The Big Time, Fritz Leiber [book recommendations website TXT] 📗

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 pickup 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 copilot 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 teenager 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