The Change War

by Fritz Leiber

  “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 Gray 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 edge 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 up-turned collar. He estimated the distance, hefted Grayl’s static box, guessed at the wind and made a measured throw. Blaster-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 disjointedly, 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 trap-door, but he said it dully, as if he knew before hand 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 up by surprise. We didn’t have time to prepare resistance. We were panicked and it’s given us a permanent panic-psychology. 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 Grayl’s words, rejoiced at the prospect of meeting the thing, however hopelessly, on its 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 over-master 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 flyabouts 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.”

  Black Corridor

  HE sat hunched in a corridor head-high and about two doors wide try
ing to remember who he was.

  He felt very weary in his legs, as if he’d been walking the corridor a long, long time.

  The corridor was of a black shimmering metal cool to his skin. He couldn’t spot the source of the shimmer, which dimly lit the corridor though leaving the metal black, but he was pretty sure that was a minor problem.

  He heard a faint steady whining, but he thought that was minor too.

  He was hunched so that his heels pressed his buttocks and his elbows his sides, while his hands and the lower half of his face rested on his knees. Like a big rangy fetus sitting up, or the corpse in an early Egyptian holeburial. There droned in his mind, “Naked I came into the world and naked I go out.”

  The corridor was literally two doors wide, for it ended ten yards away in two doors which faced him squarely. Each door had a glowing button on it and below the button a short word he couldn’t quite read, though now and then he lifted his face to squint at them.

  After a while he might go and read the two words, but now it seemed important to sit hunched all together, as if that helped him concentrate, and try to remember who he was.

  Moreover, though he tried to keep it out of his mind, he really shrank from investigating the two doors. There was something about them that daunted and sickened him.

  Instead he chased memories in the inner darkness of his mind, but they turned and fled like tiny moonlit fish from a nighttime skin-diver.

  He had the feeling that he’d taken a wrong fork somewhere behind him in the corridor, and that as he’d taken that curving turn, his name and all that had ever happened to him had slipped away, as if dragged out of his mind by centrifugal force.

  Maybe when he had rested a little more he should go back and find the fork and this time take the straight branch.

  As he had that thought, cool metal touched his back.

  He threw out his arms, and they struck cool metal, even with his back, to either side.

  The movement jerked his torso erect. His head, neck, and shoulders touched cool metal too.

  He scrambled to his feet and turned around. Where there had stretched an endless corridor, there was now a wall about a yard away. A black wall with no doors or door in it.

  Instead of being in a corridor open-ended one way, he was in a glimmering black box ten yards long.

  He realized that the faint steady whining had stopped only when it started up again.

  The wall that had touched him began moving toward him very slowly, at about the normal walking speed of an ant.

  He stood stiffly erect, facing it. His arms hanging at his sides began to tremble, then his legs. His breath came and went between his teeth in little shuddering gusts. His eyes slowly converged. The wall touched the ends of his big toes, then nudged them. Without stepping back, he threw up his hands beside his shoulders and pressed against the wall.

  The whining stopped, but after he had taken two more breaths, softly sighing ones through his nose, he could feel the wall begin to press back. Holding his breath and without changing his stance, he pressed harder. The wall pressed harder still and with a sudden little scream threw him back.

  He saved himself from falling and then took another backward jump.

  The wall’s little scream sank immediately to a whine, but the whine was a little louder now, and the wall came on a little faster, like a cockroach in a hurry.

  This time he readied himself carefully for the wall’s approach, taking a position somewhat like that of a wrestler but also a fencer. His right leg, bent slightly at the knee, was thrust almost straight behind him, and that foot pointed back too. His left leg was bent under him, left foot pointing straight forward. The soles of both feet, toes gripping, were planted flat on the floor, which compared to the smooth walls was a trifle gritty, firming his stance.

  When the wall reached him, the box he was in being then seven yards long, he met the wall simultaneously with his spread-fingered right hand, his left shoulder and his whole left arm doubled up clench-fisted against his chest, the left side of his head and his left knee.

  The wall stopped dead. In fact, it gave back a little, or seemed to. He pressed a little harder, but it gave no more. He did not waste his strength then, but only maintained the same relatively light pressure which had stopped the wall, trying to relax as much as he dared. His teeth were lightly clenched, but through his nostrils he drew and expelled deep breaths, as a climber does before tackling a difficult stretch of rock-face.

  After what seemed a long time, the wall began to push at him again. He contented himself with matching its pressure, guessing that if he put out his full strength, the wall would do the same, shortening the contest.

  What point there was in prolonging the contest for as long a time as possible, he couldn’t define, but he was sure there was one.

  Naturally he was pushing at the wall to keep himself from being crushed when the glimmering black box shortened to nothing. Yet surely the sane thing to do would be to inspect the two doors behind him and escape by way of one of them, instead of pouring out his remaining strength here. But no, he had such a deep if undefined horror of the two doors that he was determined to have nothing to do with them unless absolutely forced to. Whether sane or not, the preferable course now was to oppose the wall with all his might.

  Slowly his muscles began to bulge and his heartbeat and respiration to speed up, though he made himself take the same deep, even, controlled breaths. A bead of sweat stung the inside corner of his left eye. He had to keep reminding himself not to waste energy grinding his teeth and on no account to yield to the temptation to shove out with sudden violence or begin to shout curses. I mustn’t let the wall trick me, he thought fiercely.

  His muscles began to ache, his breaths were now deep snorts. He became aware of his heartbeat and felt the blood throbbing in his temples and wrists. He heard little creakings here and there in his body, or thought he did. Despite himself, his teeth began to clench tighter and tighter.

  The pain in his muscles increased. There was fire in his joints. He broke wind, and that rattled him and almost threw him off guard. He could feel the sweat trickling down his back and legs. He prayed that it wouldn’t make him slip. It was running into his eyes now, so that he blinked constantly. Under his chin it pooled in the tiny cup between the bent thumb and curled forefinger of his clenched left fist.

  But he knew the wall still hadn’t budged him, chiefly because it was silent—no whine, no scream.

  In the midst of his near agony, there flashed up in his mind one sane reason for keeping up his seemingly insane struggle: the hope that a connection might bum out in the engine powering the wall, or something in it break, or its fuel run out, or the creature or creatures pushing the wall from the other side tire before he did. Then he might be able to push the wall back, even as far as the fork in the tunnel, making it unnecessary to investigate the two doors ahead.

  His heart and head were pounding now, there was a roaring in his ears, he was breathing in deep, open-mouthed gasps, his body was one flame, through his sweat-smarting eyes the wall seemed dazzling one moment, dead black the next, he felt consciousness ebbing, but still he stuck to his labor.

  With a scream like a hunting leopard close by, the wall gave a mighty shove that sent him staggering back. The scream sank to a loud whine, and the wall came on at the speed of ungoaded oxen.

  Though his mind was swimming and he could barely stand, and while he was still breathing in great, wide-mouthed, acid gasps, he turned at once and walked in long strides toward the two doors. And though he reeled from side to side, his legs cramping and his arms hanging like fiery bars of lead, he nevertheless went on tiptoe, fearing that any extra sound he made might speed up the wall.

  He was burning when he started that five-stride journey. When he finished it he was shivering and the sweat on him was icy and his teeth were chattering.

  By the time he was within touching distance of the doors, his mind and body had steadied, but he still had t
o blink twice before he could read the short words under the two buttons.

  The one said WATER, the other AIR.

  With the eager whine coming swiftly closer and closer, he lashed himself to think. Let’s see, air could mean emptiness and height, a great fall. He couldn’t fly, hell, he could hardly stand.

  But he could swim. Water was necessary to life. Life came originally from the seas.

  Yet he could also drown.

  Acrophobia versus hydrophobia.

  As the well struck his heels and pushed him on, this time with a merciless lack of hesitation, and as he zigged a finger toward the button on the WATER door, an afterthought came to him in a flash.

  Air was also necessary to life. He still had enough water in him, even after his sweating, to live at least a day. But he would be dead without air, or his brain would be dead, in about five minutes.

  He zagged his finger to the AIR button. That door opened away from him, and he stumbled through it, pushed by the wall, and it slammed shut behind him.

  He wasn’t falling through emptiness, or standing in the open either, for that matter. He was simply in another section of black corridor.

  He staggered forward a few steps and then between relief and exhaustion collapsed to his knees and hands. His roaring head slumped, his eyes staring dully at the faintly gritty metallic floor while he gulped oxygen.

  After a short time he looked around him. The corridor wall on the WATER-door side wasn’t shimmering black metal as he had taken for granted, but must be heavy glass or some other transparent amorphous substance, for in it were small silvery fish, a few small squid jetting about, and some speeding faintly-phosphorescent veils he couldn’t identify, all lodged in dark water which rose at least to the roof of that other corridor.

  He congratulated himself that he’d made the right choice, even on a last-minute hunch.

  By right (except that the universe doesn’t recognize rights) the corridor he was in should have been halved in width, but it was as broad as before. He deduced that it had acquired extra width on the side away from the water.