The Big Time by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online

rush of questions at what she said about Crete—I asked one of them, for the news certainly frightened me—but she shot up her arm straight for silence and took a deep breath and began.
    “In the balance hung the battle. Rowing like black centipedes, the Dorian hulls bore down on our outnumbered ships. On the bright beach, masked by rocks, Sevensee and I stood by the needle gun, ready to give the black hulls silent wounds. Beside us was Ilhilihis, suited as a sea monster. But then … then …”
    Then I saw she wasn’t altogether the iron babe, for her voice broke and she started to shake and to sob rackingly, although her face was still a mask of rage, and she threw up the wine. Sid stepped in and made her stop, which I think he’d been wanting to do all along.

5
    When I take up a newspaper and read it, I
    fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines.
    There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me.
    —Ibsen
    SID INSISTS ON GHOSTGIRLS
    My Elizabethan boy friend put his fists on his hips and laid down the law to us as if we were a lot of nervous children who’d been playing too hard.
    “Look you, masters, this is a Recuperation Station and I am running it as such. A
    plague of all operations! I care not if the frame of things dis joints and the whole Change
    World goes to ruin, but you, warrior maid, are going to rest and drink more wine slowly before you tell your tale and your colleagues are going to be properly companioned. No questions, anyone. Beau, and you love us, give us a lively tune.”
    Kaby relaxed a little and let him put his hand carefully against her back in token of support and she said grudgingly, “All right, Fat Belly.”
    Then, so help me, to the tune of the Muskrat Ramble, which I’d taught Beau, we got girls for those two ETs and everybody properly paired up.
    Right here I want to point out that a lot of the things they say in the Change World about Recuperation Stations simply aren’t so—and anyway they always leave out nine-tenths of it. The Soldiers that come through the Door are looking for a good time, sure, but they’re hurt real bad too, every one of them, deep down in their minds and hearts, if not always in their bodies or so you can see it right away.
     
    Believe me, a temporal operation is no joke, and to start with, there isn’t one person in a hundred who can endure to be cut from his lifeline and become a really wide-awake
    Doubleganger—a Demon, that is—let alone a Soldier. What does a badly hurt and mixed-up creature need who’s been fighting hard? One individual to look out for him and feel for him and patch him up, and it helps if the one is of the opposite sex—that’s something that goes beyond species.
    There’s your basis for the Place and the wild way it goes about its work, and also for most other Recuperation Stations or Entertainment Spots. The name Entertainer can be misleading, but I like it. She’s got to be a lot more than a good party girl— or boy—though she’s got to be that too. She’s got to be a nurse and a psychologist and an actress and a mother and a practical ethnologist and a lot of things with longer names—and a reliable friend.
    None of us are all those things perfectly or even near it. We just try. But when the call comes, Entertainers have to forget grudges and gripes and envies and jealousies—and remember, they’re lively people with sharp emotions—because there isn’t any time then for anything but help and don’t ask who!
    And, deep inside her, a good Entertainer doesn’t care who. Take the way it shaped up this time. It was pretty clear to me I ought to shift to Illy, although I wasn’t quite easy in my mind about leaving Erich, because the Lunan was a long time from home and, after all, Erich was among anthropoids. Ilhilihis needed someone who was simpatico .
    I like Illy and not just because he is a sort of tail cross between a spider monkey and a