The Big Time (13 page)

Bruce must have seen from the bar who took the Maintainer, and who would he cover up for but his girl?”

There he was plagiarizing my ideas, but I guess I was willing to sign them over to him in full if he got the right pail of water for that time-bomb.

He glanced at his wrist “According to my Caller, you have twenty-nine and a half minutes, including the time it will take to get a Door or contact headquarters. When are you going to get busy on the girl?”

Bruce laughed a little—deprecatingly, so help me—and started toward him. “Look here, old man,” he said, “There’s no need to trouble Lili, or to fuss with headquarters, even if

you could. Really not at all. Not to mention that your sunnises are quite unfounded, old chap, and I’m a bit surprised at your advancing them. But that’s quite all right because, as it happens, I’m an atomics technician and I even worked on that very bomb. To disarm it, you just have to fiddle a bit with some of the ankhs, those hoopy little crosses. Here, let me—”

Allah il allah, but it must have struck everybody as it did me as being just too incredible an assertion, too bloody British a barefaced bluff, for Erich didn’t have to say a word; Mark and Sevensee grabbed Bruce by the arms, one on each side, as he stooped toward the bronze chest, and they weren’t gentle about it. Then Erich spoke.

“Oh, no, Bruce. Very sporting of you to try to cover up for your girl friend, but we aren’t going to let ourselves be blown to stripped atoms twentyeight minutes too soon while you monkey with the buttons, the very thing BensonCarter warned against, and pray for a guesswork miracle. It’s too thin, Bruce, when you come from 1917 and haven’t been on the

Big Time for a hundred sleeps and were calling for an A-tech yourself a few hours ago. Much too thin. Bruce, something is going to happen that I’m afraid you won’t like, but you’re going to have to put up with it. That is, unless Miss Foster decides to be cooperative.”

“I say, you fellows, let me go,” Bruce demanded, struggling experimentally. “I know it’s a bit thick to swallow and I did give you the wrong impression calling for an A-tech, but I

just wanted to capture your attention then; I didn’t want to have to work on the bomb. Really, Erich, would they have ordered BensonCarter to pick us up unless one of us were an A-tech?

They’d be sure to include one in the bally operation.”

“When they’re using patchwork tactics?” Erich grinningly quoted back at him.

Kaby spoke up beside me and said, “BensonCarter was a magician of matter and he was going on the operation disguised as an old woman. We have the cloak and hood with the other garments,” and I wondered how this cold fish of a she-officer could be the same girl who was giving Mark slurpy looks not ten minutes ago.

“Well?” Erich asked, glancing at his Caller and then swinging his eyes around at us as if there must be some of the old
Wehrmacht
iron somewhere. We all found ourselves looking at Lili and she was looking so sharp herself, so ready to jump and so at bay, that it was all
I
needed, at any rate, to make Erich’s theory about the Maintainer a rock-bottom certainty.

Bruce must have realized the way our minds were working, for he started to struggle in earnest and at the same time called, “For God’s sake, don’t do anything to Lili! Let me loose, you idiots! Everything’s true I told you—I can save you from that bomb. Sevensee, you took my side against the Spiders; you’ve nothing to lose. Sid, you’re an Englishman. Beau, you’re a gentleman and you love her, too—for God’s sake, stop them!”

Beau glanced up over his shoulder at Bruce and the others surging around close to his ankles and he had on his poker face. Sid I could tell was once more going through the purgatory of decision. Beau reached his own decision first and I’ll say it for him that he acted on it fast and intelligently. Right from his kneeling position and before he’d even turned his head quite back, he jumped Erich.

But other things in this cosmos besides Man can pick sides and act fast. Illy landed on

Beau midway and whipped his tentacles around him tight and they went wobbling around like a drunken whiteand-silver barber pole. Beau got his hands each around a tentacle, and at the same time his face began to get purple, and I winced at what they were both going through.

Maybe Sevensee had a hoof in Sid’s purgatory, because Bruce shook loose from the satyr and tried to knock out Mark, but the Roman twisted his arm and kept him from getting in a good punch.

Erich didn’t make a move to mix into either fight, which is my little commandant all over. Using his fists on anybody but me is beneath him.

Then Sid made his choice, but there was no way for me to tell what it was, for, as he reached for the Minor Maintainer, Kaby contemptuously snatched it away from his hands and gave him a knee in the belly that doubled me up in sympathy and sent him sprawling on his knees toward the fighters. On the return, Kaby gave Lili, who’d started to grab too, an effortless backhand smash that set her down on the divan.

Erich’s face lit up like an electric sign and he kept his eyes fixed on Kaby.

She crouched a little, carrying her weight on the balls of her feet and firmly cradling

the Minor Maintainer in her left arm, like a basketball captain planning an offensive. Then she waved her free hand decisively to the right. I didn’t get it, but Erich did and Mark too, for

Erich jumped for the Refresher sector and Mark let go of Bruce and followed him, ducking around Sevensee’s arms, who was coming back into the fight on which side I don’t know. Illy unwhipped from Beau and copied Erich and Mark with one big spring.

Then Kaby twisted a dial as far as it would go and Bruce, Beau, Sevensee and poor

Siddy were slammed down and pinned to the floor by about eight gravities.

It should have been lighter near us—I hoped it was, but you couldn’t tell from watching Siddy; he went flat on his face, spread-eagled, one hand stretched toward me so close, I could have touched it (but not let go!), and his mouth was open against the floor and he was gasping through a corner of it and I could see his spine trying to sink through his belly. Bruce just managed to get his head and one shoulder up a bit, and they all made me think of a Dore illustration of the
Inferno
where the cream of the damned are frozen up to their necks in ice in the innermost circle of Hell.

The gravity didn’t catch me, although I could feel it in my left arm. I was mostly in the Refresher secor, but I dropped down flat too, partly out of a crazy compassion I have, but mostly because I didn’t want to take a chance of having Kaby knock me down.

Erich, Mark and Illy had got clear and they headed toward us. Maud picked the moment to make her play; she hadn’t much choice of times, if she wanted to make one. The

Old Girl was looking it for once, but I guess the thought of her miracle must have survived alongside the fear of sacked sun and must have meant a lot to her, for she launched out fast, all set to straight-arm Kaby into the heavy gravity and grab the Minor Maintainer with the other hand.

Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.

—Webster

“NOW WILL YOU TALK?”

Cretans have eyes under their back hair, or let’s face it, Entertainers aren’t Soldiers.

Kaby waved to one side and flicked a helpful hand and poor old Maud went where she’d been going to send Kaby. It sickened me to see the gravity take hold and yank her down.

I could have jumped up and made it four in a row for Kaby, but I’m not a bit brave when things like my life are at stake.

Lili was starting to get up, acting a little dazed. Kaby gently pushed her down again and quietly said, “Where is it?” and then hauled off and slapped her across the face. What got me was the matter-of- fact way Kaby did it. I can understand somebody getting mad and socking someone, or even deliberately working up a rage so as to be able to do something nasty, but this cold-blooded way turns my stomach.

Lili looked as if half her face were about to start bleeding, but she didn’t look dazed any more and her jaw set. Kaby grabbed Lili’s pearl necklace and twisted it around her neck and it broke and the pearls went bouncing around like ping-pong balls, so Kaby yanked down

Lili’s gray silk bandeau until it was around the neck and tightened that. Lili started to choke through her tight-pressed lips. Erich, Mark and Illy had come up and crowded around, but they seemed to be content with the job Kaby was doing.

“Listen, slut,” she said, “we have no time. You have a healing room in this place. I

can work the things.”

“Here it comes,” I thought, wishing I could faint. On top of everything, on top of death even, they had to drag in the nightmare personally stylized for me, the horror with my name on it. I wasn’t going to be allowed to blow up peacefully. They weren’t satisfied with an

A-bomb. They had to write my private hell into the script.

“There is a thing called an Invertor,” Kaby said exactly as I’d know she would, but as

I didn’t really hear it just then—a mental split I’ll explain in a moment. “It opens you up so

they can cure your insides without cutting you skin or making you bleed anywhere. It turns the big parts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin—your eyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it—becoming the lining of a little hole that’s half-filled with your hair.

“Meantime, your insides are exposed for whatever the healer wants to do to them.

You live for a while on the air inside the hole. First the healer gives you an air that makes you sleep, or you go mad in about fifty heartbeats. We’ll see what ten heartbeats do to you without the sleepy air. Now will you talk?”

I hadn’t been listening to her, though, not the real me, or I’d have gone mad without getting the treatment. I once heard Doc say your liver is more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, because although you live with your liver all your life, you never see it or learn to point to it instinctively, and the thought of someone messing around with that intimate yet unknow part of you is just too awful.

I knew I had to do something quick. Hell, at the first hint of Introversion, before

Kaby had even named it, Illy winced so that his tentacles were all drawn up like fat feather—

sausages. Erich had looked at him questioningly, but that lousy Looney had un-endeared himself to me by squeaking, “Don’t mind me, I’m just sensitive. Get on with the girl. Make her tell.”

Yes, I knew I had to do something, and here on the floor that meant thinking hard and in high gear about something else. The screwball sculpture Erich had tried to smash was a foot from my nose and I saw a faint trail of white stuff where it had skidded. I reached out and touched the trail; it was finely gritty, like powered glass. I tipped up the sculpture and the part on which it had skidded wasn’t marred at all, not even dulled; the gray spheres were as glisteningly bright as ever. So I knew the trail was diamond dust rubbed off the diamonds in the floor by something even harder.

That told me the sculpture was something special and maybe Doc had had a real idea in his pickled brain when he’d been pushing the thing at all of us and trying to tell us something. He hadn’t managed to say anything then, but he had earlier when he’d been going to tell us what to do about the bomb, and maybe there was a connection.

I twisted my memory hard and let it spring back and I got “Inversh … bosh …”

Bosh, indeed! Bosh and inverse bosh to all boozers, Russki or otherwise.

So I quick tried the memory trick again and this time I got “glovsh” and then I

grasped and almost sneezed on diamond dust as I watched the pieces fit themselves together in my mind like a speeded-up movie reel.

It all hung on that black right-hand hussar’s glove Lili had produced for Bruce. Only she couldn’t have found it in Stores, because we’d searched every fractional pigeonhole later on and there hadn’t been any gloves there, not even the left-hand mate there would have been.

Also, Bruce had had two left-hand gloves to start with, and we had been through the whole

Place with a fine-tooth comb, and there had been only the two black gloves on the floor where Bruce had kicked them off the bar—those two and those two only, the left-hand glove he’d brought from outside and the right-hand glove Lili had produced for him.

So a left-hand glove had disappeared—the last I’d seen of it, Lili had been putting it on her tray—and a right-hand glove had appeared. Which could only add up to one thing: Lili had turned the left-hand glove into an identical right. She couldn’t have done it by turning it inside out the ordinary way, because the lining was different.

But as I knew only too sickeningly well, there was an extraordinary way to turn things inside out, things like human beings. You merely had to put them on the Invertor in

Surgery and flick it for full Inversion.

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 will 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.