by Fritz Leiber
Even under the stress of horror, Mort had time to realize how strange it was to be listening to Grayl’s words instead of her thoughts. They never used words except when ordinary people were present. It was like acting in a play. Suddenly it occurred to him that they would never be able to share thoughts again. Why, if their static boxes were to fail for a few seconds, as Evelyn’s had this morning . . .
"That’s where it’s been,” Grayl continued, “locked in the heart of the Antarctic, dreaming its centuries-long dreams of escape and revenge, waking now and again to rage against its captivity and rack its mind with a thousand schemes—and searching, searching, always searching! Searching for telepathic contact with creatures capable of operating the locks of its prison. And now, waking after its last fifty year trance, finding them!”
He nodded and caught her trembling hands in his.
“Look,” he said, “do you know where the creature’s prison is located?”
She glanced up at him fearfully. “Oh, yes, it printed the coordinates of the place on my mind as if my brain were graph paper. You see, the creature has a kind of colorless perception that lets it see out of its prison. It sees through rock as it sees through air and what it sees it measures. I’m sure that it knows all about Earth—because it knows exactly what it wants to do with Earth, beginning with the forced evolution of new dominant life forms from the insects and arachnids . . . and other organisms whose sensation-tone pleases it more than that of the mammals.”
He nodded again. “All right,” he said, “that pretty well settles what you and I have got to do. Dean and Hobart and Evelyn are under its control—we’ve got to suppose that. It may detach one or even two of them for the side job of finishing us off, just as it tried to use you to finish me. But it’s a dead certainty that it’s guiding at least one of them as fast as is humanly possible to its prison, to release it. We can’t call in Interplanetary Police or look for help anywhere. Everything hinges on our being telepathic, and it would take days to convince them even of that. We’ve got to handle this all by ourselves. There’s not a soul in the world can help us.
We’ve got to hire an all-purpose flyabout that can make the trip, and we’ve got to go down there. While you were unconscious I put through some calls. Evelyn has left the office. She hasn’t gone home. Hobart should be at his laboratory, but he isn’t. Dean’s home station can’t get in touch with him. We can’t hope to intercept them on the way—I thought of getting I. P. to nab them by inventing some charges against them, but that would probably end with the police stopping us. The only place where we have a chance of finding them, and of stopping them, is down there, where it is.
“And we'll have to be ready to kill them.”
For millenniums piled on millenniums, the gales of Earth’s loftiest, coldest, loneliest continent had driven the powdered ice against the dull metal without scoring it, without rusting it, without even polishing it. Like some grim temple sacred to pitiless gods it rose from the Antarctic gorge, a blunt hemisphere ridged with steps, with a tilted platform at the top, as if for an altar. A temple built to outlast eternity. Unmistakably the impression came through that this structure was older than Earth, older perhaps than the low-circling sun, that it had felt colds to which this was summer warmth, that it had known the grip of forces to which these ice-fisted gales were playful breezes, that it had known loneliness to which this white wasteland was teeming with life.
Not so the two tiny figures struggling toward it from one of three flyabouts lying crazily atilt on the drift. Their every movement betrayed frail humanity. They stumbled and swayed, leaning into the wind. Sometimes a gust would send them staggering. Sometimes one would fall. But always they came on. Though their clothing appeared roughly adequate —the sort of polar clothing a person might snatch up in five minutes in the temperate zone—it was obvious that they could not survive long in this frigid region. But that did not seem to trouble them.
Behind them toiled two other tiny figures, coming from the second grounded flyabout. Slowly, very slowly, they gained on the first two. Then a fifth figure came from behind a drift and confronted the second pair.
“Steady now. Steady!” Dean Horn shouted against the wind, leveling his blaster. “Mort! Grayl! For your lives, don’t move!”
For a moment these words resounded in Mort’s ears with the inhuman and mocking finality of the Antarctic gale. Then the faintly hopeful thought came to him that Dean would hardly have spoken that way if he had been under the creature’s control. He would hardly have bothered to speak at all.
The wind shrieked and tore. Mort staggered and threw an arm around Grayl’s shoulders for mutual support.
Dean fought his way toward them, blaster always leveled. In his other hand he had a small black cube—his static box, Mort recognized. He held it a little in front of him (like a cross, Mort thought) and as he came close to them he thrust it toward their heads (as if he were exorcising demons, Mort thought). Only then did Dean lower the muzzle of his blaster.
Mort said, “I’m glad you didn’t count lurching with the wind as moving.”
Dean smiled harshly. “I dodged the thing, too,” he explained. “Just managed to flick on my static box. Like you did, I guess. Only I had no way of knowing that, so when I saw you I had to make sure I—”
The circular beam of a blaster hissed into the drift beside them, raining a great cloud of steam and making a hole wide as a bushel basket. Mort lunged at Dean, toppling him down out of range, pulling Grayl after.
“Hobart and Evelyn!” He pointed. “In the hollow ahead! Blast to keep them in it, Dean. What I’ve got in mind won’t take long. Grayl, stay close to Dean . . . and give me your static box!”
He crawled forward along a curve that would take him to the edec of the hollow. Behind him and at the further side of the hollow, snow puffed into clouds of steam as the blasters spat free energy. Finally he glimpsed a shoulder, cap, and upturned collar. He estimated the distance, hefted Grayl’s static box, guessed at the wind and made a measured throw. Blast-er-fire from the hollow ceased. He rushed forward, waving to Dean and Grayl.
Hobart was sitting in the snow, staring dazedly at the weapon in his hand, as if it could tell him why he’d done what he’d done. He looked up at Mort with foggy eyes. The black static box had lodged in the collar of his coat and Mort felt a surge of confidence at the freakish accuracy of his toss.
But Evelyn was nowhere in sight. Over the lip of the hollow, very close now, appeared the ridged and dully gleaming hemisphere, like the ascendant disk of some tiny and ill-boding asteroid. A coldness that was more than that of the ice-edged wind went through Mort. He snatched Hobart’s blaster and ran. The others shouted after him, but he only waved back at them once, frantically.
The metal of the steps seemed to suck warmth even from the wind that ripped at his back like a snow-tiger as he climbed. The steps were as crazily tilted as those in a nightmare, and there seemed always to be more of them, as if they were somehow growing and multiplying. He found himself wondering if material and mental steps could ever get mixed.
He reached the platform. As his head came up over the edge, he saw, hardly a dozen feet away, Evelyn’s face, blue with cold but having frozen into the same spiderish expression he had once seen in Grayl’s. He raised the blaster, but in the same moment the face dropped out of sight. There was a metallic clang. He scrambled up onto the platform and clawed impotently at the circular plate barring the opening into which Evelyn had vanished. He was still crouched there when the others joined him.
The demon wind had died, as if it were the Mind Spider’s ally and had done its work. The hush was like a prelude to a planet’s end, and Hobart’s bleak words, gasped out disjoint--edly, were like the sentence of doom.
“There are two doors. The thing told us all about them . . . while we were under its control. The first would be open . . . we were to go inside and shut it ^behind us. That’s what Evelyn’s done . . . she’s locked it from the inside .
. . just the simplest sliding bolt . . . but it will keep us from getting at her . . . while she activates the locks of the second door . . . the real door. We weren’t to get the instructions ... on how to do that. . . until we got inside.”
“Stand aside,” Dean said, aiming his blaster at the trapdoor, but he said it dully, as if he knew beforehand that it wasn’t going to work. Waves of heat made the white hill beyond them waver. But the dull metal did not change color and when Dean cut off his blaster and tossed down a handful of snow on the spot, it did not melt.
Mort found himself wondering if you could make a metal of frozen thought. Through his numbed mind flashed a panorama of the rich lands and seas of the Global Democracy they had flown over yesterday—the green-framed white powder stations of the Orinoco, the fabulous walking cities of the Amazon Basin, the jet-atomic launching fields of the Gran Chaco, the multi-domed Oceanographic Institute of the Falkland Islands. A dawn world, you might call it. He wondered vaguely if other dawn worlds had struggled an hour or two into the morning only to fall prey to things like the Mind Spider.
“No! The word came like a command heard in a dream. He looked up dully and realized that it was Grayl who had spoken—realized, with stupid amazement, that her eyes were flashing with anger.
“No! There's still one way we can get at it and try to stop it. The same way it got at us. Thought! It took us by surprise. We didn’t have time to prepare resistance. We were panicked and it’s given us a permanent panic-psvchology. We could only think of getting behind our thought-screens and about how—once there—we’d never dare come out again. Maybe this time, if we all stand firm when we open our screens . . .
“I know it’s a slim chance, a crazy chance . .
Mort knew that too. So did Dean and Hobart. But something in him, and in them, rejoiced at Gravl’s words, rejoiced at the prospect of meeting the thing, however hopelessly, on it’s own ground, mind to mind. Without hesitation they brought out their static boxes, and, at the signal of Dean’s hand uplifted, switched them off.
That action plunged them from a material wilderness of snow and bleakly clouded sky into a sunless, dimensionless wilderness of thought. Like some lone fortress on an endless plain, their minds linked together, foursquare, waiting the assault. And like some monster of nightmare, the thoughts of the creature that accepted the name of the Mind Spider rushed toward them across that plain, threatening to overmaster them by the Satanic prestige that absolute selfishness and utter cruelty confer. The brassy stench of its being was like a poison cloud.
They held firm. The thoughts of the Mind Spider darted about, seeking a weak point, then seemed to settle down upon them everywhere, engulfingly, like a dry black web.
Alien against human, egocentric killer-mind against mutually loyal preserver-minds—and in the end it was the mutual loyalty and knittedness that turned the tide, giving them each a four-fold power of resistance. The thoughts of the Mind
Spider retreated. Theirs pressed after. They sensed that a corner of his mind was not truly his. They pressed a pincers attack at that point, seeking to cut it off. There was a moment of desperate resistance. Then suddenly they were no longer four minds against the Spider, but five.
The trapdoor opened. It was Evelyn. They could at last switch on their thought-screens and find refuge behind the walls of neutral gray and prepare to fight back to their fly-abouts and save their bodies.
But there was something that had to be said first, something that Mort said for them.
“The danger remains and we probably can’t ever destroy it. They couldn’t destroy it, or they wouldn’t have built this prison. We can’t tell anyone about it. Non-telepaths wouldn’t believe all our story and would want to find out what was inside. We Horns have the job of being a monster’s jailers. Maybe someday we’ll be able to practice telepathy again—behind some sort of static-spheres. We will have to prepare for that time and work out many precautions, such as keying our static boxes, so that switching on one switches on all. But the Mind Spider and its prison remains our responsibility and our trust, forever.”
