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

the order Kaby had given: one, three, five, six, two, four, seven. I was able to pray seven distinct times that he’d make a mistake.

He straightened up. Illy landed by the box like a huge silver spider and his tentacles whipped futilely across its top. The others surged to a frightened halt around them.

Erich’s chest was heaving, but his voice was cool and collected as he said, “You mentioned something about our having a future, Miss Foster. Now you can make that more specific. Unless we get back to the cosmos and dump this box, or find a Spider A-tech, or manage to call headquarters for guidance on disarming the bomb, we have a future exactly thirty minutes long.”

XIII The Tiger Is Loose

But whence he was, or of what wombe ybore,
Of beasts, or of the earth, I have not red:
But certes was with milke of wolves and tygres fed.

Spenser

I guess when they really push the button or throw the switch or spring the trap or focus the beam or what have you, you don’t faint or go crazy or anything else convenient. I didn’t. Everything, everybody, every move that was made, every word that was spoken, was painfully real to me, like a hand twisting and squeezing things deep inside me, and I saw every least detail spotlighted and magnified like I had the seven skulls.

Erich was standing beyond the bomb chest; little smiles were ruffling his lips. I’d never seen him look so sharp. Illy was beside him, but not on his side, you understand. Mark, Sevensee and Beau were around the chest to the nearer side. Beau had dropped to a knee and was scanning the chest minutely, terror-under-control making him bend his head a little closer than he needed to for clear vision, but with his hands locked together behind his back, I guess to restrain the impulse to push any and everything that looked like a disarming button.

Doc was sprawled face down on the nearest couch, out like a light, I suppose.

Us four girls were still by the control divan. With Kaby, that surprised me, because she didn’t look scared or frozen, but almost as intensely alive as Erich.

Sid had turned back, as I’d said, and had one hand stretched out toward but not touching the Minor Maintainer, and a look on his beardy face as if he were calling down death and destruction on every boozy rogue who had ever gone up from King’s Lynn to Cambridge and London, and I realized why: if he’d thought of the Minor Maintainer a second sooner, he could have pinned Erich down with heavy gravity before he could touch the buttons.

Bruce was resting one hand on the head of the control divan and was looking toward the group around the chest, toward Erich, I think, as if Erich had done something rather wonderful for him, though I can’t imagine myself being tickled at being included in anybody’s suicide surprise party. Bruce looked altogether too dreamy, Brahma blast him, for someone who must have the same steel-spiked thought in his head that I know darn well the rest of us had: that in twenty-nine minutes or so, the Place would be a sun in a bag.

Erich was the first to get down to business, as I’d have laid any odds he would be. He had the jump on us and he wasn’t going to lose it.

“Well, when are you going to start getting Lili to tell us where she hid the Maintainer? It has to be her⁠—she was too certain it was gone forever when she talked. And Bruce must have seen from the bar who took the Maintainer, and who would he cover up for but his girl?”

There he was plagiarizing my ideas, but I guess I was willing to sign them over to him in full if he got us the right pail of water for that time-bomb.

He glanced at his wrist. “According to my Caller, you have twenty-nine and a half minutes, including the time it will take to get a Door or contact headquarters. When are you going to get busy on the girl?”

Bruce laughed a little⁠—deprecatingly, so help me⁠—and started toward him. “Look here, old man,” he said, “there’s no need to trouble Lili, or to fuss with headquarters, even if you could. Really not at all. Not to mention that your surmises are quite unfounded, old chap, and I’m a bit surprised at your advancing them. But that’s quite all right because, as it happens, I’m an atomics technician and I even worked on that very bomb. To disarm it, you just have to fiddle a bit with some of the ankhs, those hoopy little crosses. Here, let me⁠—”

Allah il allah, but it must have struck everybody as it did me as being just too incredible an assertion, too bloody British a barefaced bluff, for Erich didn’t have to say a word; Mark and Sevensee grabbed Bruce by the arms, one on each side, as he stooped toward the bronze chest, and they weren’t gentle about it. Then Erich spoke.

“Oh, no, Bruce. Very sporting of you to try to cover up for your girl friend, but we aren’t going to let ourselves be blown to stripped atoms twenty-eight minutes too soon while you monkey with the buttons, the very thing Benson-Carter warned against, and pray for a guesswork miracle. It’s too thin, Bruce, when you come from 1917 and haven’t been on the Big Time for a hundred sleeps and were calling for an A-tech yourself a few hours ago. Much too thin. Bruce, something is going to happen that I’m afraid you won’t like, but you’re going to have to put up with it. That is, unless Miss Foster decides to be cooperative.”

“I say, you fellows, let me go,” Bruce demanded, struggling experimentally. “I know it’s a bit thick to swallow and I did give you the wrong impression calling for an A-tech,