ace--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--"

"--but which leads to the ultimate victory of the Spiders and the West
over the Snakes and Communism, _Liebchen_, remember that. Anyway, our
cou