Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Big Time
    The Big Time
    The Big Time
    Ebook158 pages3 hours

    The Big Time

    By Fritz Leiber

    3/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theatre and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy. Moreover, he excelled in all fields of speculative fiction, writing award-winning work in fantasy, horror, and science fiction.“The Big Time” is a short science fiction novel by Fritz Leiber. It was awarded the Hugo Award during 1958. The Big Time is a story involving only a few characters, but with a vast, cosmic back story. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOtbebookpublishing
    Release dateDec 27, 2015
    ISBN9783956766770
    Author

    Fritz Leiber

    Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was the highly acclaimed author of numerous science fiction stories and novels, many of which were made into films. He is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won many awards, including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

    Read more from Fritz Leiber

    Related to The Big Time

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Reload

      Oct 5, 2021

      Reload
      11 min read

    • Article

      Asleep At The Gap

      May 7, 2019

      Asleep At The Gap
      16 min read

    • Article

      Gene Wolfe And The Book Of Gold

      Apr 25, 2019

      His example was a welcome counter to the romanticized notion of the philandering rebel artist. Regular habits, a strong work ethic, and a love of revision were the secret ingredients to a successful writing career. The post Gene Wolfe and the Book of

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Beautiful South

      Nov 11, 2021

      The Beautiful South
      10 min read

    • Article

      Alastair Reynolds

      Aug 11, 2021

      What is your daily writing routine like? I’m not a morning person, so I don’t rush to the keyboard. Typically I’ll aim to get 1,000 words done before lunch, then another 1,000-2,000 by the end of the afternoon. Things shift around in winter as I like

      2 min read

    • Article

      Requiem for a Reader

      Jul 28, 2017

      My first memory of my father as a reader was him telling me to hurry up; it was almost time to silflay. The post Requiem for a Reader appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      A Recipe For Murder

      Oct 5, 2023

      A Recipe For Murder
      4 min read

    • Article

      Reader's Letter

      May 31, 2023

      SIR: I was astonished to read (Spring issue) that Hunter Davies believes he may be the only person left in the UK who has milk delivered in glass bottles every morning. Oop ’ere in t’north, we have milk delivered in this way. We also have Ringtons Te

      6 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Mar 24, 2022

      CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS The very interesting report on ‘Man Of Russia’ and his outlandish claims about giant trees [FT415:9] got me thinking

      14 min read

    • Article

      Spellcheck

      Jan 1, 2019

      Whose history I do not know. I do know I’ve been e-upbraided for my fast and loose spelling of Woden, the god whose last worshipper must have slipped under the sod during the medieval period, somewhere in the 10th century—imagine those bog-soaked des

      5 min read

    • Article

      Tangled Up In The Blues

      Dec 14, 2022

      Tangled Up In The Blues
      3 min read

    • Article

      LetTerBOCKS

      Oct 13, 2022

      LetTerBOCKS
      13 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jul 13, 2023

      James Wright’s letter [FT431:62- 63] rightly points out that the film Poltergeist was allegedly ‘cursed’. However, he gave me a laugh when he mentions actress “JoBeth Williams, who won the part for showing precocious reading ability at her audition”.

      14 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

      Dec 12, 2021

      As long as there are authors, translators, publishers large or small committed to the deliberate word deliberately committed to the page, and so many who still need those words on pages, legal or illegal, right, left, or center, we’ll find our feet a

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Spectre Of The Past

      Jan 25, 2024

      The Spectre Of The Past
      6 min read

    • Article

      Going Gothic How To Tell The Goth-iest Story Ever

      Oct 1, 2021

      WHAT DO DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, AND YOUR SISTER’S LACE-UP COMBAT BOOTS ALL HAVE IN COMMON? If your answer was “they’re super cool,” you’d be right! But if your answer was “they’re all part of the gothic’tradition,” you’d be even righter. Being gothic

      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 5, 2020

      Sadly, the wonderfully prescient quotation from Samuel Pepys [FT397:70], “A dram in exchange for the pox is an ill bargain indeed,” is not by the great diarist, but from a spoof Twitter account. (https://londonist.com/london/books-and-poetry/samuel-p

      13 min read

    • Article

      A Rake’s Regression

      Aug 16, 2019

      There are not many of us who don’t have memories of the kleptomaniac wild canines, cantankerous aunties and troublingly eccentric confectionery peddlers he created when we were children. Those of a similar vintage to me may also recall the first stir

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Big Time

    3/5

    235 ratings22 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Kelsey Cretcher's review below pretty much nailed it, though I liked it only slightly better.

      Plot? Not interesting, barely there.
      Characters? Not interesting, barely there.
      Evocative atmosphere, immortal prose, etc.? Not a chance.

      It reads like a novelisation of some 1950s anthology sci-fi series, pre-Twilight Zone. It's slim, not very important, not terribly well-done. And to call it a thrilling "saga" as one book cover does is ludicrous. You may as well call the "Old Mother Hubbard" nursery rhyme "an astonishing new series."
    • 4/5
      Greta Forzane is an Entertainer, a sort of USO worker for the soldiers fighting in the Change War, a mighty struggle to determine the course of history. The controlling forces in this war are known to their human forces only as Spiders and Snakes; Greta's with the Spiders. She works in an R&R facility for Spider forces coming off rough duty. Some soldiers arrive straight from combat, and then some more arrive, this time non-humans, bringing an atomic bomb intended for use in changing the outcome of a conflict deep in Earth's past. Tensions amongst the ill-matched group run high--and then they find that their Place has been cut off from the rest of reality, and the machine that did it, which is also the machine which maintains the existence of the Place, has vanished. While trying to solve this very alarming problem, these people learn entirely too much about each other, and possibly even about themselves. In the end, I concluded that I didn't much like any of them, but that really didn't matter while I was reading. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      I can't think of a better way to start off the Hugo's than this story. Set in The Piano Bar at the End of the Universe, this is a simple, short book that left me feeling completely decompressed from some of the extremely dense books I've been reading lately while still being excited for science fiction. The incorporation of strange technologies and aliens reminded me of the feeling I get when I'm watching a good Star Trek episode, one where they aren't trying to technobabble a science-y explanation, but are simply using technology as a rhetorical tool to bring together elements that could not otherwise exist in the same place. There is no need to explain exactly what "Inversion" does in The Big Time, it is being completely shut away from the cosmos and that is all we need to know.
    • 4/5
      I read this in my early teens and was crushingly disappointed by it. I knew enough about sf to know that for a novel to win a Hugo was a Big Thing, I'd read Isaac Asimov's first anthology of Hugo-winning shorts, I'd read a few Hugo-winning novels that had pinned me gasping to my seat . . . and yet this novel I'd picked up and hurried home with eagerly because of the big HUGO WINNER on the cover was a slight little thing, staged entirely in a single room and its antechambers, narrated in a quirky fashion, and with not a lot going on of yer actual dramatic action. Galaxies remained unspanned, gobs unsmacked.

      So I was a little nervous when I picked up The Big Time again after an elapse of, gawdelpus, nearly half a century. This time around the novel's slenderness struck me as one of its major appeals . . .

      . . . and then I read it, and discovered at last why it's absolutely right that this book should have won a Hugo -- in fact, it's depressing the book was published at a time when the ghetto walls around sf were tall and strong, because really the novel deserved wider recognition than a Hugo could offer.

      Greta Forzane is an "Entertainer" in The Place, a Recuperation Station, one of a number of Places where troops go for R&R in between tours of duty as they fight the Change War, the war between the Spiders and the Snakes that's waged by altering history in order to effect desirable changes in the future. The troops -- and ancillary personnel like Greta -- are recruited ("Resurrected") by being plucked out of their lives in the Little Time soon before their deaths and brought into the Big Time, which is the amorphous spatiotemporal region that's outside spacetime and via which it's possible to travel immediately from one point in the Little Time's chronology to another. (One of the possibilities the denizens of the Big Time especially dread is Change Death, which happens when a change in history shifts the moment of your death to a point before that of your "Resurrection".) Making desirable changes to history is not as easy as you might think, because, as Leiber explains in his Introduction to the 1982 Collier edition (the SFBC version of which is the one I read),

      I assumed a Law of the Conservation of Reality, meaning that the past would resist change (temporal reluctance) and tend to work back quickly into its old course, and you'd have to go back and make many little changes, sometimes over and over again, before you could get a really big change going [. . .:] It still seems to me a plausible assumption, reflecting the tenacity of events and the difficulty of achieving anything of real significance in this cosmos -- a measure of the strength of the powers that be. (p3)

      Into The Place, which has something of the Blue Angel about it, tumble one day three weary temporal soldiers -- a Nazi officer, Erich (who is Greta's occasional lover and who beats her), a Roman legionnaire (whom she also knows) and a stranger, an English poet who met his death in WWI. While they are still settling in for their R&R, another trio arrives: a centaur, a creature from the moon when the moon was civilized millions of years ago, and a Minoan warrior princess . . . bearing with them what proves to be a 1950s atom bomb. One of Greta's fellow-Entertainers falls in love with the poet, whose work she has adored all her life and whose tragically early death in the trenches has always made him seem yet more romantic. While the principals are discussing various surprisingly interesting existential matters ("Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos?" -- p 65), one of their number switches off and hides the Major Maintainer, the gadget that maintains The Place in its correct relationship with not just the rest of the Big Time but the rest of all reality. The cast (a term I use because the novel reads in some ways like a stage play) could be trapped here in isolation forever. Yet, since The Place is only one big room and a couple of secondary ones, where -- and how -- could the Major Maintainer have been hidden in such a fashion that even the most painstaking search fails to reveal it?

      Minds are concentrated when Erich, the sociopathic Nazi, arms the atom bomb so that it'll detonate within half an hour. The only way to escape the blast would seem to be to locate the Major Maintainer and then, reconnected to the rest of reality once more, sling the device out of The Place before it can explode. In other words, the characters' survival depends on their ability to solve what's a fairly distinguished locked-room mystery. (The solution, when it finally appears, is one that John Dickson Carr would have been pleased with.)

      As noted above, the Change War is being waged between the Spiders and the Snakes. No one knows what the purpose of the war is, or what result could possibly constitute victory for one side of the other. None of the cast, although their nominal allegiance is with the Spiders, have ever met a Spider, and certainly they've never met a Snake; they have no idea, in fact, who or what the Spiders and Snakes are. To most of the characters, especially the soldiers, this barely matters: they loudly detest the Snakes, have great loyalty toward the Spiders. Exceptions are Greta herself, with whose thoughts we grow most acquainted since she's our narrator, and the poet, Bruce, who is likewise, as a poet, introspective. It's Bruce who, in an impassioned oration to the others, spells out the reality of war as it affects ordinary soldiers and civilians:

      But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world -- one little solar system [. . .:] -- and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear. (p63)

      Now, of course, I have to try to lay hands on Leiber's spinoff shorter Change War pieces: "Try and Change the Past", "Damnation Morning", "The Oldest Soldier", "Knight to Move" and "No Great Magic".
    • 3/5
      Part of my plan this year (my 49th on this earth) is to read books that I started but never finished. I took this book on a family vacation when I was 16 and got stuck somewhere in the first five pages. Reading it this time, I could see why...it took me probably 20 pages (in a very short novel) to get the characters and setting straight in my head. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed it by the end. It made me yearn for some more science fiction of that vintage. (This was a 1958 Hugo Award Winner.)
    • 5/5
      i was secretary to this brilliant human being, and this is my personal favorite book of all of his remarkable titles. [the 'change wars' cycle has other goodies too]

    • 5/5
      Say you're about to die in a few minutes, maybe, like our narrator Greta Forzane, after ten minutes of being raped to death by soldiers of a Third Reich that goes from the salt mines of Siberia to the cornfields of Iowa. And then you are offered an opportunity to escape your fate - an opportunity no one ever refuses. Of course, you have to enroll with the Spiders or the Snakes, become a Demon in their eternal Change War, a vast cosmic struggle across millions of years to change history to ... well, no one is really sure what the war's point is. You just serve your side as a Soldier or an Entertainer.Greta's an Entertainer, one of the staff in the Place, a zone outside of regular time and space, an R&R stop for the Soldiers back from missions to terminate the Roman Empire early, nuke Ancient Crete, or kidnap a baby Einstein. History is a stubborn, hard thing to change. And, if you succeed, there's always the blowback of the Change Winds which may you take you into nonexistence.Part party girl, part song and dance trouper, part sex therapist and comfort woman, she has a thing for Sid, former contemporary of Shakespeare - when duty doesn't have her attending to Nazi soldier boyfriend Erich. Her co-workers are Beau, formerly of a Great South that never knew Grant's gunboats on the Mississippi, and Doc, a drunken, derelict medical officer, formerly of a Nazi occupied Czarist Russia. And then there's Maud from the 23rd Century and New Girl who seems destined to off herself in many versions of the early 20th century - until recruited.Enter three soldiers - a Nazi, a Roman, and a casualty of Passchendaele - back from a botched mission. New Girl falls for the latter, a poet who starts suggesting something suspiciously like rebellion against their Spider masters. And then a distress call, a rescue mission for three other Soldiers - two of them aliens.In 160 pages of story, Leiber creates and explains a world of Demons, Ghostgirls, Doublegangers, and Zombies, throws out a bunch of alternate histories, convincingly shows the psychology of those who are comfortable with the chaos of the Change War, and, ripped from normal lives, what they most miss.Leiber puts his theatrical experience to good use. With only nine characters, one setting, and offstage action related in convincing, if sometimes poetic, dialogue, this is one classic that lives up to its billing. In fact, it's one of those rare science fiction classics that history and technological progress have not dated, not even a bit.The book comes with an informative introduction by Leiber about the creation of the novel and the Change War series - though this story stands entirely on its own and an afterword by Robert Thurston on the theatrical elements of the novel.
    • 4/5
      There are moments of genius in this book
    • 3/5
      Soldiers from across Time fight in the endless Change War for their unseen masters the Spiders and Snakes. And when it all gets too much, they retire briefly to a Place outside space and time for some R&R. There, Entertainers like narrator Greta or Elizabethan actor Sidney look after their needs. But this time some radical Change War veterans, a nuclear bomb and getting cut off from the Big Time make for a most unrelaxing stopover.
    • 3/5
      Hard to follow at times. Amazing idea and locked-room mystery but in many ways shows the time of its creation.
    • 2/5
      Ultimately, a disappointment. Somewhere in here was a cool idea but the execution just fell flat for me - even allowing for the era in which it was written. Keeping that era in mind usually gives me the ability to forgive the weirdly condescending attitude toward women and the strangely arrogant nature of several character depictions. But this book was just too disjointed in delivery. Most of the glib pseudo-hippie jingo-lingo felt just plain forced and the time-travel alternate reality stuff seemed a coat of semi-shiny paint on an otherwise rickety closed-room mystery tale. The fact that most of the first-person narrative was delivered as private thoughts instead of conversation/interaction with other characters also didn't help. In short, the whole thing was more of a mess than I had expected from a hugo-winning novel. Unfortunately, the best thing I can say for this book is that it is short.
    • 4/5
      I liked the first two thirds of this short cold war novel quite a bit, but felt a bit let down by the ending. It certainly has a very different feel from your normal scifi yarn, telling the tale of what happens to a limited cast of characters trapped in a single room (outside of time and space) over the course of a few hours. Indeed, it has the feeling a an ensemble play (which might have worked even better with a bit smaller cast of better defined characters)..
    • 3/5
      Just barely makes it into the "worth reading" pile ... but you have to get beyond the dated writing style and casual misogyny ... and it's really more of a novella based on its length.
    • 2/5
      A story which looks at time travel from outside time, and the possible consequences of deliberate interference with event with the intent of manipulating the future. The protagonists are all actors in a war being waged across time, by two ill-defined groups known as the spiders and snakes.The war setting is typical of 1960s SF, where the cold war and its various hot proxies in Vietnam and elsewhere were inescapable realities which affected much fiction. To me, this was very much a book of its time. I found the prose a bit laboured, and the story ultimately unengaging. I've greatly enjoyed some of Fritz Leiber's short stories, most memorably "Gonna Roll the Bones", but this book didn't provide anything like the same sort of enjoyment. It won a Hugo, and maybe that means it was more striking at the time it was written than now, some 40 years later. Certainly there are many ideas and devices that set it apart from the fiction of the time - a female narrator, aliens from the past as well as the future - but they aren't enough to rescue it now for me.
    • 3/5
      Part of my plan this year (my 49th on this earth) is to read books that I started but never finished. I took this book on a family vacation when I was 16 and got stuck somewhere in the first five pages. Reading it this time, I could see why...it took me probably 20 pages (in a very short novel) to get the characters and setting straight in my head. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed it by the end. It made me yearn for some more science fiction of that vintage. (This was a 1958 Hugo Award Winner.)
    • 2/5
      The book assumes a lot in the first two chapters and you have to draw a diagram to keep track of what's happening. I don't like stories that jump in the middle and expect the readers to bring it into clarity. Gosh!
    • 3/5
      Well! This is a weird one. There's a whole rich backstory about two mysterious factions called the "Snakes" and "Spiders" that are fighting a crosstime "Change War" with the whole of history as their backdrop and dangerous dudes drawn from all eras, past and future as their soldiers. Each of them is simultaneously mounting some near-infinitude of missions to alter how it is/was/will be and put themselves in charge across a timestream that is trying to knit itself back together and preserve its logic even though one minute the Nazis are in Cleveland and the next the Horgons are on Glovax 7. But none of that intrudes here, not really; instead, we get a bunch of "Soldiers" on furlough and their "Entertainers" trying to soothe their screaming psyches and philosophizing and machinating against one another in their different ways to escape from under the thumb of their masters/cause death on a cosmic scale/have a rollicking Elizabethan adventure in outer space/punch out the guy who stole their lady/find out what's really going on here/etc. It all goes on in some kind of crazyphysics lounge at the end of the universe, and people embody Nietzschean and existential ideas in different ways and there is an a-bomb. All this in 135 pages. I understood about as much as I enjoyed, which was a reasonable amount I'd say.
    • 4/5
      A group of time warriors and R&R center workers have a little adventure all on their own.As I was reading this book, I didn't know quite what to think about it. Just as a general description, it's very much like a one room play with everything happening right there in front of you. I think you could call it a psychological thriller because there is no action to speak of - it's just a series of deceptions, ploys, bluffs and schemes.The basic idea is that you've got a small group of warriors back from a mission who need a little time for rest and relaxation. You've got the people working at the R&R facility whose job it is to provide an environment that is conducive to rest, relaxation and recuperation. The R&R facility is a single room, kind of cordoned off into a couple of different niches. There's a niche of surgery, a storage room, bedrooms and a bar/dance floor.One day, one of the soldiers begins ranting about whether or not they should be fighting the fight they're fighting or whether they should just defect and live a life of quiet tranquility. Then all hell breaks loose. They end up being "inverted" which is essentially turned inside out and hidden from the rest of the universe, both in space and in time. Eventually, through a couple of gambits and some quick thinking by our narrator, the inversion is undone and everything returns to normal. It's almost like it never happened. That's their story and they're sticking to it.After I was done with it, I discovered I liked the book far more than I liked it while I was reading it. I don't know why.
    • 5/5
      Originally published in Galaxy magazine in 1958, it won the Hugo for that year."A superior adventure-mystery about the strangely assorted crew of men and women, snatched out of their lives by emissaries from the far future, who fight and scheme to change the structure of time and history." (from P. Schuyler Miller, reviewing in Analog)It's fun. This was written nearly sixty years ago. It was the beginning of things. Read it with that thought.
    • 4/5
      A Riff on Time, War, and Existence

      Fritz Leiber was a man of many skills and trades, among them brilliant student who graduated from the University of Chicago, minor roles in theater and film (he was the child of Shakespearean actors), and writer. His novel The Big Time appeared first in Galaxy Magazine. Though having only appeared in the magazine, it won the 1958 Hugo for best science fiction novel. Later, in 1962, Ace Books published it in book form, and the Library of America has included in its classic science fiction volumes.

      The Big Time is as much a philosophical query into the nature of life, the effects of perpetual war, external life, love, and cynicism about pretty much everything, as it is about time travel and the disruption of the time line. In the novel, Leiber introduces his Law of the Conservation of Reality, which states that changed time will eventually return to its forgone timeline, and that the only way to change time permanently is to effect many small changes in time over the course of the timeline. This is what the Change War, the backdrop for the novel, is all about. Two cosmic factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, wage war on an epic scale, across time and space, on all the inhabited planets, from the start of time to the end of it. For their troops, they resurrect people from all eras, team them up, and send them off on missions to change events. For example, we learn that the Nazis have won WWII and rule most of the world, including the U.S.

      The novel itself transpires in a more finite space and time, a few hours in a way station know as The Place. It’s a combination recuperation field hospital and entertainment venue for soldiers finishing a mission and on their way to another. The story begins when three soldiers pass through the door and begin mingling with the staff, among them four women, one of whom serves as the narrator, Greta. Over the course of their hours together, they argue about war, about rebelling and trying to effect peace, and about just retiring and returning to a normal life. To sharpen the arguments and introduce a bit of urgency and theater, Leiber introduces an A-bomb into The Place and has one of the characters start it ticking, giving the occupants only thirty minutes to avoid oblivion.

      As mentioned, Leiber was an intellect and Shakespearean and both show in this novel. The meditations prove weighty and the dialogues between characters not only are jammed with literary allusions, references, and palaver in the slang of the time, but also Shakespearean prose, German, and Latin. Perhaps, then, not for everybody, but definitely for sci-fi readers who like their imaginations stimulated and challenged, often all in the same sentence.

    • 4/5
      I love to read some SF classics every once in a while, and Leiber never disappoints. While the style and language definitely reflect the time in which it was written, I think this story holds up pretty well. Although all the action takes place in one "Place", it's an engaging and fast-moving read (or listen; this was the audiobook version, excellently narrated by Suzanne Torren). Highly recommended if you want to try some older SF.
    • 3/5
      A closed door mystery in a setting where demons and ghosts are just as human in their fears and needs as any crime victim and survival is much more a matter of psychology than of power. Not much is actually happening in this recreation centre for soldiers wounded in a cosmic war between time travellers, but the unraveling and unpicking of the characters, their lives and the horrors they went through as well as the relationships between them is definitely worth a read.Again an excellent librivox audiobook read by Karen Savage.

    Book preview

    The Big Time - Fritz Leiber

    THE BIG TIME

    By FRITZ LEIBER

    Illustrated by FINLAY

    You can't know there's a war on—for the Snakes coil and Spiders weave to keep you from knowing it's being fought over your live and dead body!

    CHAPTER 1

    When shall we three meet again

    In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

    When the hurlyburly's done.

    When the battle's lost and won.

    —Macbeth

    ENTER THREE HUSSARS

    My name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me. I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time—not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either.

    I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star who also bears my first name, but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own. I need it, for my job is to nurse back to health and kid back to sanity Soldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going. This war is the Change War, a war of time travelers—in fact, our private name for being in this war is being on the Big Time. Our Soldiers fight by going back to change the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help our side win the final victory a billion or more years from now. A long killing business, believe me.

    You don't know about the Change War, but it's influencing your lives all the time and maybe you've had hints of it without realizing.

    Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints of the Change War.

    How I got recruited into the Change War, how it's conducted, what the two sides are, why you don't consciously know about it, what I really think about it—you'll learn in due course.

    The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer and I've got my silly side, as you'll find out.

    My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of times and places. We're a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run a pretty good Recuperation Station, though we have our family troubles. But most of our troubles come slamming into the Place with the beat-up Soldiers, who've generally just been going through hell and want to raise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived Soldiers who started this thing I'm going to tell you about, this thing that showed me so much about myself and everything.

    When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and two thousand nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one thousand. This two-nightmares routine every time you lay down your dizzy little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it.

    The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub where the Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated for a party, though a Zeppelin is one thing we haven't had yet. You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with anything from the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look strangely similar except for size.

    Solely on doctor's orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since coming to work at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if you care to call them that, for believe me they are busman's holidays, considering what goes on in the Place 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 pick-up 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 co-pilot 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 teen-ager 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 German to understand that last crack. He threw back his sable-edged pelisse to clear his sword arm and he swung away from Erich, which bumped him into Beau. At the first sign of the quarrel, Beau had raised himself from the divan as quickly and silently as a—no, I won't use that word—and slithered over to them.

    Sirs, you forget yourselves, he said sharply, off balance, supporting himself on the New Boy's upraised arm. This is Sidney Lessingham's Place of Entertainment and Recuperation. There are ladies—

    With a contemptuous snarl, the New Boy shoved him off and snatched with his bare hand for his saber. Beau reeled against the divan, it caught him in the shins and he fell toward the Maintainers. Sid whisked them out of the way as if they were a couple of beach

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1