After about 0.1 millisecond (one ten-thousandth part of a second)
has elapsed, the radius of the ball of fire is some 45 feet, and the
temperature is then in the vicinity of 300,000 degrees Centigrade.
At this instant, the luminosity, as observed at a distance of
100,000 yards (5.7 miles), is approximately 100 times that of the
sun as seen at the earth's surface ... the ball of fire expands very
rapidly to its maximum radius of 450 feet within less than a second
from the explosion.
--Los Alamos
TIME TO THINK
Brother, that was all we needed to make everybody but Kaby and the two
ETs start yelping at once, me included. It may seem strange that Change
People, able to whiz through time and space and roust around outside the
cosmos and knowing at least by hearsay of weapons a billion years in the
future, like the Mindbomb, should panic at being shut in with a little
primitive mid-20th Century gadget. Well, they feel the same as atomic
scientists would feel if a Bengal tiger were brought into their
laboratory, neither more nor less scared.
I'm a moron at physics, but I do know the Fireball is bigger than the
Place. Remember that, besides the bomb, we'd recently been presented
with a lot of other fears we hadn't had time to cope with, especially
the business of the Snakes having learned how to get at our Places and
melt the Maintainers and collapse them. Not to mention the general
impression--first Saint Petersburg, then Crete--that the whole Change
War was going against the Spiders.
Yet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were all
panicking. It made me admit what I didn't like to: that we were all in
pretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn't happen
to be our out.
And had the rest of us been controlling our drinking so well lately?
Maud yelled, "Jettison it!" and pulled away from the satyr and ran from
the bronze chest. Beau, harking back to what they'd thought of doing in
the Express Room when it was too late, hissed, "Sirs, we must
Introvert," and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for the
control divan. Erich seconded him with a white-faced "_Gott in Himmel,
ja!_" from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slim
stem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass.
I felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degrees
worse than foxholing. It's supposed not only to keep the Door tight
shut, but also to lock it so even the Change Winds can't get
through--cut the Place loose from the cosmos altogether.
I'd never talked with anyone from a Place that had been Introverted.
* * * * *
Mark dumped Phryne off his lap and ran after Maud. The Greek Ghostgirl,
quite solid now, looked around with sleepy fear and fumbled her
apple-green chiton together at the throat. She wrenched my attention
away from everyone else for a moment, and I couldn't help wondering
whether the person or Zombie back in the cosmos, from whose lifeline the
Ghost has been taken, doesn't at least have strange dreams or thoughts
when something like this happens.
Sid stopped Beau, though he almost got bowled over doing it, and he held
the gambler away from the Maintainer in a bear hug and bellowed over his
shoulders, "Masters, are you mad? Have you lost your wits? Maud! Mark!
Marcus! Magdalene! On your lives, unhand that casket!"
Maud had swept the clothes and bows and quivers and stuff off it and was
dragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump it
through fast when we got one, I guess, while Mark acted as if he were
trying to help her and wrestle it away from her at the same time.
They kept on as if they hadn't heard a word Sid said, with Mark yelling,
"Let go, _meretrix_! This holds Rome's answer to Parthia on the Nile."
Kaby watched them as if she wanted to help Mark but scorned to scuffle
with a mere--well, Mark had said it in Latin, I guess--call girl.
Then, on the top of the bronze chest, I saw those seven lousy skulls
starting at the lock as plain as if they'd been under a magnifying
glass, though ordinarily they'd have been a vague circle to my eyes at
the distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the opposite
direction, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, and
squeaked, "Easy now, Greta girl, don't you be doing it, too. Hold still
or Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you have
a mind to."
My stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but it
stopped me and I got my mind back, partly.
"Unhand it, I say!" Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and he
released Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler's shoulder.
Then my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Void
and blustered at no one in particular, "'Sdeath, think you I'd mutiny
against my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent fox
and pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggests
it? Introversion's no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervised
and sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I'd Introverted ere we got
Kaby's call for succor, hey?"
* * * * *
His warrior maid nodded with harsh approval and he noticed it and shook
his free hand at her and scolded her, "Not that I say yea to your mad
plan for that Devil's casket, you half-clad lackwit. And yet to
jettison.... Oh, ye gods, ye gods--" he wiped his hand across his
face--"grant me a minute in which I may think!"
Thinking time wasn't an item even on the strictly limited list at the
moment, although Sevensee, squatting dourly on his hairy haunches where
Maud had left him, threw in a dead-pan "Thas tellin em, Gov."
Then Doc at the bar stood up tall as Abe Lincoln in his top hat and
shawl and 19th Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence and
said something that sounded like: "Introversh, inversh, glovsh," and
then his enunciation switched to better than perfect as he continued, "I
know to an absolute certainty what we must do."
It showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a church
while we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for a
poor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves.
He said something like, "Inversh ... bosh ..." and held our eyes for a
moment longer. Then the light went out of his and he slobbered out a
"_Nichevo_" and slid an arm far along the bar for a bottle and started
to pour it down his throat without stopping sliding.
Before he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second while
our attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top of
it, so fast it was almost like he'd popped up from nowhere, though I'd
seen him start from behind the piano.
"I've a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?" he said in a
voice that was very clear and just loud enough. "So it can't go off," he
went on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk manner
putting more heart into me all the time. "What's more, if it were to be
triggered, we'd still have half an hour. I believe you said it had that
long a fuse?"
He stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded.
"Right," he said. "It'd have to be that long for whoever plants it in
the Parthian camp to get away. There's another safety margin.
"Second question. Is there a locksmith in the house?"
* * * * *
For all Bruce's easiness, he was watching us like a golden eagle and he
caught Beau's and Maud's affirmatives before they had a chance to
explain or hedge them and said, "That's very good. Under certain
circumstances, you two'd be the ones to go to work on the chest. But
before we 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 two-thousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect
that his culture didn't rightly use any kind of power, but just sort of
moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling space-time 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 past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to
wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and
look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it
and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and
decide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.
"Or he can't stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you've got
to decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams,
only they'll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, or
whether, if she's got that tantalizing something, to bring her shell
along for a Ghostgirl--that's sweet, too. It's even sweet to have Change
Death poised over your neck, to know that the past isn't the precious
indestructible thing you've been taught it was, to know that there's no
certainty about the future either, whether there'll even be one, to know
that no part of reality is holy, that the cosmos itself may wink out
like a flicked switch and God be not and nothing left but nothing!"
He threw out his arms against the Void. "And knowing all that, it's
doubly sweet to come through the Door into the Place and be out of the
worst of the Change Winds and enjoy a well-earned Recuperation and share
the memories of all these sweetnesses I've been talking about, and work
out all the fascinating feelings you've been accumulating back in the
cosmos, layer by black layer, in the company of and with the help of the
best bloody little band of fellow Fausts and Faustines going!
"Oh, it's a sweet life, all right, but I'm asking you--" and here his
eyes stabbed us again, one by one, fast--"I'm asking you what it's done
to us. I've been getting a completely new picture, as I said, of what my
life was and what it could have been if there'd been changes of the sort
that even we Demons can't make, and what my life is. I've been watching
how we've all been responding to things just now, to the news of Saint
Petersburg and to what the Cretan officer told beautifully--only it
wasn't beautiful what she had to tell--and mostly to that bloody box of
bomb. And I'm simply asking each one of you, what's happened to you?"
* * * * *
He stopped his pacing and stuck his thumbs in his belt and seemed to be
listening to the wheels turning in at least eleven other heads--only I
stopped mine pretty quick, with Dave and Father and the Rape of Chicago
coming up out of the dark on the turn and Mother and the Indiana Dunes
and Jazz Limited just behind them, followed by the unthinkable thing
the Spider doctor had flicked into existence when I flopped as a nurse,
because I can't stand that to be done to my mind by anybody but myself.
I stopped them by using the old infallible Entertainers' gimmick, a fast
survey of the most interesting topic there is--other people's troubles.
* * * * *
Offhand, Beau looked as if he had most troubles, shamed by his boss and
his girl given her heart to a Soldier; he was hugging them to himself
very quiet.
I didn't stop for the two ETs--they're too hard to figure--or for Doc;
nobody can tell whether a fallen-down drunk's at the black or bright end
of his cycle; you just know it's cycling.
Maud ought to be suffering as much as Beau, called names and caught out
in a panic, which always hurts her because she's plus three hundred
years more future than the rest of us and figures she ought to be that
much wiser, which she isn't always--not to mention she's over fifty
years old, though her home-century cosmetic science keeps her looking
and acting teenage most of the time. She'd backed away from the bronze
chest so as not to stand out, and now Lili came from behind the piano
and stood beside her.
Lili had the opposite of troubles, a great big glow for Bruce, proud as
a promised princess watching her betrothed. Erich frowned when he saw
her, for he seemed proud too, proud of the way his _Kamerad_ had taken
command of us panicky whacks _Fuehrer_-fashion. Sid still looked mostly
grateful and inclined to let Bruce keep on talking.
Even Kaby and Mark, those two dragons hot for battle, standing a little
in front and to one side of us by the bronze chest, like its guardians,
seemed willing to listen. They made me realize one reason Sid had for
letting Bruce run on, although the path his talk was leading us down was
flashing with danger signals: When it was over, there'd still be the
problem of what to do with the bomb, and a real opposition shaping up
between Soldiers and Entertainers, and Sid was hoping a solution would
turn up in the meantime or at least was willing to put off the evil day.
But beyond all that, and like the rest of us, I could tell from the way
Sid was squinting his browy eyes and chewing his beardy lip that he was
shaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped into
our hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of us
could have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had to
think of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs we
were--well, we wanted to keep on listening.