American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (107 page)

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 sworne none could touch the Maintainer, much less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet . . .”

“Eftsoons yet,” I seconded him.

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

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

Some areas, like the bar, kitchen and Stores, took a long while, but we were thorough. Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made the Place, she has been stationed in a Field Hospital (it turns out the Spiders actually are mounting operations from them) and learned a few nice new wrinkles.

However, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course, every check was observed by at least three people, not including Bruce or Lili. When the Maintainer vanished, Doc had pulled out of his glassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me if I hadn’t seen it happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to the Art Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out his coat and duck his head and whip out a flask and take a swig and by now he was well on his way toward another peak.

The Art Gallery had taken time too, because there’s such a jumble of strange stuff, and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split a beautiful blue woodcarving of a Venusian medusa because, although there wasn’t a mark in the pawpolished surface, she claimed it was just big enough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces together and mooning over the other stuff.

After we’d finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling the floor. Beau and Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a one-sided Place, that there is nothing, but nothing, under the floor; it just gets a lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you get a quarter inch down—that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark was knuckleheaded (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the q.t.) and broke four diamond-plus drills before he was satisfied.

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

During the hunt, Kaby and Erich had used their Callers as direction finders to point out the Maintainer, just as they’re used in the cosmos to locate the Door—and sometimes in the Big Places, people tell me. But the Callers only went wild—like a compass needle whirling around without stopping—and nobody knew what that meant.

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

Since time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts of tricks for sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanently or temporarily. But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybody that should know tells me that time traveling
through
the Big Time is out. It’s this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the countryside and we’re on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as Gertie Stein might put it, you can’t time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.

I’d also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvious hiding place, maybe something that several people could pass back and forth between them, which could mean a conspiracy, and, of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself. Still, I’d got a sort of shell-game idea about the Soldiers’ three big black shakos and I hadn’t been satisfied until I’d got the three together and looked in them all at the same time.

“Wake up, Greta, and take something, I can’t stand here forever.” Maud had brought us a tray of hearty snacks from then and yon, and I must say they were tempting; she whips up a mean hors d’oeuvre.

I looked them over and said, “Siddy, I want a hot dog.”

“And I want a venison pasty! Out upon you, you finical jill, you o’erscrupulous jade, you whimsic and tyrannous poppet!”

I grabbed a handful and snuggled back against him.

“Go on, call me some more, Siddy,” I told him. “Real juicy ones.”

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not.

—Macbeth

motives and opportunities

My big bad waif from King’s Lynn had set the tray on his knees and started to wolf the food down. The others were finishing up. Erich, Mark and Kaby were having a quietly furious argument I couldn’t overhear at the end of the bar nearest the bronze chest, and Illy was draped over the piano like a real octopus, listening in.

Beau and Sevensee were pacing up and down near the control divan and throwing each other a word now and then. Beyond them, Bruce and Lili were sitting on the opposite couch from us, talking earnestly about something. Maud had sat down at the other end of the bar and was knitting—it’s one of the habits like chess and quiet drinking, or learning to talk by squeak box, that we pick up to pass the time in the Place in the long stretches between parties. Doc was fiddling around the Gallery, picking things up and setting them down, still managing to stay on his feet at any rate.

Lili and Bruce stood up, still gabbing intensely at each other, and Illy began to pick out with one tentacle a little tune in the high keys that didn’t sound like anything on God’s earth. “Where do they get all the energy?” I wondered.

As soon as I asked myself that, I knew the answer and I began to feel the same way myself. It wasn’t energy; it was nerves, pure and simple.

Change is like a drug, I realized—you get used to the facts never staying the same, and one picture of the past and future dissolving into another maybe not very different but still different, and your mind being constantly goosed by strange moods and notions, like nightclub lights of shifting color with weird shadows between shining right on your brain.

The endless swaying and jogging is restful, like riding on a train.

You soon get to like the movement and to need it without knowing, and when it suddenly stops and you’re just you and the facts you think from and feel from are exactly the same when you go back to them—boy, that’s rough, as I found out now.

The instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks into the Place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing but ourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make of that, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation.

I decided I felt like I’d been dropped into a swimming pool full of cement and held under until it hardened.

I could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonder they didn’t hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best, maybe she’d got a little preparation from the long watches between stars; and then she is older than all of us, even Sid, though with a small “o” in “older.”

The restless work of the search for the Maintainer had masked the feeling, but now it was beginning to come full force. Before the search, Bruce’s speech and Erich’s interruptions had done a passable masking job too. I tried to remember when I’d first got the feeling and decided it was after Erich had jumped on the bomb, about the time he mentioned poetry. Though I couldn’t be sure. Maybe the Maintainer had been Introverted even earlier, when I’d turned to look at the Ghostgirls. I wouldn’t have known. Nuts!

Believe me, I could feel that hardened cement on every inch of me. I remembered Bruce’s beautiful picture of a universe without Big Change and decided it was about the worst idea going. I went on eating, though I wasn’t so sure now it was a good idea to keep myself strong.

“Does the Maintainer have an Introversion telltale? Siddy!”

“ ’Sdeath, chit, and you love me, speak lower. Of a sudden, I feel not well, as if I’d drunk a butt of Rhenish and slept inside it. Marry yes, blue. In short flashes, saith the manual. Why ask’st thou?”

“No reason. God, Siddy, what I’d give for a breath of Change Wind.”

“Thou can’st say that eftsoons,” he groaned. I must have looked pretty miserable myself, for he put his arm around my shoulders and whispered gruffly, “Comfort thyself sweetling, that while we suffer thus sorely, we yet cannot die the Change Death.”

“What’s that?” I asked him.

I didn’t want to bounce around like the others. I had a suspicion I’d carry it too far. So, to keep myself from going batty, I started to rework the business of who had done what to the Maintainer.

During the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossed around as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat of Snake science amounting to sorcery; the Spider high command bunkering the Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the Express Room, in such a hurry that they hadn’t even time to transmit warnings; the hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beings who are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of the Change War into the future much beyond Sevensee’s epoch—unless the Late Cosmicians are the ones fighting the Change War.

One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one of us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political police, agent of—who knows, after Bruce?—a secret Change World Committee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, or strictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the Maintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich’s and Bruce’s factions.

Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but that didn’t apply to what I did with my own thoughts.

Who wanted to escape so bad they’d Introvert the Place, cutting off all possible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and running the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all?

Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things up, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid couldn’t keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments for derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as Erich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of the bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly hadn’t had my eye on him every second.

Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he said counted, so he’d hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.

Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people especially, more than any man or woman I’ve ever known—he’s like a big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his mouth—and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the cosmos.

Maud, Kaby, Mark and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of, though Sevensee’s being from the very far future did tie in with that idea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something developing between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to be Introverted together.

“Stick to the facts, Greta,” I reminded myself with a private groan.

That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself.

Erich, I thought—now we’re getting somewhere. The little commandant has the nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if he thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be locked in with him, he’d do it in a second.

But even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he’d been heckling Bruce from the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for him to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and . . . well, that was nine-tenths of the problem.

If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanation of all. Gr-r-r!

Bruce’s motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it immortal?) danger he’d put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed a shame he’d been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the Maintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar, we’d all have noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I’d have noticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls—if it worked as Sid claimed, and he said he had never seen it in operation, just read in the manual—oh, ’sdeath!