metimes in the Big Places, people tell me. But
the Callers only went wild--like a compass needle whirling around
without stopping--and nobody knew what that meant.

The trick hiding places were the Minor Maintainer, a cute idea, but it
is no bigger than the Major and has its own mysterious insides and had
obviously kept on doing its own work, so that was out for several
reasons, and the bomb chest, though it seemed impossible for anyone to
have opened it, granting they knew the secret of its lock, even before
Erich jumped on it and put it in the limelight double. But when you've
ruled out everything else, the word impossible changes meaning.

Since time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts of
tricks for sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanently
or temporarily. But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybody
that should know tells me that time traveling _through_ the Big Time is
out. It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the
countryside and we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as
Gertie Stein might put it, you can't time travel through the time you
time travel in when you time travel.

I'd also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvious
hiding place, maybe something that several people could pass back and
forth between them, which would mean a conspiracy, and, of course, if
you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including
the cosmos itself. Still, I'd got a sort of shell-game idea about the
Soldiers' three big black shakos and I hadn't been satisfied until I'd
got the three together and looked in them all at the same time.

"Wake up, Greta, and take something. I can't stand here forever." Maud
had brought us a tray of hearty snacks from then and yon, and I must say
they were tempting; she whips up a mean hors d'oeuvre.

I looked them over and said, "Siddy, I want a hot dog."

"And I want a venison pasty! Out upon you, you finical jill, you
o'erscrupulous jade, you whimsic and tyrannous poppet!"

I grabbed a handful and snuggled back against him.

"Go on, call me some more, Siddy," I told him. "Real juicy ones."

CHAPTER 10

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.

--Macbeth

MOTIVES AND OPPORTUNITIES

My big