"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 closets, gray sacks, puss pockets--no offense to this Place--that the Spiders have created, maybe by gigantic implosions, but no one knows for certain, and then we're sent off on all sorts of missions into the past and future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart the Snakes." "True, lad." "And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks come so fast, our emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public and private metaphysics distorted so insanely, the deepest thread of reality we cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can get things straight." "We've all felt that way, lad," Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek death's head; "You should have seen me, _Kamerad_, my first fifty sleeps," Erich put in; while I added, "Us girls, too, Bruce." "Oh, I know I'll get hardened to it, and don't think I can't. It's not that," Bruce said harshly. "And I wouldn't mind the personal confusion, the mess it's made of my spirit, I wouldn't even mind remaking history and destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past, if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart the Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the East. But what have they done to achieve this? I'll give you some beautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key." * * * * * "You got time for culture?" I heard myself say and I clapped my hand over my mouth in gentle reproof. "But _you_ remember the dialogues, lad," Sid observed. "And rail not at Crete--I have a sweet Keftian friend." "For how long will I remember Plato's dialogues? And who after me?" Bruce challenged. "Here's another. The Spiders want Rome powerful and, to date, they've helped Rome so much that she collapses in a blaze of German and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of Julius Caesar."