The Big Time Read Online Free PDF

quietly side by side.
    He looked down at his shiny boots and the rest of his black duds like he was just waking up and couldn’t believe it all, and he said, “ Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis ,” and I raised my eyebrows at Beau, who was taking the tray back, and he did proud by old Vicksburg by translating: “All things change and we change with them.”
    Then Mark slowly looked around at us, and I can testify that a Roman smile is just as warm as any other nationality, and he finally said, “We are nine, the proper number for a party. The couches, too. It is good.”
    Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, “Welcome back from the Void, Kamerad ,” and then, because he’s German and thinks all parties have to be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, “ Heren und Damen , permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them all, Marcus Vipsalus Niger, legate to Nero Claudlius
    (called Germanicus in a former time stream) and who In 763 A.U.C. (Correct, Mark? It means
    10 A.D., you meatheads!) died bravely fighting the Parthians and the Snakes in the Battle of
    Alexandria. Hoch, hoch, hoch! ”
    We all swung our glasses and cheered with him and Sud yelled at Erich, “Keep your feet off the furniture, you unschooled rogue,” and grinned and boomed at all three hussars, “Take your ease, Recuperees,” and Maud and Mark got their drinks, the Roman paining Beau by refusing Falernian wine in favor of scotch and soda, and right away everyone was talking a mile a minute.
    We had a lot to catch up on. There was the usual yak about the war—“The Snakes are laying mine fields in the Void,” I don’t believe it, how can you mine nothing?”—and the
     
    shortages—bourbon, bobby pins, and the stabiitin that would have brought Mark out of it faster—and what had become of people—“Marcia? Oh, she’s not around any more,” (She’d been caught in a Change Gale and green and stinking in five seconds, but I wasn’t going to say that)—and Mark had to be told about Bruce’s glove, which convulsed us all over again, and the Roman remembered a legionary who had carried a gripe all the way to Octavius because he’d accidentally been issued the unbelievable luxury item sugar instead of the usual salt, and Erich asked Sid if he had any new Ghostgirls in stock and Sid sucked his beard like the old goat he is. “Dost thou ask me, lusty Allemand? Nay, there are several great beauties, amongst them an Austrian countess from Strauss’s Vienna, and if it were not for sweetling here … Mnnnn.” -
    I poked a finger in Erich’s chest between two of the bright buttons with their tiny death’s heads. “You, my little von Hohenwald, are a menace to us real girls. You have too much of a thing about the unawakened, ghost kind.”
    He called me his little Demon and hugged me a bit too hard to prove it wasn’t so, and then he suggested we show Bruce the Art Gallery. I thought this was a real brilliant idea, but when 1 tried to argue him out of it, he got stubborn. Bruce and Lilt were willing to pay any attention while doing it. The saber cut was just a thin red line on his cheek; she’d washed away all the dried blood.
    The Gallery gets you, though. It’s a bunch of paintings and sculptures and especially odd knickknacks, all made by Soldiers recuperating here and a lot of them telling about the
    Change War from the stuff they’re made of—brass cartridges, flaked flint, bits of ancient pottery glued into futuristic shapes, mashed-up Incan gold rebeaten by a Martian, whorls of beady Lunan wire, a picture in tempera on a crinkle-cracked thick round of quartz that had filled a starship porthole, a Sumerian inscription chiseled into a brick from an atomic oven.
    There are a lot of things in the Gallery and I can always find some I haven’t ever seen before. It gets you, as I say, thinking about the guys that made them and their thoughts, and the far times and places they came from, and