eezed 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
Marchant, 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 Spiders--and we
don't know who they are ultimately; it's just a name; we see only agents
like ourselves--the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of our
lifelines--"

"Is that bad, lad?" Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced.

"--and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another
time-traveling power called the Snakes--just a name, too--which is bent
on perverting and enslaving the whole cosmos, past, present and future."

"And isn't it, lad?"

"Before we're properly awake, we're Recruited into the Big Time and
hustled into tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserable
clo