by Fritz Leiber
Up to now it had been a rather more nervously gay Tranquility Festival than most of the mothers approved. Even while the orchestra played there had been more than the usual quota of squeals, little shrieks, hysterical giggles, complaints of pinches and prods in the shadows, candles blown out, raids on the refreshment tables, small children darting into the buses and having to be retrieved. But Pop Wisant’s talk would smooth things out, the worriers told themselves.
And indeed as he strode between the ranked nymphs with an impassive smile and mounted the vine-wreathed podium, the children grew much quieter. In fact the hush that fell on the leafy Big Top was quite remarkable.
“Dear friends, charming neighbors, and fellow old coots,” he began—and then noticed that most of the audience were looking up at the green ceiling.
There had been no wind that evening, no breeze at all, but some of the boughs overhead were shaking violently. Suddenly the shaking died away. (“My, what a sudden gust that was,” Mrs. Ames said to her husband. Mr. Ames nodded vaguely—he had somehow been thinking of the lines from Macbeth about Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.)
“Fellow householders and family members of Civil Service Knolls,” Wisant began again, wiping his forehead, “in a few minutes several of you will be singled out for friendly recognition, but I think the biggest award ought to go to all of you collectively for one more year of working for tranquility…”
The shaking of the boughs had started up again and was traveling down the far wall. At least half the eyes of the audience were traveling with it. (“George” Mr. Potter said to her husband, “it looks as if a lot of crumpled cellophane were being dragged through the branches. It all wiggles.” He replied, “I forgot my glasses.” Mr. Ames muttered to himself: “The wood began to move. Liar and slave!”
Wisant resolutely kept his eyes away from the traveling commotion and continued, “…and for one more year of keeping up the good fight against violence, delinquency, irrationality…”
A rush of wind (looking like “curdled air,” some said afterwards) sped from the rear of the hall to the podium. Most of the candles were blown out, as if a giant had puffed at his giant birthday cake, and the Nymphs and Sprites squealed all the way down the double line.
The branches around Wisant shook wildly. “…emotionalism, superstition, and the evil powers of the imagination!” he finished with a shout, waving his arms as if to keep off bats or bees.
Twice after that he gathered himself to continue his talk, although his audience was in a considerable uproar, but each time his attention went back to a point a little above their heads. No one else saw anything where he was looking (except some “curdled air”), but Wisant seemed to see something horrible, for his face paled, he began to back off as if the something were approaching him, he waved out his arms wildly as one might at a wasp or a bat, and suddenly he began to scream, “Keep it off me! Can’t you see it, you fools? Keep it off!”
As he stepped off the podium backwards he snatched something from inside her jerkin. There was a nasty whish in the air and those closest to him felt a wave of heat. There were a few shrill screams. Wisant fell heavily on the turf and did not move. A shining object skidded away from his hand. Mr. Ames picked it up. The pistol-shaped weapon was unfamiliar to him and he only later discovered it was a heat-gun.
The foliage of the Great Bower was still again, but a long streak of leaves in the ceiling had instantaneously turned brown. A few of these came floating down as if it were autumn.
Sometimes I think of the whole world as one great mental hospital, its finest people only inmates trying out as aides.
—The notebooks of A.S.
It is more fun than skindiving to soar through the air in an antigravity harness. That is, after you have got the knack of balancing your field. It is deeply thrilling to tilt your field and swoop down at a slant, or cut it entirely and just drop—and then right it or gun it and go bounding up like a rubber ball. The positive field around your head and shoulders creates an air cushion against the buffeting of the wind and your own speed.
But after a while the harness begins to chafe, your sense of balance gets tired, your gut begins to resent the slight griping effects of the field supporting you, and the solid ground which you first viewed with contempt comes to seem more and more inviting. David Cruxon discovered all of these things.
Also, it is great fun to scare people. It is fun to flash a green demon mask in their faces out of nowhere and see them blanch. Or to glow white in the dark and listen to them scream. It is fun to snarl traffic and panic pedestrians and break up solemn gatherings—the solemner the better—with rude or shocking intrusions. It is fun to know that your fellow man is little and puffed up and easily terrified and as in love with security as a baby with his bottle, and to prove it on him again and again. Yes, it is fun to be a practicing monster.
But after a while the best of Halloween pranks becomes monotonous, fear reactions begin to seem stereotyped, you start to see yourself in your victims, and you get ashamed of winning with loaded dice. David Cruxon discovered this too.
He had thought after he broke up the Tranquility Festival that he had hours of mischief left in him. The searing near-miss of Wisant’s hot-rod had left him exhilarated. (Only the light-flow fabric, diverting the infrared blast around him, had saved him from dangerous, perhaps fatal burns.) And now the idea of stampeding an insane asylum had an ironic attraction. And it had been good sport at first, especially when he invisibly buzzed two sand-cars of aides into a panic so that they went careening over the dunes on their fat tires, headlight beams swinging frantically, and finally burst through the light fence on the landward side (giving rise to a rumor of an erupting horde of ravening madmen). That had been very good fun indeed, rather like harmlessly strafing war refugees, and after it Dave had shucked off his robe and hood of invisibility and put on a Glowing Phantom aerobatic display, diving and soaring over the dark tiny hills, swooping on little groups of menacing phosphorescent claws and peals of Satanic laughter.
But that didn’t prove to be nearly as good fun. True, his victims squealed and sometimes ran, but they didn’t seem to panic permanently like the aides. They seemed to stop after a few steps and come back to be scared again, like happily hysterical children. He began to wonder what must be going on in the minds down there if a Glowing Phantom were merely a welcome diversion. Then the feeling got hold of him that those people down there saw through him and sympathized with him. It was a strange feeling—both deflating and heart-warming.
But what really finished Dave off as a practicing monster was when they started to cheer him—cheer him as if he were their champion returning in triumph. Cruxon’s Crusade—was that what he’d called it? And was this his Holy Land? As he asked himself that question he realized that he was drifting wearily down toward a hilltop on a long slow slant and he let his drift continue, landing with a long scuff.
Despite the cheers, he rather expected to be gibbered at and manhandled by the crowd that swiftly gathered around him. Instead he was patted on the back, congratulated for his exploits at New Angeles, and asked intelligent questions.
Gabby Wisant’s mind had fully determined to stay underground a long time. But that had been on the assumptions that her body would stay near Daddikins at Civil Service Knolls and that the thing that had taken control of her body would stay hungry and eager. Now those assumptions seemed doubtful, so her mind decided to risk another look around.
She found herself one of the scattered crowd of people wandering over sandhills in the dark. Some memories came to her, even of the morning, but not painfully enough to drive her mind below. They lacked pressure.
There was an older woman beside her—a rather silly and strangely affected woman by her talk, yet somehow likable—who seemed to be trying to look after her. By stages Gabby came to realize it must be her mother.
Most of the crowd were following the movements of something that glowed whitely as it swooped and whirled through t
he air, like a small demented comet far off course. After a bit she saw that the comet was a phosphorescent man. She laughed.
Some of the people started to cheer. She copied them. The glowing man landed on a little sand hill just ahead. Some of the crowd hurried forward. She followed them. She saw a young man stepping clumsily out of some glowing coveralls. The glow let her see his face.
“Dave, you idiot!” she squealed at him happily.
He smiled at her shamefacedly.
Doctor Snowden found Dave and Gabby and Beth Wisant on a dune just inside the break in the wire fence—the last of the debris from last night’s storm. The sky was just getting light. The old man motioned back the aides with him and trudged up the sandy rise and sat down on a log.
“Oh, hello, Doctor,” Beth Wisant said. “Have you met Gabrielle? She came to visit me just like I told you.”
Dr. Snowden nodded tiredly. “Welcome to Serenity Shoals, Miss Wisant. Glad to have you here.”
Gabby smiled at him timidly. “I’m glad to be here too—I think. Yesterday…” Her voice trailed off.
“Yesterday you were a wild animal,” Beth Wisant said loudly, “and you killed a pillow instead of your father. The doctor will tell you that’s very good sense.”
Dr. Snowden said, “All of us have these somatic wild animals—” (He looked at Dave) “—these monsters.”
Gabby said, “Doctor, do you think that Mama calling me so long ago can have had anything to do with what happened to me yesterday?”
“I see no reason why not,” he replied, nodding. “Of course there’s a lot more than that that’s mixed up about you.”
“When I implant a suggestion, it works,” Beth Wisant asserted.
Gabby frowned. “Part of the mix-up is in the world, not me.”
“The world is always mixed up,” Dr. Snowden said. “It’s a pretty crazy hodge-podge with sensible strains running through it, if you look for them very closely. That’s one of the things we have to accept.” He rubbed his eyes and looked up. “And while we’re on the general topic of unpleasant facts, here’s something else. Serenity Shoals has got itself one more new patient besides yourselves—Joel Wisant.”
“Hum,” said Beth Wisant. “Maybe now that I don’t have him to go home to, I can start getting better.”
“Poor Daddikins,” Gabby said dully.
“Yes,” Snowden continued, looking at Dave, “that last little show you put on at the Tranquility Festival—and then on top of it the news that there was an outbreak here—really broke him up.” He shook his head. “Iron perfectionist. At the end he was even demanding that we drop an atomic bomb on Serenity Shoals—that was what swung Harker around to my side.”
“An atom bomb!” Beth Wisant said. “The idea!”
Dr. Snowden nodded. “It does seem a little extreme.”
“So you class me as a psychotic too,” Dave said, a shade argumentatively. “Of course I’ll admit that after what I did—”
Dr. Snowden looked at him sourly. “I don’t class you as psychotic at all—though a lot of my last-century colleagues would have taken great delight in tagging you as a psychopathic personality. I think you’re just a spoiled and willful young man with no capacity to bear frustration. You’re a self-dramatizer. You jumped into the ocean of aberration—that was the meaning of your note, wasn’t it?—but the first waves tossed you back on the beach. Still, you got in here, which was your main object.”
“How do you know that?” Dave asked.
“You’d be surprised,” Dr. Snowden said wearily, “at how many more-or-less sane people want to get into mental hospitals these days—it’s probably the main truth behind the Report K figures. They seem to think that insanity is the only great adventure left man in a rather depersonalizing age. They want to understand their fellow man at the depths, and here at least they get the opportunity.” He looked at Dave meaningfully as he said that. Then he went on, “At any rate, Serenity Shoals is the safest place for you right now, Mr. Cruxon. It gets you out from under a stack of damage suits and maybe a lynch-mob or two.”
He stood up. “So come on then, all of you, down to Receiving,” he directed, a bit grumpily. “Pick up that junk you’ve got there, Dave, and bring it along. We’ll try to hang onto the harness—it might be useful in treating gravitational dementia. Come on, come on!—I’ve wasted all night on you. Don’t expect such concessions in the future. Serenity Shoals is no vacation resort—and no honeymoon resort either!—though…” (He smiled flickeringly) “…though some couples do try.”
They followed him down the sandy hill. The rising sun behind them struck gold from the drab buildings and faded tents ahead.
Dr. Snowden dropped back beside Dave. “Tell me one thing,” he said quietly. “Was it fun being a green demon?”
Dave said, “That it was!”
The Mind Spider
HOUR and minute hand of the odd little gray clock stood almost at midnight, Horn Time, and now the second hand, driven by the same tiny, invariable radioactive pulses, was hurrying to overtake them. Morton Horn took note. He switched off his book, puffed a brown cigarette alight, and slumped back gratefully against the saddle-shaped forcefield which combined the sensations of swansdown and laced rawhide.
When all three hands stood together, he flicked the switch of a small black cubical box in his smock pocket. A look of expectancy came into his pleasant, swarthy face, as if he were about to receive a caller, although the door had not spoken.
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 corner of the work table, littered with air-brushes and cans of dye and acid. The easel, with one half-completed film for the multi-level 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 me!” she told him. “A girl ought to be allowed some privacy.”
“Should she?” he asked teasingly.
“Well, at least leave me my fingers and toes! 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 nontelepathic 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. Swiftly 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.”