The Mind Spider and Other Stories

by Fritz Leiber

  Table of Contents

  THE HAUNTED FUTURE

  DAMNATION MORNING

  THE OLDEST SOLDIER

  TRY AND CHANGE THE PAST

  THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

  THE MIND SPIDER

  THE MIND SPIDER And Other Stories

  by

  FRITZ LEIBER

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  THE HAUNTED FUTURE

  My strangest case, bar none, from the Psychotic Years was the Green Demon of New Angeles.

  —from the notebooks of Andreas Snowden

  IT would be hard to imagine a more peaceful and reassuring spot, a spot less likely to harbor or attract horrors, even in America of the tranquil Early Twenty-first Century, than the suburb—exurb, rather—of Civil Service Knolls. Cozy was the word for the place—a loose assembly of a half thousand homes snuggling down in the warm moonlight a mountain ridge away from the metropolis of New Angeles. With their fashionably rounded roofs the individual houses looked rather like giant mushrooms among the noble trees. They were like mushrooms too in the way they grew with the families they housed—one story for the newlyweds, two for the properly ehildrened and community-seasoned, three for those punchdrunk with reproduction and happy living. From under their eaves spilled soft yellow light of the exact shade that color analysts had pronounced most homelike.

  There were no streets or roads, only the dark pine-scented asphalt disks of sideyard landing spots now holding the strange-vaned shapes of ’copters and flutteryplanes locked for the night, like sleeping dragonflies and moths. While for the ground-minded there was the unobtrusive subway entrance. Even the groceries came by underground tube straight to the kitchen in response to the housewife’s morning dialing, delivery having at last gone underground with the other utilities. Well-chewed garbage vanished down rust-proof ducts in the close company of well-bred bacteria. There were not even any unsightly dirt paths worn in the thick springy lawns—the family hypnotherapist had implanted in the mind of every resident, each last baldie and toddler, the suggestion that pedestrians vary their routes and keep their steps light and rather few.

  No night clubs, no bars, no feelie pads, no mess parlors, no bongo haunts, no jukebox joints, no hamburg havens, no newstands, no comic books, no smellorama, no hot-rods, no weed, no jazz, no gin.

  Yes, tranquil, secure and cosy were all good words for Civil Service Knolls—a sylvan monument to sane, civilized, progressive attitudes.

  Yet fear was about to swoop there just the same. Not fear of war, missile-atomic or otherwise—the Cold Truce with Communism was a good fifty years old. Not fear of physical disease or any crippling organic infirmity—such ills were close to the vanishing point and even funerals and deaths—again with the vital aid of the family hypnotherapist—were rather pleasant or at least reassuring occasions for the survivors. No, the fear that was about to infiltrate Civil Service Knolls was of the sort that must be called nameless.

  A householder crossing a stretch of open turf as he strolled home from the subway thought he heard a whish directly overhead. There was nothing whatever blackly silhouetted against the wide stretch of moon-pale sky, yet it seemed to him that one of the moon-dimmed stars near the zenith quivered and shifted, as if there were an eddy in the air or sky. Heaven had wavered. And weren’t there two extra stars there now?—two new stars in the center of the eddy—two dim red stars close-placed like eyes?

  No, that was impossible, he must be seeing things—his own blasted fault for missing his regular soothe-session with the hypnotherapist! Just the same, he hurried his steps.

  The eddy in the darkness overhead floated in pace with him a while, then swooped. He heard a louder whish, then something brushed his shoulder and claws seemed to fasten there for an instant.

  He gasped like someone about to vomit and leaped forward frantically.

  From the empty moon-glowing darkness behind him came a cackle of grim laughter.

  While the householder desperately pounded upon his own front door, the eddy in the darkness shot up to the height of a sequoia, then swooped on another section of Civil Service Knolls. It hovered for a while above the imposing two-story residence of Judistrator Wisant, took a swing around the three-story one of Securitor Harker, but in the end drifted down to investigate a faintly glowing upstairs window in another three-story house.

  Inside the window an athletically-handsome matron, mother of five, was leisurely preparing for bed. She was thinking, rather self-satisfiedly, that (1) she had completed all preparations for her family’s participation in the Twilight Tranquility Festival tomorrow, high point of the community year; (2) she had thrown just the right amount of cold water on her eldest daughter’s infatuation for the unsuitable boy visiting next door (and a hint to the hypnotherapist before her daughter’s next session would do the rest); and (3) she truly didn’t look five years older than her eldest daughter.

  There was a tap at the window.

  The matron started, pulling her robe around her, then craftily waved off the light. It had instantly occurred to her that the unsuitable boy might have had the audacity to try to visit her daughter illicitly and have mistaken bedroom windows—she had read in magazine articles that such wild lascivious young men actually existed in parts of America, though—thank Placidityl—not as regular residents of Civil Service Knolls.

  She walked to the window and abruptly waved it to full transparency and then with a further series of quick side-wise waves brought the room’s lights to photoflood brilliance.

  At first she saw nothing but the thick foliage of the sycamore a few yards outside.

  Then it seemed to her as if there were an eddy in the massed greenery. The leaves seemed to shift and swirl.

  Then a face appeared in the eddy—a green face with the fanged grin of a devil and hotly glowing eyes that looked like twin peepholes into Hell.

  The matron screamed, spun around, and sprinted into the hall, shouting the local security number toward the phone which her scream triggered into ear-straining awareness.

  From beyond the window came peals of cold maniacal laughter.

  Yes, fear had come to Civil Service Knolls—in fact, horror would hardly be too strong a term.

  Some men lead perfect lives —poor devils!

  —the notebooks of A.S.

  Judistrator Wisant was awakened by a familiar insistent tingling in his left wrist. He reached out and thumbed a button. The tingling stopped. The screen beside the bed glowed into life with the handsome hatchet-face of his neighbor Se-curitor Harker. He touched another button, activating the tiny softspeaker and micromike relays at his ear and throat.

  “Go ahead, Jack,” he murmured.

  Two seconds after his head had left the pillow a faint light had sprung from the walls of the room. It increased now by easy stages as he listened to a terse second-hand account of the two most startling incidents to disturb Civil Service Knolls since that tragic episode ten years ago when the kindergarten hypnotherapist went crazy and called attention to her psychosis only by the shocking posthypnotic suggestions she implanted in the toddlers’ minds.

  Judistrator Wisant was a large, well-built, shaven-headed man. His body, half covered now by the lapping sheet, gave the impression of controlled strength held well in reserve. His hands were big and quiet. His face was a compassionate yet disciplined mask of sanity. No one ever met him and failed to be astounded when they learned afterwards that it was his wife Beth who had been the aberrating school hypnotherapist and who was now a permanent resident of the nearby mental hospital of Serenity Shoals.

  The bedroom was as bare and impersonal as a gymnasium locker room. Screen, player, two short bedside shelves of which one was fil
led with books and tapes and neatly stacked papers, an uncurtained darkened windoor leading to a small outside balcony and now set a little ajar, the double bed itself exactly half slept in—that about completed the inventory, except for two 3-D photographs on the other bedside shelf of two smiling, tragic-eyed women who looked enough alike to be sisters of about 27 and 17. The photograph of the elder bore the inscription, “To my Husband, With all my Witchy Love. Beth,” and of the younger, “To her Dear Daddikins from Gabby.”

  The topmost of the stacked papers was a back cover cut from a magazine demurely labeled Individuality Unlimited: Monthly Bulletin. The background was a cluster of shadowy images of weird and grim beings: vampires, werewolves, humanoid robots, witches, murderesses, "Martians,” mask-wearers, naked brains with legs. A central banner shouted: Next Month: Accent the Monster in Youl In the lower left-hand comer was a small sharp photo of a personable young man looking mysterious, with the legend David Cruxon: Your Monster Mentor. Clipped to the page was a things-to-do-tomorrow memo in Joel Wisant’s angular script: “10 ack emma: Individuality Unlimited hearing. Warn them on injunction."

  Wisant’s gaze shifted more than once to this item and to the two photographs as he patiently heard out Harker’s account. Finally he said, “Thanks, Jack. No, I don’t think it’s a prankster—what Mr. Fredericks and Mrs. Ames report seeing is no joke-shop scare-your-friends illusion. And I don’t think it’s anything that comes in any way from Serenity Shoals, though the overcrowding there is a problem and we’re going to have to do something about it. What’s that? No, it’s nobody fooling around in an antigravity harness—they’re too restricted. And we know it’s nothing from outside—that’s impossible. No, the real trouble, I’m afraid is that it’s nothing at all—nothing material. Does the name Mattoon mean anything to you?

  “I’m not surprised, it was a hundred years ago. But a town went mad because of an imaginary prowler, there was an epidemic of insane fear. That sort of thing happening today could be much worse. Are you familiar with Report K?

  “No matter, I can give you the gist of it. You’re cleared for it and ought to have it. But you are calling on our private line, aren’t you?—this stuff is top restricted.

  “Report K is simply the true annual statistics on mental health in America. Adjusted ones showing no significant change have been issued through the usual channels. Jack, the real incidence of new phychoses is up 15 per cent in the last eight months. Yes, it is pretty staggering and I am a close-mouthed old dog. No, it’s been pretty well proved that it isn’t nerve-viruses or mind-war, much as the Kremlin boys would like to see us flip and despite those irrational but persistent rumors of a Mind Bomb. Analysis is not complete, but the insanity-surge seems to be due to a variety of causes —things that we’ve let get out of hand and must deal with drastically.”

  As Wisant said those last words he was looking at the Accent-the-Monster banner on the Individuality Unlimited bulletin. His hand took a stylus, crossed out the “Warn them on” in his memo, underlined “injunction” three times and added an exclamation point.

  Meanwhile he continued, “As far as Mr. Fredericks and Mrs. Ames are concerned, here’s your procedure. First, instruct them to tell no one about what they thought they saw—tell them it’s for the public safety—and direct them to see their hypnotherapists. Same instructions to family members and anyone to whom they may have talked. Second, find the names of their hypnotherapists, call them and fell them to get in touch with Dr. Andreas Snowden at Serenity Shoals—he’s up on Report K and will know what reassurance-techniques or memory-wiping to advise. I depend on Snowden a lot—for that matter he's going to be with us tomorrow when we go up against Individuality Unlimited. Third, don’t let anything leak to the press—that’s vital. We must confine this outbreak of delusions before any others are infected. I don’t have to tell you, Jack, that I have a reason to feel very deeply about a thing like this.” (His gaze went to the photo of his wife.) “That’s right, Jack, we’re sanitary engineers of the mind, you and I—we hose out mental garbage!”

  A rather frosty smile came into his face and stayed there while he listened again to Harker.

  After a bit he said, “No, I wouldn’t think of missing the Tranquility Festival—in fact they’ve got me leading part of it. Always proud to—and these community occasions are very important in keeping people sane. Gabby?—she’s looking forward to it, too, as only a pretty, sweet-minded girl of 17 can, who’s been chosen Tranquility Princess. She really makes it for me. And now hop to it, Jack, while this old man grabs himself some more shut-eye. Remember that what you’re up against is delusions and hallucinations, nothing real.”

  Wisant thumbed off the phone. As his head touched the pillow and the light in the room started to die, he nodded twice, as if to emphasize his last remark.

  Serenity Shoals, named with a happy unintended irony, is a sizable territory in America’s newest frontier: the Mountains of Madness.

  —the notebooks of A.S.

  While the scant light that filtered past the windoor died, the eddy in the darkness swung away from the house of Judistrator Wisant and sped with a kind of desperation toward the sea. The houses and lawns gave out. The wooded knolls became lower and sandier and soon gave way to a wide treeless expanse of sand holding a half dozen large institutional buildings and a tent-city besides. The buildings were mostly dark, but with stripes of dimly lit windows marking stairwells and corridors; the tent-city likewise had its dimly lit streets. Beyond them both the ghostly breakers of the Pacific were barely visible in the moonlight.

  Serenity Shoals, which has been called a Sandbox for Grownups, was one of Twenty-first Century America’s largest mental hospitals and now it was clearly filled beyond any planned capacity. Here dwelt the garden-variety schizos, manics, paranoids, brain-damageds, a few exotic sufferers from radiation-induced nerve sickness and spaceflight-gendered gravitational dementia and cosmic shock, and a variety of other special cases—but really all of them were simply the people who for one reason or another found it a better or at least more bearable bargain to live with their imaginings rather than even pretend to live with what society called reality.

  Tonight Serenity Shoals was restless. There was more noise, more laughter and chatter and weeping, more movement of small lights along the corridors and streets, more shouts and whistles, more unscheduled night-parties and night-wanderings of patients and night-expeditions of aides, more beetle-like scunyings of sand-cars with blinking headlights, more emergencies of all sorts. It may have been the general overcrowding, or the new batch of untrained nurses and aides, or the rumor that lobotomies were being performed again, or the two new snackbars. It may even have been the moonlight—Luna disturbing the “loonies” in the best superstitious tradition.

  For that matter, it may have been the eddy in the darkness that was the cause of it all.

  Along the landward side of Serenity Shoals, between it and the wasteland bordering Civil Service Knolls, stretched a bright new wire fence, unpleasantly but not lethally electrified—one more evidence that Serenity Shoals was having to cope with more than its quota.

  Back and forth along the line of the fence, though a hundred yards above, the eddy in the darkness beat and whirled, disturbing the starlight. There was an impression of hopeless yearning about its behavior, as if it wanted to reach its people but could not pass over the boundary.

  From the mangy terrace between the permanent buildings and the nominally temporary tents, Director Andreas Snowden surveyed his schizo-manic domain. He was an elderly man with sleepy eyes and unruly white hair. He frowned, sensing an extra element in the restlessness tonight. Then his brow cleared, and smiling with tender cynicism, he recited to himself:

  “Give me ycrur tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teaming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

  Applies a lot more to Serenity
Shoals, he thought, than to America these days. Though I ain’t no bloody copper goddess bearing a lamp to dazzle the Dagos and I ain’t got no keys to no golden doors. (Dr. Snowden was always resolutely crude and ungrammatical in his private thoughts, perhaps in reaction to the relative gentility of his spoken utterances. He was also very sentimental.)

  “Oh, hello, Doctorl” The woman darting across the comer of the terrace had stopped suddenly. It was hard to see anything about her except that she was thin.

  Dr. Snowden walked toward her. “Good evening, Mrs. Wisant,” he said. “Rather late for you to be up and around, isn’t it?”

  “I know, Doctor, but the thought-rays are very thick tonight and they sting worse than the mosquitoes. Besides I’m too excited I couldn’t sleep anyhow. My daughter is coming here tomorrow.”

  “Is she?” Dr. Snowden asked gently. “Odd that Joel hasn’t mentioned it to me—as it happens, I’m to see your husband tomorrow on a legal matter.”

  “Oh, Joel doesn’t know she’s coming,” the lady assured him. “He’d never let her if he did. He doesn’t think I’m good for her ever since I started blacking out on my visits home and . . . doing things. But it isn’t a plot between me and Gabby, either—she doesn’t know she’s coming.”

  “So? Then how are you going to manage it, Mrs. Wisant?” “Don’t try to sound so normal, Doctor!—especially when you know very well I’m not. I suppose you think that I think I will summon her by sending a thought-ray. Not at all. I’ve

  practically given up using thought-rays. They’re not reliable and they carry yellow fever. No, Doctor, I got Gabby to come here tomorrow ten years ago.”

  “Now how did you do that, Mrs. Wisant? Time travel?” “Don’t be so patronizing! I merely impressed it on Gabby’s mind ten years ago—after all, I am a trained hypnotherapist— that she should come to me when she became a princess. Now Joel writes me she’s been chosen Tranquility Princess for the festival tomorrow. You see?”

  “Very interesting. But don’t be disappointed if—”