ourselves? Bear with me, Ilhilihis; I know that no being is created
dirty or malignant by Nature, but this is a matter of anthropoid
feelings and folkways. Yes, Mark, I know that some of your legions have
nicknames like the Drunken Lions and the Snails, and that's about as
insulting as calling the British Expeditionary Force the Old
Contemptibles.

"No, you'd have to go to bands of vicious youths in cities slated for
ruin to find a habit of naming like ours, and even they would try to
brighten up the black a bit. But simply--Spiders. And Snakes, for that's
their name for themselves too, you know. Spiders and Snakes. What are
our masters, that we give them names like that?"

It gave me the shivers and set my mind working in a dozen directions and
I couldn't stop it, although it made the shivers worse.

Illy beside me now--I'd never given it a thought before, but he did have
eight legs of a sort, and I remembered thinking of him as a spider
monkey, and hadn't the Lunans had wisdom and atomic power and a billion
years in which to get the Change War rolling?

Or suppose, in the far future, Terra's own spiders evolved intelligence
and a cruel cannibal culture. They'd be able to keep their existence
secret. I had no idea of who or what would be on Earth in Sevensee's
day, and wouldn't it be perfect black hairy poisoned spider-mentality to
spin webs secretly through the world of thought and all of space and
time?

And Beau--wasn't there something real Snaky about him, the way he moved
and all?

Spiders and Snakes. _Spinne und Schlange_, as Erich called them. S & S.
But SS stood for the Nazi _Schutzstaffel_, the Black Shirts, and what if
some of those cruel, crazy Jerries had discovered time travel and--I
brought myself up with a jerk and asked myself, "Greta, how nuts can you
get?"

* * * * *

From where he was on the floor, the front of the bar his sounding board,
Doc shrieked up at Bruce like one of the damned from the pit, "Don't
speak against the Spiders! Don't blaspheme! They can hear the Unborn
whisper. Others whip only the skin, but they whip the naked brain and
heart," and Erich called out, "That's enough, Bruce!"

But Bruce didn't spare him a look and said, "But whatever the Spiders
are and no matter how much whip they use, it's plain as the telltale on
the Maintainer that the Change War is not only going against them, but
getting away from them. Dwell for a bit on the curre