The whole of this claustrophobic novel unfolds within the Place, a Recuperation Station suspended in an artificial pocket of spacetime outside the ordinary universe, where wounded soldiers of the Change War are patched up between missions. Greta Forzane, a young Entertainer drawn from early twentieth-century Chicago, narrates from inside this bubble, part nurse and part hostess to fighters plucked from across history and other worlds: an RAF pilot, a Wehrmacht officer, a Cretan Amazon, a Roman, and the non-human Sevensee and Illy. Two unseen factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, are refighting all of time, editing the past to reshape the present. The peace of the Place shatters when a soldier brings in an atomic bomb and the Maintainer, the device anchoring the station apart from the main timeline, vanishes, trapping everyone together with a threat of detonation. Leiber, better known for sword-and-sorcery, stages the entire crisis as a single-set chamber drama, and the conceit rewards the constraint. Beneath the temporal-war furniture it is really a study of soldiers with no cause they understand, asking whether anyone caught inside an endless war can trust the reasons given for it.
