The Big Time Read Free Page B

gone to Surgery (Ugh!) for a first-aid tray. She reached a swab toward the New Boy’s sticky cheek, saying rather shrilly, “If I might . .
    Her timing was bad. Sid’s last words and Erich’s approach had darkened the look in
     
    the young Soldier’s face and he angrily swept her arm aside without even glancing at her.
    Erich squeezed my arm. The tray clattered to the floor—and one of the drinks that Beau was bringing almost followed it. Ever since the New Girl’s arrival, Beau had been figuring that she was his responsibility, though I don’t think the two of them had reached an agreement yet.
    Beau was especially set on it because I was thick with Sid at the time and Maud with Doc, she loving tough cases.
    “Easy now, lad, and you love me!” Sid thundered, again shooting Beau the “Hold it”
    look. “She’s just a poor pagan trying to comfort you. Swallow your bile, you black villain, and perchance it will turn to poetry. Ah, did I touch you there? Confess, you are a poet.”
    There isn’t much gets by Sid, though for a second I forgot my psychology and wondered if he knew what he was doing with his insights.
    “Yes, I’m a poet, all right,” the New Boy roared. “I’m Bruce Marchant, you bloody
    Zombies. I’m a poet in a world where even the lines of the King James and your precious Will whom you use for laughs aren’t safe from Snakes’ slime and the Spiders’ dirty legs. Changing our history, stealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and best intentioned and efficient, and what does it lead to? This bloody SI glove!”
    He held up his black-gloved left hand which still held the mate and he shook it.
    “What’s wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?” Sid demanded. “And you love us, tell us.” While Erich laughed, “Consider yourself lucky, Kamerad . Mark and I
    didn’t draw any gloves at all.”
    “What’s wrong with it?” Bruce yelled. “The bloody things are both lefts!” He slammed it down on the floor.
    We are howled, we couldn’t help it. He turned his back on us and stamped off, though
    I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed my arm and said between gasps, “ Mein Gott, Liebchen , what have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!”
    One of us didn’t laugh. Ever since the New Girl heard the name Bruce Merchant, she’d had a look In her eyes like she’d been given the sacrament. I was glad she’d got interested in something, because she’d been pretty much of a snoot and a wet blanket up until now, although she’d come to the Place with the recommendation of having been a real whoopee girl in London and New York in the Twenties. She looked disapprovingly at us as she gathered up the tray and stuff, not forgetting the glove, which she placed on the center of the tray like a holy relic.
    Beau cut over and tried to talk to her, but she ghosted past him and once again he couldn’t do anything because of the tray in his hands. He came over and got rid of the drinks quick. I took a big gulp right away because I saw the New Girl stepping through the screen into Surgery and I hate to be reminded we have it and I’m glad Doc is too drunk to use it, some of the Arachnoid surgical techniques being very sickening as I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten.
    By that time, Bruce had come back to us, saying in a carefully hard voice, “Look here, it’s not the dashed glove itself, as you very well know, you howling Demons.”
    “What is it then, noble heart?” Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard heightening the effect of innocent receptivity.
    “It’s the principle of the thing,” Bruce said, looking around sharply, but none of us cracked a smile. “It’s this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos—and don’t tell me that isn’t in the cards!— masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The