by Fritz Leiber
With the flicking of the switch a curtain of brainwave static surrounding his mind vanished. Unnoticed while present, because it was a meaningless thought-tone—a kind of mental gray—the vanishing static left behind a great inward silence and emptiness. To Morton it was as if his mind were crouched on a mountainpeak 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 friendliest greeting imaginable—words clear 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 comer of the work table, littered with air-brushes and cans of dye and acid. The easel, with one half-completed film for the multilevel picture she was spraying, now clouded by cigarette smoke. In the foreground, the shimmery gray 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, it 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 blending 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 mel” she told him. “A girl ought to be allowed some privacy.”
“Should she?” he asked teasingly.
“Well, at least leave me my fingers and toesl What if Fred had been visiting me?”
“I knew he wasn’t," Morton replied. “You know, Sis, I’d 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 in the final plea. And there had been a knot of something like fear under her breastbone. He questioned her about it. Swifdy 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 sometimes bugs me.” "How do you mean exactly?”
“You know, Mort. Ordinary people are protected. Their minds are walled in from birth, and behind the walls it may be stuffy but it’s very safe. So safe that they don’t even realize that there are walls . . . that there are frontiers 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 anyway—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 beyond our conception, something vast, vast! 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 comer, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”
“Brrr!” Morton thought, trying to make the shiver comic for Grayl’s sake. “Those old White and Red Russkies certainly had black minds! Andreyev? Dostoyevsky?”
"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-susceptible sister?”
"Stop poking fun! It was real, I tell you.”
“Real? How? Sounds like mood-reality to me. Here, stop being so ticklish and let me get a close-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 black and devilish.”
“Speaking of the devil and his cohorts, here we arel May we come in?” The texture of the interrupting thought was bluff and yet ironic, highly individual—suggesting 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 welcome 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 gray-green forest below—their uncle’s work as a ranger kept him up in his flyabout 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 parlor you’ve got, as the fly said to the spider."
“Uncle DeanI—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 reflecting a thought-flicker from your own unconscious or Morton’s. Why the fear-flurry?”
But just then a fourth mind joined them—resinous in flavor like Greek wine. “Hobat 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 cluck-cluck thought.” The newcomer’s tartness was unmalicious. They glimpsed the large office in which Evelyn worked, the m
icrotypewriter and rolls of correspondence tape on her desk. “But —bright truthl—someone always has to be last,” she continued. “And I’m working overtime. Always make a family conference, though. Afterwards will you take control 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 he 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. “Evelyn, Grayl, Uncle Dean, Hobart, and myself—the whole damn family. Would you care to share my day’s experiences first? Pretty dull armchair stuff, I warn you. Or shall we make it a five-dimensional free-for-all? A Quintet 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 minds, because there were five sensory-memory set-ups available for each individual. Five separate individuals, some of them thousands of miles apart, each viewing a different sector of the world of the First Global Democracy. Five separate visual landscapes— stydy, studio, laboratory, office, and the cloud-studded openness of the upper air—all of them existing in one mental space, now superimposed on each other, now replacing each other, now jostling each other as two ideas may jostle in a single non-telepathic'mind. Five varying auditory landscapes— the deep throb of the vanes of Dean’s flyabout making the dominant tone, around which the other noises wove counterpoint. In short, five complete sensory pictures, open to mutual inspection.
Five different ideational set-ups too. Five concepts of truth and beauty and honor, of good and bad, of wise and foolish, and of all the other so-called abstractions with which men and women direct their lives—all different, yet all vastly more similar than such concepts are among the non-telepathic, who can never really share them. Five different ideas of life, jumbled together like dice in a box.
And yet there was no confusion. The dice were educated. The five minds slipped into and out of each other with the practised grace and courtesy of diplomats at a tea. For these daily conferences had been going on ever since Grandfather Horn first discovered that he could communicate mentally with his children. Until then he had not known that he was a telepathic mutant, for before his children were bom there had been no other minds with which he could communicate— and the strange mental silence, disturbed from time to time by clouds of mental static, had even made him fear that he was psychotic. Now Grandfather Horn was dead, but the conferences went on between the members of the slowly widening circle of his lineal descendants—at present only five in number, although the mutation appeared to be a partial dominant. The conferences of the Horns were still as secret as the earliest ones had been. The First Global Democracy was still ignorant that, telepathy was a long-established fact —among the Horns. For the Horns believed that jealousy and suspicion and savage hate would be what they would get from the world if it ever became generally known that, by the chance of mutated heredity, they possesed a power which other men could never hope for. Or else they would be exploited as all-weather and interplanetary “radios.” So to the outside world, including even their non-telepathic husbands and wives, sweethearts and friends, they were just an ordinary group of blood relations—no more "psychic” certainly than any group of close-knit brothers and sisters and cousins. They had something of a reputation of being a family of "daydreamers”—that was about all. Beyond enriching their personalities and experience, the Horns’ telepathy was no great advantage to them. They could not read the minds of animals and other humans and they seemed to have no powers whatever of clairvoyance, clairaudience, telekinesis, or foreseeing the future or past. Their telepathic power was, in short, simply like having a private, all-senses family telephone.
The conference—it was much more a hyper-intimate gabfest— proceeded.
“My static box bugged out for a few ticks this morning,” Evelyn remarked in the course of talking over the trivia of the past twenty-four hours.
The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain waves. Without such individual thought-screens, there was too much danger of complete loss of individual personality—once Grandfather Horn had “become” his infant daughter as well as himself for several hours and the unfledged mind had come close to being permanently lost in its own subconscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall behind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently always enclosed.
In spite of the boxes, the Horns shared thoughts and emotions to an amazing degree. Their mental togetherness was as real and as mysterious—and as incedible—as thought itself . . . and thought is the original angel-cloud dancing on the head of a pin. Their present conference was as warm and initimate and tart as any actual family gathering in one actual room around one actual table. Five minds, joined together in the vast mental darkness that shrouds all minds. Five minds hugged together for comfort and safety in the infinite mental loneliness that pervades the cosmos.
Evelyn continued, "Your boxes were all working, of course, so I couldn’t get your thoughts—just the blurs of your boxes like litde old dark gray stars. But this time it gave me a funny uncomfortable feeling, like a spider crawling down my— Grayl! Don’t feel so wildly! What is it?”
Then . . . just as Grayl started to think her answer . . . something crept from the vast mental darkness and infinite cosmic loneliness surrounding the five minds of the Horns.
Grayl was the first to notice. Her panicky thought had the curling too-keen edge of hysteria. “There are six of us now! There should only be five, but there are six. Count! Count, I tell you! Six!”
To Mort it seemed that a gigantic spider was racing across the web of their thoughts. He felt Dean’s hands grip convulsively at the controls of his flyabout. He felt Evelyn’s slave-body freeze at her desk and Hobart grope out blindly so that a piece of apparatus fell with a crystalline tinkle. As if they had been sitting together at dinner and had suddenly realized that there was a sixth place set and a tall figure swathed in shadows sitting at it. A figure that to Mort exuded an overpowering taste and odor of brass—a sour metallic stench.
And then that figure spoke. The greater portion of the intruder’s thought was alien, unintelligible, frightening in its expression of an unearthly power and an unearthly hunger.
The understandable portion of its speech seemed to be in the nature of a bitter and coldly menacing greeting, insofar as references and emotional sense could be at all determined.
“I, the Mind Spider as you name me—the deathless one, the eternally exiled, the etemallv imprisoned—or so his overconfident enemies suppose—coming in."
Mort saw the danger almost too late—and he was the first to see it. He snatched toward the static box in his smock.
In what seemed no more than an instant he saw the shadow of the intruder darken the four other minds, saw them caught and wrapped in the intruder’s thoughts, just as a spider twirls a shroud around its victims, saw the black half-intelligible thoughts of the intruder scuttle toward him with blinding speed, felt the fanged impact of indomitable power, felt his own will fail.
There was a click. By a hairsbreath his fingers had carried out their mission. Around his mind the neutral gray wall was up and—Thank the Lord!—it appeared that the intruder could not penetrate it.
Mort sat there gasping, shaking, staring with the dull eyes of shock. Direct mental contact with the utterly inhuman— with that sort of inhumanity—is not something that can be lightly brushed aside or ever forgotten. It makes a wound. For minutes afterwards a man cannot think at all.
And the brassy stench lingered tainting
his entire consciousness—a stench of Satanic power and melancholy.
When he finally sprang up, it was not because he had thought things out but because he heard a faint sound behind him and knew with a chilling certainty that it meant death.
It was Grayl. She was carrying an airbrush as if it were a gun. She had kicked off her shoes. Poised there in the doorway she was the incarnation of taut stealthiness, as if she had sloughed off centuries of civilization in seconds of time, leaving only the primeval core of the jungle killer.
But it was her face that was the worst, and the most revealing. Pale and immobile as a corpse’s—almost. But the little more left over from the “almost” was a spiderish implacability, the source of which Mort knew only too well.
She pointed the airbrush at his eyes. His sidewise twist saved them from the narrow pencil of oily liquid that spat from the readjusted nozzle, but a little splashed against his hand and he felt the bits of acid. He lunged toward her, ducking away from the spray as she whipped it back toward him. He caught her wrist, bowled into her, and carried her with him to the floor.
She dropped the airbrush and fought—with teeth and claws like a cat, yet with this horrible difference that it was not like an animal lashing out instinctively but like an animal listening for orders and obeying them.
Suddenly she went limp. The static from his box had taken effect. He made doubly sure by switching on hers.
She was longer than he had been in recovering from the shock, but when she began to speak it was with a rush, as if she already realized that every minute was vital.
“We’ve got to stop the others, Mort, before they lest it out. The . . . the Mind Spider, Mort! It’s been imprisoned for eons, for cosmic ages. First floating in space, then in the Antarctic, where its prison spiralled to Earth. Its enemies . . . really its judges . . . had to imprison it, because it’s something that can’t be killed. I can’t make you understand just why they imprisoned it—” (Her face went a shade grayer) “—you’d have to experience the creature’s thoughts for that —but it had to do with the perversion and destruction of the life-envelopes of more than one planet.”
