t, "Kill
the Spiders--and the Germans!"

And Doc didn't collapse then, though I could see he was hanging onto
the bar tight with his other hand, and the Place got stiller, inside and
out, than I've ever known it, and Bruce's eyes were finally moving back
toward Sid.

* * * * *

But the eyes stopped short of Sid and I heard Bruce say, "Miss Forzane?"
and I thought, "That's funny," and I started to look around at the
Countess, and felt all the eyes and I realized, "Hey, that's me! But
this can't happen to me. To the others, yes, but not to me. I just work
here. Not to Greta, no, no, no!"

But it had, and the eyes didn't let go, and the silence and the feeling
of reality were Godawful, and I said to myself, "Greta, you've got to
say something, if only a suitable four-letter word," and then suddenly I
knew what the silence was like. It was like that of a big city if there
were some way of shutting off all the noise in one second. It was like
Erich's singing when the piano had deserted him. It was as if the Change
Winds should ever die completely ... and I knew beforehand what had
happened when I turned my back on them all.

The Ghostgirls were gone. The Major Maintainer hadn't merely been
switched to Introvert. It was gone, too.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER 9

"We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed."

"You looked among D----'s papers, of course, and into the books of
the library?"

"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened
every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume...."

--Poe

A LOCKED ROOM

Three hours later, Sid and I plumped down on the couch nearest the
kitchen, though too tired to want to eat for a while yet. A tighter
search than I could ever have cooked up had shown that the Maintainer
was not in the Place.

Of course it had to be in the Place, as we kept telling each other for
the first two hours. It had to be, if circumstances and the theories we
lived by in the Change World meant anything. A Maintainer is what
maintains a Place. The Minor Maintainer takes care of oxygen,
temperature, humidity, gravity, and other little life-cycle and
matter-cycle things generally, but it's the Major Maintainer that keeps
the walls from buckling and the ceiling from falling in. It is little,
but oh my, it does so much.

It