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restoring reality's richness and giving the Ghosts good sleep and perhaps even regaining the
real now. We have the means right at hand. What if the power of time traveling were used not
for war and destruction, but for healing, for the mutual enrichment of the ages, for quiet
communication and growth, in brief, to bring a peace message--"
But my little commandant is quite an actor himself and knows a wee bit about the
principles of scene-stealing and he was not going to let Bruce drown him out as if he were
just another extra playing a Voice from the Mob. He darted across our front, between us and
the bar, took a nmning leap, and landed bang on the bloody box of bomb.
A bit later, Maud was silently showing me the white ring above her elbow where I'd
grabbed her and Illy was teasing a clutch of his tentacles out of my other hand and squeaking
reproachfully, "Greta girl, don't ever do that."
Erich was standing on the chest and I noticed that his boots carefully straddled the
circle of skulls, and I should have known anyway you could hardly push them in the right
order by jumping on them, and he was pointing at Bruce .and saying, "--and that means
mutiny, my young sir. _Um Gottes willen_, Bruce, listen to me and step down before you say
anything worse. I'm older than you, Bruce. Mark's older. Trust in your _Kameraden_. Guide
yourself by their knowledge."
He had got my attention, but I had much rather have him black my eye.
"You older than me?" Bruce was grinning. "When your twelve-years' advantage was
spent in soaking up the wisdom of a race of sadistic dreamers gone paranoid, in a world
whose thought-stream had already been muddied by one total war? Mark older than me?
When all his ideas and loyalties are those of a wolf pack of unimaginative sluggers two
thousand years younger than I am? Either of you older because you have more of the killing
cynicism that is all the wisdom the Change World ever gives you? Don't make me laugh!
'I'm an Englishman, and I come from an epoch when total war was still a desecration
and the flowers and buds of thoughts not yet whacked off or blighted. I'm a poet and poets are
wiser than anyone because they're the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the
same time. Right, Sid? When I talk to all of you about a peace message, I want you to think
about it concretely in terms of using the Places to bring help across the mountains of time
when help is really needed, not to bring help that's undeserved or knowledge that's premature
or contaminating, sometimes not to bring anything at all, but just to check with infinite
tenderness and concern that everything's safe and the glories of the universe unfolding as they
were intended to--"
"Yes, you are a poet, Bruce," Erich broke in. "You can tootle soulfully on the flute
and make us drip tears. You can let out the stops on the big organ pipes and make us tremble
as if at Jehovah's footsteps. For the last twenty minutes, you have been giving us some very
_charmante_ poetry. But what are you? An Entertainer? Or are you a Soldier?"
Right then--I don't know what it was, maybe Sid clearing his throat--I could sense our
feelings beginning to turn against Bruce. I got the strangest feeling of reality clamping down
and bright colors going dull and dreams vanishing. Yet it was only then I also realized how
much Bruce had moved us, maybe some of us to the verge of mutiny, even. I was mad at
Erich for what he was doing, but I couldn't help admiring his cockiness.
I was still under the spell of Bruce's words and the more-than-words behind them, but
then Erich would shift around a bit and one of his heels would kick near the death's head
pushbuttons and I wanted to stamp with spike heels on every death'shead button on his
uniform. I didn't know exactly what I felt yet.
"Yes, I'm a Soldier," Bruce told him, "and I hope you won't ever have to worry about
my courage, because it's going to take more courage than any operation we've ever planned,
ever dreamed of, to carry the peace message to the other Places and to the wound-spots of the
cosmos. Perhaps it will be a fast wicket and we'll be bowled down before we score a single
run, but who cares? We may at least see our real masters when they come to smash us, and for
me that will be a deep satisfaction. And we may do some smashing of our own."
"So you're a Soldier," Erich said, his smile showing his teeth. "Bruce, I'll admit that
the half-dozen operations you've been on were rougher than anything I drew in my first
hundred sleeps. For that, I am all honest sympathy. But that you should let them get you into
such a state that love and a girl can turn you upside down and start you babbling about peace
messages--"
"Yes, by God, love and a girl have changed me!" Bruce shouted at him, and I looked
at Lili and I remembered Dave saying, "I'm going to Spain," and I wondered if anything
would ever again make my face flame like that. "Or, rather, they've made me stand up for
what I've believed in all along. They've made me--"
"_Wunderbar_," Erich called and began to do a little sissy dance on the bomb that set
my teeth on edge. He bent his wrists and elbows at arty angles and stuck out a hip and ducked
his head simperingly and blinked his eyes very fast. "Will you invite me to the wedding,
Bruce? You'll have to get another best man, but I will be the flower girl and throw pretty little
posies to all the distinguished guests. Here, Mark. Catch, Kaby. One for you, Greta. _Danke
schön. Ach, zwei Herzen in dreivierteltakt . . . ta-ta . . . ta-ta . . . ta-ta-tata-ta_ . . ."
"What the hell do you think a woman is?" Bruce raged. "Something to mess around
with in your spare time?"
Erich kept on humming "Two Hearts in Waltz Time"--and jigging around to it, damn
him--but he slipped in a nod to Bruce and a "Precisely." So I knew where I stood, but it was
no news to me.
"Very well," Bruce said, "let's leave this Brown Shirt _maricón_ to amuse himself
and get down to business. I made all of you a proposal and I don't have to tell you how
serious it is or how serious Lili and I are about it. We not only must infiltrate and subvert
other Places, which luckily for us are made for infiltration, we also must make contact with
the Snakes and establish working relationships with their Demons at our level as one of our
first steps."
That stopped Erich's jig and got enough of a gasp from some of us to make it seem- to
come from practically everybody. Erich used it to work a change of pace.
"Bruce! We've let you carry this foolery further than we should. You seem to have
the idea that because anything goes in the Place--dueling, drunkenness, _und so weiter_--you
can say what you have and it will all be forgotten with the hangover. Not so. It is true that
among such a set of monsters and free spirits as ourselves, and working as secret agent to
boot, there cannot be the obvious military discipline that would obtain in a Terran army.
"But let me tell you, Bruce, let me grind it home into you--Sid and Kaby and Mark
will bear me out in this, as officers of equivalent rank--that the Spider line of command
stretches into and through this Place just as surely as the word of _der Führer_ rules Chicago.
And as I shouldn't have to emphasize to you, Bruce, the Spiders have punishments that would
make my countrymen in Belsen and Buchenwald--well, pale a little. So while there is still a
shadow of justification for our interpreting your remarks as utterly tasteless clowning--"
"Babble on," Bruce said, giving him a loose downward wave of his hand without
looking. "I made you people a proposal." He paused. "How do you stand, Sidney
Lessingham?"
Then I felt my legs getting weak, because Sid didn't answer right away. The old boy
swallowed and started to look around at the rest of us. Then the feeling of reality clamping
down got something awful, because he didn't look around, bñt straightened his back a little.
Just then, Mark cut in fast. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]