consider that, there’s Question Three: Is anyone here an atomics technician?”
That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to explain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power—hadn’t they blasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly craters?—but no, he wasn’t a technician exactly, he was a “thinger” (I
thought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?— well, a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly impossible to describe, but no, you couldn’t possibly thing atomics; the idea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn’t be an atomics thinger; the term was worse than a contradiction, well, really!—while Sevensee, from his twothousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect that his culture didn’t rightly use any kind qf power, but just sort of moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling spacetirne around, “or think em roun ef we hafta. Can’t think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have—I dunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow.”
“So we don’t have an A-tech,” Bruce summed up, “which makes it worse than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn’t know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question.” He directed it toward Sid. “How long before we can jettison anything?”
Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn’t seem to be taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the word “rhythm,” he pulled the answer away from him.
“In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again. Thank you, Master
Lessingham. That’s at least five hours—two mealtimes, as the Cretan officer put it,” and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly smile. “So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there’s not a thing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!”
His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn’t seem to notice them and we hardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.
“All right then,” he repeated suddenly. “We’re twelve Spiders and two Ghosts, and we’ve time for a bit of a talk, and we’re all in the same bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we’ll all. know what we’re talking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are off!”
Bruce ripped them out of his belt where they’d been tucked and slammed them down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and forth, and it wasn’t funny.
“Because,” he went right on, “I’ve been getting a completely new picture of what this
Spiders’ war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it’s jolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged little party outside both of them when the operation’s over. It’s sweet to know there’s no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can’t shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the ultimate insatiable hunger, and it’s great to be Faust, even in a pack of other Fausts.
“It’s sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man’s life or a culture’s, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes— hah! killing men or carrying off women isn’t in it for glutting the sense of power. It’s sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the
That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to explain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power—hadn’t they blasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly craters?—but no, he wasn’t a technician exactly, he was a “thinger” (I
thought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?— well, a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly impossible to describe, but no, you couldn’t possibly thing atomics; the idea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn’t be an atomics thinger; the term was worse than a contradiction, well, really!—while Sevensee, from his twothousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect that his culture didn’t rightly use any kind qf power, but just sort of moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling spacetirne around, “or think em roun ef we hafta. Can’t think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have—I dunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow.”
“So we don’t have an A-tech,” Bruce summed up, “which makes it worse than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn’t know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question.” He directed it toward Sid. “How long before we can jettison anything?”
Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn’t seem to be taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the word “rhythm,” he pulled the answer away from him.
“In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again. Thank you, Master
Lessingham. That’s at least five hours—two mealtimes, as the Cretan officer put it,” and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly smile. “So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there’s not a thing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!”
His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn’t seem to notice them and we hardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.
“All right then,” he repeated suddenly. “We’re twelve Spiders and two Ghosts, and we’ve time for a bit of a talk, and we’re all in the same bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we’ll all. know what we’re talking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are off!”
Bruce ripped them out of his belt where they’d been tucked and slammed them down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and forth, and it wasn’t funny.
“Because,” he went right on, “I’ve been getting a completely new picture of what this
Spiders’ war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it’s jolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged little party outside both of them when the operation’s over. It’s sweet to know there’s no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can’t shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the ultimate insatiable hunger, and it’s great to be Faust, even in a pack of other Fausts.
“It’s sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man’s life or a culture’s, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes— hah! killing men or carrying off women isn’t in it for glutting the sense of power. It’s sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the
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