ern Church, without ever
letting it pass into the hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is the
Snakes' Three-Thousand-Year Plan which we are fighting against, striving
to revive Rome's glories."

"Striving is the word for it," Bruce snapped. "Here's yet another
example. To beat Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out of
World War Two, thereby ensuring a German invasion of the New World and
creating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines of Siberia to the
plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!"

He stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chanting
in a weird spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow.

"_Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Kein' Peitsch', gnaedige Herren. Salz, Salz,
Salz._"

I turned and there was Doc waltzing toward us with little tiny steps,
bent over so low that the ends of his shawl touched the floor, his head
crooked up sideways and looking through us.

I knew then, but Erich translated softly. "'Salt, salt, I bring salt. No
whip, merciful sirs.' He is speaking to my countrymen in their
language." Doc had spent his last months in a Nazi-operated salt mine.

* * * * *

He saw us and got up, straightening his top hat very carefully. He
frowned hard while my heart thumped half a dozen times. Then his face
slackened, he shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "_Nichevo_."

"And it does not matter, sir," Beau translated, but directing his remark
at Bruce. "True, great civilizations have been dwarfed or broken by the
Change War. But others, once crushed in the bud, have bloomed. In the
1870s, I traveled a Mississippi that had never known Grant's gunboats. I
studied piano, languages, and the laws of chance under the greatest
European masters at the University of Vicksburg."

"And you think your pipsqueak steamboat culture is compensation for--"
Bruce began but, "Prithee none of that, lad," Sid interrupted smartly.
"Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards, and I'll drink
dead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so puny
as to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no,
nor with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and
nerves of brass. Waste not your pity on them."

"True indeed, sir," Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack on
his Greater South. "Most of us enter the Change World with the false
metaphysic that the slightest change in the past--a