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

High Vixen of all Foxes, but what the Hell is Peterhouse?”

“The oldest college at Cambridge,” he told me rather coolly.

XVI The Possibility-Binders

Familiar with infinite universe sheafs and open-ended postulate systems?⁠—the notion that everything is possible⁠—and I mean everything⁠—and everything has happened. Everything.

Heinlein

An hour later, I was nursing a weak highball and a black eye in the sleepy-time darkness on the couch farthest from the piano, half watching the highlighted party going on around it and the bar, while the Place waited for rendezvous with Egypt and the Battle of Alexandria.

Sid had swept all our outstanding problems into one big bundle and, since his hand held the joker of the Minor Maintainer, he had settled them all as high-handedly as if they’d been those of a bunch of schoolkids.

It amounted to this:

We’d been Introverted when most of the damning things had happened, so presumably only we knew about them, and we were all in so deep one way or another that we’d all have to keep quiet to protect our delicate complexions.

Well, Erich’s triggering the bomb did balance rather neatly Bruce’s incitement to mutiny, and there was Doc’s drinking, while everybody who had declared for the peace message had something to hide. Mark and Kaby I felt inclined to trust anywhere, Maud for sure, and Erich in this particular matter, damn him. Illy I didn’t feel at all easy about, but I told myself there always has to be a fly in the ointment⁠—a darn big one this time, and furry.

Sid didn’t mention his own dirty linen, but he knew we knew he’d flopped badly as boss of the Place and only recouped himself by that last-minute flimflam.

Remembering Sid’s trick made me think for a moment about the real Spiders. Just before I snuck out of Surgery, I’d had a vivid picture of what they must look like, but now I couldn’t get it again. It depressed me, not being able to remember⁠—oh, I probably just imagined I’d had a picture, like a hophead on a secret-of-the-universe kick. Me ever find out anything about the Spiders?⁠—except for nervous notions like I’d had during the recent fracas?⁠—what a laugh!

The funniest thing (ha-ha!) was that I had ended up the least-trusted person. Sid wouldn’t give me time to explain how I’d deduced what had happened to the Maintainer, and even when Lili spoke up and admitted hiding it, she acted so bored I don’t think everybody believed her⁠—although she did spill the realistic detail that she hadn’t used partial Inversion on the glove; she’d just turned it inside out to make it a right and then done a full Inversion to get the lining back inside.

I tried to get Doc to confirm that he’d reasoned the thing out the same way I had, but he said he had been blacked out the whole time, except during the first part of the hunt, and he didn’t remember having any bright ideas at all. Right now, he was having Maud explain to him twice, in detail, everything that had happened. I decided that it was going to take a little more work before my reputation as a great detective was established.

I looked over the edge of the couch and just made out in the gloom one of Bruce’s black gloves. It must have been kicked there. I fished it up. It was the right-hand one. My big clue, and was I sick of it! Got mittens, God forbid! I slung it away and, like a lurking octopus, Illy shot up a tentacle from the next couch, where I hadn’t known he was resting, and snatched the glove like it was a morsel of underwater garbage. These E.T.s can seem pretty shuddery nonhuman at times.

I thought of what a cold-blooded, skin-saving louse Illy had been, and about Sid and his easy suspicions, and Erich and my black eye, and how, as usual, I’d got left alone in the end. My men!

Bruce had explained about being an A-tech. Like a lot of us, he’d had several widely different jobs during his first weeks in the Change World and one of them had been as secretary to a group of the minor atomics boys from the Manhattan-Project-Earth-Satellite days. I gathered he’d also absorbed some of his bothersome ideas from them. I hadn’t quite decided yet what species of heroic heel he belonged to, but he was thick with Mark and Erich again. Everybody’s men!

Sid didn’t have to argue with anybody; all the wild compulsions and mighty resolves were dead now, anyway until they’d had a good long rest. I sure could use one myself, I knew.

The party at the piano was getting wilder. Lili had been dancing the black bottom on top of it and now she jumped down into Sid’s and Sevensee’s arms, taking a long time about it. She’d been drinking a lot and her little gray dress looked about as innocent on her as diapers would on Nell Gwyn. She continued her dance, distributing her marks of favor equally between Sid, Erich and the satyr. Beau didn’t mind a bit, but serenely pounded out “Tonight’s the Night”⁠—which she’d practically shouted to him not two minutes ago.

I was glad to be out of the party. Who can compete with a highly experienced, utterly disillusioned seventeen-year-old really throwing herself away for the first time?

Something touched my hand. Illy had stretched a tentacle into a furry wire to return me the black glove, although he ought to have known I didn’t want it. I pushed it away, privately calling Illy a washed-out moronic tarantula, and right away I felt a little guilty. What right had I to be critical of Illy? Would my own character have shown to advantage if I’d been locked in with eleven octopoids a billion years away? For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?

Still, I was glad to be out of the party, though I kept on watching it. Bruce was drinking