t
there's a big thing."

He paused again, to let us wonder, I guess. Maud must have worked her
way over to me, for I felt her dry little hand on my arm and she
whispered out of the side of her mouth, "What do we do now?"

"We listen," I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her
need to be doing something about things.

She cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, "You, too?"

I didn't get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts!--because
just then Bruce's voice took up again in the faraway range.

"Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of
history can stand before it's all stitches, whether too much Change
won't one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too,
the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality
any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians?
Change Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every
operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more
makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that
are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you've
stripped off the paint.

"If that goes on, won't the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself,
then nothing? How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more
Doublegangers cut out of it? And there's another thing about every
operation--it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change
Winds die, it leaves them a little more disturbed and nightmare-ridden
and frazzled. Those of you who have been on operations in heavily
worked-over temporal areas will know what I mean--that look they give
you out of the sides of their eyes as if to say, 'You again? For
Christ's sake, go away. We're the dead. We're the ones who don't want to
wake up, who don't want to be Demons and hate to be Ghosts. Stop
torturing us.'"

* * * * *

I looked around at the Ghostgirls; I couldn't help it. They'd somehow
got together on the control divan, facing us, their backs to the
Maintainers. The Countess had dragged along the bottle of wine Erich had
fetched her earlier and they were passing it back and forth. The
Countess had a big rose splotch across the ruffled white lace of her
blouse.

Bruce said, "There'll come a day when all the Zombies and all the Unborn
wake up and go crazy together and figuratively come marching at us in
their numberless hordes, saying,