The other didn't pull away, but he didn't look up and Erich came on. Sid was hurrying toward the New Boy, and as he passed Erich, he wagged a finger at him and gayly said, "You rogue." Next thing I was giving Erich my "Man, you're home" hug and he was kissing me and cracking my ribs and saying, "_Liebchen! Doppchen!_"--which was fine with me because I do love him and I'm a good lover and as much a Doubleganger as he is. We had just pulled back from each other to get a breath--his blue eyes looked so sweet in his worn face--when there was a thud behind us. With the snapping of the tension, Doc had fallen off his bar stool and his top hat was over his eyes. As we turned to chuckle at him, Maud squeaked and we saw that the Roman had walked straight up against the Void and was marching along there steadily without gaining a foot, like it does happen, his black uniform melting into that inside-your-head gray. Maud and Beau rushed over to fish him back, which can be tricky. The thin gambler was all courtly efficiency again. Sid supervised from a distance. "What's wrong with him?" I asked Erich. He shrugged. "Overdue for Change Shock. And he was nearest the stun guns. His horse almost threw him. _Mein Gott_, you should have seen Saint Petersburg, _Liebchen_: the Nevsky Prospekt, the canals flying by like reception carpets of blue sky, a cavalry troop in blue and gold that blundered across our escape, fine women in furs and ostrich plumes, a monk with a big tripod and his head under a hood--it gave me the horrors seeing all those Zombies flashing past and staring at me in that sick unawakened way they have, and knowing that some of them, say the photographer, might be Snakes." Our side in the Change War is the Spiders, the other side is the Snakes, though all of us--Spiders and Snakes alike--are Doublegangers and Demons too, because we're cut out of our lifelines in the cosmos. Your lifeline is all of you from birth to death. We're Doublegangers because we can operate both in the cosmos and outside of it, and Demons because we act reasonably alive while doing so--which the Ghosts don't. Entertainers and Soldiers are all Demon-Doublegangers, whichever side they're on--though they say the Snake Places are simply ghastly. Zombies are dead people whose lifelines lie in the so-called past. * * * * * "What were you doing in Saint Petersburg before the ambush?" I asked Erich. "That is, if you can talk about it." "Why not? We were kidnapping the infant Einstein back from the Snakes in 1883. Yes, the Snakes got him, _Liebchen_, only a few sleeps back, endangering the West's whole victory over Russia--" "--which gave your dear little Hitler the world on a platter for fifty years and got me loved to death by your sterling troops in the Liberation of Chicago--"