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When shall we three , or in rain?

When the hurlyburly&039;s done

When the battle&039;s lost and won

- Macbeth

ENTER THESE HUSSARS

My nairl would describe o, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time - not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either

I a as the immortal filh-and-ready charm of my own I need it, for my job is to nurse back to health and kid back to sanity Soldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going This war is the Change War, a war of time travelers - in fact, our private na Tie the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help our side win the final victory a billion orbusiness, believe e War, but it&039;s influencing your lives all the ti

Have you ever worried about youryou exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts - not the storybook kind, but the billions of beings ere once so real and strong it&039;s hard to believe they&039;ll just sleep hars you may call devils or Deh all tih the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe ht be a crazy, mixed-up dreae War

How I got recruited into the Change War, how it&039;s conducted, what the two sides are, why you don&039;t consciously know about it, what I really think about it - you&039;ll learn in due course

The place outside the cos job I si and hu Soldiers fresh back from raids into tiot my sffly side, as you&039;ll find out

My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortood teaood Recuperation Station, though we have our fa into the Place with the beat-up Soldiers, who&039;ve generally just been going through hell and want to raise some of their own As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived Soldiers who started this thing I&039; that showed

When it started, I had been on the Big Tiht in the Place for five hundred-one thousand This two-nightmares routine every tih, but you pretend to get used to it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it

The Place is htclub where the Entertainers sleep in and a sh a Zeppelin is one thing we haven&039;t had yet You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an Entertainer likefroely similar except for size

Solely on doctor&039;s orders, I have been on cos I have had six brief vacations, if you care to call them that, for believe oes on in the Place all the tiot a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got over it Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be fitted by the Spiders into serious operations of the Change War, and you can iine how restful thatthe past? You stick along with theh, but don&039;t wander off either Relax and enjoy yourself"

Ha! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they cohter color, si by coive the happily back into action, though once in a great while so may happen to throee shadow on the party

I am dead in some ways, but don&039;t let that bother you - I ah in others If you met in the cosmos, you would be more apt to yak with me or try to pick me up than to ask a cop to do same or a father to douse me with holy water, unless you are one of those hard-boiled reformer types But you are not likely to meet me in the cosmos, because (bar Basin Street and the Prater) 15th Century Italy and Augustan Rome - until they spoiled it - are my favorite (Ha!) vacation spots and, as I have said, I stick as close to the Place as I can It is really the nicest Place in the whole Change World (Crisis! I even think of it capitalized!)

Anyhoo, when this thing started, I iddlingit was too late to do ernails and whoever came in probably wouldn&039;t notice them anyway

The Place was juray velvet of the Void around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when you close your eyes in the dark

Sid was tuning the Maintainers for the pickup and the right shoulder of his gold-worked gray doublet was streaked where he&039;d been wiping his face on it with quick ducks of his head

Beauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid&039;s other shoulder, one white-trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control divan, and he wasn&039;t ers on the dials; Beau&039;s copilot besides piano player Beau&039;s face had that dead blank look it le he owned andon the next card to be turned in the ga-cake Mississippi stea at the bar with his top hat pushed back and his knitted shawl pulled around hi whatever horrors a life in Nazi-occupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk Dee World

Maud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili - the New Girl, of course - were telling the big heads of their identical pearl necklaces

YouDemons doesn&039;t automatically make us brave

Then the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door began to darken in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds blowing hard andthree Soldiers had stepped out of the cos the floor hard as they changed tihts

They were dressed as officers of hussars, as we&039;d been advised, and - praise the Bonny Dew! - I saw that the first of them was Erich, my own dear little commandant, the pride of the von Hohenwalds and the Terror of the Snakes Behind him was so into him as they staod who&039;s just been touring a Christian hell

They were uniformed exactly alike in black - shakos, furedged pelisses, boots, and so forth - hite skull emblems on the shakos The only difference between them was that Erich had a Caller on his wrist and the New Boy had a black-gauntleted glove on his left hand and was clenching thebare like both of Erich&039;s and the Roold," Ski boo courtly and Maud began to chant, "Shut the Door!" and the New Girl copied her and I joined in because the Change Winds do blow like crazy when the Door is open, even though it can&039;t ever be shut tight enough to keep theh

"Shut it before it blorinides in our faces," Maud called in her gaer in the tight, kneelength frock she&039;d copied fro attention The Roman - I remembered his na forward stiffly as if there were so with his eyes, while Erich and the New Boy were yelling at each other about a kid and Einstein and a su booby-trapped Saint Petersburg Erich had that taut sadistic sets when he wants to hit e "Why&039;d you pull us out so bloody fast? We fair chewed the Nevsky Prospekt to pieces galloping away"

"Didn&039;t you feel their stun guns, Du the trap - too soon, Gott sei Dank?" Erich deh to numb a cat Why didn&039;t you show us action?"

"Shut up I&039;h"

"You won&039;t You&039;re a filthy Nazi coward"

"Weibischer Englander!"

"Schlange!"