Free The Mind Spider and Other Stories by Fritz Leiber

“You see, Buster,” she said, “ you’re stiU back in that room. You might be able to handle the problem of rejoining yourself if you went back alone, but not with other people around.”
    "What did you do to me?” I said very softly.
    "I’m a Resurrectionist,” she said as quietly. "I dig bodies out of the space-time continuum and give them the freedom of the fourth dimension. When I Resurrected you, I cut you out of your lifeline close to the point that you think of as the Now.”
    "My lifeline?” I interrupted. “Something in my palm?” “All of you from your birth to your death,” she said. “A you-shaped rope embedded in the space-time continuum— I cut you out of it. Or I made a fork in your lifeline, if you want to think of it that way, and you’re in the free branch. But the other you, the buried you, the one people think of as the real you, is back in your room with the other Zombies going through the motions.”
    “But how can you cut people out of their lifelines?” I asked. “As a bull-session theory, perhaps. But to actually do it—” “You can if you have the proper tool,” she said flatly swinging her handbag. “Any number of agents might have done it. A Snake might have done it as easily as a Spider. Might still— but we won’t go into that.”
    “But if you’ve cut me out of my lifeline,” I said, “and given me the freedom of the fourth dimension, why are we in the same old space-time? That is, if this elevator still is—”
    “It is,” she assured me. "We’re still in the same spacetime because I haven’t led us out of it. We’re moving through it at the same temporal speed as the you we left behind, keeping pace with his Now. But we both have an added mode of freedom, at present imperceptible and inoperative. Don’t worry, I’ll make a Door and get us out of here soon enough— if you pass the test.”
    I stopped trying to understand her metaphysics. Maybe I was between floors with a maniac. Maybe I was a maniac myself. No matter—I would just go on clinging to what felt like reality. “Look," I said, "that person I murdered, or left to die, is he back in the room too? Did you see him—or her?”
    She looked at me and then nodded. She said carefully, "The person you killed or doomed is still in the room.”
    An aching impulse twisted me a little. “Maybe I should try to go back—” I began. “Try to go back and unite the selves ...”
    “It’s too late now,” she repeated.
    "But I want to,” I persisted. “There’s something pulling at me, like a chain hooked to my chest.”
    She smiled unpleasantly. “Of course there is,” she said. “It’s the vampire in you—the same thing that drew me to your room or would draw any Spider or Snake. The blood scent of the person you killed or doomed.”
    I drew back from her. “Why do you keep saying ‘or’?” I blustered. “I didn’t look but you must have seen. You must know. Whom, did 1 kill? And what is the Zombie me doing back there in that room with the body?”
    “There’s no time for that now,” she said, spreading the mouth of her handbag. “Later you can go back and find out, if you pass the test.”
    She drew from her handbag a pale gray gleaming implement that looked by quick turns to me like a knife, a gun, a slim scepter, and a delicate branding iron—especially when its tip sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.
    “The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.
    “Yes, to determine whether you can live in the fourth dimension or only die in it.”
    The star began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Then it held still, but Something that was part of it or created by it went on spinning like a Helmholtz color wheel—a fugitive, flashing rainbow spiral. It looked like the brain’s own circular scanning pattern become visible and that frightened me because that is what you see at the onset of alcoholic hallucinations.
    “Close your eyes,” she said.
    I wanted to jerk