The Mind Spider and Other Stories (6 page)

"Later,” Wisant told them loudly as he strode by.

“Joel!" Harker called urgently, but Wisant did not pause or turn his head. He went out. The four men looked after him puzzledly.

The Twilight Tranquility Festival was approaching its muted climax. The Pixies and Fairies (girls) had danced their woodland ballet. The Leprechauns and Elves (boys) had made their Flashlight Parade. The Greenest Turf, the Growingest Garden, the Healthiest Tree, the Quietest ’Copter, the Friendliest House, the Rootedest Family, and many other silendy superlative exurban items had been identified and duly admired. The orchestra had played all manner of forest, brook, and bird music. The Fauns and Pans (older boys) had sung “Tranquility So Masterful,” “These Everlasting Knolls,” the Safety Hymn, and “Come Let’s Steal Quietly.” The Sprites and Nymphs (older girls) had done their Candlelight Saraband. Representing religion, the local Zen Buddhist pastor (an old Caucasian Californian) had blessed the gathering with a sweet-sour wordlessness. And now the everpopular Pop Wisant was going to give his yearly talk and award trophies. (“It’s tremendous of him to give of himself this way,” one matron said, “after what he went through this morning. Did you know that she was stark naked? They wrapped a blanket around her to put her aboard the ’copter but she kept pulling it off.”)

Freshly cut boughs attached to slim magnesium scaffolding made, along with the real trees, a vast leafy bower out of what had this morning been an acre of lawn. Proud mothers in green robes and dutiful fathers in green jerkins lined the walls, shepherding their younger children. Before them stood a double line of Nymphs and Sprites in virginal white ballet costumes, each holding a tall white candle tipped with blue-hearted golden flame.

Up to now it had been a rather more nervously gay Tranquility Festival than most of the mothers approved. Even while the orchestra played there had been more than the usual quota of squeals, little shrieks, hysterical giggles, complaints of pinches and prods in the shadows, candles blown out, raids on the refreshment tables, small children darting into the buses and having to be retrieved. But Pop Wisant’s talk would smooth things out, the worriers told themselves.

And indeed as he strode between the ranked nymphs with an impassive smile and mounted the vine-wreathed podium, the children grew much quieter. In fact the hush that fell on the leafy Big Top was quite remarkable.

“Dear friends, charming neighbors, and fellow old coots,” he began—and then noticed that most of the audience were looking up at the green ceiling.

There had been no wind that evening, no breeze at all, but some of the boughs overhead were shaking violently. Suddenly the shaking died away. (“My, what a sudden gust that was,” Mrs. Ames said to her husband. Mr. Ames nodded vaguely— he had somehow been thinking of the lines from Macbeth about Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.)

“Fellow householders and family members of Civil Service Knolls,” Wisant began again, wiping his forehead, "in a few minutes several of you will be singled out for friendly recognition, but I think the biggest award ought to go to all of you collectively for one more year of working for tranquility . . .”

The shaking of the boughs had started up again and was traveling down the far wall. At least half the eyes of the audience were traveling with it. ("George!” Mrs. Potter said to her husband, "it looks as if a lot of crumpled cellophane were being dragged through the branches. It all wiggles.” He replied, “I forgot my glasses.” Mr. Ames muttered to himself: “The wood began to move. Liar and slave!"

Wisant resolutely kept his eyes away from the traveling commotion and continued, "... and for one more year of keeping up the good fight against violence, delinquency, irrationality .. .”

A rush of wind (looking like “curdled air,” some said afterwards) sped from the rear of the hall to the podium. Most of the candles were blown out, as if a giant had puffed at his giant birthday cake, and the Nymphs and Sprites squealed all the way down the double line.

The branches around Wisant shook wildly. “ . . . emotionalism, superstition, and the evil powers of the imagination]” he finished with a shout, waving his arms as if to keep off bats or bees.

Twice after that he gathered himself to continue his talk, although his audience was in a considerable uproar, but each time his attention went back to a point a little above their heads. No one else saw anything where he was looking (except some “curdled air”), but Wisant seemed to see something most horrible, for his face paled, he began to back off as if the something were approaching him, he waved out his arms wildly as one might at a wasp or a bat, and suddenly he began to scream, “Keep it off mel Can’t you see it, you fools? Keep it offl”

As he stepped off the podium backwards he snatched something from inside his jerkin. There was a nasty
whish
in the air and those closest to him felt a wave of heat. There were a few shrill screams. Wisant fell heavily on the turf and did not move. A shining object skidded away from his hand. Mr. Ames picked it up. The pistol-shaped weapon was unfamiliar to him and he only later discovered it was a heat-gun.

The foliage of the Great Bower was still again, but a long streak of leaves in the ceiling had instantaneously turned brown. A few of these came floating down as if it were autumn.

Sometimes I think of the whole world as one great mental hospital, its finest people only inmates trying out as aides.

The notebooks of A.S.

It is more fun than skindiving to soar through the air in an antigravity harness. That is, after you have got the knack of balancing your field. It is deeply thrilling to tilt your field and swoop down at a slant, or cut it entirely and just drop—and then right it or gun it and go bounding up like a rubber ball. The positive field around your head and shoulders creates an air cushion against the buffeting of the wind and your own speed.

But after a while the harness begins to chafe, your sense of balance gets tired, your gut begins to resent the slight griping effects of the field supporting you, and the solid ground which you first viewed with contempt comes to seem more and more inviting. David Cruxon discovered all of these things.

Also, it is great fun to scare people. It is fun to flash a green demon mask in their faces out of nowhere and see them blanch. Or to glow white in the dark and listen to them scream. It is fun to snarl traffic and panic pedestrians and break up solemn gatherings—the solemner the better—with rude or shocking intrusions. It is fun to know that your fellow man is little and puffed up and easily terrified and as in love with security as a baby with his bottle, and to prove it on him again and again. Yes, it is fun to be a practicing monster.

But after a while the best of Halloween pranks becomes monotonous, fear reactions begin to seem stereotyped, you start to see yourself in your victims, and you get ashamed of winning with loaded dice. David Cruxon discovered this too.

He had thought after he broke up the Tranquility Festival that he had hours of mischief left in him. The searing near-miss of Wisant’s hot-rod had left him exhilarated. (Only the light-flow fabric, diverting the infrared blast around him, had saved him from dangerous, perhaps fatal burns.) And now the idea of stampeding an insane asylum had an ironic attraction. And it
had
been good sport at first, especially when he invisibly buzzed two sand-cars of aides into a panic so that they went careening over the dunes on their fat tires, headlight beams swinging frantically, and finally burst through the light fence on the landward side (giving rise to a rumor of an erupting horde of ravening madmen).
That
had been very good fun indeed, rather like harmlessly strafing war refugees, and after it Dave had shucked off his robe and hood of invisibility and put on a Glowing Phantom aerobatic display, diving and soaring over the dark tiny hills, swooping on little groups with menacing phosphorescent claws and peals of Satanic laughter.

But that didn’t prove to be nearly as good fun. True, his victims squealed and sometimes ran, but they didn’t seem to panic permanently like the aides. They seemed to stop after a few steps and come back to be scared again, like happily hysterical children. He began to wonder what must be going on in the minds down there if a Glowing Phantom were merely a welcome diversion. Then the feeling got hold of him that those people down there saw through him and sympathized with him. It was a strange feeling—both deflating and heart-warming.

But what really finished Dave off as a practicing monster was when they started to cheer him—cheer him as if he were their champion returning in triumph. Cruxon’s Crusade—was that what he’d called it? And was this his Holy Land? As he asked himself that question he realized that he was drifting wearily down toward a hilltop on a long slow slant and he let his drift continue, landing with a long scuff.

Despite the cheers, he rather expected to be gibbered at and manhandled by the crowd that swiftly gathered around him. Instead he was patted on the back, congratulated for his exploits at New Angeles, and asked intelligent questions.

Gabby Wisant’s mind had fully determined to stay underground a long time. But that had been on the assumptions that her body would stay near Daddikins at Civil Service Knolls and that the thing that had taken control of her body would stay hungry and eager. Now those assumptions seemed doubtful, so her mind decided to risk another look around.

She found herself one of the scattered crowd of people wandering over sandhills in the dark. Some memories came to her, even of the morning, but not painfully enough to drive her mind below. They lacked pressure.

There was an older woman beside her—a rather silly and strangely affected woman by her talk, yet somehow likable— who seemed to be trying to look after her. By stages Gabby came to realize it must be her mother.

Most of the crowd were following the movements of something that glowed whitely as it swooped and whirled through the air, like a small demented comet far off course. After a bit she saw that the comet was a phosphorescent man. She laughed.

Some of the people started to cheer. She copied them. The glowing man landed on a little sand hill just ahead. Some of the crowd hurried forward. She followed them. She saw a young man stepping clumsily out of some glowing coveralls. The glow let her see his face.

“Dave, you idiot!" she squealed at him happily.

He smiled at her shamefacedly.

Doctor Snowden found Dave and Gabby and Beth Wisant on a dune just inside the break in the wire fence—the last of the debris from last night’s storm. The sky was just getting light. The old man motioned back the aides with him and trudged up the sandy rise and sat down on a log.

“Oh, hello, Doctor,” Beth Wisant said. “Have you met Gabrielle? She came to visit me just like I told you.”

Dr. Snowden nodded tiredly. “Welcome to Serenity Shoals, Miss Wisant. Glad to have you here.”

Gabby smiled at him timidly. “I’m glad to be here too—I think. Yesterday . .Her voice trailed off.

"Yesterday you were a wild animal,” Beth Wisant said loudly, "and you killed a pillow instead of your father. The doctor will tell you that’s very good sense.”

Dr. Snowden said, "All of us have these somatic wild animals—” (He looked at Dave) “—these monsters.”

Gabby said, “Doctor, do you think that Mama calling me so long ago can have had anything to do with what happened to me yesterday?”

"I see no reason why not,” he replied, nodding. “Of course there’s a lot more than that that’s mixed up about you.”

"When I .implant a suggestion, it works," Beth Wisant asserted.

Gabby frowned. “Part of the mix-up is in the world, not me.”

“The world is always mixed up," Dr. Snowden said. “It’s a pretty crazy hodge-podge with sensible strains running through it, if you look for them very closely. That’s one of the things we have to accept.” He rubbed his eyes and looked up. "And while we’re on the general topic of unpleasant facts, here’s something else. Serenity Shoals has got itself one more new patient besides yourselves—Joel Wisant.”

"Hum," said Beth Wisant. "Maybe now that I don’t have him to go home to, I can start getting better.”

“Poor Daddikins,” Gabby said dully.

“Yes," Snowden continued, looking at Dave, “that last little show you put on at the Tranquility Festival—and then on top of it the news that there was an outbreak here— really broke him up.” He shook his head. “Iron perfectionist. At the end he was even demanding that we drop an atomic bomb on Serenity Shoals—that was what swung Harker around to my side.”

“An atom bomb!” Beth Wisant said. “The ideal”

Dr. Snowden nodded. “It does seem a little extreme.”

"So you class me as a psychotic too,” Dave said, a shade argumentively. "Of course I’ll admit that after what I did—” Dr. Snowden looked at him sourly.
“I
don’t class you as psychotic at all—though a lot of my last-century colleagues would have taken great delight in tagging you as a psychopathic personality. I think you’re just a spoiled and willful young man with no capacity to bear frustration. You’re a self-dramatizer. You jumped into the ocean of aberration— that was the meaning of your note, wasn’t it?—but the first waves tossed you back on the beach. Still, you got in here, which was your main object.”

“How do you know that?” Dave asked.

“You’d be surprised,” Dr. Snowden said wearily, “at how many more-or-less sane people want to get into mental hospitals these days—it’s probably the main truth behind the Report K figures. They seem to think that insanity is the only great adventure left man in a rather depersonalizing age. They want to understand their fellow man at the depths, and here at least they get the opportunity.” He looked at Dave meaningfully as he said that. Then he went on, “At any rate, Serenity Shoals is the safest place for you right now, Mr. Cruxon. It gets you out from under a stack of damage suits and maybe a lynch-mob or two.”

He stood up. “So come on then, all of you, down to Receiving,” he directed, a bit grumpily. “Pick up that junk you’ve got there, Dave, and bring it along. We’ll try to hang onto the harness—it might be useful in treating gravitational dementia. Come on, come on!—I’ve wasted all night on you. Don’t expect such concessions in the future. Serenity Shoals is no vacation resort—and no honeymoon resort either!— though . .
7
(He smiled flickeringly) . . though some couples do try.”