Free The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

on the current flurry of stupid slugging and panicky anachronism, when we all know that anachronism is what gets the Change Winds out of control. This punch-drunk pounding on the Cretan-Dorian fracas as if it were the only battle going and the only way to work things. Whisking Constantine from
    Britain to the Bosporus by rocket, sending a pocket submarine back to sail with the Armada against Drake’s woodensides—I’lI wage you hadn’t heard those! And now, to save Rome, an atomic bomb.
    “Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a fission weapon …
    I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will make in what’s left of history—the smothering of Greece and the vanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy’s
    Irish Captivity won’t be in it!”
    The cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he didn’t pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned in irony and he said, “But I’m forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we’re just one little world—
    one little solar system, Sevensee—and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.
    “Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever than go on
     
    living in a world without the Summa , the Field Equations, Process and Reality , Hamlet , Matthew, Keats, and the Odyssey , but our masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those rugged souls who want to go on living no matter what.”
    Erich’s “Bruce, I’m telling you that’s enough,” was lost in the quickening flow of the
    New Boy’s words. “I won’t spend much time on the minor signs of our major crack-up—the canceling of leaves, the sharper shortages, the loss of the Express Room, the use of
    Recuperation Stations for ops and all the other frantic patchwork—last operation but one, we were saddled with three Soldiers from outside the Galaxy and, no fault of theirs, they were no earthly use. Such little things might happen at a bad spot in any war and are perhaps only local. But there’s a big thing.”
    He paused again, to let us wonder, I guess. Maud must have worked her way over to me, for I felt her dry little hand on my arm and she whispered out of the side of her mouth, “What do we do now?”
    “We listen,” I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her need to be doing something about things.
    She cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, “You, too?”
    I didn’t get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts!—because just then
    Bruce’s voice took up again in the faraway range.
    “Have you ever asked yourself how many operations the fabric of history can stand before it’s all stitches, whether too much Change won’t one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of
    Reality any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? Change
    Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you’ve stripped off the paint.
    “If that goes on, won’t the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself, then nothing?
    How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more Doublegangers cut out of it?
    And there’s another thing about every operation—it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change Winds die, it leaves