The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

can’t say for sure what was it slowly squeezed that sweet Express Room, but we fear the dirty Snakes have found a way to find our Places and attack outside the cosmos!—
    found the Spiderweb that links us in the Void’s gray less-than-nothing.”
    No murmur this time. This reaction was genuine; we’d been hit where we lived and I
    could see everybody was scared as sick as I was. Except maybe Bruce and Lili, who were still holding hands and beaming gently. I decided they were the kind that love makes brave, which it doesn’t do to me. It just gives me two people to worry about.
    “I can see you dig our feeling,” Kaby continued. “This thing scared the pants off of us. If we could have, we’d have even Introverted the Maintainer, broken all the ties that bind us, chanced it incommunicado. But the little old Maintainer was a seething red-hot puddle filled with bubbles big as handballs. We sat tight and watched the Void close. I kept calling on my Caller.”
    I squeezed my eyes shut, but that made it easier to see the three of them with the Void shutting down on them. (Was ours till behaving? Yes, Bibi Miriam.) Poetry or no poetry, it got me.
    “BensonCarter, lying dying, also thought the Snakes had done it. And he knew that death was in him, so he whispered me his mission, giving me precise instructions: how to press the seven death’s hands, starting lockside counterclockwise, one, three, five, six, two, four, seven, then you have a half an hour; after you have pressed the seven, do not monkey with the buttons—get out fast and don’t stop moving.”
    I wasn’t getting this part and I couldn’t see that anyone else was, though Bruce was whispering to Lili. I remembered seeing skulls engraved on the bronze chest. I looked at Illy and he nodded a tentacle and spread two to say, I guessed, that yes, BensonCarter had said something like that, but no, Illy didn’t know much about it.
    “All these things and more he whispered,” Kaby went on, “with the last gasps of his life-force, telling all his secret orders—for he’d not been sent to get us, he was on a separate mission, when he heard my SOSs. Sid, it’s you he was to contact, as the first leg of his mission, pick up from you three black hussars, death’s-head Demons, daring Soldiers, then to wait until the Places next match rhythm with the cosmos—matter of two mealtimes, barely—
    and to tune in northern Egypt in the age of the last Caesar, in the year the Rome’s swift downfall, there to start on operation in a battle near a city named for Thrace’s Alexander, there to change the course of battle, blow sky-high the stinking Serpents, all their agents, all their Zombies!
    “Goddess, pardon, now I savvy how you’ve guided my least footstep, when I thought you’d gone and left me—for I flubbed your three-mole signal. We’ve found Sid’s Place, that’s the first leg, and I see the three black hussars, and we’ve brought with us the weapon and the
    Parthian disguises, salvaged from the doomed Express Room when your Door appeared in time’s nick, and the Room around us closing spewed us through before it vanished with the corpse of BensonCarter. Triple Goddess, draw the milk now from the womanhood I flaunt here and inject the blackest hatred! Vengeance now upon the Serpants, vengeance sweet in northern Egypt, for your island, Crete, Goddess!—and a victory for the Spiders! Goddess, Goddess, we can swing it!”
    The roar that made me try to stop my ears with my shoulders didn’t come from
    Kaby—she’d spoken her piece—but from Sid. The dear boy was purple enough to make me want to remind him you can die of high blood pressure just as easy in the Change World.
     
    “Dump me with ops! ‘Sblood, I’ll not endure it! from field hospitals next. Kabysia
    Labrys, thou art mad to suggest it. And what’s this prattle of locks, clocks, and death’s heads, buttons and monkeys? This brabble, this farrago, this hocus-pocus! And where’s the