The Mind Spider and Other Stories

by Fritz Leiber

  “Stop being a wet blanket, Doctor! Don’t you have any trust in psychological techniques? I know she’s coming. Oh the daisies, the beautiful daisies . .

  “Then that settles it. How are they treating you here these days?”

  “I have no complaints, Doctor—except I must say I don’t like all these new nurses and aides. They’re callow. They seem to think it’s very queer of us to be crazy.”

  Dr. Snowden chuckled. “Some people are narrow-minded," he agreed.

  “Yes, and so gullible, Doctor. Just this afternoon two of the new nurses were goggling over a magazine ad about how people should improve their personalities by becoming monsters. I ask you!”

  Dr. Snowden shrugged. “I doubt whether all of us are monster material. And now perhaps you’d better . . .”

  “I suppose so. Good night, Doctor.”

  As she was turning to go, Mrs. Wisant paused to slap her left forearm viciously.

  “Thought-ray?” Dr. Snowden asked.

  Mrs. Wisant looked at him sardonically. “No,” she said. "Mosquito!”

  Dull security and the dead weight of perfection breed aberration even more surely than disorder and fear.

  —the notebooks of A.S.

  Gabrielle Wisant, commonly called Gabby though she was anything but that, was sleeping on her back in long pink pajamas, stretched out very straight and with her arms folded across her breasts, looking more like the stone funeral effigy of a girl than a living one—an effect which the unrumpled bedclothes heightened.

  The unocculted windoor let in the first cold granular light of dawn. The room was feminine, but without any special character—it seemed secretive. It had one item in common with her father’s: on a low bedside stand and next to a pad of pink notepaper was another sliced-off back cover of the Individuality Unlimited bulletin. Close beside the "David Cruxon: Your Monster Mentor” photo there was a note scrawled in green ink.

  Gabs— How’s this for lacks? Cruxon’s Camyl or corny? Lunch with your MM same place but 130 pip emma. Big legal morning. Tell you then, Dave.

  (Sign and Sealed in the Monsterarium, 4 pip emma, 15 June)

  The page was bowed up as if something about ten inches long were lying under it.

  Gabrielle Wisant’s eyes opened, though not another muscle of her moved, and they stayed that way, directed at the ceiling.

  And then . . . then nothing overt happened, but it was as if the mind of Gabrielle Wisant—or the soul or spirit, call it what you will—rose from unimaginable depths to the surface of her eyes to take a long look around, like a small furtive animal that silently mounts to the mouth of its burrow to sniff the weather, ready to duck back at the slightest sudden noise or apprehension of danger—in fact, rather like the ground-hog come up to see or not to see its shadow on Candlemas Day.

  With a faculty profounder than physical sight, the mind of Gabby Wisant took a long questioning look around at her world—the world of a “pretty, sweet-minded girl of 17”—to decide if it were worth living in.

  Sniffing the weather of America, she became aware of a country of suntanned, slimmed-down people with smooth-ed-out minds, who fed contentedly on decontaminated news and ads and inspiration pieces, like hamsters on a laboratory diet. But what were they after? What did they do for kicks? What happened to the ones whose minds wouldn’t smooth, or smoothed too utterly?

  She saw the sane, civilized, secure, superior community of Civil Service Knolls, a homestead without screeching traffic or violence, without jukeboxes or juvenile delinquency, a place of sensible adults and proper children, a place so tranquil it was going to have a Tranquility Festival tonight. But just beyond it she saw Serenity Shoals with its lost thousands living in brighter darker worlds, including one who had planted posthypnotic suggestions in children’s minds like time-bombs.

  She saw a father so sane, so just, so strong, so perfectly controlled, so always right that he was not so much a man as a living statue—the statue she too tried to be every night while she slept. And what was the statue really like under the marble? What were the heat and color of its blood?

  She saw a witty man named David Cruxon who perhaps loved her, but who was so mixed up between his cynicism and his idealism that you might say he cancelled out. A knight without armor ... and armor without a knight.

  She saw no conventional monsters, no eddies in darkness— her mind had been hiding deep down below all night.

  She saw the surface of her own mind, so sweetly smoothed by a succession of kindly hypnotherapists (and one beloved traitor who must not be named) that it was positively frightening, like a book of horrors bound in pink velvet with silk rosebuds, or the sluggish sea before a hurricane or night softly silent before a scream. She wished she had the kind of glass-bottomed boat that would let her peer below, but that was the thing above all else she must not do.

  She saw herself as Tranquility Princess some twelve hours hence, receiving the muted ovation under the arching trees, candlelight twinkling back from her flared and sequinned skirt and just one leaf drifted down and caught in her finespun hair.

  Princess . . . Princess ... As if that word were somehow a signal, the mind of Gabby Wisant made its decision about the worth of the upper world and dove back inside, dove deep deep down. The ground-hog saw its shadow black as ink and decided to dodge the dirty weather ahead.

  The thing that instantly took control of Gabby Wisant’s body when her mind went into hiding treated that body with a savage familiarity, certainly not as if it were a statue. It sprang to its haunches in the center of the bed, snuffing the air loudly. It ripped off the pink pajamas with a complete impatience or ignorance of magnetic clasps. It switched on the lights and occulted the windoor, making it a mirror, and leered approvingly at itself and ran its hands over its torso in fierce caresses. It snatched a knife with a six-inch blade from under the bulletin cover and tried its edge on its thumb and smiled at the blood it drew and sucked it. Then it went through the inner door, utterly silent as to footsteps but breathing in loud, measured gasps like a careless tiger.

  When Judistrator Wisant woke, his daughter was squatted beside him on the permanently undisturbed half of his bed, crooning to his scoutmaster's knife. She wasn’t looking at him quite, or else she was looking at him sideways—he couldn’t tell through the eyelash-blur of his slitted eyes.

  He didn’t mova He wasn’t at all sure he could. He humped the back of his tongue to say “Gabby,” but he knew it would come out as a croak and he wasn’t even sure he could manage that. He listened to his daughter—the crooning had changed back to faintly gargBag tiger-gasps—and he felt the cold sweat trickling down the sides of his face and over his naked scalp and stingiflgly into his eyes.

  Suddenly his daughter lifted the knife high above her head, both hands locked around the hilt, and drove it down into the center of the empty, perfectly mounded pillow beside him. As it thudded home he realized with faint surprise that he hadn’t moved although he’d tried to. It was as though he had contracted his muscles convulsively, but discovered that all the tendons had been cut without his knowing.

  He lay there quite flaccid, watching his daughter through barely parted eyelids as she mutilated the pillow with slow savage slashes, digging in the point with a twist, and sawing off a comer. She must be sweating too—strands of her finespun pale gold hair clung wetly to her neck and slim shoulders. She was crooning once more, with a rippling low laugh and a soft growl for variety, and she was drooling a little. The hospital smell of the fresh-cut plastic came to him faintly.

  Young male voices were singing in the distance. Judistrator Wisant’s daughter seemed to hear them as soon as he did, for she stopped chopping at the pillow and held still, and then she started to sway her head and she smiled and she got off the bed with long easy movements and went to the windoor and thumbed it wide open and stood on the balcony, the knife trailing laxly from her left hand.

  The singing was louder now—young male voices rather dutifully joyous in
a slow marching rhythm—and now he recognized the tune. It was “America the Beautiful” but the words were different. This verse began,

  “Oh beautiful for peaceful minds.

  Secure families ..

  It occurred to Wisant that it must be the youths going out at dawn to gather the boughs and deck the Great Bower, a traditional preparatory step to the Twilight Tranquility Festival. He’d have deduced it instandy if his tendons hadn’t been cut...

  But then he found that he had turned his head toward the balcony and even turned his shoulders and lifted up on one elbow a little and opened his eyes wide.

  His daughter put her knife between her teeth and clambered sure-footedly onto the railing and jumped to the nearest sycamore branch and hung there swinging, like a golden-haired, long-legged, naked ape.

  “And bring with thee

  Tranquility

  To Civil Service Knolls

  She swung in along the branch to the trunk and laid her knife in a crotch and braced one foot there and started to swing the other and her free arm too in monkey circles.

  He reached out and tried to thumb the phone button, but his hand was shaking in a four-inch arc.

  He heard his daughter yell, “Yoohool Yoohoo, boys!"

  The singing stopped.

  Judistrator Wisant half scrabbled, half rolled out of bed and hurried shakingly—and he hoped noiselessly—through the door and down the hall and into his daughter’s bedroom, shut the door behind him—and locked it, as he only discovered later—and grabbed her phone and punched out Securitor Harker’s number.

  The man he wanted answered almost immediately, a little cross with sleep.

  Wisant was afraid he’d have trouble being coherent at all. He was startled to find himself talking with practically his normal confident authority and winningness.

  "Wisant, Jack. Calling from home. Emergency. I need you and your squad on the double. Yes. Pick up Dr. Sims or Armstrong on the way but don’t waste time. Oh—and have your men bring ladders. Yes, and put in a quick call to Serenity Shoals for a ’copter. What? My authority. What? Jack, I don’t want to say it now, I’m not using our private line. Well, all right, just let me think for a minute . .

  Judistrator Wisant ordinarily never had trouble in talking his way around stark facts. And he wouldn’t have had even this time, perhaps, if he hadn’t just the moment before seen something that distracted him.

  Then the proper twist of phrase came to him.

  “Look, Jack,” he said, “it’s this way: Gabby has gone to join her mother. Get here fast.”

  He turned off the phone and picked up the disturbing item: the bulletin cover beside his daughter’s bed. He read the note from Cruxon twice and his eyes widened and his jaw tightened.

  His fear was all gone away somewhere. For the moment all his concerns were gone except this young man and his stupid smirking face and stupider title and his green ink.

  He saw the pink pad and he picked up a dark crimson stylus and began to write rapidly in a script that was a shade larger and more angular than usual.

  For 100 years even breakfast foods had been promoting delirious happiness and glorious peace of mind. To what end?

  —the notebooks of A.S.

  “Suppose you begin by backgrounding us in on what Individuality Unlimited is and how it came to be? I’m sure we all have a general idea and may know some aspects in detail, but the bold outline, from management’s point of view, should be firmed. At the least it will get us talking.”

  This suggestion, coming from the judistrator himself, reflected the surface informality of the conference taking place in Wisant’s airy chambers in central New LA. Dr. Andreas Snowden sat on the judistrator’s right, doodling industriously. Securitor Harker sat on Wisant’s left, while flanking the trio were two female secretaries in dark business suits similar to those men wore a century before, though of somewhat shapelier cut and lighter material.

  Like all the other men in the room, Wisant was sensibly clad in singlet, business jerkin, Bermuda shorts, and sandals. A folded pink paper sticking up a little from his breast pocket provided the only faintly incongruous detail. He had been just seven minutes late to the conference, perhaps a record for fathers who have seen their daughters ’coptered off to a mental hospital two hours earlier—though only Harker knew of and so could appreciate this iron-man achievement.

  A stocky man with shaggy pepper-and-salt hair and pugnacious brows stood up across the table from Wisant.

  "Good idea,” he said gruffly. “If we’re going to be hanged, let’s get the ropes around our necks. First I’d better identify us shifty-eyed miscreants. I’m Bob Diskrow, president and general manager.” He then indicated the two men on his left: "Mr. Sobody, our vice president in charge of research, and Dr. Gline, IU’s chief psychiatrist.” He turned to the right: “Miss Rawvetch, V. P. in charge of presentation—” (A bigboned blonde flashed her eyes. She was wearing a lavender business suit with pearl buttons, wing collars and Ascot tie) “—and Mr. Cruxon, junior V.P. in charge of the ... Monster Program.” David Cruxon was identifiably the young man of the photograph with the same very dark, crewcut hair and sharply watchful eyes, but now he looked simply haggard rather than mysterious. At the momentary hesitation in Disk-row’s voice he quirked a smile as rapid and almost as convulsive as a tic.

  “I happen already to be acquainted with Mr. Cruxon,” Wisant said with a smile, “though in no fashion prejudicial to my conducting this conference. He and my daughter know each other socially.”

  Diskrow stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels reflectively.

  Wisant lifted a hand. “One moment,” he said. “There are some general considerations governing any judistrative conference of which I should remind us. They are in line with the general principle of government by Commission, Committee and Conference which has done so much to simplify legal problems in our times. This meeting is private. Press is excluded, politics are taboo. Any information you furnish about IU will be treated by us as strictly confidential and we trust you will return the courtesy regarding matters we may divulge. And this is a democratic conference. Any of us may speak freely.

  “The suggestion has been made,” Wisant continued smoothly, “that some practices of IU are against the public health and safety. After you have presented your case and made your defense—pardon my putting it that way—I may in my judicial capacity issue certain advisements. If you comply with those, the matter is settled. If you do not, the advisements immediately become injunctions and I, in my administrative capacity, enforce them—though you may work for their removal through the regular legal channels. Understood?”

  Diskrow nodded with a wry grimace. “Understood—you got us in a combined hammerlock and body scissors. (Just don’t sprinkle us with fire ants!) And now I’ll give you that bold outline you asked for—and try to be bold about it.”

  He made a fist and stuck out a finger from it. "Let’s get one thing straight at the start: Individuality Unlimited is no idealistic or mystical outfit with its head in orbit around the moon, and it doesn’t pretend to be. We just manufacture and market a product the public is willing to fork out money for. That product is individuality.” He rolled the word on his tongue.

  “Over one hundred years ago people started to get seriously afraid that the Machine Age would turn them into a race of robots. That mass production and consumption, the mass media of a now instantaneous communication, the subtle and often subliminal techniques of advertising and propaganda, plus the growing use of group-and hypnotherapy would turn them into a bunch of identical puppets. That wearing the same clothes, driving the same cars, living in look-alike suburban homes, reading the same pop books and listening to the same pop programs, they’d start thinking the same thoughts and having the same feelings and urges and end up with rubber-stamp personalities.

  "Make no mistake, this fear was very real,” Diskrow went on, leaning his weight on the table and scowling. “It was just about t
he keynote of the whole Twentieth Century (and of course to some degree it’s still with us). The world was getting too big for any one man to comprehend, yet people were deeply afraid of groupthink, teamlife, hive-living, hypo-conformity, passive adjustment, and all the rest of it. The sociologist and analyst told them they had to play ‘roles’ in their family life and that didn’t help much, because a role is one more rubber stamp. Other cultures like Russia offered us no hope—they seemed further along the road to robot life than we were.

  “Is short, people were deathly afraid of loss of identity, loss of the sense of being unique human beings. First and always they dreaded depersonalization, to give it its right name.

  “Now that’s where Individuality Unlimited, operating under its time-honored slogan ‘Different Ways to Be Different,’ got its start,” Diskrow continued, making a scooping gesture, as if his right hand were IU gathering up the loose ends of existence. “At first our methods were pretty primitive or at least modest—we sold people individualized doodads to put on their cars and clothes and houses, we offered conversation kits and hobby guides, we featured Monthly Convention-Crushers and Taboo-Breakers that sounded very daring but really weren’t—” (Diskrow grinned and gave a little shrug) “—and incidentally we came in for a lot of ribbing on the score that we were trying to mass-produce individuality and turn out uniqueness on an assembly line. Actually a lot of our work still involves randomizing pattem-details and introducing automatic unpredictable variety into items as diverse as manufactured objects and philosophies of life.

  “But in spite of the ribbing we kept going because we knew we had hold of a sound idea: that if a person can be made to feel he’s different, if he is encouraged to take the initiative in expressing himself in even a rather trivial way, then his inner man wakes up and takes over and starts to operate under his own steam. What people basically need is a periodic shot in the arm. I bunk you not when I tell you that here IU has always done and is still doing a real public service. We don’t necessarily give folks new personalities, but we renew the glow of those they have. As a result they become happier workers, better citizens. We make people individuality-certain"