“What is it then, noble heart?” Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard heightening 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 and death of the cosmos—and don’t tell me that isn’t in the cards!—masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders—and we don’t know who they are ultimately; it’s just a name; we see only agents like ourselves—the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of our lifelines—”
“Is that bad, lad?” Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced.
“—and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another time-traveling power called the Snakes—just a name, too—which is bent on 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 and hustled into tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserable closets, gray sacks, puss pockets—no offense to this Place—that the Spiders have created, maybe by gigantic implosions, but no one knows for certain, and then we’re sent off on all sorts of missions into the past and future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart the Snakes.”
“True, lad.”
“And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks come so fast, our emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public and private metaphysics distorted so insanely, the deepest thread of reality we cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can get things straight.”
“We’ve all felt that way, lad,” Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek death’s head; “You should have seen me, Kamerad, my first fifty sleeps,” 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 not that,” 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 history and destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past, if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart the Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the East. But what have they done to achieve this? I’ll give you some beautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key.”
“You got time for culture?” I heard myself say and I clapped my hand over my mouth in gentle reproof.
“But you remember the dialogues, lad,” Sid observed. “And rail not at Crete—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 of German and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of Julius Caesar.”
This time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place loves these bull sessions. “You omit to mention, sir, that Rome’s newest downfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes have fomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power futurewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever letting it pass into the hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is the Snakes’ Three-Thousand-Year Plan which we are fighting against, striving to revive Rome’s glories.”
“Striving is the word for it,” Bruce snapped. “Here’s yet another example. To beat Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out of World War Two, thereby ensuring a German invasion of the New World and creating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!”
He stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chanting in a weird spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow.
“Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Kein’ Peitsch’, gnädige 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 head crooked up sideways and looking through us.
I knew then, but Erich translated softly. “ ‘Salt, salt, I bring salt. No whip, merciful sirs.’ He is speaking to my countrymen in their language.” Doc had spent his last months in a Nazi-operated salt mine.
He saw us and got up, straightening his top hat very carefully. He frowned hard while my heart thumped half a dozen times. Then his face slackened, he shrugged his shoulders and muttered, “Nichevo.”
“And it does not matter, sir,” Beau translated, but directing his remark at Bruce. “True, great civilizations have been dwarfed or broken by the Change War. But others, once crushed in the bud, have bloomed. In the 1870s, I traveled a Mississippi that had never known Grant’s gunboats. I studied piano, languages, and the laws of chance under the greatest European 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 drink dead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so puny as to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no, nor with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and nerves of brass. Waste not your pity on them.”
“True indeed, sir,” Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack on his Greater South. “Most of us enter the Change World with the false metaphysic that the slightest change in the past—a grain of dust misplaced—will transform the whole future. It is a long while
