The Big Time Read online

  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 withhis eyes elsewhere, looking very sallow and professional in his white,and I thought--Damballa!--I'm in the French Quarter. I couldn't see theNew Girl. Sid was at last getting to the New Boy after the fuss aboutMark. He threw me a sign and I started over with Erich in tow.

  "Welcome, sweet lad. Sidney Lessingham's your host, and a fellowEnglishman. Born in King's Lynn, 1564, schooled at Cambridge, but Londonwas 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, abawd--the two trades are hand in glove--a poet of no account, a beggar,and a peddler of resurrection tracts. Beau Lassiter, our throats aretinder!"

  At the word "poet," the New Boy looked up, but resentfully, as if he hadbeen tricked into it.

  "And to spare your throat for drinking, sweet gallant, I'll be so boldas to guess and answer one of your questions," Sid rattled on. "Yes, Iknew Will Shakespeare--we were of an age--and he was such a modest,mind-your-business rogue that we all wondered whether he really didwrite those plays. Your pardon, 'faith, but that scratch might be lookedto."

  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'ssticky cheek, saying rather shrilly, "If I might ..."

  Her timing was bad. Sid's last words and Erich's approach had darkenedthe look in the young Soldier's face and he angrily swept her arm asidewithout even glancing at her. Erich squeezed my arm. The tray clatteredto the floor--and one of the drinks that Beau was bringing almostfollowed it. Ever since the New Girl's arrival, Beau had been figuringthat she was his responsibility, though I don't think the two of themhad reached an agreement yet. Beau was especially set on it because Iwas thick with Sid at the time and Maud with Doc, she loving toughcases.

  "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. Swallowyour 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 psychologyand 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 theKing James and your precious Will whom you use for laughs aren't safefrom Snakes' slime and the Spiders' dirty legs. Changing our history,stealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and bestintentioned and efficient, and what does it lead to? This bloody SIglove!"

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

  "What's wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?" Siddemanded. "And you love us, tell us." While Erich laughed, "Consideryourself lucky, _Kamerad_. Mark and I didn't draw any gloves at all."

  "What's wrong with it?" Bruce yelled. "The bloody things are bothlefts!" He slammed it down on the floor.

  We all howled, we couldn't help it. He turned his back on us and stampedoff, though I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed myarm and said between gasps, "_Mein Gott, Liebchen_, what have I alwaystold you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! Itis infallible!"

  One of us didn't laugh. Ever since the New Girl heard the name BruceMarchant, she'd had a look in her eyes like she'd been given thesacrament. I was glad she'd got interested in something, because she'dbeen pretty much of a snoot and a wet blanket up until now, althoughshe'd come to the Place with the recommendation of having been a realwhoopee girl in London and New York in the Twenties. She lookeddisapprovingly at us as she gathered up the tray and stuff, notforgetting the glove, which she placed on the center of the tray like aholy relic.

  * * * * *

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

  By that time, Bruce had come back to us, saying in a carefully hardvoice, "Look here, it's not the dashed glove itself, as you very wellknow, you howling Demons."

  "What is it then, noble heart?" Sid asked, his grizzled gold beardheightening 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 anddeath of the cosmos--and don't tell me that isn't in thecards!--masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders--and wedon't know who they are ultimately; it's just a name; we see only agentslike ourselves--the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of ourlifelines--"

  "Is that bad, lad?" Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced.

  "--and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight anothertime-traveling power called the Snakes--just a name, too--which is benton 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 andhustled into tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserableclosets, gray sacks, puss pockets--no offense to this Place--that theSpiders have created, maybe by gigantic implosions, but no one knows forcertain, and then we're sent off on all sorts of missions into the pastand future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart theSnakes."

  "True, lad."

  "And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks comeso fast, our emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public andprivate metaphysics distorted so insanely, the deepest thread of realitywe cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can get thingsstraight."

  "We've all felt that way, lad," Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleekdeath's head; "You should have seen me, _Kamerad_, my first fiftysleeps," 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 notthat," 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 historyand destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past,if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwartthe Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat theEast. But what have they done to achieve this? I'll give you somebeautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world,they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghostcity, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minorkey."

  * * * * *

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

  "But _you_ remember the dialogues, lad," Sid observed. "And rail not atCrete--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 ofGerman and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of JuliusCaesar."

  This time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place lovesthese bull sessions. "You omit to mention, sir, that Rome's newestdownfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes havefomented between the Eastern Classical World, MohammedanizedChristianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of powerfuturewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without everletting it
pass into the hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is theSnakes' Three-Thousand-Year Plan which we are fighting against, strivingto revive Rome's glories."

  "Striving is the word for it," Bruce snapped. "Here's yet anotherexample. To beat Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out ofWorld War Two, thereby ensuring a German invasion of the New World andcreating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines of Siberia to theplantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!"

  He stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chantingin a weird spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow.

  "_Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Kein' Peitsch', gnaedige 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 headcrooked up sideways and looking through us.

  I knew then, but Erich translated softly. "'Salt, salt, I bring salt. Nowhip, merciful sirs.' He is speaking to my countrymen in theirlanguage." Doc had spent his last months in a Nazi-operated salt mine.

  * * * * *

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

  "And it does not matter, sir," Beau translated, but directing his remarkat Bruce. "True, great civilizations have been dwarfed or broken by theChange War. But others, once crushed in the bud, have bloomed. In the1870s, I traveled a Mississippi that had never known Grant's gunboats. Istudied piano, languages, and the laws of chance under the greatestEuropean 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 drinkdead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so punyas to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no,nor with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron andnerves of brass. Waste not your pity on them."

  "True indeed, sir," Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack onhis Greater South. "Most of us enter the Change World with the falsemetaphysic that the slightest change in the past--a grain of dustmisplaced--will transform the whole future. It is a long while before weaccept with our minds as well as our intellects the law of theConservation of Reality: that when the past is changed, the futurechanges barely enough to adjust, barely enough to admit the new data.The Change Winds meet maximum resistance always. Otherwise the firstoperation 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 theimperialistic and Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historiancan tell the difference in most ages between the former Latin and thepresent Gothic Catholic Church. As you yourself, sir, said of Greece, itis as if an old melody were shifted into a slightly different key. Inthe wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it'strue, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for theusual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaninglessaccidents."

  "All right, you bloody savants--maybe I pushed my point too far," Brucegrowled. "But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methodswe 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?" heretorted, arguing like a woman. "If we need Einstein, why don't weResurrect 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 Doublegangera _soupcon_ longer, you will understand that great men can rarely beResurrected. Their beings are too crystallized, sir, their lifelines tootough."

  "Pardon me, but I think that's rot. I believe that most great men refuseto make the bargain with the Snakes, or with us Spiders either. Theyscorn Resurrection at the price demanded."

  "Brother, they ain't that great," I whispered, while Beau glided onwith, "However that may be, you have accepted Resurrection, sir, and soincurred an obligation which you as a gentleman must honor."

  "I accepted Resurrection all right," Bruce said, a glare coming into hiseyes. "When they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '17 tenminutes before I died, I grabbed at the offer of life like a drunkardgrabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I was alsoseizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace." His voice wasgetting wilder all the time. Just beyond our circle, I noticed the NewGirl watching him worshipfully. "But what did I find the Spiders wantedme for? Only to fight more wars, over and over again, make them cruelerand stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each BigChange, 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, "Whatkind of ball, think you, will please and so quench this fire-brainedrogue? And you love me, discover it."

  I whispered back without taking my eyes off Bruce either, "I knowsomebody who'll be happy to put on any kind of ball he wants, if he'lljust notice her."

  "The New Girl, sweetling? 'Tis well. This rogue speaks like an angryangel. It touches my heart and I like it not."

  Bruce was saying hoarsely but loudly, "And so we're sent on operationsin the past and from each of those operations the Change Winds blowfuturewards, swiftly or slowly according to the opposition they breast,sometimes rippling into each other, and any one of those Winds may shiftthe date of our own death ahead of the date of our Resurrection, so thatin an instant--even here, outside the cosmos--we may molder and rot orcrumble to dust and vanish away. The wind with our name in it may leakthrough 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 alwaysanother Resurrection."

  But Bruce didn't keep his mouth shut. He said, "Is there? I know theSpiders promise it, but even if they do go back and cut anotherDoubleganger from my lifeline, is he me?" He slapped his chest with hisbare hand. "I don't think so. And even if he is me, with unbrokenconsciousness, why's he been Resurrected again? Just to refight morewars and face more Change Death for the sake of an almighty power--" hisvoice was rising to a climax--"an almighty power so bloody ineffectual,it can't furnish one poor Soldier pulled out of the mud ofPasschendaele, one miserable Change Commando, one Godforsaken Recupereea 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 outragedsympathy in the whole world.

  The New Girl's timing was perfect. She whisked through us, and before hecould so much as wiggle the fingers, she whipped a black gauntletedglove on it and anyone could see that it fitted his hand perfectly.

  This time our laughing beat the other. We collapsed and slopped ourdrinks and pounded each other on the back and then started all over.

  "_Ach, der Handschuh, Liebchen!_ Where'd she get it?" Erich gasped in myear.

  "Probably just turned the other one inside out--that turns a left into aright--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 thefingers a little now and then, and the New Girl stood watching him as ifhe 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?"
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  "Lili," she said, and believe you me, she was Lili to me even in mythoughts from then on, for the way she'd handled that lunatic.

  "Lilian Foster," she explained. "I'm English also. Mr. Marchant, I'veread _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 Cambridgedays. In the trenches, I was working up some poems that were ratherbetter."

  "I won't hear you say that. But I'd be terribly thrilled to hear the newones. Oh, Mr. Marchant, it was so strange to hear you call itPassiondale."

  "Why, if I may ask?"

  "Because that's the way I pronounce it to myself. But I looked it up andit's more like Pas-ken-DA-luh."

  "Bless you! All the Tommies called it Passiondale, just as they calledYpres Wipers."

  "How interesting. You know, Mr. Marchant, I'll wager we were Recruitedin the same operation, summer of 1917. I'd got to France as a Red Crossnurse, 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 Erichgave me as we listened to them, as if to say, "Ain't it nice,_Liebchen_, Bruce has a silly little English schoolgirl to occupy himbetween operations?"

  Just the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklaceand tight little gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Brucehulking over her tenderly in his snazzy hussar's rig, I knew that I wasseeing the start of something that hadn't been part of me since Davedied fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort ofthing that almost made me wish there could be children in the ChangeWorld. I wondered why I'd never thought of trying to work things so thatDave got Resurrected and I told myself: no, it's all changed, I'vechanged, 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 wastelling Bruce. "I lived all through the Twenties, as you can see fromthe 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 youstarted in the trenches? I can't fancy them bettering your sonnet thatconcludes with, 'The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep; Lookat the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.'"

  That one almost made me whoop--what monkeys we are, I thought--thoughI'd be the first to admit that the best line to use on a poet is one ofhis own--in fact, as many as possible. I decided I could safely forgetour little Britons and devote myself to Erich or whatever needed me.