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

Or you could flick it for partial Inversion and turn something into a perfect three-dimensional mirror image of itself, just what a right-hand glove is of a left. Rotation through the fourth dimension, the science boys call it; I’ve heard of it being used in surgery on the highly asymmetric Martians, and even to give a socially impeccable right hand to a man who’d lost one, by turning an amputated right arm into an amputated left.

Ordinarily, nothing but live things are ever Inverted in Surgery and you wouldn’t think of doing it to an inanimate object, especially in a Place where the Doc’s a drunk and the Surgery hasn’t been used for hundreds of sleeps.

But when you’ve just fallen in love, you think of wonderful crazy things to do for people. Drunk with love, Lili had taken Bruce’s extra left-hand glove into Surgery, partially Inverted it, and got a right-hand glove to give him.

What Doc had been trying to say with his “Inversh⁠ ⁠… bosh⁠ ⁠…” was “Invert the box,” meaning we should put the bronze chest through full Inversion to get at the bomb inside to disarm it. Doc too had got the idea from Lili’s trick with the glove. What an inside-out tactical atomic bomb would look like, I could not imagine and did not particularly care to see. I might have to, though, I realized.

But the fast-motion film was still running in my head. Later on, Lili had decided like I had that her lover was going to lose out in his plea for mutiny unless she could give him a really captive audience⁠—and maybe, even then, she had been figuring on creating the nest for Bruce’s chicks and⁠ ⁠… all those other things we’d believed in for a while. So she’d taken the Major Maintainer and remembered the glove, and not many seconds later, she had set down on a shelf of the Art Gallery an object that no one would think of questioning⁠—except someone who knew the Gallery by heart.

I looked at the abstract sculpture a foot from my nose, at the clustered gray spheres the size of golf balls. I had known that the inside of the Maintainer was made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, but I hadn’t realized they were quite that big.

I said to myself, “Greta, this is going to give you a major psychosis, but you’re the one who has to do it, because no one is going to listen to your deductions when they’re all practically living on negative time already.”

I got up as quietly as if I were getting out of a bed I shouldn’t have been in⁠—there are some things Entertainers are good at⁠—and Kaby was just saying “you go mad in about fifty heartbeats.” Everybody on their feet was looking at Lili. Sid seemed to have moved, but I had no time for him except to hope he hadn’t done anything that might attract attention to me.

I stepped out of my shoes and walked rapidly to Surgery⁠—there’s one good thing about this hardest floor anywhere, it doesn’t creak. I walked through the Surgery screen that is like a wall of opaque, odorless cigarette smoke and I concentrated on remembering my snafued nurse’s training, and before I had time to panic, I had the sculpture positioned on the gleaming table of the Invertor.

I froze for a moment when I reached for the Inversion switch, thinking of the other time and trying to remember what it had been that bothered me so much about an inside-out brain being bigger and not having eyes, but then I either thumbed my nose at my nightmare or kissed my sanity goodbye, I don’t know which, and twisted the switch all the way over, and there was the Major Maintainer winking blue about three times a second as nice as you could want it.

It must have been working as sweet and steady as ever, all the time it was Inverted, except that, being inside out, it had hocused the direction finders.

black legged spiders
with red hearts of hell

“Jesu!” I turned and Sid’s face was sticking through the screen like a tinted bas-relief hanging on a gray wall and I got the impression he had peered unexpectedly through a slit in an arras into Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom.

He didn’t have any time to linger on the sensation, even if he’d wanted to, for an elbow with a copper band thrust through the screen and dug his ribs and Kaby marched Lili in by the neck. Erich, Mark and Illy were right behind. They caught the blue flashes and stopped dead, staring at the long-lost. Erich spared me one look which seemed to say, so you did it, not that it matters. Then he stepped forward and picked it up and held it solidly to his left side in the double right-angle made by fingers, forearm and chest, and reached for the Introversion switch with a look on his face as if he were opening a fifth of whisky.

The blue light died and Change Winds hit me like a stiff drink that had been a long, long time in coming, like a hot trumpet note out of nowhere.

I felt the changing pasts blowing through me, and the uncertainties whistling past, and ice-stiff reality softening with all its duties and necessities, and the little memories shredding away and dancing off like autumn leaves, leaving maybe not even ghosts behind, and all the crazy moods like Mardi Gras dancers pouring down an evening street, and something inside me had the nerve to say it didn’t care whether Greta Forzane’s death was riding in those Winds because they felt so good.

I could tell it was hitting the others the same way. Even battered, tightlipped Lili seemed to be saying, you’re making me drink the stuff and I hate you for it, but I do love it. I guess we’d all had the worry that even finding and Extroverting the Maintainer wouldn’t