Fritz Leiber - The Mind Spider

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From Fritz Leiber’s

The Mind Spider and Other Stories

THE MIND SPIDER

Fritz Leiber

Hour and minute hand of the odd little grey clock stood

almost at midnight, Horn Tune, and now the second hand,

driven by the same tiny, invariable radioactive pulses,

was hurrying to overtake them. Morton Horn took note.

He switched off his book, puffed a brown cigarette alight,

and slumped back gratefully against the saddle-shaped

forcefield which combined the sensations of swansdown.

and laced rawhide.

When all three hands stood together, he flicked the

switch of a small black cubical box in his smock pocket

A. look of expectancy came into his pleasant, swarthy

face, as if he were about to receive a caller, although

the door had not spoken.

With the flicking of the switch a curtain of ^brainwave

static surrounding his mind vanished. Unnoticed white

present, because it was a meaningless thought-tone—a

kind of mental grey—the vanishing static left behind a

great inward silence and emptiness. To Morton it was as

if his mind were crouched on a mountain-peak in infinity.

"Hello, Mort. Are we first?"

A stranger in the room could not have heard those

words, yet to Mort they were the cheeriest and friendli-

est greeting imaginable—words dear as crystal without

any of the air-noise or bone-noise that blurs, ordinary

speech, and they sounded like chocolate tastes.

"Guess so, Sis,"' his every thought responded, ^"unless

the others have started a shaded contact at their end."

His mind swiftly absorbed a vision of his sister Grayl's

studio upstairs, just as it appeared to her. A corner of

the work table, littered with air-brushes and cans of dye

and acid. The easel, with one half-completed film for the

multi-level picture she was spraying, now clouded by

cigarette smoke. In the foreground, the shimmery grey

curve of her skirt and the slim, competent beauty of her

hands, so close—especially when she raised the cigarette

to puff it—that they seemed his own. The feathery touch

of her clothes on her skin. The sharp cool tingly tone of

her muscles. In the background, only floor and cloudy sky,

for the glastic walls of her studio did not refract.

The vision seemed a ghostly thing at first, a shadowy

projection against the solid walls of his own study. But

as the contact between their minds deepened, i£ grew

more real. For a moment, the two visual images swung

apart and stood side by side, equally real, as if he were

trying to focus one with each eye. Then for another

moment his room became the ghost room and Grayl's

the real one—as if he had become Grayl. He raised the

cigarette in her hand to her lips and inhaled the pleasant

fumes, milder than those of his own

rompe-pecho

. Then

he savored the two at once and enjoyed the mental blend-

fag of her Virginia cigarette with his own Mexican

"chestbreaker."

From the depths of her ... his ... their mind Grayl

laughed at him amiably.

"Here now, don't go sliding into all of me!" she told

him. "A girl ought to be allowed some privacy."

"Should she?" he' asked teasingly

"Well, at least leave me my fillers and toes! What if

Fred had been visiting me?

"I knew he wasn't," Morion replied. "You know, Sis,

Id never invade your body while you were with your

non-telepathic sweetheart."

"Nonsense, you'd love to, you old hedonist!—and I don’t

think I'd grudge you the experience—-especially if at the

same time you let me be with your lovely Helen! But

now please get out of me. Please, Morton."

.He retreated obediently until their thoughts met only

at the edges. But he had noticed something strangely

skittish in her first reaction. There had been a touch of

.hysteria in even the laughter and banter and certainly la

the final plea. And there had been a knot of something

like fear under her breastbone. He questioned her about

it Swiftly as the thoughts of one person, the mental

dialogue spun itself out.

"Really afraid of me taking control of you, Grayl?"

"Of course not, Mort! I'm as keen for control-exchange

experiments as any of us, especially when I exchange

with a man. But . . . we're so exposed, Mort—it some-

times bugs me."

'How do you mean exactly?"

"You know, Mort. Ordinary people are protected. Then-

minds are walled in from birth, and behind the walls it

may be stuffy but it's very safe. So safe that they dent

even realize that there are walls . . . that there are fron-

tiers of mind as well as frontiers of matter . . . and that

things can get at you across those frontiers."

"What sort of things? Ghosts? Martians? Angels?

Evil spirits? Voices from the Beyond? Big bad black

static-clouds?" His response was joshing. "You know

how flatly we've failed to establish any contacts in those

directions. As mediums we’re a howling failure. We've

never got so much as a hint of any telepathic mentalities

save our own. Nothing in the whole mental universe but

silence and occasional clouds of noise—static—and the

sound of distant Horns, if you'll pardon the family pun."

"I know Mort, but we're such a tiny young cluster of

mind, and the universe is an awfully big place and there's

a chance of some awfully queer things existing in it. Just

yesterday I was reading an old Russian novel from the

Years of Turmoil and one of the characters said something

that my memory photographed. Now where did I tuck it

away?—No, keep out of my files, Mort! I've got it any-

way—here it is."

A white oblong bobbed up in her mind. Morton read the

black print on it.

"We always imagine eternity (it said) as something be-

yond our conception, something vast, vasti But why must

it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little

room, like a bathhouse, in. the country, black and grimy

and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is?

I sometimes fancy it like that.'

"Brrr!" Morton thought, trying to make the shiver

comic for Grayls sake. "Those old White and Red Rus-

skies certainly had, black mindsl Andreyev? Dostoyev-

sky?"

"Or Svidrigailov, or some name like that. But it wasn't

the book that bothered me. It was that about an hour

ago I switched off my static box to taste the silence and

for the first time in my life I got the feeling there was

something nasty and alien in infinity and that it was

watching me, just like those spiders in the bathhouse. It

had been asleep for centuries but now it-was waking up.

I switched on my box

fast

"Ho-ho! The power of suggestion! Are you sure that

Russian wasn't named Svengali, dear self-hypnosis-sus

ceptible sister?"

"Stop poking funi It was real, I tell you."

"Real? How? Sounds like mood-reality to me. Here,

Stop being so ticklish and let me get a dose-up."

He started mock-forcibly to explore her memories,

thinking that a friendly mental roughhouse might be what"

she needed, but she pushed away his thought-tendrils with

a panicky and deathly-serious insistence. Then, he saw her

decisively stub out her cigarette and he felt a sudden

secretive chilling of her feelings.

"It's all really nothing, Mort," she told him briskly.

"Just a mood, I guess, like you say. No use bothering

a family conference with a mood. no matter how blade

and devilish."

"Speaking of the devil and his cohorts, here we are!

May we come in?" The texture of the interrupting

thought was bluff and yet ironic, highly individual—sug-

gesting not chocolate but black coffee. Even if Mort and

Grayl had not been well acquainted with its tone and

rhythms, they would have recognized it as that of a third

person. It was as if a third dimension had been added to

the two of their shared mind. They knew it immediately.

"Make yourself at home. Uncle Dean." was the wel-

come Grayl gave him. "Our minds are yours."

''Very cozy indeed," the newcomer responded with a

show of gruff amusement. "I'll do as you say, my dear.

Good to be in each other again." They caught a glimpse

of scudding ragged clouds patching steel-blue sky above to

grey-green forest below—their uncle's work as a ranger

kept him up in his fly-about a good deal of the day.

"Dean Horn coming in," he announced with a touch of

formality and then immediately added, "Nice tidy little

mental parlour you've got, as the fly said to the spider."

"Uncle Dean!—what made you think of spiders?"

Grayl's question was sharply anxious.

"Haven't the faintest notion, my dear. Maybe recalling

the time we took turns mind-sitting with Evelyn until she

got over her infant fear of spiders. More likely just re-

flecting a thought-flicker from your own unconscious or

Morton's. Why the fear-flurry?"

But just then a fourth mind joined them—resinous in

flavour like Greek wine. "Hobart Horn coming in." They

saw a ghostly laboratory, with chemical apparatus,

Then a fifth—sweet-sour apple-tasting. "Evelyn Horn

coming in. Yes, Grayl, late as usual—thirty-seven seconds

by Horn Time. I didn't miss your duck-duck thought"

The newcomer's tartness was unmalicious. They glimpsed

the large office in which Evelyn worked, the microtype-

writer and rolls of her correspondence tape on her desk.

“But—bright truth!—someone always has to be last," she

continued. "And I'm working overtime. Always make a

family conference, though; Afterwards will you take con-

trol of me, Grayl, and spell me at -this typing for a while?

I'm really fagged—and I don't want to leave my body on

automatic too long. It gets hostile on automatic and hurts

to squeeze back into. How about it, Grayl?"

“I will," Grayl promised, "but don't make it a habit.

I don't know what your administrator would say if ha

knew you kept sneaking off two thousand miles to my

studio to smoke cigarettes—and get my throat raw for

mel"

"All present and accounted for," Mort remarked. "Eve-

lyn, Grayl, Uncle Dean, Hobart, and myself—the whole

damn family. Would you care to share my day's experi-

ences first? Pretty dull armchair stuff, I warn you. 0r

shall we make it a five-dimensional free-for-all? A Quin-

tet for Horns? Hey, Evelyn, quit directing four-letter

thoughts at the chair!"

With that the conference got underway. Five minds

that were in a sense one mind, because they were wide

open to each other, and in another sense twenty-five

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