Scanned by gojukai	
From Fritz Leiber’s 
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-tone—a
kind of mental grey—the 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 friendli-
est greeting imaginable—words 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, Mort—it some-
times 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 fron-
tiers 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 any-
way—here 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 be-
yond 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 Rus-
skies certainly had, black mindsl Andreyev? Dostoyev-
sky?"

"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 individual—sug-
gesting 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 wel-
come 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 below—their 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 re-
flecting a thought-flicker from your own unconscious or
Morton's. Why the fear-flurry?"

But just then a fourth mind joined them—resinous in
flavour like Greek wine. "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 duck-duck thought"
The newcomer's tartness was unmalicious. They glimpsed
the large office in which Evelyn worked, the microtype-
writer and rolls of her 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 con-
trol 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 ha
knew you kept sneaking off two thousand miles to my
studio to smoke cigarettes—and get my throat raw for
mel"

"All present and accounted for," Mort remarked. "Eve-
lyn, Grayl, Uncle Dean, Hobart, and myself—the 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 Democ-
racy. Five separate visual landscapes—study, studio, lab-
oratory, office, and the cloud-studded openness of the up-
per .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 sin-
gle 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 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 could communi-
cate mentally with his children. Until then he had not
.known that he was a telepathic mutant, for before Us chil-
dren 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 con-
ferences 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 be-
lieved 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 "day-
dreamers”—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 conference—it was much more a hyper-intimate
gabfest—proceeded.

"My static box bugged out for a few ticks this mom-
ing," 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 daugh-
ter 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, simi-
lar 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 grey stars. But this time
if 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 in-
finite 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
Evelyn’s slave-body freeze at her desk and Hobart grope
out blindly so that a piece of apparatus fell with a crystal-
line 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 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
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 me—the deathless one,
the eternally exiled, the eternally imprisoned—or so his
overconfident 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 to-
ward 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 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 in-
human—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 con-
sciousness—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 be-
hind 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 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 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 spiralled to Earth. Its
enemies . . . really its judges . . . had to imprison it, be-
cause 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 that—but it had to do with the per-
version 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 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 thou-
sand schemes—and searching, searching, always search-
ing! Searching for telepathic contact with creatures capa-
ble 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 Earth—be-
cause 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 or-
ganisms 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 Po-
lice 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 uncon-
scious I put through some calls. Evelyn has left the office.
She hasn't gone home. Hobart should be at his labora-
tory, 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 Ant-
arctic 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 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 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 both-
ered 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 lev-
eled. In his other hand he had a small black cube—his
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, "I’m glad you didn't count lurching with the
"wind as moving."

Dean smiled harshly. "I dodged the thing, too," he ex-
plained. "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, top-
pling 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 shoul-
der, 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 ac-
curacy 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 weren’t
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 yesterday—the green-
framed white powder stations of the Orinoco, the fabulous
walking cities of the Amazon Basin, the jet-atomic launch-
ing fields of the Gran Chaco, the multi-domed Oceano-
graphic 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 spoken—realized, 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 how—once there—we'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, dimension-
less wilderness of thought Like some lone fortress on an
endless plain, their minds linked together, foursquare,
waiting the assault. And like some monster of night-
mare, 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-minds—and in the end it was the
mutual loyalty and knittedness that turned the tide, giv-
ing 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 resis-
tance. 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 can’t ever de-
stroy it. They couldn't destroy it, or they wouldn't have
built this prison. We can't tell anyone about it. Non-tele-
paths 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 prac-
tice telepathy again—behind 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."