（外文电子版资料）Fritz Leiber - The Mind Spider.pdf

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 Grayls 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