The Mind Spider and Other Stories by Fritz Leiber

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    The shaking of the boughs had started up again and was traveling down the far wall. At least half the eyes of the audience were traveling with it. ("George!” Mrs. Potter said to her husband, "it looks as if a lot of crumpled cellophane were being dragged through the branches. It all wiggles.” He replied, “I forgot my glasses.” Mr. Ames muttered to himself: “The wood began to move. Liar and slave!"
    Wisant resolutely kept his eyes away from the traveling commotion and continued, "... and for one more year of keeping up the good fight against violence, delinquency, irrationality .. .”
    A rush of wind (looking like “curdled air,” some said afterwards) sped from the rear of the hall to the podium. Most of the candles were blown out, as if a giant had puffed at his giant birthday cake, and the Nymphs and Sprites squealed all the way down the double line.
    The branches around Wisant shook wildly. “ . . . emotionalism, superstition, and the evil powers of the imagination]” he finished with a shout, waving his arms as if to keep off bats or bees.
    Twice after that he gathered himself to continue his talk, although his audience was in a considerable uproar, but each time his attention went back to a point a little above their heads. No one else saw anything where he was looking (except some “curdled air”), but Wisant seemed to see something most horrible, for his face paled, he began to back off as if the something were approaching him, he waved out his arms wildly as one might at a wasp or a bat, and suddenly he began to scream, “Keep it off mel Can’t you see it, you fools? Keep it offl”
    As he stepped off the podium backwards he snatched something from inside his jerkin. There was a nasty whish in the air and those closest to him felt a wave of heat. There were a few shrill screams. Wisant fell heavily on the turf and did not move. A shining object skidded away from his hand. Mr. Ames picked it up. The pistol-shaped weapon was unfamiliar to him and he only later discovered it was a heat-gun.
    The foliage of the Great Bower was still again, but a long streak of leaves in the ceiling had instantaneously turned brown. A few of these came floating down as if it were autumn.
    Sometimes I think of the whole world as one great mental hospital, its finest people only inmates trying out as aides.
    The notebooks of A.S.
    It is more fun than skindiving to soar through the air in an antigravity harness. That is, after you have got the knack of balancing your field. It is deeply thrilling to tilt your field and swoop down at a slant, or cut it entirely and just drop—and then right it or gun it and go bounding up like a rubber ball. The positive field around your head and shoulders creates an air cushion against the buffeting of the wind and your own speed.
    But after a while the harness begins to chafe, your sense of balance gets tired, your gut begins to resent the slight griping effects of the field supporting you, and the solid ground which you first viewed with contempt comes to seem more and more inviting. David Cruxon discovered all of these things.
    Also, it is great fun to scare people. It is fun to flash a green demon mask in their faces out of nowhere and see them blanch. Or to glow white in the dark and listen to them scream. It is fun to snarl traffic and panic pedestrians and break up solemn gatherings—the solemner the better—with rude or shocking intrusions. It is fun to know that your fellow man is little and puffed up and easily terrified and as in love with security as a baby with his bottle, and to prove it on him again and again. Yes, it is fun to be a practicing monster.
    But after a while the best of Halloween pranks becomes monotonous, fear reactions begin to seem stereotyped, you start to see yourself in your victims, and you get ashamed of winning with loaded dice. David Cruxon discovered this too.
    He had thought after he broke up the Tranquility Festival that he had hours of