the Nevsky Prospekt to pieces galloping away."
"Didn't you feel their stun guns, Dummkopf, when they sprung the trap—too soon, Gott sei Dank?" Erich demanded.
"I did," the New Boy told him. "Not enough to numb a cat. Why didn't you show us action?"
"Shut up. I'm your leader. I'll show you action enough."
"You won't. You're a filthy Nazi coward."
"Weibischer Engländer!"
"Bloody Hun!"
"Schlange!"
The blond lad knew enough German to understand that last crack. He threw back his sable-edged pelisse to clear his sword arm and he swung away from Erich, which bumped him into Beau. At the first sign of the quarrel, Beau had raised himself from the divan as quickly and silently as a—no, I won't use that word—and slithered over to them.
"Sirs, you forget yourselves," he said sharply, off balance, supporting himself on the New Boy's upraised arm. "This is Sidney Lessingham's Place of Entertainment and Recuperation. There are ladies—"

---

With a contemptuous snarl, the New Boy shoved him off and snatched with his bare hand for his saber. Beau reeled against the divan, it caught him in the shins and he fell toward the Maintainers. Sid whisked them out of the way as if they were a couple of beach radios—simply nothing in the Place is nailed down—and had them back on the coffee table before Beau hit the floor. Meanwhile, Erich had his saber out and had parried the New Boy's first wild slash and lunged in return, and I heard the scream of steel and the rutch of his boot on the diamond-studded pavement.

---

Beau rolled over and came up pulling from the ruffles of his shirt bosom a derringer I knew was some other weapon in disguise—a stun gun or even an Atropos. Besides scaring me damp for Erich and everybody, that brought me up short: us Entertainers' nerves must be getting as naked as the Soldiers', probably starting when the Spiders canceled all cosmic leaves twenty sleeps back.

Sid shot Beau his look of command, rapped out, "I'll handle this, you whoreson firebrand," and turned to the Minor Maintainer. I noticed that the telltale on the Major was glowing a reassuring red again, and I found a moment to thank Mamma Devi that the Door was shut.
Maud was jumping up and down, cheering I don't know which—nor did she, I bet—and the New Girl was white and I saw that the sabers were working more businesslike. Erich's flicked, flicked, flicked again and came away from the blond lad's cheek spilling a couple of red drops. The blond lad lunged fiercely, Erich jumped back, and the next moment they were both floating helplessly in the air, twisting like they had cramps.
I realized quick enough that Sid had shut off gravity in the Door and Stores sectors of the Place, leaving the rest of us firm on our feet in the Refresher and Surgery sectors. The Place has sectional gravity to suit our Extraterrestrial buddies—those crazy ETs sometimes come whooping in for recuperation in very mixed batches.
From his central position, Sid called out, kindly enough but taking no nonsense, "All right, lads, you've had your fun. Now sheathe those swords."
For a second or so, the two black hussars drifted and contorted. Erich laughed harshly and neatly obeyed—the commandant is used to free fall. The blond lad stopped writhing, hesitated while he glared upside down at Erich and managed to get his saber into its scabbard, although he turned a slow somersault doing it. Then Sid switched on their gravity, slow enough so they wouldn't get sprained landing.

---

Erich laughed, lightly this time, and stepped out briskly toward us. He stopped to clap the New Boy firmly on the shoulder and look him in the face.

"So, now you get a good scar," he said.
The other didn't pull away, but he didn't look up and Erich came on. Sid was hurrying toward the New Boy, and as he passed Erich, he wagged a finger at him and gayly said, "You rogue." Next thing I was giving Erich my "Man, you're home" hug and he was kissing me and cracking my ribs and saying, "Liebchen! Doppchen!"—which was fine with me because I do love him and I'm a good lover and as much a Doubleganger 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, Liebchen: 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, Liebchen, 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 far—with Bruce and with you too. We're all hacked 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 still 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 Narvik, where he was Recruited by the Spiders. Lifeline lengthened 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 lifelines 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.
Erich 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 Got 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.

---

CHAPTER 2

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 me 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 all 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 Marchant, 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 lifelines—"
"Is that bad, lad?" Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced.
"—and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another time-traveling power called the Snakes—just a name, too—which is bent on perverting and enslaving the whole cosmos, past, present and future."
"And isn't it, lad?"
"Before we're properly awake, we're Recruited into the Big Time and hustled into tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserable closets, gray sacks, puss pockets—no offense to this Place—that the Spiders have created, maybe by gigantic implosions, but no one knows for certain, and then we're sent off on all sorts of missions into the past and future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart the Snakes."
"True, lad."
"And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks come so fast, our emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public and private metaphysics distorted so insanely, the deepest thread of reality we cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can get things straight."
"We've all felt that way, lad," Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek death's head; "You should have seen me, Kamerad, my first fifty sleeps," Erich put in; while I added, "Us girls, too, Bruce."
"Oh, I know I'll get hardened to it, and don't think I can't. It's not that," Bruce said harshly. "And I wouldn't mind the personal confusion, the mess it's made of my spirit, I wouldn't even mind remaking history and destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past, if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart the Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the East. But what have they done to achieve this? I'll give you some beautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key."

---

"You got time for culture?" I heard myself say and I clapped my hand over my mouth in gentle reproof.

"But you remember the dialogues, lad," Sid observed. "And rail not at Crete—I have a sweet Keftian friend."
"For how long will I remember Plato's dialogues? And who after me?" Bruce challenged. "Here's another. The Spiders want Rome powerful and, to date, they've helped Rome so much that she collapses in a blaze of German and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of Julius Caesar."
This time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place loves these bull sessions. "You omit to mention, sir, that Rome's newest downfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes have fomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power futurewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever letting it pass into the hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is the Snakes' Three-Thousand-Year Plan which we are fighting against, striving to revive Rome's glories."
"Striving is the word for it," Bruce snapped. "Here's yet another example. To beat Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out of World War Two, thereby ensuring a German invasion of the New World and creating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!"
He stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chanting in a weird spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow.
"Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Kein' Peitsch', gnädige Herren. Salz, Salz, Salz."
I turned and there was Doc waltzing toward us with little tiny steps, bent over so low that the ends of his shawl touched the floor, his head crooked up sideways and looking through us.
I knew then, but Erich translated softly. "'Salt, salt, I bring salt. No whip, merciful sirs.' He is speaking to my countrymen in their language." Doc had spent his last months in a Nazi-operated salt mine.

---

He saw us and got up, straightening his top hat very carefully. He frowned hard while my heart thumped half a dozen times. Then his face slackened, he shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "Nichevo."

"And it does not matter, sir," Beau translated, but directing his remark at Bruce. "True, great civilizations have been dwarfed or broken by the Change War. But others, once crushed in the bud, have bloomed. In the 1870s, I traveled a Mississippi that had never known Grant's gunboats. I studied piano, languages, and the laws of chance under the greatest European masters at the University of Vicksburg."
"And you think your pipsqueak steamboat culture is compensation for—" Bruce began but, "Prithee none of that, lad," Sid interrupted smartly. "Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards, and I'll drink dead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so puny as to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no, nor with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and nerves of brass. Waste not your pity on them."
"True indeed, sir," Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack on his Greater South. "Most of us enter the Change World with the false metaphysic that the slightest change in the past—a grain of dust misplaced—will transform the whole future. It is a long while before we accept with our minds as well as our intellects the law of the Conservation of Reality: that when the past is changed, the future changes barely enough to adjust, barely enough to admit the new data. The Change Winds meet maximum resistance always. Otherwise the first operation in Babylonia would have wiped out New Orleans, Sheffield, Stuttgart, and Maud Davies' birthplace on Ganymede!
"Note how the gap left by Rome's collapse was filled by the imperialistic and Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historian can tell the difference in most ages between the former Latin and the present Gothic Catholic Church. As you yourself, sir, said of Greece, it is as if an old melody were shifted into a slightly different key. In the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it's true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless accidents."
"All right, you bloody savants—maybe I pushed my point too far," Bruce growled. "But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methods we use in our wonderful Change War. Poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra. Kidnapping Einstein when he's a baby."
"The Snakes did it first," I reminded him.
"Yes, and we copied them. How resourceful does that make us?" he retorted, arguing like a woman. "If we need Einstein, why don't we Resurrect him, deal with him as a man?"

---

Beau said, serving his culture in slightly thicker slices, "Pardonnez-moi, but when you have enjoyed your status as Doubleganger a soupcon longer, you will understand that great men can rarely be Resurrected. Their beings are too crystallized, sir, their lifelines too tough."

"Pardon me, but I think that's rot. I believe that most great men refuse to make the bargain with the Snakes, or with us Spiders either. They scorn Resurrection at the price demanded."
"Brother, they ain't that great," I whispered, while Beau glided on with, "However that may be, you have accepted Resurrection, sir, and so incurred an obligation which you as a gentleman must honor."
"I accepted Resurrection all right," Bruce said, a glare coming into his eyes. "When they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '17 ten minutes before I died, I grabbed at the offer of life like a drunkard grabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I was also seizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace." His voice was getting wilder all the time. Just beyond our circle, I noticed the New Girl watching him worshipfully. "But what did I find the Spiders wanted me for? Only to fight more wars, over and over again, make them crueler and stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each Big Change, work our way a little closer to the death of the cosmos."
Sid touched my wrist and, as Bruce raved on, he whispered to me, "What kind of ball, think you, will please and so quench this fire-brained rogue? And you love me, discover it."
I whispered back without taking my eyes off Bruce either, "I know somebody who'll be happy to put on any kind of ball he wants, if he'll just notice her."
"The New Girl, sweetling? 'Tis well. This rogue speaks like an angry angel. It touches my heart and I like it not."
Bruce was saying hoarsely but loudly, "And so we're sent on operations in the past and from each of those operations the Change Winds blow futurewards, swiftly or slowly according to the opposition they breast, sometimes rippling into each other, and any one of those Winds may shift the date of our own death ahead of the date of our Resurrection, so that in an instant—even here, outside the cosmos—we may molder and rot or crumble to dust and vanish away. The wind with our name in it may leak through the Door."

---

Faces hardened at that, because it's bad form to mention Change Death, and Erich flared out with, "Halt's Maul, Kamerad! There's always another Resurrection."

But Bruce didn't keep his mouth shut. He said, "Is there? I know the Spiders promise it, but even if they do go back and cut another Doubleganger from my lifeline, is he me?" He slapped his chest with his bare hand. "I don't think so. And even if he is me, with unbroken consciousness, why's he been Resurrected again? Just to refight more wars and face more Change Death for the sake of an almighty power—" his voice was rising to a climax—"an almighty power so bloody ineffectual, it can't furnish one poor Soldier pulled out of the mud of Passchendaele, one miserable Change Commando, one Godforsaken Recuperee a proper issue of equipment!"
And he held out his bare right hand toward us, fingers spread a little, as if it were the most amazing object and most deserving of outraged sympathy in the whole world.
The New Girl's timing was perfect. She whisked through us, and before he could so much as wiggle the fingers, she whipped a black gauntleted glove on it and anyone could see that it fitted his hand perfectly.
This time our laughing beat the other. We collapsed and slopped our drinks and pounded each other on the back and then started all over.
"Ach, der Handschuh, Liebchen! Where'd she get it?" Erich gasped in my ear.
"Probably just turned the other one inside out—that turns a left into a right—I've done it myself," I wheezed, collapsing again at the idea.
"That would put the lining outside," he objected.
"Then I don't know," I said. "We got all sorts of junk in Stores."
"It doesn't matter, Liebchen," he assured me. "Ach, der Handschuh!"
All through it, Bruce just stood there admiring the glove, moving the fingers a little now and then, and the New Girl stood watching him as if he were eating a cake she'd baked.

---

When the hysteria quieted down, he looked up at her with a big smile. "What did you say your name was?"

"Lili," she said, and believe you me, she was Lili to me even in my thoughts from then on, for the way she'd handled that lunatic.
"Lilian Foster," she explained. "I'm English also. Mr. Marchant, I've read A Young Man's Fancy I don't know how many times."
"You have? It's wretched stuff. From the Dark Ages—I mean my Cambridge days. In the trenches, I was working up some poems that were rather better."
"I won't hear you say that. But I'd be terribly thrilled to hear the new ones. Oh, Mr. Marchant, it was so strange to hear you call it Passiondale."
"Why, if I may ask?"
"Because that's the way I pronounce it to myself. But I looked it up and it's more like Pas-ken-DA-luh."
"Bless you! All the Tommies called it Passiondale, just as they called Ypres Wipers."
"How interesting. You know, Mr. Marchant, I'll wager we were Recruited in the same operation, summer of 1917. I'd got to France as a Red Cross nurse, but they found out my age and were going to send me back."
"How old were you—are you? Same thing, I mean to say."
"Seventeen."
"Seventeen in '17," Bruce murmured, his blue eyes glassy.
It was real corny dialogue and I couldn't resent the humorous leer Erich gave me as we listened to them, as if to say, "Ain't it nice, Liebchen, Bruce has a silly little English schoolgirl to occupy him between operations?"
Just the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklace and tight little gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Bruce hulking over her tenderly in his snazzy hussar's rig, I knew that I was seeing the start of something that hadn't been part of me since Dave died fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort of thing that almost made me wish there could be children in the Change World. I wondered why I'd never thought of trying to work things so that Dave got Resurrected and I told myself: no, it's all changed, I've changed, better the Change Winds don't disturb Dave or I know about it.
"No, I didn't die in 1917—I was merely Recruited then," Lili was telling Bruce. "I lived all through the Twenties, as you can see from the way I dress. But let's not talk about that, shall we? Oh, Mr. Marchant, do you think you can possibly remember any of those poems you started in the trenches? I can't fancy them bettering your sonnet that concludes with, 'The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep; Look at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.'"
That one almost made me whoop—what monkeys we are, I thought—though I'd be the first to admit that the best line to use on a poet is one of his own—in fact, as many as possible. I decided I could safely forget our little Britons and devote myself to Erich or whatever needed me.

---

CHAPTER 3

Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine churchmen, and the fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go. There go also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside their lord. There go the gold and the silver, the sables and ermine. There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth.

—Aucassin

NINE FOR A PARTY

I exchanged my drink for a new one from another tray Beau was bringing around. The gray of the Void was beginning to look real pleasant, like warm thick mist with millions of tiny diamonds floating in it. Doc was sitting grandly at the bar with a steaming tumbler of tea—a chaser, I guess, since he was just putting down a shot glass. Sid was talking to Erich and laughing at the same time and I said to myself it begins to feel like a party, but something's lacking.

It wasn't anything to do with the Major Maintainer; its telltale was glowing a steady red like a nice little home fire amid the tight cluster of dials that included all the controls except the lonely and frightening Introversion switch that was never touched. Then Maud's couch curtains winked out and there were she and the Roman sitting quietly side by side.
He looked down at his shiny boots and the rest of his black duds like he was just waking up and couldn't believe it all, and he said, "Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis," and I raised my eyebrows at Beau, who was taking the tray back, and he did proud by old Vicksburg by translating: "All things change and we change with them."
Then Mark slowly looked around at us, and I can testify that a Roman smile is just as warm as any other nationality, and he finally said, "We are nine, the proper number for a party. The couches, too. It is good."
Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, "Welcome back from the Void, Kamerad," and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, "Herren und Damen, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them all, Marcus Vipsaius Niger, legate to Nero Claudius (called Germanicus in a former time stream) and who in 763 A.U.C. (Correct, Mark? It means 10 A.D., you meatheads!) died bravely fighting the Parthians and the Snakes in the Battle of Alexandria. Hoch, hoch, hoch!"

---

We all swung our glasses and cheered with him and Sid yelled at Erich, "Keep your feet off the furniture, you unschooled rogue," and grinned and boomed at all three hussars, "Take your ease, Recuperees," and Maud and Mark got their drinks, the Roman paining Beau by refusing Falernian wine in favor of scotch and soda, and right away everyone was talking a mile a minute.

We had a lot to catch up on. There was the usual yak about the war—"The Snakes are laying mine fields in the Void," "I don't believe it, how can you mine nothing?"—and the shortages—bourbon, bobby pins, and the stabilitin that would have brought Mark out of it faster—and what had become of people—"Marcia? Oh, she's not around any more," (She'd been caught in a Change Gale and green and stinking in five seconds, but I wasn't going to say that)—and Mark had to be told about Bruce's glove, which convulsed us all over again, and the Roman remembered a legionary who had carried a gripe all the way to Octavius because he'd accidentally been issued the unbelievable luxury item sugar instead of the usual salt, and Erich asked Sid if he had any new Ghostgirls in stock and Sid sucked his beard like the old goat he is. "Dost thou ask me, lusty Allemand? Nay, there are several great beauties, amongst them an Austrian countess from Strauss's Vienna, and if it were not for sweetling here ... Mnnnn."
I poked a finger in Erich's chest between two of the bright buttons with their tiny death's heads. "You, my little von Hohenwald, are a menace to us real girls. You have too much of a thing about the unawakened, ghost kind."
He called me his little Demon and hugged me a bit too hard to prove it wasn't so, and then he suggested we show Bruce the Art Gallery. I thought this was a real brilliant idea, but when I tried to argue him out of it, he got stubborn. Bruce and Lili were willing to do anything anyone wanted them to, though not so willing to pay any attention while doing it. The saber cut was just a thin red line on his cheek; she'd washed away all the dried blood.
The Gallery gets you, though. It's a bunch of paintings and sculptures and especially odd knick-knacks, all made by Soldiers recuperating here, and a lot of them telling about the Change War from the stuff they're made of—brass cartridges, flaked flint, bits of ancient pottery glued into futuristic shapes, mashed-up Incan gold rebeaten by a Martian, whorls of beady Lunan wire, a picture in tempera on a crinkle-cracked thick round of quartz that had filled a starship porthole, a Sumerian inscription chiseled into a brick from an atomic oven.

---

There are a lot of things in the Gallery and I can always find some I haven't ever seen before. It gets you, as I say, thinking about the guys that made them and their thoughts and the far times and places they came from, and sometimes, when I'm feeling low, I'll come and look at them so I'll feel still lower and get inspired to kick myself back into a good temper. It's the only history of the Place there is and it doesn't change a great deal, because the things in it and the feelings that went into them resist the Change Winds better than anything else.

Right now, Erich's witty lecture was bouncing off the big ears I hide under my pageboy bob and I was thinking how awful it is that for us that there's not only change but Change. You don't know from one minute to the next whether a mood or idea you've got is really new or just welling up into you because the past has been altered by the Spiders or Snakes.
Change Winds can blow not only death but anything short of it, down to the featheriest fancy. They blow thousands of times faster than time moves, but no one can say how much faster or how far one of them will travel or what damage it'll do or how soon it'll damp out. The Big Time isn't the little time.
And then, for the Demons, there's the fear that our personality will just fade and someone else climb into the driver's seat and us not even know. Of course, we Demons are supposed to be able to remember through Change and in spite of it; that's why we are Demons and not Ghosts like the other Doublegangers, or merely Zombies or Unborn and nothing more, and as Beau truly said, there aren't any great men among us—and blamed few of the masses, either—we're a rare sort of people and that's why the Spiders have to Recruit us where they find us without caring about our previous knowledge and background, a Foreign Legion of time, a strange kind of folk, bright but always in the background, with built-in nostalgia and cynicism, as adaptable as Centaurian shape-changers but with memories as long as a Lunan's six arms, a kind of Change People, you might say, the cream of the damned.
But sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn't once entirely different from anything we remember, and we've forgotten that we forgot.
As I say, the Gallery gets you feeling real low, and so now I said to myself, "Back to your lousy little commandant, kid," and gave myself a stiff boot.
Erich was holding up a green bowl with gold dolphins or spaceships on it and saying, "And, to my mind, this proves that Etruscan art is derived from Egyptian. Don't you agree, Bruce?"
Bruce looked up, all smiles from Lili, and said, "What was that, dear chap?"

---

Erich's forehead got dark as the Door and I was glad the hussars had parked their sabers along with their shakos, but before he could even get out a Jerry cussword, Doc breezed up in that plateau-state of drunkenness so like hypnotized sobriety, moving as if he were on a dolly, ghosted the bowl out of Erich's hand, said, "A beautiful specimen of Middle Systemic Venusian. When Eightaitch finished it, he told me you couldn't look at it and not feel the waves of the Northern Venusian Shallows rippling around your hoofs. But it might look better inverted. I wonder. Who are you, young officer? Nichevo," and he carefully put the bowl back on its shelf and rolled on.

It's a fact that Doc knows the Art Gallery better than any of us, really by heart, he being the oldest inhabitant, though he maybe picked a bad time to show off his knowledge. Erich was going to take out after him, but I said, "Nix, Kamerad, remember gloves and sugar," and he contented himself with complaining, "That nichevo—it's so gloomy and hopeless, ungeheuerlich. I tell you, Liebchen, they shouldn't have Russians working for the Spiders, not even as Entertainers."
I grinned at him and squeezed his hand. "Not much entertainment in Doc these days, is there?" I agreed.
He grinned back at me a shade sheepishly and his face smoothed and his blue eyes looked sweet again for a second and he said, "I shouldn't want to claw out at people that way, Greta, but at times I am just a jealous old man," which is not entirely true, as he isn't a day over thirty-three, although his hair is nearly white.
Our lovers had drifted on a few steps until they were almost fading into the Surgery screen. It was the last spot I would have picked for the formal preliminaries to a little British smooching, but Lili probably didn't share my prejudices, though I remembered she'd told me she'd served a brief hitch in an Arachnoid Field Hospital before being transferred to the Place.
But she couldn't have had anything like the experience I'd had during my short and sour career as a Spider nurse, when I'd acquired my best-hated nightmare and flopped completely (jobwise, but on the floor, too) at seeing a doctor flick a switch and a being, badly injured but human, turn into a long cluster of glistening strange fruit—ugh, it always makes me want to toss my cookies and my buttons. And to think that dear old Daddy Anton wanted his Greta chile to be a doctor.

---

Well, I could see this wasn't getting me anywhere I wanted to go, and after all there was a party going on.

Doc was babbling something at a great rate to Sid—I just hoped Doc wouldn't get inspired to go into his animal imitations, which sound pretty fierce and once seriously offended some recuperating ETs.
Maud was demonstrating to Mark a 23rd Century two-step and Beau sat down at the piano and improvised softly on her rhythm.
As the deep-thrumming relaxing notes hit us, Erich's face brightened and he dragged me over. Pleasantly soon I had my feet off the diamond-rough floor, which we don't carpet because most of the ETs, the dear boys, like it hard, and I was shouldering back deep into the couch nearest the piano, with cushions all around me and a fresh drink in my hand, while my Nazi boy friend was getting ready to discharge his Weltschmerz as song, which didn't alarm me too much, as his baritone is passable.
Things felt real good, like the Maintainer was just idling to keep the Place in existence and moored to the cosmos, not exerting itself at all or at most taking an occasional lazy paddle stroke. At times the Place's loneliness can be happy and comfortable.
Then Beau raised an eyebrow at Erich, who nodded, and next thing they were launched into a song we all know, though I've never found out where it originally came from. This time it made me think of Lili, and I wondered why—and why it's a tradition at Recuperation Stations to call the new girl Lili, though in this case it happened to be her real name.

Standing in the Doorway just outside of space, Winds of Change blow 'round you but don't touch your face; You smile as you whisper tenderly, "Please cross to me, Recuperee; The operation's over, come in and close the Door."

---

CHAPTER 4

De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms.

—Eliot

SOS FROM NOWHERE

I realized the piano had deserted Erich and I cranked my head up and saw Beau, Maud and Sid streaking for the control divan. The Major Maintainer was blinking emergency-green and fast, but the code was plain enough for even me to recognize the Spider distress call and for a second I felt just sick. Then Erich blew out his reserve breath in the middle of "Door" and I gave myself another of those helpful mental boots at the base of the spine and we hurried after them toward the center of the Place along with Mark.

The blinks faded as we got there and Sid told us not to move because we were making shadows. He glued an eye to the telltale and we held still as statues as he caressed the dials like he was making love.
One sensitive hand flicked out past the Introversion switch over to the Minor Maintainer and right away the Place was dark as your soul and there was nothing for me but Erich's arm and the knowledge that Sid was nursing a green light I couldn't even see, although my eyes had plenty time to accommodate.
Then the green light finally came back very slowly and I could see the dear reliable old face—the green-gold beard making him look like a merman—and then the telltale flared bright and Sid flicked on the Place lights and I leaned back.
"That nails them, lads, whoever and whenever they may be. Get ready for a pick-up."
Beau, who was closest of course, looked at him sharply. Sid shrugged uneasily. "Meseemed at first it was from our own globe a thousand years before our Lord, but that indication flickered and faded like witchfire. As it is, the call comes from something smaller than the Place and certes adrift from the cosmos. Meseemed too at one point I knew the fist of the caller—an antipodean atomicist named Benson-Carter—but that likewise changed."
Beau said, "We're not in the right phase of the cosmos-Places rhythm for a pick-up, are we, sir?"
Sid answered, "Ordinarily not, boy."
Beau continued, "I didn't think we had any pick-ups scheduled. Or stand-by orders."
Sid said, "We haven't."
Mark's eyes glowed. He tapped Erich on the shoulder. "An octavian denarius against ten Reichsmarks it is a Snake trap."
Erich's grin showed his teeth. "Make it first through the Door next operation and I'm on."

---

It didn't take that to tell me things were serious, or the thought that there's always a first time for bumping into something from really outside the cosmos. The Snakes have broken our code more than once. Maud was quietly serving out weapons and Doc was helping her. Only Bruce and Lili stood off. But they were watching.

The telltale brightened. Sid reached toward the Maintainer, saying, "All right, my hearties. Remember, through this Doorway pass the fishiest finaglers in and out of the cosmos."
The Door appeared to the left and above where it should be and darkened much too fast. There was a gust of stale salt seawind, if that makes sense, but no stepped-up Change Winds I could tell—and I had been bracing myself against them. The Door got inky and there was a flicker of gray fur whips and a flash of copper flesh and gilt and something dark and a clump of hoofs and Erich was sighting a stun gun across his left forearm, and then the Door had vanished like that and a tentacled silvery Lunan and a Venusian satyr were coming straight toward us.
The Lunan was hugging a pile of clothes and weapons. The satyr was helping a wasp-waisted woman carry a heavy-looking bronze chest. The woman was wearing a short skirt and high-collared bolero jacket of leather so dark brown it was almost black. She had a two-horned petsofa hairdress and she was boldly gilded here and there and wore sandals and copper anklets and wristlets—one of them a copper-plated Caller—and from her wide copper belt hung a short-handled double-headed ax. She was dark-complexioned and her forehead and chin receded, but the effect was anything but weak; she had a face like a beautiful arrowhead—and a familiar one, by golly!
But before I could say, "Kabysia Labrys," Maud shrilly beat me to it with, "It's Kaby with two friends. Break out a couple of Ghostgirls."
And then I saw it really was old-home week because I recognized my Lunan boy friend Ilhilihis, and in the midst of all the confusion I got a nice kick out of knowing I was getting so I could tell the personality of one silver-furred muzzle from another.
They reached the control divan and Illy dumped his load and the others let down the chest, and Kaby staggered but shook off the two ETs when they started to support her, and she looked daggers at Sid when he tried to do the same, although she's his "sweet Keftian friend" he'd mentioned to Bruce.

---

She leaned straight-armed on the divan and took two gasping breaths so deep that the ridges of her spine showed through her brown-skinned waist, and then she threw up her head and commanded, "Wine!"

While Beau was rushing it, Sid tried to take her hand again, saying, "Sweetling, I'd never heard you call before and knew not this pretty little fist," but she ripped out, "Save your comfort for the Lunan," and I looked and saw—Hey, Zeus!—that one of Ilhilihis' six tentacles was lopped off halfway.
That was for me, and, going to him, I fast briefed myself: "Remember, he only weighs fifty pounds for all he's seven feet high; he doesn't like low sounds or to be grabbed; the two legs aren't tentacles and don't act the same; uses them for long walks, tentacles for leaps; uses tentacles for close vision too and for manipulation, of course; extended, they mean he's at ease; retracted, on guard or nervous; sharply retracted, disgusted; greeting—"
Just then, one of them swept across my face like a sweet-smelling feather duster and I said, "Illy, man, it's been a lot of sleeps," and brushed my fingers across his muzzle. It still took a little self-control not to hug him, and I did reach a little cluckingly for his lopped tentacle, but he wafted it away from me and the little voice-box belted to his side squeaked, "Naughty, naughty. Papa will fix his little old self. Greta girl, ever bandaged even a Terra octopus?"
I had, an intelligent one from around a quarter billion A.D., but I didn't tell him so. I stood and let him talk to the palm of my hand with one of his tentacles—I don't savvy feather-talk but it feels good, though I've often wondered who taught him English—and watched him use a couple others to whisk a sort of Lunan band-aid out of his pouch and cap his wound with it.
Meanwhile, the satyr knelt over the bronze chest, which was decorated with little death's heads and crosses with hoops at the top and swastikas, but looking much older than Nazi, and the satyr said to Sid, "Quick thinkin, Gov, when ya saw the Door comin in high n soffened up gravty unner it, but cud I hav sum hep now?"
Sid touched the Minor Maintainer and we all got very light and my stomach did a flip-flop while the satyr piled on the chest the clothes and weapons that Illy had been carrying and pranced off with it all and carefully put it down at the end of the bar. I decided the satyr's English instructor must have been quite a character, too. Wish I'd met him—her—it.
Sid thought to ask Illy if he wanted Moon-normal gravity in one sector, but my boy likes to mix, and being such a lightweight, Earth-normal gravity doesn't bother him. As he said to me once, "Would Jovian gravity bother a beetle, Greta girl?"

---

I asked Illy about the satyr and he squeaked that his name was Sevensee and that he'd never met him before this operation. I knew the satyrs were from a billion years in the future, just as the Loonies were from a billion in the past, and I thought—Kreesed us!—but it must have been a real big or emergency-like operation to have the Spiders using those two for it, with two billion years between them—a time-difference that gives you a feeling of awe for a second, you know.

I started to ask Illy about it, but just then Beau came scampering back from the bar with a big red-and-black earthenware goblet of wine—we try to keep a variety of drinking tools in stock so folks will feel more at home. Kaby grabbed it from him and drained most of it in one swallow and then smashed it on the floor. She does things like that, though Sid's tried to teach her better. Then she stared at what she was thinking about until the whites showed all around her eyes and her lips pulled way back from her teeth and she looked a lot less human than the two ETs, just like a fury. Only a time traveler knows how like the wild murals and engravings of them some of the ancients can look.
My hair stood up at the screech she let out. She smashed a fist into the divan and cried, "Goddess! Must I see Crete destroyed, revived, and now destroyed again? It is too much for your servant."
Personally, I thought she could stand anything.
There was a rush of questions at what she said about Crete—I asked one of them, for the news certainly frightened me—but she shot up her arm straight for silence and took a deep breath and began.
"In the balance hung the battle. Rowing like black centipedes, the Dorian hulls bore down on our outnumbered ships. On the bright beach, masked by rocks, Sevensee and I stood by the needle gun, ready to give the black hulls silent wounds. Beside us was Ilhilihis, suited as a sea monster. But then ... then ..."
Then I saw she wasn't altogether the iron babe, for her voice broke and she started to shake and to sob rackingly, although her face was still a mask of rage, and she threw up the wine. Sid stepped in and made her stop, which I think he'd been wanting to do all along.

---

CHAPTER 5

Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me.

—Ibsen

SID INSISTS ON GHOSTGIRLS

My Elizabethan boy friend put his fists on his hips and laid down the law to us as if we were a lot of nervous children who'd been playing too hard.

"Look you, masters, this is a Recuperation Station and I am running it as such. A plague of all operations! I care not if the frame of things disjoints and the whole Change World goes to ruin, but you, warrior maid, are going to rest and drink more wine slowly before you tell your tale and your colleagues are going to be properly companioned. No questions, anyone. Beau, and you love us, give us a lively tune."
Kaby relaxed a little and let him put his hand carefully against her back in token of support and she said grudgingly, "All right, Fat Belly."
Then, so help me, to the tune of the Muskrat Ramble, which I'd taught Beau, we got girls for those two ETs and everybody properly paired up.
Right here I want to point out that a lot of the things they say in the Change World about Recuperation Stations simply aren't so—and anyway they always leave out nine-tenths of it. The Soldiers that come through the Door are looking for a good time, sure, but they're hurt real bad too, every one of them, deep down in their minds and hearts, if not always in their bodies or so you can see it right away.
Believe me, a temporal operation is no joke, and to start with, there isn't one person in a hundred who can endure to be cut from his lifeline and become a really wide-awake Doubleganger—a Demon, that is—let alone a Soldier. What does a badly hurt and mixed-up creature need who's been fighting hard? One individual to look out for him and feel for him and patch him up, and it helps if the one is of the opposite sex—that's something that goes beyond species.
There's your basis for the Place and the wild way it goes about its work, and also for most other Recuperation Stations or Entertainment Spots. The name Entertainer can be misleading, but I like it. She's got to be a lot more than a good party girl—or boy—though she's got to be that too. She's got to be a nurse and a psychologist and an actress and a mother and a practical ethnologist and a lot of things with longer names—and a reliable friend.

---

None of us are all those things perfectly or even near it. We just try. But when the call comes, Entertainers have to forget grudges and gripes and envies and jealousies—and remember, they're lively people with sharp emotions—because there isn't any time then for anything but help and don't ask who!

And, deep inside her, a good Entertainer doesn't care who. Take the way it shaped up this time. It was pretty clear to me I ought to shift to Illy, although I wasn't quite easy in my mind about leaving Erich, because the Lunan was a long time from home and, after all, Erich was among anthropoids. Ilhilihis needed someone who was simpatico.
I like Illy and not just because he is a sort of tall cross between a spider monkey and a persian cat—though that is a handsome combo when you come to think of it. I like him for himself. So when he came in all lopped and shaky after a mean operation, I was the right person to look out for him. Now I've made my little speech and know-nothings in the Change World can go on making their bum jokes. But I ask you, how could an arrangement between Illy and me be anything but Platonic?
We might have had some octopoid girls and nymphs in stock—Sid couldn't be sure until he checked—but Ilhilihis and Sevensee voted for real people and I knew Sid saw it their way. Maud squeezed Mark's hand and tripped over to Sevensee ("Those are sharp hoofs you got, man"—she's picked up some of my language, like she has everything else), though Beau did frown over his shoulder at Lili from the piano, maybe to argue that she ought to take on the ET, as Mark had been a real casualty and could use live nursing. But it was plain as day to anybody but Beau that Bruce and Lili were a big thing and the last to be disturbed.
Erich acted stiffly hurt at losing me, but I knew he wasn't. He thinks he has a great technique with Ghostgirls and he likes to show it off, and he really is pretty slick at it, if you go for that sort of thing and—yang my yin!—who doesn't at times?
And when Sid formally wafted the Countess out of Stores—a real blonde stunner in a white satin hobble skirt with a white egret swaying up from her tiny hat, way ahead of Maud and Lili and me when it came to looks, though transparent as cigarette smoke—and when Erich clicked his heels and bowed over her hand and proudly conducted her to a couch, black Svengali to her Trilby, and started to German-talk some life into her with much head cocking and toothy smiling and a flow of witty flattery, and when she began to flirt back and the dream look in her eyes sharpened hungrily and focused on him—well, then I knew that Erich was happy and felt he was doing proud by the Reichswehr. No, my little commandant wasn't worrying me on that score.

---

Mark had drawn a Greek hetaera, name of Phryne; I suppose not the one who maybe still does the famous courtroom striptease back in Athens, and he was waking her up with little sips of his scotch and soda, though, from some looks he'd flashed, I got the idea Kaby was the kid he really went for. Sid was coaxing the fighting gal to take some high-energy bread and olives along with the wine, and, for a wonder, Doc seemed to be carrying on an animated and rational conversation with Sevensee and Maud, maybe comparing notes on the Northern Venusian Shallows, and Beau had got on to Panther Rag, and Bruce and Lili were leaning on the piano, smiling very appreciatively, but talking to each other a mile a minute.

Illy turned back from inspecting them all and squeaked, "Animals with clothes are so refreshing, dahling! Like you're all carrying banners!"
Maybe he had something there, though my banners were kind of Ash Wednesday, a charcoal gray sweater and skirt. He looked at my mouth with a tentacle to see how I was smiling and he squeaked softly, "Do I seem dull and commonplace to you, Greta girl, because I haven't got banners? Just another Zombie from a billion years in your past, as gray and lifeless as Luna is today, not as when she was a real dreamy sister planet simply bursting with air and water and feather forests. Or am I as strangely interesting to you as you are to me, girl from a billion years in my future?"
"Illy, you're sweet," I told him, giving him a little pat. I noticed his fur was still vibrating nervously and I decided the heck with Sid's orders, I'm going to pump him about what he was doing with Kaby and the satyr. Couldn't have him a billion years from home and bottled up, too. Besides, I was curious.

---

CHAPTER 6

Maiden, Nymph, and Mother are the eternal royal Trinity of the island, and the Goddess, who is worshipped there in each of these aspects, as New Moon, Full Moon, and Old Moon, is the sovereign Deity.

—Graves

CRETE CIRCA 1300 B.C.

Kaby pushed back at Sid some seconds of bread and olives, and, when he raised his bushy eyebrows, gave him a curt nod that meant she knew what she was doing. She stood up and sort of took a position. All the talk quieted down fast, even Bruce's and Lili's. Kaby's face and voice weren't strained now, but they weren't relaxed either.

"Woe to Spider! Woe to Cretan! Heavy is the news I bring you. Bear it bravely, like strong women. When we got the gun unlimbered, I heard seaweed fry and crackle. We three leaped behind the rock wall, saw our gun grow white as sunlight in a heat-ray of the Serpents! Natch, we feared we were outnumbered and I called upon my Caller."

I don't know how she does it, but she does—in English too. That is, when she figures she's got something important to report, and maybe she needs a little time to get ready.
Beau claims that all the ancients fit their thoughts into measured lines as naturally as we pick a word that will do, but I'm not sure how good the Vicksburg language department is. Though why I should wonder about things like that when I've got Kaby spouting the stuff right in front of me, I don't know.
"But I didn't die there, kiddos. I still hoped to hurt the Greek ships, maybe with the Snake's own heat gun. So I quick tried to outflank them. My two comrades crawled beside me—they are males, but they have courage. Soon we spied the ambush-setters. They were Snakes and they were many, filthily disguised as Cretans."
There was an indignant murmur at this, for our cutthroat Change War has its code, the Soldiers tell me. Being an Entertainer, I don't have to say what I think.
"They had seen us when we saw them," Kaby swept on, "and they loosed a killing volley. Heat- and knife-rays struck about us in a storm of wind and fire, and the Lunan lost a feeler, fighting for Crete's Triple Goddess. So we dodged behind a sand hill, steered our flight back toward the water. It was awful, what we saw there: Crete's brave ships all sunk or sinking, blue sky sullied by their death-smoke. Once again the Greeks had licked us!—aided by the filthy Serpents.
"Round our wrecks, their black ships scurried, like black beetles, filth their diet, yet this day they dine on heroes. On the quiet sunlit beach there, I could feel a Change Gale blowing, working changes deep inside me, aches and pains that were a stranger's. Half my memories were doubled, half my lifeline crooked and twisted, three new moles upon my sword-hand. Goddess, Goddess, Triple Goddess—"

---

Her voice wavered and Sid reached out a hand, but she straightened her back.

"Triple Goddess, give me courage to tell everything that happened. We ran down into the water, hoping to escape by diving. We had hardly gotten under when the heat-rays hit above us, turning all the cool green surface to a roaring white inferno. But as I believe I told you, I was calling on my Caller, and a Door now opened to us, deep below the deadly steam-clouds. We dived in like frightened minnows and a lot of water with us."
Off Chicago's Gold Coast, Dave once gave me a lesson in skin-diving and, remembering it, I got a flash of Kaby's Door in the dark depths.
"For a moment, all was chaos. Then the Door slammed shut behind us. We'd been picked up in time's nick by—an Express Room of our Spiders!—sloshing two feet deep in water, much more cramped for space than this Place. It was manned by a magician, an old coot named Benson-Carter. He dispelled the water quickly and reported on his Caller. We'd got dry, were feeling human, Illy here had shed his swimsuit, when we looked at the Maintainer. It was glowing, changing, melting! And when Benson-Carter touched it, he fell backward—death was in him. Then the Void began to darken, narrow, shrink and close around us, so I called upon my Caller—without wasting time, let me tell you!
"We can't say for sure what was it slowly squeezed that sweet Express Room, but we fear the dirty Snakes have found a way to find our Places and attack outside the cosmos!—found the Spiderweb that links us in the Void's gray less-than-nothing."
No murmur this time. This reaction was genuine; we'd been hit where we lived and I could see everybody was scared as sick as I was. Except maybe Bruce and Lili, who were still holding hands and beaming gently. I decided they were the kind that love makes brave, which it doesn't do to me. It just gives me two people to worry about.
"I can see you dig our feelings," Kaby continued. "This thing scared the pants off of us. If we could have, we'd have even Introverted the Maintainer, broken all the ties that bind us, chanced it incommunicado. But the little old Maintainer was a seething red-hot puddle filled with bubbles big as handballs. We sat tight and watched the Void close. I kept calling on my Caller."

---

I squeezed my eyes shut, but that made it easier to see the three of them with the Void shutting down on them. (Was ours still behaving? Yes, Bibi Miriam.) Poetry or no poetry, it got me.

"Benson-Carter, lying dying, also thought the Snakes had done it. And he knew that death was in him, so he whispered me his mission, giving me precise instructions: how to press the seven death's hands, starting lockside counterclockwise, one, three, five, six, two, four, seven, then you have a half an hour; after you have pressed the seven, do not monkey with the buttons—get out fast and don't stop moving."
I wasn't getting this part and I couldn't see that anyone else was, though Bruce was whispering to Lili. I remembered seeing skulls engraved on the bronze chest. I looked at Illy and he nodded a tentacle and spread two to say, I guessed, that yes, Benson-Carter had said something like that, but no, Illy didn't know much about it.
"All these things and more he whispered," Kaby went on, "with the last gasps of his life-force, telling all his secret orders—for he'd not been sent to get us, he was on a separate mission, when he heard my SOSs. Sid, it's you he was to contact, as the first leg of his mission, pick up from you three black hussars, death's-head Demons, daring Soldiers, then to wait until the Places next match rhythm with the cosmos—matter of two mealtimes, barely—and to tune in northern Egypt in the age of the last Caesar, in the year of Rome's swift downfall, there to start an operation in a battle near a city named for Thrace's Alexander, there to change the course of battle, blow sky-high the stinking Serpents, all their agents, all their Zombies!
"Goddess, pardon, now I savvy how you've guided my least footstep, when I thought you'd gone and left me—for I flubbed your three-mole signal. We've found Sid's Place, that's the first leg, and I see the three black hussars, and we've brought with us the weapon and the Parthian disguises, salvaged from the doomed Express Room when your Door appeared in time's nick, and the Room around us closing spewed us through before it vanished with the corpse of Benson-Carter. Triple Goddess, draw the milk now from the womanhood I flaunt here and inject the blackest hatred! Vengeance now upon the Serpents, vengeance sweet in northern Egypt, for your island, Crete, Goddess!—and a victory for the Spiders! Goddess, Goddess, we can swing it!"
The roar that made me try to stop my ears with my shoulders didn't come from Kaby—she'd spoken her piece—but from Sid. The dear boy was purple enough to make me want to remind him you can die of high blood pressure just as easy in the Change World.
"Dump me with ops! 'Sblood, I'll not endure it! Is this a battle post? They'll be mounting operations from field hospitals next. Kabysia Labrys, thou art mad to suggest it. And what's this prattle of locks, clocks, and death's heads, buttons and monkeys? This brabble, this farrago, this hocus-pocus! And where's the weapon you prate of? In that whoreson bronze casket, I suppose."
She nodded, looking blank and almost a little shy as poetic possession faded from her. Her answer came like its faltering last echo.
"It is nothing but a tiny tactical atomic bomb."

---

CHAPTER 7

After about 0.1 millisecond (one ten-thousandth part of a second) has elapsed, the radius of the ball of fire is some 45 feet, and the temperature is then in the vicinity of 300,000 degrees Centigrade. At this instant, the luminosity, as observed at a distance of 100,000 yards (5.7 miles), is approximately 100 times that of the sun as seen at the earth's surface ... the ball of fire expands very rapidly to its maximum radius of 450 feet within less than a second from the explosion.

—Los Alamos

TIME TO THINK

Brother, that was all we needed to make everybody but Kaby and the two ETs start yelping at once, me included. It may seem strange that Change People, able to whiz through time and space and roust around outside the cosmos and knowing at least by hearsay of weapons a billion years in the future, like the Mindbomb, should panic at being shut in with a little primitive mid-20th Century gadget. Well, they feel the same as atomic scientists would feel if a Bengal tiger were brought into their laboratory, neither more nor less scared.

I'm a moron at physics, but I do know the Fireball is bigger than the Place. Remember that, besides the bomb, we'd recently been presented with a lot of other fears we hadn't had time to cope with, especially the business of the Snakes having learned how to get at our Places and melt the Maintainers and collapse them. Not to mention the general impression—first Saint Petersburg, then Crete—that the whole Change War was going against the Spiders.
Yet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were all panicking. It made me admit what I didn't like to: that we were all in pretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn't happen to be our out.
And had the rest of us been controlling our drinking so well lately?
Maud yelled, "Jettison it!" and pulled away from the satyr and ran from the bronze chest. Beau, harking back to what they'd thought of doing in the Express Room when it was too late, hissed, "Sirs, we must Introvert," and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for the control divan. Erich seconded him with a white-faced "Gott in Himmel, ja!" from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slim stem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass.
I felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degrees worse than foxholing. It's supposed not only to keep the Door tight shut, but also to lock it so even the Change Winds can't get through—cut the Place loose from the cosmos altogether.
I'd never talked with anyone from a Place that had been Introverted.

---

Mark dumped Phryne off his lap and ran after Maud. The Greek Ghostgirl, quite solid now, looked around with sleepy fear and fumbled her apple-green chiton together at the throat. She wrenched my attention away from everyone else for a moment, and I couldn't help wondering whether the person or Zombie back in the cosmos, from whose lifeline the Ghost has been taken, doesn't at least have strange dreams or thoughts when something like this happens.

Sid stopped Beau, though he almost got bowled over doing it, and he held the gambler away from the Maintainer in a bear hug and bellowed over his shoulders, "Masters, are you mad? Have you lost your wits? Maud! Mark! Marcus! Magdalene! On your lives, unhand that casket!"
Maud had swept the clothes and bows and quivers and stuff off it and was dragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump it through fast when we got one, I guess, while Mark acted as if he were trying to help her and wrestle it away from her at the same time.
They kept on as if they hadn't heard a word Sid said, with Mark yelling, "Let go, meretrix! This holds Rome's answer to Parthia on the Nile."
Kaby watched them as if she wanted to help Mark but scorned to scuffle with a mere—well, Mark had said it in Latin, I guess—call girl.
Then, on the top of the bronze chest, I saw those seven lousy skulls starting at the lock as plain as if they'd been under a magnifying glass, though ordinarily they'd have been a vague circle to my eyes at the distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the opposite direction, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, and squeaked, "Easy now, Greta girl, don't you be doing it, too. Hold still or Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you have a mind to."
My stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but it stopped me and I got my mind back, partly.
"Unhand it, I say!" Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and he released Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler's shoulder.
Then my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Void and blustered at no one in particular, "'Sdeath, think you I'd mutiny against my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent fox and pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggests it? Introversion's no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervised and sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I'd Introverted ere we got Kaby's call for succor, hey?"

---

His warrior maid nodded with harsh approval and he noticed it and shook his free hand at her and scolded her, "Not that I say yea to your mad plan for that Devil's casket, you half-clad lackwit. And yet to jettison.... Oh, ye gods, ye gods—" he wiped his hand across his face—"grant me a minute in which I may think!"

Thinking time wasn't an item even on the strictly limited list at the moment, although Sevensee, squatting dourly on his hairy haunches where Maud had left him, threw in a dead-pan "Thas tellin em, Gov."
Then Doc at the bar stood up tall as Abe Lincoln in his top hat and shawl and 19th Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence and said something that sounded like: "Introversh, inversh, glovsh," and then his enunciation switched to better than perfect as he continued, "I know to an absolute certainty what we must do."
It showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a church while we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for a poor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves.
He said something like, "Inversh ... bosh ..." and held our eyes for a moment longer. Then the light went out of his and he slobbered out a "Nichevo" and slid an arm far along the bar for a bottle and started to pour it down his throat without stopping sliding.
Before he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second while our attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top of it, so fast it was almost like he'd popped up from nowhere, though I'd seen him start from behind the piano.
"I've a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?" he said in a voice that was very clear and just loud enough. "So it can't go off," he went on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk manner putting more heart into me all the time. "What's more, if it were to be triggered, we'd still have half an hour. I believe you said it had that long a fuse?"
He stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded.
"Right," he said. "It'd have to be that long for whoever plants it in the Parthian camp to get away. There's another safety margin.
"Second question. Is there a locksmith in the house?"

---

For all Bruce's easiness, he was watching us like a golden eagle and he caught Beau's and Maud's affirmatives before they had a chance to explain or hedge them and said, "That's very good. Under certain circumstances, you two'd be the ones to go to work on the chest. But before we consider that, there's Question Three: Is anyone here an atomics technician?"

That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to explain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power—hadn't they blasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly craters?—but no, he wasn't a technician exactly, he was a "thinger" (I thought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?—well, a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly impossible to describe, but no, you couldn't possibly thing atomics; the idea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn't be an atomics thinger; the term was worse than a contradiction, well, really!—while Sevensee, from his two-thousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect that his culture didn't rightly use any kind of power, but just sort of moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling space-time around, "or think em roun ef we hafta. Can't think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have—I dunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow."
"So we don't have an A-tech," Bruce summed up, "which makes it worse than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn't know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question." He directed it toward Sid. "How long before we can jettison anything?"
Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn't seem to be taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the word "rhythm," he pulled the answer away from him.
"In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again. Thank you, Master Lessingham. That's at least five hours—two mealtimes, as the Cretan officer put it," and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly smile. "So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there's not a thing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!"
His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn't seem to notice them and we hardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.
"All right then," he repeated suddenly. "We're twelve Spiders and two Ghosts, and we've time for a bit of a talk, and we're all in the same bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we'll all know what we're talking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are off!"

---

Bruce ripped them out of his belt where they'd been tucked and slammed them down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and forth, and it wasn't funny.

"Because," he went right on, "I've been getting a completely new picture of what this Spiders' war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it's jolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged little party outside both of them when the operation's over. It's sweet to know there's no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can't shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the ultimate insatiable hunger, and it's great to be Faust, even in a pack of other Fausts.
"It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's life or a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes—hah! killing men or carrying off women isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It's sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and decide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.
"Or he can't stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you've got to decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams, only they'll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, or whether, if she's got that tantalizing something, to bring her shell along for a Ghostgirl—that's sweet, too. It's even sweet to have Change Death poised over your neck, to know that the past isn't the precious indestructible thing you've been taught it was, to know that there's no certainty about the future either, whether there'll even be one, to know that no part of reality is holy, that the cosmos itself may wink out like a flicked switch and God be not and nothing left but nothing!"
He threw out his arms against the Void. "And knowing all that, it's doubly sweet to come through the Door into the Place and be out of the worst of the Change Winds and enjoy a well-earned Recuperation and share the memories of all these sweetnesses I've been talking about, and work out all the fascinating feelings you've been accumulating back in the cosmos, layer by black layer, in the company of and with the help of the best bloody little band of fellow Fausts and Faustines going!
"Oh, it's a sweet life, all right, but I'm asking you—" and here his eyes stabbed us again, one by one, fast—"I'm asking you what it's done to us. I've been getting a completely new picture, as I said, of what my life was and what it could have been if there'd been changes of the sort that even we Demons can't make, and what my life is. I've been watching how we've all been responding to things just now, to the news of Saint Petersburg and to what the Cretan officer told beautifully—only it wasn't beautiful what she had to tell—and mostly to that bloody box of bomb. And I'm simply asking each one of you, what's happened to you?"

---

He stopped his pacing and stuck his thumbs in his belt and seemed to be listening to the wheels turning in at least eleven other heads—only I stopped mine pretty quick, with Dave and Father and the Rape of Chicago coming up out of the dark on the turn and Mother and the Indiana Dunes and Jazz Limited just behind them, followed by the unthinkable thing the Spider doctor had flicked into existence when I flopped as a nurse, because I can't stand that to be done to my mind by anybody but myself.

I stopped them by using the old infallible Entertainers' gimmick, a fast survey of the most interesting topic there is—other people's troubles.

---

Offhand, Beau looked as if he had most troubles, shamed by his boss and his girl given her heart to a Soldier; he was hugging them to himself very quiet.

I didn't stop for the two ETs—they're too hard to figure—or for Doc; nobody can tell whether a fallen-down drunk's at the black or bright end of his cycle; you just know it's cycling.
Maud ought to be suffering as much as Beau, called names and caught out in a panic, which always hurts her because she's plus three hundred years more future than the rest of us and figures she ought to be that much wiser, which she isn't always—not to mention she's over fifty years old, though her home-century cosmetic science keeps her looking and acting teenage most of the time. She'd backed away from the bronze chest so as not to stand out, and now Lili came from behind the piano and stood beside her.
Lili had the opposite of troubles, a great big glow for Bruce, proud as a promised princess watching her betrothed. Erich frowned when he saw her, for he seemed proud too, proud of the way his Kamerad had taken command of us panicky whacks Führer-fashion. Sid still looked mostly grateful and inclined to let Bruce keep on talking.
Even Kaby and Mark, those two dragons hot for battle, standing a little in front and to one side of us by the bronze chest, like its guardians, seemed willing to listen. They made me realize one reason Sid had for letting Bruce run on, although the path his talk was leading us down was flashing with danger signals: When it was over, there'd still be the problem of what to do with the bomb, and a real opposition shaping up between Soldiers and Entertainers, and Sid was hoping a solution would turn up in the meantime or at least was willing to put off the evil day.
But beyond all that, and like the rest of us, I could tell from the way Sid was squinting his browy eyes and chewing his beardy lip that he was shaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped into our hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of us could have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had to think of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs we were—well, we wanted to keep on listening.

---

CHAPTER 8

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.

—Archimedes

A PLACE TO STAND

Bruce's voice had a faraway touch and he was looking up left at the Void as he said, "Have you ever really wondered why the two sides of this war are called the Snakes and the Spiders? Snakes may be clear enough—you always call the enemy something dirty. But Spiders—our name for ourselves? Bear with me, Ilhilihis; I know that no being is created dirty or malignant by Nature, but this is a matter of anthropoid feelings and folkways. Yes, Mark, I know that some of your legions have nicknames like the Drunken Lions and the Snails, and that's about as insulting as calling the British Expeditionary Force the Old Contemptibles.

"No, you'd have to go to bands of vicious youths in cities slated for ruin to find a habit of naming like ours, and even they would try to brighten up the black a bit. But simply—Spiders. And Snakes, for that's their name for themselves too, you know. Spiders and Snakes. What are our masters, that we give them names like that?"
It gave me the shivers and set my mind working in a dozen directions and I couldn't stop it, although it made the shivers worse.
Illy beside me now—I'd never given it a thought before, but he did have eight legs of a sort, and I remembered thinking of him as a spider monkey, and hadn't the Lunans had wisdom and atomic power and a billion years in which to get the Change War rolling?
Or suppose, in the far future, Terra's own spiders evolved intelligence and a cruel cannibal culture. They'd be able to keep their existence secret. I had no idea of who or what would be on Earth in Sevensee's day, and wouldn't it be perfect black hairy poisoned spider-mentality to spin webs secretly through the world of thought and all of space and time?
And Beau—wasn't there something real Snaky about him, the way he moved and all?
Spiders and Snakes. Spinne und Schlange, as Erich called them. S & S. But SS stood for the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the Black Shirts, and what if some of those cruel, crazy Jerries had discovered time travel and—I brought myself up with a jerk and asked myself, "Greta, how nuts can you get?"

---

From where he was on the floor, the front of the bar his sounding board, Doc shrieked up at Bruce like one of the damned from the pit, "Don't speak against the Spiders! Don't blaspheme! They can hear the Unborn whisper. Others whip only the skin, but they whip the naked brain and heart," and Erich called out, "That's enough, Bruce!"

But Bruce didn't spare him a look and said, "But whatever the Spiders are and no matter how much whip they use, it's plain as the telltale on the Maintainer that the Change War is not only going against them, but getting away from them. Dwell for a bit on the current flurry of stupid slugging and panicky anachronism, when we all know that anachronism is what gets the Change Winds out of control. This punch-drunk pounding on the Cretan-Dorian fracas as if it were the only battle going and the only way to work things. Whisking Constantine from Britain to the Bosporus by rocket, sending a pocket submarine back to sail with the Armada against Drake's woodensides—I'll wager you hadn't heard those! And now, to save Rome, an atomic bomb.
"Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a fission weapon.... I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will make in what's left of history—the smothering of Greece and the vanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy's Irish Captivity won't be in it!"
The cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he didn't pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned in irony and he said, "But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world—one little solar system, Sevensee—and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.
"Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever than go on living in a world without the Summa, the Field Equations, Process and Reality, Hamlet, Matthew, Keats, and the Odyssey, but our masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those rugged souls who want to go on living no matter what."

---

Erich's "Bruce, I'm telling you that's enough," was lost in the quickening flow of the New Boy's words. "I won't spend much time on the minor signs of our major crack-up—the canceling of leaves, the sharper shortages, the loss of the Express Room, the use of Recuperation Stations for ops and all the other frantic patchwork—last operation but one, we were saddled with three Soldiers from outside the Galaxy and, no fault of theirs, they were no earthly use. Such little things might happen at a bad spot in any war and are perhaps only local. But there's a big thing."

He paused again, to let us wonder, I guess. Maud must have worked her way over to me, for I felt her dry little hand on my arm and she whispered out of the side of her mouth, "What do we do now?"
"We listen," I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her need to be doing something about things.
She cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, "You, too?"
I didn't get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts!—because just then Bruce's voice took up again in the faraway range.
"Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of history can stand before it's all stitches, whether too much Change won't one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? Change Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you've stripped off the paint.
"If that goes on, won't the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself, then nothing? How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more Doublegangers cut out of it? And there's another thing about every operation—it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change Winds die, it leaves them a little more disturbed and nightmare-ridden and frazzled. Those of you who have been on operations in heavily worked-over temporal areas will know what I mean—that look they give you out of the sides of their eyes as if to say, 'You again? For Christ's sake, go away. We're the dead. We're the ones who don't want to wake up, who don't want to be Demons and hate to be Ghosts. Stop torturing us.'"

---

I looked around at the Ghostgirls; I couldn't help it. They'd somehow got together on the control divan, facing us, their backs to the Maintainers. The Countess had dragged along the bottle of wine Erich had fetched her earlier and they were passing it back and forth. The Countess had a big rose splotch across the ruffled white lace of her blouse.

Bruce said, "There'll come a day when all the Zombies and all the Unborn wake up and go crazy together and figuratively come marching at us in their numberless hordes, saying, 'We've had enough.'"
But I didn't turn back to Bruce right away. Phryne's chiton had slipped off one shoulder and she and the Countess were sitting sagged forward, elbows on knees, legs spread—at least, as far as the Countess's hobble skirt would let her—and swayed toward each other a little. They were still surprisingly solid, although they hadn't had any personal attention for a half hour, and they were looking up over my head with half-shut eyes and they seemed, so help me, to be listening to what Bruce was saying and maybe hearing some of it.
"We make a careful distinction between Zombies and Unborn, between those troubled by our operations whose lifelines lie in the past and those whose lifelines lie in the future. But is there any distinction any longer? Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we're on, but that's different and it's not made for real living.
"The Spiders tell us that the real now is somewhere in the last half of the 20th Century, which means that several of us here are also alive in the cosmos, have lifelines along which the now is traveling. But do you swallow that story quite so easily, Ilhilihis, Sevensee? How does it strike the servants of the Triple Goddess? The Spiders of Octavian Rome? The Demons of Good Queen Bess? The gentlemen Zombies of the Greater South? Do the Unborn man the starships, Maud?
"The Spiders also tell us that, although the fog of battle makes the now hard to pin down precisely, it will return with the unconditional surrender of the Snakes and the establishment of cosmic peace, and roll on as majestically toward the future as before, quickening the continuum with its passage. Do you really believe that? Or do you believe, as I do, that we've used up all the future as well as the past, wasted it in premature experience, and that we've had the real now smudged out of existence, stolen from us forever, the precious now of true growth, the child-moment in which all life lies, the moment like a newborn baby that is the only home for hope there is?"

---

He let that start to sink in, then took a couple of quick steps and went on, his voice rising over Erich's "Bruce, for the last time—" and seeming to pick up a note of hope from the very word he had used, "But although things look terrifyingly black, there remains a chance—the slimmest chance, but still a chance—of saving the cosmos from Change Death and restoring reality's richness and giving the Ghosts good sleep and perhaps even regaining the real now. We have the means right at hand. What if the power of time traveling were used not for war and destruction, but for healing, for the mutual enrichment of the ages, for quiet communication and growth, in brief, to bring a peace message—"

But my little commandant is quite an actor himself and knows a wee bit about the principles of scene-stealing, and he was not going to let Bruce drown him out as if he were just another extra playing a Voice from the Mob. He darted across our front, between us and the bar, took a running leap, and landed bang on the bloody box of bomb.
A bit later, Maud was silently showing me the white ring above her elbow where I'd grabbed her and Illy was teasing a clutch of his tentacles out of my other hand and squeaking reproachfully, "Greta girl, don't ever do that."
Erich was standing on the chest and I noticed that his boots carefully straddled the circle of skulls, and I should have known anyway you could hardly push them in the right order by jumping on them, and he was pointing at Bruce and saying, "—and that means mutiny, my young sir. Um Gottes willen, Bruce, listen to me and step down before you say anything worse. I'm older than you, Bruce. Mark's older. Trust in your Kameraden. Guide yourself by their knowledge."
He had got my attention, but I had much rather have him black my eye.
"You older than me?" Bruce was grinning. "When your twelve-years' advantage was spent in soaking up the wisdom of a race of sadistic dreamers gone paranoid, in a world whose thought-stream had already been muddied by one total war? Mark older than me? When all his ideas and loyalties are those of a wolf pack of unimaginative sluggers two thousand years younger than I am? Either of you older because you have more of the killing cynicism that is all the wisdom the Change World ever gives you? Don't make me laugh!
"I'm an Englishman, and I come from an epoch when total war was still a desecration and the flowers and buds of thoughts not yet whacked off or blighted. I'm a poet and poets are wiser than anyone because they're the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time. Right, Sid? When I talk to all of you about a peace message, I want you to think about it concretely in terms of using the Places to bring help across the mountains of time when help is really needed, not to bring help that's undeserved or knowledge that's premature or contaminating, sometimes not to bring anything at all, but just to check with infinite tenderness and concern that everything's safe and the glories of the universe unfolding as they were intended to—"
"Yes, you are a poet, Bruce," Erich broke in. "You can tootle soulfully on the flute and make us drip tears. You can let out the stops on the big organ pipes and make us tremble as if at Jehovah's footsteps. For the last twenty minutes, you have been giving us some very charmante poetry. But what are you? An Entertainer? Or are you a Soldier?"

---

Right then—I don't know what it was, maybe Sid clearing his throat—I could sense our feelings beginning to turn against Bruce. I got the strangest feeling of reality clamping down and bright colors going dull and dreams vanishing. Yet it was only then I also realized how much Bruce had moved us, maybe some of us to the verge of mutiny, even. I was mad at Erich for what he was doing, but I couldn't help admiring his cockiness.

I was still under the spell of Bruce's words and the more-than-words behind them, but then Erich would shift around a bit and one of his heels would kick near the death's-head pushbuttons and I wanted to stamp with spike heels on every death's-head button on his uniform. I didn't know exactly what I felt yet.
"Yes, I'm a Soldier," Bruce told him, "and I hope you won't ever have to worry about my courage, because it's going to take more courage than any operation we've ever planned, ever dreamed of, to carry the peace message to the other Places and to the wound-spots of the cosmos. Perhaps it will be a fast wicket and we'll be bowled down before we score a single run, but who cares? We may at least see our real masters when they come to smash us, and for me that will be a deep satisfaction. And we may do some smashing of our own."
"So you're a Soldier," Erich said, his smile showing his teeth. "Bruce, I'll admit that the half-dozen operations you've been on were rougher than anything I drew in my first hundred sleeps. For that, I am all honest sympathy. But that you should let them get you into such a state that love and a girl can turn you upside down and start you babbling about peace messages—"
"Yes, by God, love and a girl have changed me!" Bruce shouted at him, and I looked around at Lili and I remembered Dave saying, "I'm going to Spain," and I wondered if anything would ever again make my face flame like that. "Or, rather, they've made me stand up for what I've believed in all along. They've made me—"
"Wunderbar," Erich called and began to do a little sissy dance on the bomb that set my teeth on edge. He bent his wrists and elbows at arty angles and stuck out a hip and ducked his head simperingly and blinked his eyes very fast. "Will you invite me to the wedding, Bruce? You'll have to get another best man, but I will be the flower girl and throw pretty little posies to all the distinguished guests. Here, Mark. Catch, Kaby. One for you, Greta. Danke schön. Ach, zwei Herzen in dreivierteltakt ... ta-ta ... ta-ta ... ta-ta-ta-ta-ta ..."
"What the hell do you think a woman is?" Bruce raged. "Something to mess around with in your spare time?"

---

Erich kept on humming "Two Hearts in Waltz Time"—and jigging around to it, damn him—but he slipped in a nod to Bruce and a "Precisely." So I knew where I stood, but it was no news to me.

"Very well," Bruce said, "let's leave this Brown Shirt maricón to amuse himself and get down to business. I made all of you a proposal and I don't have to tell you how serious it is or how serious Lili and I are about it. We not only must infiltrate and subvert other Places, which luckily for us are made for infiltration, we also must make contact with the Snakes and establish working relationships with their Demons at our level as one of our first steps."
That stopped Erich's jig and got enough of a gasp from some of us to make it seem to come from practically everybody. Erich used it to work a change of pace.
"Bruce! We've let you carry this foolery further than we should. You seem to have the idea that because anything goes in the Place—dueling, drunkenness, und so weiter—you can say what you have and it will all be forgotten with the hangover. Not so. It is true that among such a set of monsters and free spirits as ourselves, and working as secret agents to boot, there cannot be the obvious military discipline that would obtain in a Terran army.
"But let me tell you, Bruce, let me grind it home into you—Sid and Kaby and Mark will bear me out in this, as officers of equivalent rank—that the Spider line of command stretches into and through this Place just as surely as the word of der Führer rules Chicago. And as I shouldn't have to emphasize to you, Bruce, the Spiders have punishments that would make my countrymen in Belsen and Buchenwald—well, pale a little. So while there is still a shadow of justification for our interpreting your remarks as utterly tasteless clowning—"
"Babble on," Bruce said, giving him a loose downward wave of his hand without looking. "I made you people a proposal." He paused. "How do you stand, Sidney Lessingham?"
Then I felt my legs getting weak, because Sid didn't answer right away. The old boy swallowed and started to look around at the rest of us. Then the feeling of reality clamping down got something awful, because he didn't look around, but straightened his back a little. Just then, Mark cut in fast.
"It grieves me, Bruce, but I think you are possessed. Erich, he must be confined."

---

Kaby nodded, almost absently. "Confine or kill the coward, whichever is easier, whip the woman, and let'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?"
Beside me, Maud said flatly, "Do you think I'm a fool?" Beyond her, I saw Lili and I 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.

---

CHAPTER 9

"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 than 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 space-time.
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 mental—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, gold-worked 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 gold-work? 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 you 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 yipping 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, "Twenty-three, 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 argument with quinquo when you 'gan prattle, I could have sworn none could touch the Maintainer, much less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet ..."
"Eftsoons yet," I seconded him.