The Mind Spider and Other Stories (11 page)

the quick red fox jumped over the crazy black dog . . .

I kept on typing. It was better than reading. Typing I was doing something, I could discharge. I typed a flood of fragments: “Now is the time for all good men—”, the first words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Winston Commercial, six lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” without punctuation, Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “Mary had a big black—”

In the middle of it all the face of the electric clock that I’d looked at sprang into my mind. My mental image of it had been blanked out until then. The hands were at quarter to twelve.

Whipping in a fresh yellow sheet, I typed the first stanza of Poe’s “Raven,” the Oath of Allegiance to the American Flag, the lost-ghost lines from Thomas Wolfe, the Creed and the Lord’s prayer, “Beauty is truth; truth, blackness—”

The rattling made a swift circuit of the windows—though I heard nothing from the bedroom, nothing at all—and finally the rattling settled on the kitchen door. There was a creaking of wood and metal under pressure.

I thought:
You are standing guard. You are standing guard for yourself and for Max.
And then the second thought came:
If you open the door, if you welcome it in, if you open the kitchen door and then the bedroom door, it will spare-you, it will not hurt you.

Over and over again I fought down that second thought and the urge that went with it. It didn’t seem to be coming from my mind, but from the outside. I typed Ford, Buick, the names of all the automobiles I could remember, Overland Moon, I typed all the four-letter words, I typed the alphabet, lower case and capitals. I typed the numerals and punctuation marks, I typed the keys of the keyboard in order from left to right, top to bottom, then in from each side alternately. I filled the last yellow sheet I was on and it fell out and I kept pounding mechanically, making shiny black marks on the dull black platen.

But then the urge became something I could not resist. I stood up and in the sudden silence I walked through the hall to the back door, looking down at the floor and resisting, dragging each step as much as I could.

My hands touched the knob and the long-handled key in the lock. My body pressed the door, which seemed to surge against me, so that I felt it was only my counter-pressure that kept it from bursting open in a shower of splintered glass and wood.

Far off, as if it were something happening in another universe, I heard the University cloek tolling One . .. two . ..

And then, because I could resist no longer, I turned the key and the knob.

The lights all went out.

In the darkness the door pushed open against me and something came in past me like a gust of cold black wind with streaks of heat in it.

I heard the bedroom door swing open.

The clock completed its strokes. Eleven ... twelve ...

And then ...

Nothing . . . nothing at all. All pressures lifted from me. I was aware only of being alone, utterly alone. I.knew it, deep down.

After some . . . minutes, I think, I shut and locked the door and I went over and opened a drawer and rummaged out a candle, lit it, and went through the apartment and into the bedroom.

Max wasn’t there. I’d known he wouldn’t be. I didn’t know how badly I’d failed him. I lay down on the bed and after a while I began to sob and, after another while, I slept.

Next day I told the janitor about the lights. He gave me a funny look.

“I know,” he said. “I just put in a new fuse this morning. I never saw one blown like that before. The window in the fuse was gone and there was a metal sprayed all over the inside of the box.”

That afternoon I got Max’s message. I’d gone for a walk in the park and was sitting on a bench beside the lagoon, watching the water ripple in the breeze when I felt something burning against my chest. For a moment I thought I’d dropped my cigarette butt inside my windbreaker. I reached in and touched something hot in my pocket and jerked it out. It was the sheet of green paper Max had given me. Tiny threads of smoke were rising from it.

I flipped it open and read, in a scrawl that smoked and grew blacker instant by instant:

Thought you’d like to know I got through okay. Just in 
time. I’m back with my outfit. It’s not too bad. Thanks for 
the rearguard action.

The handwriting (thought-writing?) of the blackening scrawl was identical with the salutation above and the signature below.

And then the sheet burst into flame. I flipped it away from me. Two boys launching a model sailboat looked at the paper flaming, blackening, whitening, disintegrating . . .

I know enough chemistry to know that paper smeared with wet white phosphorus will burst into flame when it dries completely. And I know there are kinds of invisible writing that are brought out by heat. There are those general sorts of possibility. Chemical writing.

And then there’s thoughtwriting, which is nothing but a word I’ve coined. Writing from a distance—a literal telegram.

And there may be a combination of the two—chemical writing activated by thought from a distance . . . from a great distance.

I don’t know. I simply don’t know. When I remember that last night with Max, there are parts of it I doubt. But there’s one part I never doubt.

When the gang asks me, “Where’s Max?” I just shrug.

But when they get to talking about withdrawals they’ve covered; rearguard actions they've been in, I remember mine. I’ve never told them about it, but I never doubt that it took place.

No, I wouldn’t advise anyone to try to change the past, at least not his
personal
past, although changing the
general
past is my business, my fighting business. You see, I’m a Snake in the Change War. Don’t back off—human beings, even Resurrected ones engaged in time-fighting, aren’t built for outward wriggling and their poison is mostly psychological. “Snake” is slang for the soldiers on our side, like Hun or Reb or Ghibbelin. In the Change War we’re trying to alter the past—and it’s tricky, brutal work, believe me—at points all over the cosmos, anywhere and anywhen, so that history will be warped to make our side defeat the Spiders. But that’s a much bigger story, the biggest in fact, and I’ll leave it occupying several planets of microfilm and two asteroids of coded molecules in the files of the High Command.

Change one event in the past and you get a brand new future? Erase the conquests of Alexander by nudging a Neolithic pebble? Extirpate America by pulling up a shoot of Sumerian grain? Brother, that isn’t the way it works at all! The space-time continuum’s built of stubborn stuff and change is anything but a chain-reaction. Change the past and you start a wave of changes moving futurewards, but it damps out mighty fast. Haven’t you ever heard of temporal reluctance, or of the Law of Conservation of Reality?

Here’s a litde story that will illustrate my point: This guy was fresh recruited, the Resurrection sweat still wet in his armpits, when he got the idea he’d use the time-traveling power to go back and make a couple of little changes in his past, so that his life would take a happier course and maybe, he thought, he wouldn’t have to die and get mixed up with Snakes and Spiders at all. It was as if a new-enlisted feuding hillbilly soldier should light out with the high-power rifle they issued him to go back to his mountains and pick off his pet enemies.

Normally it couldn’t ever have happened. Normally, to avoid just this sort of thing, he’d have been shipped straight off to some place a few thousand or million years distant from his point of enlistment and maybe a few light-years, too. But there was a local crisis in the Change War and a lot of routine operations got held up and one new recruit was simply forgotten.

Normally, too, he’d never have been left alone a moment in the Dispatching Room, never even have glimpsed the place except to be rushed through it on arrival and reshipment. But, as I say, there happened to be a crisis, the Snakes were shortharided, and several soldiers were careless. Afterwards two N.C.’s were busted because of what happened and a First Looey not only lost his commission but was transferred outside the galaxy and the era. But during the crisis this recruit I’m telling you about had the opportunity and more to fool around with forbidden things and try out his schemes.

He also had all the details on the last part of his life back in the real world, on his death and its consequences, to mull over and be tempted to change. This wasn’t anybody’s carelessness. The Snakes give every candidate that information as part of the recruiting pitch. They spot a death coming and the Ressurection Men go back and recruit the person from a point a few minutes or at most a few hours earlier. They explain in uncomfortable detail what’s going to happen and wouldn’t he rather take the oath and put on scales? I never heard of anybody turning down that offer. Then they lift him from his lifeline in the form of a Doubleganger and from then on, brother, he’s a Snake.

So this guy had a clearer picture of his death than of the day he bought his first car, and a masterpiece of morbid irony it was. He was living in a classy penthouse that had belonged to a crazy uncle of his—it even had a midget astronomical observatory, unused for years—but he was stony broke, up to the top hair in debt, and due to be dispossed next day. He’d never had a real job, always lived off his rich relatives and his wife’s, but now he was getting a litde too mature for his stem dedication to a life of sponging to be cute. His charming personality, which had been his only asset, was deader from overuse and abuse than he himself would be in a few hours. His crazy uncle would not have anything to do with him any more. His wife was responsible for a lot of the wear and tear on his social-butterfly wings; she had hated him for years, had screamed at him morning to night the way you can only get away with in a penthouse, and was going batty herself. He’d been playing around with another woman, who’d just given him the gate, though he knew his wife would never believe that and would only add a scornful note to her screaming if she did.

It was a lousy evening, smack in the middle of an August heat wave. The Giants were playing a night game with Brooklyn. Two long-run musicals had closed. Wheat had hit a new high. There was a brush fire in California and a war scare in Iran. And tonight a meteor shower was due, according to an astronomical bulletin that had arrived in the morning mail addressed to his uncle—he generally dumped such stuff in the fireplace unopened, but today he had looked at it because he had nothing else to do, either more useful or more interesting.

The phone rang. It was a lawyer. His crazy uncle was dead and in the will there wasn’t a word about an Asteroid Search Foundation. Every penny of the fortune went to the no-good nephew.

This same character finally hung up the phone, fighting off a tendency for his heart to spring giddily out of his chest and through the ceiling. Just then his wife came screeching out of the bedroom. She’d received a cute, commiserating, tell-all note from the other woman; she had a gun and announced that she was going to finish him off.

The sweltering atmosphere provided a good background for sardonic catastrophe. The French doors to the roof were open behind him but the air that drifted through was muggy as death. Unnoticed, a couple of meteors streaked faintly across the night sky.

Figuring it would sure dissuade her, he told her about the inheritance. She screamed that he’d just use the money to buy more other women—not an unreasonable prediction— and pulled the trigger.

The danger was minimal. She was at the other end of a big living room, her hand wasn’t just shaking, she was waving the nickle-plated revolver as if it were a fan.

The bullet took him right between the eyes. He flopped down, deader than his hopes were before he got the phone call. He saw it happen because as a clincher the Resurrection Men brought him forward as a Doubleganger to witness it invisibly—also standard Snake procedure and not productive of time-complications, incidentally, since Doublegangers don’t imprint on reality unless they want to.

They stuck around a bit. His wife looked at the body for a couple of seconds, went to her bedroom, blonded her graying hair by dousing it with two bottles of undiluted peroxide, put on a tarnished gold-lam£ evening gown and a bucket of make-up, went back to the living room, sat down at the piano, played “Country Gardens” and then shot herself, too.

So that was the little skit, the little double blackout, he had to mull over outside the empty and unguarded Dispatching Room, quite forgotten by its twice-depleted skeleton crew while every available Snake in the sector was helping deal with the local crisis, which centered around the planet Alpha Centauri Four, two million years minus.

Naturally it didn’t take him long to figure out that if he went back and gimmicked things so that the first blackout didn’t occur, but the second still did, he would be sitting pretty back in the real world and able to devote his inheritance to fulfilling his wife’s prediction and other pastimes. He didn’t know much about Doublegangers yet and had it figured out that if he didn’t die in the real world he’d have no trouble resuming his existence there—maybe it’d even happen automatically.

So this Snake—name kind of fits him, doesn’t it?—crossed his fingers and slipped into the Dispatching Room. Dispatching is so simple a child could leam it in five minutes from studying the board. He went back to a point a couple of hours before the tragedy, carefully avoiding the spot where the Resurrection Men had lifted him from his lifeline. He found the revolver in a dresser drawer, unloaded it, checked to make sure there weren’t any more cartridges around, and then went ahead a couple of hours, arriving just in time to see himself get the slug between the eyes same as before.

As soon as he got over his disappointment, he realized he’d learned something about Doublegangers he should have known all along, if his mind had been clicking. The bullets he’d lifted were Doublegangers, too; they had disappeared from the real world only at the point in space-time where he’d lifted them, and they had continued to exist, as real as ever, in the earlier and later sections of their lifelines—with the result that the gun was loaded again by the time his wife had grabbed it up.