Fritz Leiber: "Midnight in the Mirror World," "The Number of the Beast" and "The Mind Spider"

Let's read the remaining three stories in my coffee-stained copy of Ace 53330, The Mind Spider and Other Stories, recently acquired at Second Story Books in Rockville, Maryland.  According to isfdb, "The Number of the Beast" and "The Mind Spider" are components of the Change War series, while "Midnight in the Mirror World" is not.

"Midnight in the Mirror World" (1964)

Giles Nefandor is a retired chess master and concert pianist who sometimes publishes articles in astronomy journals.  Divorced, he lives alone and has a very comfortable life style.  He wakes up at sunset, goes up to the roof to observe the stars through his battery of telescopes, then at midnight walks downstairs to play the piano and work on chess problems.  

Halfway down the steps, on a landing, are two mirrors that face each other so that in each Nefandor sees a multitude of images of himself that diminish in size.  One night, as the clock is striking twelve, he sees that one of the series of reflections is not a duplicate of the others, but instead offers an image of himself with a horrified expression, menaced by a slender black figure!  The image reverts to normal when the clock ceases to strike.  The next night the same thing happens, but the impossibly independent reflection is one step closer in the series!

Over the next few nights, as the fearsome image grows closer with each appearance, Nefandor wracks his brain, trying to remember if there is anybody out there who might want to exact revenge upon him, and studies the properties of mirrors that are reflected in each other.  He figures out the mystery, which involves a strange but attractive woman who considers herself a witch, lots of math, suicide, and an ambiguous, or maybe I should say paradoxical, ending. 

Thumbs up--I like it!  This one is especially suitable for all you fans of suicide, disastrous sexual relationships, and black magic.  You gender studies kids may find lots in here about men's conflicted feelings about women--"Midnight in the Mirror World" is at the same time a male wish fulfillment fantasy about having a relationship with a woman 15 years younger than you and a warning about female cunning and single-mindedness.

"Midnight in the Mirror World" first appeared in Fantastic and has since been included in numerous Leiber collections. 

"The Number of the Beast" (1958)

"The Number of the Beast" appeared in the same issue of Galaxy as Jack Vance's "Ullward's Retreat," which I blogged about like eight years ago when I read the version titled "Ulward's Retreat."  Galaxy editor H. L. Gold (praise of whom from Barry Malzberg we just read) liked "The Number of the Beast" enough that he included it in The Sixth Galaxy Reader. 

"The Number of the Beast" is a detective story, and not like a Mickey Spillane detective story in which a guy gets beaten up by gangsters or commies, then guns down the gangsters or commies, and beds a woman, and then guns down the woman; no, "The Number of the Beast" is a logic puzzle based on math!  

It is the future!  Earth is a member of a space federation whose membership includes a dazzling array of intelligent spacefaring species.  A newly discovered race, the Arcturians, is considering joining, but its rulers are split between a pro-federation and an isolationist party.  Across the galaxy, all eyes are on Arcturus.  A politician of one of these parties was visiting Earth when he got murdered by a nonhuman hired killer; there are four suspects and the cops don't have any idea if it was insect man, tentacle man, man who can disassemble himself, or centipede man who did the deed.  All four have criminal records, and all four just received a large amount of money which could be the pay for killing the Arcturian.  For contrived reasons Leiber comes up with to add tension to this lame story, the cops have to accuse one of these freaks in 30 minutes or an interstellar incident will occur that may cause interstellar war, and if they accuse the wrong freak an interstellar incident will occur that may cause interstellar war.  Some stable federation you got there.

One cop guesses who the killer is by looking at the amounts of money each crook recently received and figuring out who paid it by comparing the amounts to that culture's numerology and number theory.  I find this pretty dubious.

This story has many of the hallmarks of the archetypal classic SF story, what with the galactic federation and crazy aliens and telepathy (a complication I didn't waste your time with until right now) and the hero solving the problem by logic and knowledge, but in its most boring form: a semi-jocular narrative with no emotion that consists of two guys talking.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

I don't know why isfdb categorizes "The Number of the Beast" as a Change War story.

"The Mind Spider" (1959)

This is a story about telepathy. The five members of the Horn family are all telepaths who can enter each other's minds to the point they can feel what the others feel, smell what they smell, taste what they taste, etc., even control each other's bodies.  Leiber plays up the incest fetish and homoerotic angles a little bit, having a brother and sister joke about the possibility of inhabiting each other's minds while they are with their lovers.  (SF writers think outside the box, and nothing is further outside the box than incest, which I guess is why it seems to come up so often in the writing of Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Tanith Lee, and our boy Fritz.) 

Every day the five family members, who live in different parts of the story's future Earth (which is ruled by a one-world democratic government and has achieved space travel, which is sort of incidental to the story) merge their minds telepathically to chat. But today a sixth mind joins them--an evil immortal alien who was imprisoned in Antarctica centuries ago by his enemies and tries to take over the Horns so he can revolutionize the Earth, raising an intelligent race of arthropods to lord it over us mammals.  (This story seems to owe a little to H. P. Lovecraft, a correspondent of Leiber's.)  Some Horns are taken over, and others have to work to free them and to keep the alien in its polar prison.

This story feels a little lopsided, with the setting of the scene describing the Horns' powers feeling long and the adventure portion when the Horns have to fight the alien feeling brief, even rushed.  If you count the pages, though, these two sections of the story are about the same length, so take my complaint with a grain of salt, all you literal people.

Acceptable.  

As with "The Number of the Beast" and "The Haunted Future," there seems no reason for isfdb to include "The Mind Spider" in its list of Change War stories.

"The Mind Spider" debuted in that Fritz Leiber special issue of Fantastic, and has reappeared in a 1969 reprint magazine and some 21st-century Leiber collections.     

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With only one bad story, and two very good ones ("The Oldest Soldier" and "Midnight in the Mirror World"), The Mind Spider and Other Stories has proven a worthwhile purchase.  More short stories from a Second Story Books purchase in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.