"Fritz Leiber - The Big Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call
the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from
raids into time. In fact, my normal title is Entertainer and I've got my sffly side, as you'll find
out.
My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of times and
places. We're a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run a pretty good Recuperation
Station, though we have our family troubles. But most of our troubles come slamming into
the Place with the beat-up Soldiers, who've generally just been going through hell and want to
raise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived Soldiers who started
this thing I'm going to tell you about, this thing that showed me so much about myself and
everything.
When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and two thousand
nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one thousand. This two-nightmares
routine every time you lay down your dizzy little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to
it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it.
The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub where the
Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated for a party, though a Zeppelin is
one thing we haven't had yet. You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and
if you are an Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with anything from
the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look strangely similar except for size.
Solely on doctor's orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since coming to work
at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if you care to call them that, for believe
me they are busman's holidays, considering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last
one I spent in Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got over it.
Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be fitted by the Spiders into serious
operations of the Change War, and you can imagine how restful that makes them.
"See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don't go too far up
front, though, but don't wander off either. Relax and enjoy yourself."
Ha! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they come to the Place is a horse
of a far brighter color, simply dazzling by comparison. Entertainment is our business and we
give them a bang-up time and send them staggering happily back into action, though once in a
great while something may happen to throw a wee shadow on the party.
I am dead in some ways, but don't let that bother you--I am lively enough in others. If
you met in the cosmos, you would be more apt to yak with me or try to pick me up than to ask
a cop to do same or a father to douse me with holy water, unless you are one of those hard-
boiled reformer types. But you are not likely to meet me in the cosmos, because (bar Basin
Street and the Prater) 15th Century Italy and Augustan Rome--until they spoiled it-- are my
favorite (Ha!) vacation spots and, as I have said, I stick as close to the Place as I can. It is
really the nicest Place in the whole Change World. (Crisis! I even _think_ of it capitalized!)
Anyhoo, when this thing started, I was twiddling my thumbs on the couch nearest the
piano and thinking it was too late to do my fingernails and whoever came in probably
wouldn't notice them anyway.
The Place was jumpy like it always is on an approach and the gray velvet of the Void
around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when you close your eyes in the dark.
Sid was tuning the Maintainers for the pickup and the right shoulder of his gold-
worked gray doublet was streaked where he'd been wiping his face on it with quick ducks of
his head.
Beauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid's other shoulder, one white-
trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control divan, and he wasn't missing a
single flicker of Sid's old fingers on the dials; Beau's copilot besides piano player. Beau's face