The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

thyself sweetling, that while we suffer thus sorely, we yet cannot die the Change Death.”
     
    “What’s that?” I asked him.
    I didn’t want to bounce around like the others. I had a suspicion I’d carry it too far.
    So, to keep myself from going batty, I started to rework the business of who had done what to the Maintainer.
    During the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossed around as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat of Snake science amounting to sorcery; the
    Spider high command bunkering the Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the
    Express Room, in such a hurry that they hadn’t even time to transmit warnings; the hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beings who are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of the Change War into the future much beyond Sevensee’s epoch—unless the Late Cosmicians are the ones fighting the Change War.
    One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one of us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political police, agent of—who knows, after
    Bruce?—a secret Change World Committee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, or strictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the Maintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich’s and Bruce’s factions.
    Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but that didn’t apply to what I did with my own thoughts.
    Who wanted to escape so bad they’d Introvert the Place, cutting off all possible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and running the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all?
    Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things up, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid couldn’t keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments for derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as Erich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of the bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly hadn’t had my eye on him every second.
    Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he said counted, so he’d hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.
    Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people especially, more than any man or woman I’ve ever known—he’s like a big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his mouth—and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the cosmos.
    Maud, Kaby, Mark and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of, though
    Sevensee’s being from the very far future did tie in with that idea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something developing between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to be Introverted together.
    “Stick to the facts, Greta,” I reminded myself with a private groan.
    That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself.
    Erich, I though—now we’re getting somewhere. The little commandant has the nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if he thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be locked in with him, he’d do it in a second.
    But even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he’d been heckling Bruce from the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for him to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and … well, that was nine-tenths of the problem.
    If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was best explanation of all. Gr-r-r!
    Bruce’s motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it immortal?)
    danger he’d put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed a shame he’d been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the Maintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar,