"Fritz Leiber - The Mind Spider" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

Scanned by gojukai
From Fritz LeiberтАЩs
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-toneтАФa
kind of mental greyтАФthe 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 imaginableтАФwords 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 Grayl's
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