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From Fritz Leiber’s
The Mind Spider and Other Stories
DAMNATION MORNING
Fritz Leiber
Time travelling, which, is not quite the good clean boyish
fun it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman
with the sign on her forehead looked in on me from the
open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I'd hidden
myself and the bottles and asked me, "Look, Buster, do
you want to live?"
It was the sort of question mat would have suited a re-
ligious crackpot of the strong-arm, save-your-soul variety,
but she didn't look like one. And I might very well have
answered it—in fact I almost did—with a hangover, one
percent humorous, "Good God, no!" Or—a poor second
—I could have studied the dark, dust-burnished arabesques
of the faded blue carpet for a perversely long time and
then countered with a grudging, "Oh, if you insist"
But I didn't, perhaps because there didn't seem to b®
anything like one percent of humour in the situation.
Point One: I have been blacked out the past half hour
or so—this woman might just have opened the door or
she might have been watching me for ten minutes. Point
Two: I was in the fringes of DTs, trying to come off a
big drunk. Point Three: I knew for certain that I had
just killed someone or left him or her to die, though I
hadn't the faintest idea of whom or why.
Let me try to picture my state of mind a little more
vividly. My consciousness, the sentient self-aware part of
me, was a single quivering point in the centre of an end-
less plane vibrating harshly with misery and menace. I
was like a man in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific
—or better, I was like a man in a shell hole in the North
African desert (I served under Montgomery and any re-
gion adjoining the DTs is certainly a No Man's Land).
Around me, in every direction—'this is my consciousness
Fm describing, remember—-miles of flat burning sand,
nothing more. Way beyond the horizon were two divorced
wives, some estranged children, assorted jobs, and other
unexceptional wreckage. Much Closer, but still beyond the
horizon, w»e State Hospital (twice) and Psycho (four
times). Shallowly buried very near at hand, or perhaps
blackening in the open just behind me in the shell hole,
was the person I had killed.
But remember that I knew I had killed a real person.
That wasn't anything allegorical.
Now for a little more detail on this "Look, Buster,"
woman. To begin with, she didn't resemble any part of
the DTs or its outlying kingdoms, though an amateur
aright 'have thought differently—especially if he had given
too much weight to the sigil on her forehead. But I was
no amateur.
She seemed about my age—forty-five—but I couldn't
be sure. Her body looked younger than that, her face
older; both were trim and had seen a lot of use, I got
the impression. She was wearing black sandals and a
black unbelted tunic with just a hint of the sack dress
to it, yet she seemed dressed for the street. It occurred
"to me even then (off-track ideas can come to you very
swiftly and sharply in the DT outskirts) that it was a
costume that, except perhaps for the colour, would have
fitted into any number of historical eras: old Egypt,
Greece, maybe the Directoire. World War I, Burma,
Yucatan, to name some. (Should I ask her if she spoke
Mayathan? I didn't, but I don't think the question would
have fazed her; she seemed altogether sophisticated, a
real cosmopolite—she pronounced "Buster" as if it were
part of a curious, somewhat ridiculous jargon she was
using for shock purposes.)
From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed
with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of
silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively .
curious.
Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching
the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark
bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that
had a bearing on her question.
The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine
dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X
superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent.
Except for the bangs she wore her hair pinned up. Her
ears were flat, thin-edged, and nicely shaped, with the
long lobes that in Chinese art mark the philosopher.
Small square silver fiats with rounded comers ornamented
them.
Her face might have been painted by Toulouse-Lautrec
or Degas. The skin was webbed with very fine lines;
the eyes were darkly shadowed and there was a touch of
green on the lids (Egyptian?—I asked myself); her mouth
was wide, tolerant, but realistic. Yes, beyond all else,
she seemed realistic.
And as I've indicated, I was ready for realism, so when
she asked, "Do you want to live?" I somehow managed
not to let slip any of the flippant answers that came
flocking into my mouth, I realized that this was the one
time in a million when a big question is really meant
and your answer really counts and there are no second
chances, I realized that the line of my life had come to
one of .those points where there's a kink in it and the
wrong (or maybe the right) tug can break it and that
as far as I was concerned at the present moment, she
knew all about everything.
So I thought for a bit, not long, and I answered, "Yes."
She nodded—not as if she approved my decision, or dis-
approved it for that matter, but merely as if she accepted
it as a basis for negotiations—and she let her bangs fall
back across her forehead. Then she gave me a quick
dry smile and she said, "In that case you and I have got
to get out of here and do some talking."
For me that smile was the first break in the shell—the
shell around my rancid consciousness or perhaps the dark,
star-pricked shell around the space-time continuum.
"Come on," she said. "No, just as you are. Don't stop
for anything and—" (She caught the direction of my im-
mediate natural movement) "—don't look behind you if
you meant that about wanting to live."
Ordinarily being told not to look behind you is a re-
markably silly piece of advice, it makes you think of
those "pursuing fiend" horror stories that scare children,
and you look around automatically—-if only to prove
you*re no child. Also in this present case there was my
very real and dreadful curiosity: I wanted terribly (yes,
terribly) to know whom it was I had just killed—a forgot-
ten third wife? a stray woman? a jealous husband or boy-
friend? (though I seemed too cracked up for love affairs)
the hotel clerk? a fellow derelict?
But somehow, as with her "want to live" question, I
bad the sense to realize that this was one of those times
when the usually silly statement is dead serious, that
she meant her warning quite literally.
If I looked behind me, I would die.
I looked straight ahead as I stepped past the scattered^
brown empty bottles and the thin fume mounting from
the tiny crater in the carpet where I'd dropped a live
cigarette.
As I followed her through the door I caught, from the
window behind me, the distant note of a police siren.
Before we reached the elevator the siren was nearer
and it sounded as if the fire department had been called
out too.
I saw a silvery flicker ahead. There was a big mirror
facing the elevators.
"What I told you about not looking behind you goes for
mirrors -too," my conductress informed me. "Until I tell
you differently."
The instant she said that, I knew that I had forgotten
what I looked like; I simply could not visualize that
dreadful witness (generally inhabiting a smeary bathroom
mirror) of so many foggy mornings: my own face. One
glance in the mirror ...
But I told myself: realism. I saw a blur of brown shoes
and black sandals in the big mirror, nothing more.
The cage of the right-hand elevator, dark and empty.
was stopped at this floor. A crosswise wooden bar held
the door open. My conductress removed the bar and We
stepped inside. The door closed and she touched the
controls. I wondered, "Which way will it go? Sideways?"
It began to sink normally. I started to touch my face,
but didn't I 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 situa-
tion? 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 die room where I re-
cruited 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 warn-
ing 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 ag-
grandizement, not only the present and future, but also
the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and
1s merciless to its employees."
“I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clum-
sily at humour.
She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn’t
the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Aveng-
ing 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 organiza-
tion," was all I could think to say.
She shook her head. "With the really, big ones yon
don't have to. You never know if the side into which you
are born or reborn is 'right' or 'good’—you only know
that it's your side and you, try to learn about it and form
as 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 old. 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 the loud-
ness outside would be worse.
"It's too late now," my conductress informed me. She
slitted her eyes at me. "You see. Buster," she said.
you're still back in that room. You might be able to
handle the problem of rejoining yourself if you went back
done, but not with other people around."
"What did you do to me?" I said very softly.
*Tm 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 con-
tinuum—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?"
asked. "As a bun-session theory, perhaps. But to ac-
tually 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 space-,
time 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 t
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 pull-
ing 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 I 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 grey gleaming im-
plement that looked by quick turns to me like a knife,
a gun, a slim sceptre, 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
colour wheel—a fugitive, flashing rainbow spiral. It looked
like the brain's own circular scanning pattern become
visible and tha...
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