by Fritz Leiber
A white oblong bobbed up in her mind. Morton read the black print on it.
“We always imagine eternity (it said) as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”
“Brrr!” Morton thought, trying to make the shiver comic for Grayl’s sake. “Those old White and Red Russkies certainly had black minds! Andreyev? Dostoyevsky?”
“Or Svidrigailov, or some name like that. But it wasn’t the book that bothered me. It was that about an hour ago I switched off my static box to taste the silence and for the first time in my life I got the feeling there was something nasty and alien in infinity and that it was watching me, just like those spiders in the bathhouse. It had been asleep for centuries but now it was waking up. I switched on my box fast!”
“Ho-ho! The power of suggestion! Are you sure that Russian wasn’t named Svengali, dear self-hypnosis-susceptible sister?”
“Stop poking fun! It was real, I tell you.”
“Real? How? Sounds like mood-reality to me. Here, stop being so ticklish and let me get a close-up.”
He started mock-forcibly to explore her memories, thinking that a friendly mental roughhouse might be what she needed, but she pushed away his thought-tendrils with a panicky and deathly-serious insistence. Then he saw her decisively stub out her cigarette and he felt a sudden secretive chilling of her feelings.
“It’s all really nothing, Mort,” she told him briskly. “Just a mood, I guess, like you say. No use bothering a family conference with a mood, no matter how black and devilish.”
“Speaking of the devil and his cohorts, here we are! May we come in?” The texture of the interrupting thought was bluff and yet ironic, highly individual—suggesting not chocolate but black coffee. Even if Mort and Grayl had not been well acquainted with its tone and rhythms; they would have recognized it as that of a third person. It was as if a third dimension had been added to the two of their shared mind. They knew it immediately.
“Make yourself at home, Uncle Dean,” was the welcome Grayl gave him. “Our minds are yours.”
“Very cozy indeed,” the newcomer responded with a show of gruff amusement. “I’ll do as you say, my dear. Good to be in each other again.” They caught a glimpse of scudding ragged clouds patching steel-blue sky above to gray-green forest below—their uncle’s work as a ranger kept him up in his flyabout a good deal of the day.
“Dean Horn coming in,” he announced with a touch of formality and then immediately added, “Nice tidy little mental parlor you’ve got, as the fly said to the spider.”
“Uncle Dean!—what made you think of spiders?” Grayl’s question was sharply anxious.
“Haven’t the faintest notion, my dear. Maybe recalling the time we took turns mind-sitting with Evelyn until she got over her infant fear of spiders. More likely just reflecting a thought-flicker from your own unconscious or Morton’s. Why the fear-flurry?”
But just then a fourth mind joined them—resinous in flavor like Greek vine. “Hobart Horn coming in.” They saw a ghostly laboratory, with chemical apparatus.
Then a fifth—sweet-sour apple-tasting. “Evelyn Horn coming in. Yes, Grayl, late as usual—thirty-seven seconds by Horn Time. I didn’t miss your cluck-cluck thought.” The newcomer’s tartness was unmalicious. They glimpsed the large office in which Evelyn worked, the microtypewriter and rolls of correspondence tape on her desk. “But—bright truth!—someone always has to be last,” she continued. “And I’m working overtime. Always make a family conference, though. Afterwards will you take control of me, Grayl, and spell me at this typing for a while? I’m really fagged—and I don’t want to leave my body on automatic too long. It gets hostile on automatic and hurts to squeeze back into. How about it, Grayl?”
“I will,” Grayl promised, “but don’t make it a habit. I don’t know what your administrator would say if he knew you kept sneaking off two thousand miles to my studio to smoke cigarettes—and get my throat raw for me!”
“All present and accounted for,” Mort remarked. “Evelyn, Grayl, Uncle Dean, Hobart, and myself—the whole damn family. Would you care to share my day’s experiences first? Pretty dull armchair stuff, I warn you. Or shall we make it a five-dimensional free-for-all? A Quintet for Horns? Hey, Evelyn, quit directing four-letter thoughts at the chair!”
With that the conference got underway. Five minds that were in a sense one mind, because they were wide open to each other, and in another sense twenty-five minds, because there were five sensory-memory set-ups available for each individual. Five separate individuals, some of them thousands of miles apart, each viewing a different sector of the world of the First Global Democracy. Five separate visual landscapes—study, studio, laboratory, office, and the cloud-studded openness of the upper air—all of them existing in one mental space, now superimposed on each other, now replacing each other, now jostling each other as two ideas may jostle in a single non-telepathic mind. Five varying auditory landscapes—the deep throb of the vanes of Dean’s flyabout making the dominant tone, around which the other noises wove counterpoint. In short, five complete sensory pictures, open to mutual inspection.
Five different ideational set-ups too. Five concepts of truth and beauty and honor, of good and bad, of wise and foolish, and of all the other so-called abstractions with which men and women direct their lives—all different, yet all vastly more similar than such concepts are among the non-telepathic, who can never really share them. Five different ideas of life, jumbled together like dice in a box.
And yet there was no confusion. The dice were educated. The five minds slipped into and out of each other with the practiced grace and courtesy of diplomats at a tea. For these daily conferences had been going on ever since Grandfather Horn first discovered that he had not known that he was a telepathic mutant, for before his children were born there had been no other minds with which he could communicate—and the strange mental silence, disturbed from time to time by clouds of mental static, had even made him fear that he was psychotic. Now Grandfather Horn was dead, but the conferences went on between the members of the slowly widening circle of his lineal descendants—at present only five in number, although the mutation appeared to be a partial dominant. The conferences of the Horns were still as secret as the earliest ones had been. The First Global Democracy was still ignorant that telepathy was a long-established fact—among the Horns. For the Horns believed that jealousy and suspicion and savage hate would be what they would get from the world if it ever became generally known that, by the chance of mutated heredity, they possessed a power which other men could never hope for. Or else they would be exploited as all-weather and interplanetary “radios.” So to the outside world, including even their non-telepathic husbands and wives, sweethearts and friends, they were just an ordinary group of blood relations—no more “psychic” certainly than any group of close-knit brothers and sisters and cousins. They had something of a reputation of being a family of “daydreamers”—that was about all. Beyond enriching their personalities and experience, the Horns’ telepathy was no great advantage to them. They could not read the minds of animals and other humans and they seemed to have no powers whatever of clairvoyance, clairaudience, telekinesis, or foreseeing the future or past. Their telepathic power was, in short, simply like having a private, all-senses family telephone.
The conference—it was much more a hyper-intimate gabfest—proceeded.
“My static box bugged out for a few ticks this morning,” Evelyn remarked in the course of talking over the trivia of the past twenty-four hours.
The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain waves. Without such individual thought-screens, there was too much danger of complete loss of individual personality—once Grandfather Horn had “become” his infant daughter a
s well as himself for several hours and the unfledged mind had come close to being permanently lost in its own subconscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall behind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently always enclosed.
In spite of the boxes, the Horns shared thoughts and emotions to an amazing degree. Their mental togetherness was as real and as mysterious—and as incredible—as thought itself…and thought is the original angel-cloud dancing on the head of a pin. Their present conference was as warm and intimate and tart as any actual family gathering in one actual room around one actual table. Five minds, joined together in the vast mental darkness that shrouds all minds. Five minds hugged together for comfort and safety in the infinite mental loneliness that pervades the cosmos.
Evelyn continued, “Your boxes were all working, of course, so I couldn’t get your thoughts—just the blurs of your boxes like little old dark gray stars. But this time it gave me a funny uncomfortable feeling, like a spider crawling down my—Grayl! Don’t feel so wildly! What is it?”
Then…just as Grayl started to think her answer…something crept from the vast mental darkness and infinite cosmic loneliness surrounding the five minds of the Horns.
Grayl was the first to notice. Her panicky thought had the curling too-keen edge of hysteria. “There are six of us now! There should only be five, but there are six. Count! Count, I tell you! Six!”
To Mort it seemed that a gigantic spider was racing across the web of their thoughts. He felt Dean’s hands grip convulsively at the controls of his flyabout. He felt Evelyn’s slavebody freeze at her desk and Hobart grope out blindly so that a piece of apparatus fell with a crystalline tinkle. As if they had been sitting together at dinner and had suddenly realized that there was a sixth place set and a tall figure swathed in shadows sitting at it. A figure that to Mort exuded an overpowering taste and odor of brass—a sour metallic stench.
And then that figure spoke. The greater portion of the intruder s thought was alien, unintelligible, frightening in its expression of an unearthly power and an unearthly hunger.
The understandable portion of its speech seemed to be in the nature of a bitter and coldly menacing greeting, insofar as references and emotional sense could be at all determined.
“I, the Mind Spider as you name me—the deathless one, the eternally exiled, the eternally imprisoned—or so his over-confident enemies suppose—coming in.”
Mort saw the danger almost too late—and he was the first to see it. He snatched toward the static box in his smock.
In what seemed no more than an instant he saw the shadow of the intruder darken the four other minds, saw them caught and wrapped in the intruder’s thoughts, just as a spider twirls a shroud around its victims, saw the black half-intelligible thoughts of the intruder scuttle toward him with blinding speed, felt the fanged impact of indomitable power, felt his own will fail.
There was a click. By a hairsbreath his fingers had carried out their mission. Around his mind the neutral gray wall was up and—Thank the Lord!—it appeared that the intruder could not penetrate it.
Mort sat there gasping, shaking, staring with the dull eyes of shock. Direct mental contact with the utterly inhuman—with that sort of inhumanity—is not something that can be lightly brushed aside or ever forgotten. It makes a wound. For minutes afterwards a man cannot think at all.
And the brassy stench lingered tainting his entire consciousness—a stench of Satanic power and melancholy.
When he finally sprang up, it was not because he had thought things out but because he heard a faint sound behind him and knew with a chilling certainty that it meant death.
It was Grayl. She was carrying an airbrush as if it were a gun. She had kicked off her shoes. Poised there in the doorway she was the incarnation of taut stealthiness, as if she had sloughed off centuries of civilization in seconds of time, leaving only the primeval core of the jungle killer.
But it was her face that was the worst, and the most revealing. Pale and immobile as a corpse’s—almost. But the little more left over from the “almost” was a spiderish implacability, the source of which Mort knew only too well.
She pointed the airbrush at his eyes. His sidewise twist saved them from the narrow pencil of oily liquid that spat from the readjusted nozzle, but a little splashed against his hand and he felt the bits of acid. He lunged toward her, ducking away from the spray as she whipped it back toward him. He caught her wrist, bowled into her, and carried her with him to the floor.
She dropped the airbrush and fought—with teeth and claws like a cat, yet with this horrible difference that it was not like an animal lashing out instinctively but like an animal listening for orders and obeying them.
Suddenly she went limp. The static from his box had taken effect. He made doubly sure by switching on hers.
She was longer than he had been in recovering from the shock, but when she began to speak it was with a rush, as if she already realized that every minute was vital.
“We’ve got to stop the others, Mort, before they let it out. The…the Mind Spider, Mort! It’s been imprisoned for eons, for cosmic ages. First floating in space, then in the Antarctic, where its prison spiraled to Earth. Its enemies…really its judges…had to imprison it, because it’s something that can’t be killed. I can’t make you understand just why they imprisoned it—” (Her face went a shade grayer) “—you’d have to experience the creature’s thoughts for that—but it had to do with the perversion and destruction of the life-envelopes of more than one planet.”
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.