the dashed glove itself, as you very well know, you howling Demons."
"What is it then, noble heart?" Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard heightening the effect of innocent receptivity.
"It's the principle of the thing," Bruce said, looking around sharply, but none of us cracked a smile. "It's this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos--and don't tell me that isn't in the cards!--masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders--and we don't know who they are ultimately; it's just a name; we see only agents like ourselves--the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of our lifelines--"
"Is that bad, lad?" Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced.
"--and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another time-traveling power called the Snakes--just a name, too--which is bent on perverting and enslaving the whole cosmos, past, present and future."
"And isn't it, lad?"
"Before...
"We've all felt that way, lad," Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek death's head; "You should have seen me, _Kamerad_, my first fifty sleeps," Erich put in; while I added, "Us girls, too, Bruce."
"Oh, I know I'll get hardened to it, and don't think I can't. It's not that," Bruce said harshly. "And I wouldn't mind the personal confusion, the mess it's made of my spirit, I wouldn't even mind remaking history and destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past, if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart the Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the East. But what have they done to achieve this? I'll give you some beautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key."

*       *       *       *       *

"You got time for culture?" I heard myself say and I clapped my hand over my mouth in gentle reproof.
"But _you_ remember the dialogues, lad," Sid observed. "And rail not at Crete--I have a sweet Keftian friend."
"For how long will I remember Plato's dialogues? And who after me?" Bruce challenged. "Here's another. The Spiders want Rome powerful and, to date, they've helped Rome so much that she collapses in a blaze of German and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of Julius Caesar."
This time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place loves these bull sessions. "You omit to mention, sir, that Rome's newest downfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes have fomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of 

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