Scanned by gojukaiFrom Fritz Leibers 

The Mind Spider and Other Stories 

THE MIND SPIDER 

Fritz Leiber 

Hour and minute hand of the odd little grey clock stood 
almost at midnight, Horn Tune, 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 white 
present, because it was a meaningless thought-tonea 
kind of mental greythe vanishing static left behind a 
great inward silence and emptiness. To Morton it was as 
if his mind were crouched on a mountain-peak 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 imaginablewords dear 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 grey 
curve of her skirt and the slim, competent beauty of her 
hands, so closeespecially when she raised the cigarette 
to puff itthat 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, i 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 oneas 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 blend-
fag 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 fillers and toes! What if 
Fred had been visiting me? 


"I knew he wasn't," Morion replied. "You know, Sis, 
Id never invade your body while you were with your 
non-telepathic sweetheart." 

"Nonsense, you'd love to, you old hedonist!and I dont 
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 la 
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, Mortit sometimes 
bugs me." 

'How do you mean exactly?" 

"You know, Mort. Ordinary people are protected. Then-
minds are walled in from birth, and behind the walls it 
may be stuffy but it's very safe. So safe that they dent 
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 were 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 noisestaticand 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 any-
wayhere it is." 

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, vasti 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 Grayls sake. "Those old White and Red Russkies 
certainly had, black mindsl 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-sus 
ceptible sister?" 

"Stop poking funi It was real, I tell you." 


"Real? How? Sounds like mood-reality to me. Here, 
Stop being so ticklish and let me get a dose-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 blade 
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 individualsuggesting 
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 
grey-green forest belowtheir uncle's work as a ranger 
kept him up in his fly-about 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 parlour 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 themresinous in 
flavour like Greek wine. "Hobart Horn coming in." They 
saw a ghostly laboratory, with chemical apparatus, 

Then a fifthsweet-sour apple-tasting. "Evelyn Horn 
coming in. Yes, Grayl, late as usualthirty-seven seconds 
by Horn Time. I didn't miss your duck-duck thought" 
The newcomer's tartness was unmalicious. They glimpsed 
the large office in which Evelyn worked, the microtypewriter 
and rolls of her correspondence tape on her desk. 
Butbright 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 faggedand 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 ha 
knew you kept sneaking off two thousand miles to my 
studio to smoke cigarettesand get my throat raw for 
mel" 

"All present and accounted for," Mort remarked. "Evelyn, 
Grayl, Uncle Dean, Hobart, and myselfthe whole 
damn family. Would you care to share my day's experi-
ences first? Pretty dull armchair stuff, I warn you. 0r 
shall we make it a five-dimensional free-for-all? A Quin-
tet 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 landscapesstudy, studio, laboratory, 
office, and the cloud-studded openness of the upper 
.airall 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 fly-about 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 honour, of good and bad, of wise and 
foolish, and of all the other so-called abstractions with 
which men and women direct their livesall 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 could communicate 
mentally with his children. Until then he had not 
.known that he was a telepathic mutant, for before Us children 
were born there had been no other minds with 
which he could communicateand 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 descendantsat 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 factamong 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 
relationsno 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, tale-
kinesis, or foreseeing the future or past. Their telepathic 
power was, in short, simply like having a private, all-senses^ 
family telephone. ^ 

The conferenceit was much more a hyper-intimate 
gabfestproceeded. 

"My static box bugged out for a few ticks this moming," 
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 
as 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 be


-hind 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 mysteriousand as incredibleas 
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 thoughtsjust the blurs' of 
your boxes like little old dark grey stars. But this time 
if gave me a funny uncomfortable feeling, like a spider 
Crawling down myGrayl! 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 
ttie 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 
gnp convulsively at the controls of his fly-about He felt 
Evelyns slave-body 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 
odour of brassa 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 
m 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 methe deathless one, 
the eternally exiled, the eternally imprisonedor so his 
overconfident enemies supposecoming in." 

Mort saw the danger almost too lateand 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 hairsbreadth his fingers had 
carried out their mission. Around his mind the neutral 
grey wall was up andThank 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 in-
humanwith that sort of inhumanityis 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'salmost. But 
the little more left over from the "almost" was a spider" 
ish 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 bite 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 foughtwith 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. 

"Weve 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 spiralled 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 greyer) "you'd have to experience the 
creature's thoughts for thatbut 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 exempt 
when ordinary people were present. It was like acting m 
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 Evelyns 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 
schemesand 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 
colourless 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 Earthbecause 
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 controlwe'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 its 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 
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 fly about 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 lofties, 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 Barth, 
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 fly-abouts 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 adequatethe 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 fly-about. Slowly, very slowly, they 
gained on the first two. Then a-fifth figure came from 
behind a drift and confronted the second pair, 

"Steady now. Steady!" Dean Horn Shouted against the 
wind, levelling his blaster. "Morti 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 cubehis 
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 be were 
exorcising demons, Mort thought). Only then did Dean. 
lower the muzzle of his blaster. 

Mort said, "Im glad you didn't count lurching with the 
"wind as moving." 


Dean smiled harshly. "I dodged the thing, too," he explained. 
"Just managed to nick 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 Grayl 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 upturned 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 other 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 file 
blaster, but in the same moment the face dropped out 
of sight. There was a metallic dang. 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 but 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 werent 
to get the instructions . . . on how to do that . . . until: 
we got inside." 

"Stand aside," Dean said, aiming his blaster at tile trap-
door, but he said it dully, as if he knew beforehand that it 
wasn't going to work. Waves of heat made the white hill 
beyond them waver. But the dull metal did not change 
colour 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 yesterdaythe 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 thinks 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 spokenrealized, 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 us 
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 howonce therewe'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 some 
thing in him, and in them, rejoiced at Grayl's words, 
rejoiced at the prospect of meeting the thing, however 
hopelessly, on it's 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 shy 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 overmaster 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-mindsand 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 comer 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 grey and prepare to fight back to their 
fly-abouts 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 cant 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 againbehind 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." 



