The spider rushed at him across the shadowed sands, scrabbling wildly on its stalk like legs. Its body was a giant, glossy egg that trembled blackly as it charged across the windless mounds, its wake a score of sand-trickling scratches.
Paralysis locked the man. He saw the poisonous glitter of the spider eyes. He watched it scramble across a log like stick, body mounted high on its motion-blurred legs, as high as the man's shoulders. Behind him, suddenly, the steel encased flame flared into life with a thunder that shook the air. It jarred the man loose. With a sucking gasp, he spun around and ran, the damp sand crunching beneath his racing sandals.
He fled through lakes of light and into darkness again, his face a mask of terror. Beams of sunlight speared across his panic-driven path, cold shadows enveloped it. Behind, the giant spider scoured sand in its pursuit.
Suddenly the man slipped. A cry tore back his lips. He skidded to a knee, then pitched forward onto outstretched palms. He felt the cold sands shaking with the vibration of the roaring flame. He pushed himself up desperately, palms flaking sand, and started running again.
Fleeing, he glanced back across his shoulder and saw that the spider was gaining on him, its pulsing egg of a body perched on running legs-an egg whose yolk swam with killing poisons. He raced on, breathless, terror in his veins.
Suddenly the cliff edge was before him, shearing off abruptly to a gray, perpendicular face. He raced along the edge, not looking down into the vast canyon below. The giant spider scuttled after him, the sound of its running a delicate scraping on the stone. It was closer still. The man dashed between two giant cans that loomed like tanks above him. He threaded, racing, in between the silent bulks of all the clustered cans, past green and red and yellow sides all caked with livid smears. The spider had to climb above them, unable to move its swollen body rapidly enough between them. It slithered up the side of one, then sped across their metal tops, bridging the gaps between them with sudden, jerking hops.
As the man started out into the open again, he heard a scratching sound above. Recoiling and jerking back his head, he saw the spider just about to leap on him, two legs slipping down a metal side, the rest clutching at the top.
With a terrified gasp, the man dived again into the space between the giant cans, half running, half stumbling back along the winding route. Behind him, the spider drew itself back up to the top and, backing around in a twitching semicircle, started after him again.
The move gained seconds for the man, lunging out into the shadow-swept sands again, he raced around the great stone pillar and through another stack of tanlike structures. The spider leaped down on the sand and scurried in pursuit.
The great orange mass loomed over the man now as he headed once more for the edge of the cliff. There was no time for hesitation. With an extra springing of his legs, he flung himself across the gulf and clutched with spastic fingers at the roughened ledge.
Wincing, he drew himself onto the splintered orange surface just as the spider reached the cliff's edge. Jumping up, the man began running along the narrow ledge, not looking back. If the spider jumped that gap, it was over.
The spider did not jump it. Glancing back, the man saw that and, stopping, stood there looking at the spider. Was he safe now that he was out of the spider's territory?
His pale cheek twitched as he saw thread twined cable pour like shimmering vapour from the spider's tubes.
Twisting around, he began running again, knowing that, as soon as the cable was long enough, air currents would lift it, it would cling to the orange ledge, and the black spider would clamber up it. He tried to run faster, but he couldn't. His legs ached, breath was a hot burning in his throat, a stitch drove dagger points into his side. He ran and skidded down the orange slope, jumping the gaps with desperate, weakening lunges.
Another edge. The man knelt quickly, tremblingly, and, holding tight, let himself over. It was a long drop to the next level. The man waited until his body was swinging inward, then let go. Just before he fell, he saw the great spider scrabbling down the orange slope at him.
He landed on his feet and toppled forward on the hard wood. Pain drove needles up his right ankle. He struggled to his feet; he couldn't stop. Overhead, he heard the spider's scratching. Running to the edge, he hesitated, then jumped into space again. The arm-thick curve of the metal wicket flashed up at him. He grabbed for it.
He fell with a fluttering of anus and legs. The canyon floor rushed up at him. He had to miss the flower patched softness.
And yet he didn't. Almost at the edge of it, he landed feet first and bounced over backward in a neck-snapping somersault.
He lay on his stomach and chest, breathing in short, strangled bursts. There was a smell of dusty cloth in his nostrils, and fabric was rough against his cheek.
Alertness returned then and, with a spasmodic wrenching of muscles, the man looked up and saw another ghostlike cable being spun into the air. In a few moments, he knew, the spider would ride it down.
Pushing up with a groan, he stood a moment on trembling legs. The ankle still hurt, breathing was a strain, but there were no broken bones. He started off.
Hobbling quickly across the flower splotched softness, the man lowered himself across the edge. As he did so, he saw the spider swinging down, a terrible, wriggling pendulum. He was on the floor of the canyon now. He ran, limping across the wide plain of it, his sandals flopping on the leveled hardness. To his right loomed the vast brown tower in which the flame still burned, the very canyon trembling with its roar.
He glanced behind. The spider was dropping to the flower-covered softness now, then rushing for the edge. The man raced on toward the great log pile, which was half as high as the tower itself. He ran by what looked like a giant, coiled serpent, red and still and open-jawed at either end. The spider hit the canyon floor and ran at the man.
But the man had reached the gigantic logs now, and, falling forward on his chest, he wriggled into a narrow space between two of them. It was so narrow he could hardly move; dark, damp, cold, and smelling of mouldy wood. He crawled and twisted in as far as he could, then stopped and looked back. The black, shiny-cased spider was trying to follow him.
For a horrible moment, the man thought it was succeeding. Then he saw that it was stuck and had to pull back. It could not follow.
Closing his eyes, the man lay there on the canyon floor, feeling the chill of it through his clothes, panting through his opened mouth, wondering how many more times he would have to flee the spider. The flame in the steel tower went out then, and there was silence except for the spider's scratching at the rock floor as it moved about restlessly. He could hear it scraping on the logs as it clambered over them, searching for a way to get at him.
When at last the scratching sounds had gone, the man backed himself cautiously out from the narrow, splinter-edged passage between the logs. Out on the floor again, he stood with wary haste and looked in all directions to see where the spider was.
High up on the sheer wall he saw it climbing toward the cliff edge, its dark legs drawing its great egg of a body up the perpendicular face. A shaking breath trickled from the man's nostrils. He was safe for another while. Lowering his gaze, he started toward his sleeping place.
He limped slowly past the silent steel tower, which was an oil burner; past the huge red serpent, which was a nozzle less garden hose clumsily coiled on the floor, past the wide cushion whose case was covered with flower designs; past the immense orange structure, which was a stack of two wooden lawn chairs; past the great croquet mallets hanging in their racks. One of the wickets from the croquet set had been stuck in a groove on the top lawn chair. It was what the man, in his flight, had grabbed for and missed. And the tank like cans were used paint cans, and the spider was a black widow. He lived in a cellar.
Now he walked past the towering clothes tree toward his sleeping place, which was underneath a water heater. Just before he reached it, he twitched sharply as, in its concrete cave, the water pump lurched into spinning motion. He listened to its laboured wheezing and sighing, which sounded like the breathing of a dying dragon.
Then he clambered up the cement block on which the looming, enamel faced heater rested and crawled under its protective warmth.
For a long time, motionless, he lay on his bed, which was a rectangular sponge around which a torn handkerchief was wrapped. His chest rose and fell with shallow movements, his hands lay limp and curled at his sides. Without blinking, he stared up at the rust-caked bottom of the heater. The last week.
Three words and a concept. A concept that had begun in a flash of incomprehensive shock and become the intensely intimate moment-by-moment horror it now was. The last week. No, not even that now, because Monday was already half over. His eyes strayed briefly to the row of charcoal strokes on the wood scrap that was his calendar. Monday, March the tenth.
In six days he would be gone.
Across the vast reaches of the cellar, the oil-burner flame roared up again, and he felt the bed vibrate under him. That meant the temperature had fallen in the house above and that the thermostat had kicked a switch and now heat was flowing again through the floor grilles.
He thought of them up there, the woman and the little girl. His wife and daughter. Were they still that to him? Or had the element of size removed him from their sphere? Could he still be considered a part of their world when he was the size of a bug to them, when even Beth could crush him underfoot and never know it?
In six days he would be gone.
He'd thought about it a thousand times in the past year and a half, trying to visualize it. He'd never been able to. Invariably, his mind had rebelled against it, rationalizing: the injections would start to work now, the process would end by itself, something would happen. It was impossible that he could ever be so small that...
Yet he was; so small that in six days he would be gone.
When it came on him, this cruel despair, he would lie for hours on his makeshift bed, not caring whether he lived or died. The despair had never really gone. How could it? For no matter what adjustment he thought he was making, it was obviously impossible to adjust, because there had never been a tapering or a leveling off. The process had gone on and on, ceaseless. He twisted on the bed in restless agony. Why did he run from the spider? Why not let it catch him?
The thing would be out of his hands then. It would be a hideous death, but it would be quick; despair would be ended. And yet he kept fleeing from it, and improvising and struggling and existing. Why?
When he told her, the first thing she did was laugh.
It was not a long laugh. Almost instantly it had been choked off and she stood mutely before him, staring. Because he wasn't smiling, because his face was a taut blankness.
"Shrinking?" The word was spoken in a trembling whisper.
"Yes." It was all he could manage to say.
"But that's-"
She'd been about to say that was impossible. But it wasn't impossible, because now that the word had been spoken, it crystallized all the unspoken dread she'd felt since this had begun, a month before; since Scott's first visit to Dr. Branson, when he'd been checked for possible bowing of the legs or dropping of the arches, and the doctor's first diagnosis of loss of weight due to the trip and the new environment and his pushing aside of the possibility that Scott was losing height as well. The dread had grown through the passing days of tense, frightened suspicion while Scott kept growing shorter; through the second visit to Branson and the third; through the X-rays and the blood tests; through the entire bone survey, the search for signs of bone-mass decrease, the search for a pituitary tumour; through the long days of more X-raying and the grim search for cancer. Through today and this moment.
"But that's impossible."
She had to say it. They were the only words her mind and lips would form. He shook his head slowly, dazedly.
"It's what he said," he answered. "He said my height's decreased more than half an inch in the last four days." He swallowed. "But it's not just my height I'm losing. Every part of me seems to be shrinking. Proportionately."
"No." There was adamant refusal in her voice. It was the only reaction she could make to such an idea. "That's all?" she asked, almost angrily. "That's all he can say?"
"Honey, it's what's happening," he said. "He showed me X rays-the ones he took four days ago and the ones he took today. It's true. I'm shrinking." He spoke as though he'd been kicked violently in the stomach, half dazed, half breathless with shock.
"No." This time she sounded more frightened then resolute. "We'll go to a specialist," she said.
"He wants me to," Scott said. "He said I should go to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre in New York. But-"
"Then you will," she said before he could go on.
"Honey, the cost" he said painfully. "We already owe-"
"What has that got to do with it? Do you think for one moment-" A nervous tremor broke her words off. She stood trembling, arms crossed, her hands clutched at her loose-fleshed upper arms. It was the first time since it had started that she'd let him see how afraid she was.
"Lou." He put his arms around her. "It's all right, honey, it's all right."
"It isn't. You have to go to that centre. You have to."
"All right, all right," he murmured. "I will."
"What did he say they'd do?" she asked, and he could hear the desperate need for hope in her voice.
"He..." He licked his lips, trying to remember. "Oh, he said they'd check my endocrine glands; my thyroid, pituitary-my sex glands. He said they'd give me a basal metabolism. Some other tests." Her lips pressed in.
"If he knows that," she said, "why did he have to say what he did about, about shrinking? That's not good doctoring. It's thoughtless."
"Honey, I asked him," he said. "I established it when I started all the tests. I told him I didn't want any secrets. What else could he-"
"All right" she broke in. "But did he have to call it... what he did?"
"That's what it is, Lou," he said in anguish. "There's evidence for it. Those X rays..."
"He could be wrong, Scott," she said. "He's not infallible." He didn't say anything for a long moment. Then quietly, he said, "Look at me." When it had begun, he was a six-footer. Now he looked straight across into his wife's eyes; and his wife was five feet, eight inches tall.
Hopelessly he dropped the fork on his plate. "How can we?" he asked. "The cost Lou, the cost. It'll take at least a month's hospitalization; Branson said so. A month away from work. Marty's already upset as it is. How can I expect him to go on paying me my salary when I don't even-"
"Honey, your health comes first," she said in a nerve flaring voice. "Marty knows that. You know it." He lowered his head, teeth clenched behind drawn lips. Every bill was a chain that weighed him down. He could almost feel the heavy links forged around his limbs.
"And what do we-" he began, stopping as he noticed Beth staring at him, her supper forgotten.
"Eat your food," Lou told her. Beth started a little, then dug her fork into a mound of gravy-topped potatoes.
"How do we pay for it?" Scott asked. "There's no medical insurance. I owe Marty five hundred dollars for the tests I've already taken." He exhaled heavily. "And the GI loan may not even go through."
"You're going," she said.
"Easily said," he answered.
"All right, what would you rather do?" she snapped with the temper of fear in her voice. "Forget it?
Accept what the doctor said? Just sit back and-" A sob swallowed her words. The hand he put over hers was not a comforting one. It was as cold and almost as shaky as hers.
"All right," he murmured. "All right, Lou."
Later, while she was putting Beth to bed, he stood in the darkened living room watching the cars drive by on the street below. Except for the murmuring voices in the back bedroom, there was no sound in the apartment. The cars swished and hummed past the building, their headlights probing ahead at the dark pavement.
He was thinking about his application for life insurance. It had been part of the plan in coming East. First working for his brother, then applying for a GI loan with the idea of becoming a partner in Marty's business. Acquiring life and medical insurance, a bank account, a decent car, clothes, eventually a house. Building a structure of security around himself and his family.
Now this, disrupting the plan. Threatening to destroy it altogether.
He didn't know at what precise second the question came to him. But suddenly it was terribly there and he was staring fixedly at his upheld, spread-fingered hands, his heart throbbing and swollen in an icy trap.
How long could he go on shrinking?