American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (98 page)

He had never quite expected that he would be asked to do something like this. He gradually admitted to himself that as time had gone by, he had come to believe that he would never be asked to do anything. But the man was his friend, and Eddie had taken his money.

But he had other friends, now, and he had worked on this engine himself this afternoon, tuning it patiently.

But the money was important. It was helping his savings a great deal. The more he saved, the sooner he could marry Alice. But if he didn’t plant the bomb, the money would stop.

Other things might happen if he didn’t plant the bomb. His friend might turn him in somehow, and then he would lose the respect of his friends here in the shop, and never marry Alice.

He had to do something.

He drew a quick breath and thrust the bomb through the opened inspection plate into the space between the engine and the inner surface of the nacelle. He hastily bolted the plate back down and ran out of the hangar.

He had done only one thing to offset the complete helplessness he felt. As he slipped the cartridge through the opened inspection plate, his fingers closed on it convulsively, almost as though by reflex, almost as though clutching at some hope of salvation, or almost as though thrusting away something precious to him. And he knew as he was doing it that it was only an empty gesture, because what did it matter when the plane crashed?

He had re-set the timer, but no one—certainly not Eddie Bates—could have said by how much.

I must remember, Martino thought, looking across the office at Colonel Azarin, that the K-Eighty-eight is not meant to be a bribe. Some people buy the attention of other people by telling them things. No man is so drab as not to have some personal detail that will intrigue others. I must remember that I can tell Azarin about the time I played hookey from grammar school because I was ashamed to raise my hand to go to the washroom. That is intriguing enough, and will attract enough attention to me. Or I can tell him some back fence gossip— about Johnson, the astrophysicist, for instance, who looks at figure studies in his room at night. That will hold his attention at least until I have exhausted all the details of the story. I can tell him all these things, and as many more as I can remember, but I must not try to hold his attention by telling him about the K-Eighty-eight because that is not a proper use of it.

I must remember, he thought with infinite patience for clarity’s sake, never to admit I know anything about the K-Eightyeight. That is the greatest defense against the urge to gossip —to look surprised or pretend disinterest when someone comes to you for further details.

“Sit down, Doctor of Science Martino,” Azarin said, smiling pleasantly. “Please be so good.”

Martino felt the answering smile well up through his entire body. He felt the traitor joy begin as a faint surprise that someone had spoken to him at last, and then spread into a great warmth at this man who had called him by name.

Not thinking that nothing would show on his face, he trembled with panic at the thought of how easily Azarin was breaking through his defenses. He had hoped to be stronger than this.

I must remember to say
nothing
, he thought, urgently now. If ever I begin, my friendship for this man won’t let me stop. I have to fight to say nothing at all.

“Would you care for a cigarette?” Azarin extended the sandalwood box across the desk.

Martino’s right hand was trembling. He reached with his left. The metal fingertips, badly controlled, broke the papyros to shreds.

He saw Azarin frown for a moment, and in that moment Martino almost cried out, he was so upset by what he had done to offend this man. But it took an effort to activate the proper vocal affectors in his brain, and his brain detected it and stopped it.

I must remember I have other friends, he thought. I must remember that Edith and Barbara will be killed if I please this friend.

He realized in a panic that Edith and Barbara were not his friends any longer—that they probably did not remember him—that no one remembered or noticed him or cared about him except Azarin.

I must remember, he thought. I must remember to apologize to Edith and Barbara if I ever leave here. I must remember I will leave here.

Azarin was smiling again. “A glass of tea?”

I must think about that, he thought. If I take tea, I will have to open my mouth. If I do that, will I be able to close it again?

“Don’t be afraid, Doctor of Science Martino. Everything is all right now. We will sit, and we will talk, and I will listen to you.”

He felt himself beginning to do it. I must remember not going to school—and Johnson, he thought frantically.

Why? he wondered.

Because the K-Eighty-eight is not meant to be a bribe.

What does that mean?

He listened to himself think in fascination, absorbed by this phenomenon of two opposing drives in a single mechanism, and wondered just exactly how his mind did the trick—what kind of circuits were involved, and were they actually in operation simultaneously or did they use the same components alternately?

“Are you playing with me?” Azarin shouted. “What are you doing, behind that face? Are you
laughing
at me?”

Martino stared at Azarin in surprise. What? What had he done?

He could not wonder how long it might take him to complete a train of thought. It did not seem to him that a very long time at all had gone by since Azarin’s last question, or that a man looking at him might see nothing but an implacable, graven-faced figure with a deadly metal arm lying quiet but always ready to crush.

“Martino, I did not bring you here for comedies!” Azarin’s eyes suddenly narrowed. Martino thought he saw fear under the anger, and it puzzled him greatly. “Did Rogers plan this? Did he
deliberately
send you?”

Martino began to shake his head, to try to explain. But he caught himself. The thought began to come to him that there was no need to talk to this man—that he had already attracted all of Azarin’s attention.

The telephone rang, with the hard, shrill insistence that always came when the switchboard operator was relaying a call from Novoya Moskva.

Azarin picked it up and listened.

Martino watched him with no curiosity while Azarin’s eyes opened wide. After a time, Azarin put the phone down, and Martino still took no notice. Even when Azarin’s shrunken voice muttered, “Your college friend, Heywood, drowned six hundred miles too soon,” Martino had no notion of what it meant.

Martino sat motionless in the Tatra as it drew near the border. The S.I.B. man beside him—an Asiatic named Yung—was too quick to interpret every movement as an opening to practice his conversational English.

Three months wasted, Martino was thinking. The whole program must be bogged down. I only hope they haven’t tried to rebuild that particular configuration.

He searched his mind for the modified system he was almost certain he had thought of in their hospital. He had been trying to bring it back for the past two weeks, while Kothu and a therapist worked on him. But he had not been able to quite grasp it. Several times he thought he had it, but the memory was patchy and useless.

Well, he thought as the car stopped, the therapist told me there was bound to be some trouble for a while. But it’ll come to me.

“Here you are, Doctor Martino,” Yung said brightly, unsnapping the door.

“Yes.” He looked out at the gateway, with its Soviet guards. Beyond it, he could see the Allied soldiers, and a car with two men getting out of it.

He began to walk toward them. There’ll be problems, he reminded himself. These people aren’t used to my looks. It’ll take a while to overcome that.

But it can be done. A man is something more than just a collection of features. And I’ll get to work soon. That’ll keep me busy. If I can’t remember that idea I had in the hospital, I can always work out something else.

It’s been a bad time, he thought, stepping through the gate. But I haven’t lost anything.

Fritz Leiber

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 pickup 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.