The Mind Spider and Other Stories Read Free

an extra element in the restlessness tonight. Then his brow cleared, and smiling with tender cynicism, he recited to himself:
    “Give me ycrur tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teaming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”
    Applies a lot more to Serenity Shoals, he thought, than to America these days. Though I ain’t no bloody copper goddess bearing a lamp to dazzle the Dagos and I ain’t got no keys to no golden doors. (Dr. Snowden was always resolutely crude and ungrammatical in his private thoughts, perhaps in reaction to the relative gentility of his spoken utterances. He was also very sentimental.)
    “Oh, hello, Doctorl” The woman darting across the comer of the terrace had stopped suddenly. It was hard to see anything about her except that she was thin.
    Dr. Snowden walked toward her. “Good evening, Mrs. Wisant,” he said. “Rather late for you to be up and around, isn’t it?”
    “I know, Doctor, but the thought-rays are very thick tonight and they sting worse than the mosquitoes. Besides I’m too excited I couldn’t sleep anyhow. My daughter is coming here tomorrow.”
    “Is she?” Dr. Snowden asked gently. “Odd that Joel hasn’t mentioned it to me—as it happens, I’m to see your husband tomorrow on a legal matter.”
    “Oh, Joel doesn’t know she’s coming,” the lady assured him. “He’d never let her if he did. He doesn’t think I’m good for her ever since I started blacking out on my visits home and . . . doing things. But it isn’t a plot between me and Gabby, either— she doesn’t know she’s coming.”
    “So? Then how are you going to manage it, Mrs. Wisant?” “Don’t try to sound so normal, Doctor!—especially when you know very well I’m not. I suppose you think that I think I will summon her by sending a thought-ray. Not at all. I’ve
    practically given up using thought-rays. They’re not reliable and they carry yellow fever. No, Doctor, I got Gabby to come here tomorrow ten years ago.”
    “Now how did you do that, Mrs. Wisant? Time travel?” “Don’t be so patronizing! I merely impressed it on Gabby’s mind ten years ago—after all, I am a trained hypnotherapist— that she should come to me when she became a princess. Now Joel writes me she’s been chosen Tranquility Princess for the festival tomorrow. You see?”
    “Very interesting. But don’t be disappointed if—”
    “Stop being a wet blanket, Doctor! Don’t you have any trust in psychological techniques? I know she’s coming. Oh the daisies, the beautiful daisies . .
    “Then that settles it. How are they treating you here these days?”
    “I have no complaints, Doctor—except I must say I don’t like all these new nurses and aides. They’re callow. They seem to think it’s very queer of us to be crazy.”
    Dr. Snowden chuckled. “Some people are narrow-minded," he agreed.
    “Yes, and so gullible, Doctor. Just this afternoon two of the new nurses were goggling over a magazine ad about how people should improve their personalities by becoming monsters. I ask you!”
    Dr. Snowden shrugged. “I doubt whether all of us are monster material. And now perhaps you’d better . . .”
    “I suppose so. Good night, Doctor.”
    As she was turning to go, Mrs. Wisant paused to slap her left forearm viciously.
    “Thought-ray?” Dr. Snowden asked.
    Mrs. Wisant looked at him sardonically. “No,” she said. "Mosquito!”
    Dull security and the dead weight of perfection  breed aberration even more surely than disorder and fear.
    —the notebooks of A.S.
    Gabrielle Wisant, commonly called Gabby though she was anything but that, was sleeping on her back in long pink pajamas, stretched out very straight and with her arms folded across her breasts, looking more like the stone funeral effigy of a girl than a living one—an effect which the unrumpled bedclothes heightened.
    The unocculted windoor let in the first cold granular