nt flurry of stupid
slugging and panicky anachronism, when we all know that anachronism is
what gets the Change Winds out of control. This punch-drunk pounding on
the Cretan-Dorian fracas as if it were the only battle going and the
only way to work things. Whisking Constantine from Britain to the
Bosporus by rocket, sending a pocket submarine back to sail with the
Armada against Drake's woodensides--I'll wager you hadn't heard those!
And now, to save Rome, an atomic bomb.

"Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a
fission weapon.... I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will
make in what's left of history--the smothering of Greece and the
vanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy's Irish
Captivity won't be in it!"

The cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he
didn't pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned
in irony and he said, "But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and
that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of
planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're
just one little world--one little solar system, Sevensee--and we can
hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing
preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially
understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and
centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about
preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.

"Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever
than go on living in a world without the _Summa_, the Field Equations,
_Process and Reality_, _Hamlet_, Matthew, Keats, and the _Odyssey_, but
our masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those
rugged souls who want to go on living no matter what."

* * * * *

Erich's "Bruce, I'm telling you that's enough," was lost in the
quickening flow of the New Boy's words. "I won't spend much time on the
minor signs of our major crack-up--the canceling of leaves, the sharper
shortages, the loss of the Express Room, the use of Recuperation
Stations for ops and all the other frantic patchwork--last operation
but one, we were saddled with three Soldiers from outside the Galaxy
and, no fault of theirs, they were no earthly use. Such little things
might happen at a bad spot in any war and are perhaps only local. Bu