Fritz Leiber

It is the same in all we do. Our houses grow new and we dismantle them and stow the materials inconspicuously away, in mine and quarry, forest and field. Our clothes grow new and we put them off. And we grow new and forget and blindly seek a mother.

“Who are you talking about?”

“My husbands.” She shook her head dolefully. “To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian.”

Change one event in the past and you get a brand new future? Erase the conquests of Alexander by nudging a Neolithic pebble? Extirpate America by pulling up a shoot of Sumerian grain? Brother, that isn’t the way it works at all! The space-time continuum’s built of stubborn stuff and change is anything but a chain-reaction.

“That's right,” she told me, nodding. “Khrushchev was the giant Skymir, I’m pretty sure. Jotunheim and Asgard are Russia and America, all set to shoot missiles at each other across England and Europe, which must be Midgard, of course—though sometimes I think the English are the Vanir.”