Free The Mind Spider and Other Stories by Fritz Leiber Page B

stopping or even slowing down. I could control where I went but not whether I went—I had to keep on going. And going. And going.
    My mind was tired. When your mind is tired and you want to sleep you close your eyes. But if, whenever you close your eyes, you start going again, you start traveling the road . . .
    I opened mine. “How do I ever sleep?” I asked the woman. My voice had gone hoarse.
    She didn’t answer. Her expression told me nothing. Suddenly I was very frightened. But at the same time I was horribly tired, mind and body. I closed my eyes . . .
    I was standing on a narrow ledge that gritted under the soles of my shoes whenever I inched a step one way or another to ease the cramps in my leg muscles. My hands and the back of my head were flattened against a gritty wall. Sweat stung my eyes and trickled inside my collar. There was a medley of voices I was trying not to hear. Voices far below.
    I looked down at the toes of my shoes, which jutted out a little over the edge of the ledge. The brown leather was dusty and dull. I studied each gash in it, each rolled or loose peeling of tanned surface, each pale shallow pit.
    Around the toes of my shoes a crowd of people clustered, but small, very small—tiny oval faces mounted crosswise on oval bodies that were scarcely larger—navy beans each mounted on a kidney bean. Among them were red and black rectangles, proportionately small—police cars and fire trucks. Between the toes of my shoes was an empty gray space.
    In spirit or actuality, I was back in the body I had left in the hotel bedroom, the body that had climbed through the window and was threatening to jump.
    I could see from the comer of my eye that someone in black was standing beside me, in spirit or actuality. I tried to turn my head and see who it was, but that instant the invisible roller-coaster seized me and I surged forward and—this time down.
    The faces started to swell. Slowly.
    A great scream puffed up at me from them. I tried to ride it but it wouldn’t hold me. I plunged on down, face first.
    The faces below continued to swell. Faster. Much faster, and then . . .
    One of them looked all matted hair except for the forehead, which had an S on it.
    My fall took me past that horror face and then checked three feet from the gray pavement (I could see fine, dust-drifted cracks and a trodden wad of chewing gun) and without pause I shot upward again, like a high diver who fetches bottom, or as if I’d hit an invisible sponge-rubber cushion yards thick.
    I soared upward in a great curve, losing speed all the time, and landed without a jar on the ledge from which I’d just fallen.
    Beside me stood the woman in black. A gust of wind ruffled her bangs and I saw the eight-limbed sigil on her forehead.
    I felt a surge of desire and I put my arms around her and pulled her face toward mine.
    She smiled but she dipped her head so that our foreheads touched instead of our lips.
    Ether ice shocked my brain. I closed my eyes for an instant.
    When I opened them we were back in the stalled elevator and she was drawing away from me with a smile and I felt a wonderful strength and freshness and power, as if all avenues were open to me now without compulsion, as if all space and time were my private preserve.
    I closed my eyes and there was only blackness quiet as the grave and close as a caress. No roller-coaster, no scanning pattern digging movement and faces from the dark, no realms of the DT fringes. I laughed and I opened my eyes.
    My conductress was at the controls of the elevator and we were dropping smoothly and her smile was sardonic but comradely now, as if we were fellow professionals.
    The elevator stopped and the door slid open on the crowded lobby and we stepped out arm in arm. My partner checked a moment in her stride and I saw her lift an "Out of Order” sign off the door and drop in behind the sand vase.
    We strode toward the entrance. I knew what Zombies were now—the people around me, hotel