Read Online The Mind Spider and Other Stories by Fritz Leiber - Free Book Online Page B

started to try to remember my name, but stopped. It would be bad tactics, I thought, to let myself become aware of any more gaps in my knowledge. I knew I was alive. I would stick with that for a while.
    The cage sank two and a half floors and stopped, its doorway blocked by the drab purple wall of the shaft. My conductress switched on the tiny dome light and turned to me.
    “Well?” she said.
    I put my last thought into words.
    “I’m alive,” I said, “and I’m in your hands.”
    She laughed lightly. “You find it a compromising situation? But you’re quite correct. You accepted life from me, or through me, rather. Does that suggest anything to you?”
    My memory may have been lousy, but another, long unused section of my mind was clicking. “When you get anything,” I said, “you have to pay for it and sometimes money isn’t enough, though I’ve only once or twice been in situations where money didn’t help.”
    “Three times now,” she said. "Here is how it stacks up: You’ve bought your way with something other than money, into an organization of which I am an agent. Or perhaps you’d rather go back to the room where I recruited you? We might just be able to manage it.”
    Through the walls of the cage and shaft I could hear the sirens going full blast, underlining her words.
    I shook my head. I said, “I think I knew that—I mean, that I was joining an organization—when I answered your first question.”
    “It’s a very big organization,’’ she went on, as if warning me. “Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.”
    “I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor.
    She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.”
    “Which is?” I asked.
    “The Spiders,” she said.
    That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me—something like that.
    She watched me. “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.”
    “Well, at least you don’t try to prettify your organization,” was all I could think to say.
    She shook her head. “With the really big ones you don’t have to. You never know if the side into which you are bom or reborn is ‘right’ or ‘good’—you only know that it’s your side and you try to learn about it and form an opinion as you live and serve.”
    “You talk about sides,” I said. “Is there another?”
    “We won’t go into that now,” she said, “but if you ever meet someone with an S on his forehead, he’s not a friend, no matter what else he may be to you. That S stands for Snakes.”
    I don’t know why that word coming just then, gave me so much worse a scare—crystallized all my fears, as it were—but it did. Maybe it was only some little thing, like Snakes meaning DTs. Whatever it was, I felt myself turning to mush.
    “Maybe we’d better go back to the room where you found me,” I heard myself saying. I don’t think I meant it, though I surely felt it. The sirens had stopped, but I could hear a lot of general hubbub, outside the hotel and inside it too, I thought —noise from the other elevator shaft and it seemed to me, from the floor we’d just left—hurrying footsteps, taut voices, something being dragged. I knew terror here, in this stalled elevator, but that loudness outside would be worse.
    “It’s too late now,” my conductress informed me. She slitted her eyes at me.