by Fritz Leiber
“I don’t think so,” he heard Mr. Wilson whisper in reply. “Looks like an ordinary pickup to me.”
Cold prickles rose on Carr’s scalp.
“How about us doing it together?” he asked Jane, pretending there was no whispers, no people behind them, forcing himself to go on playing the part he had chosen.
She seemed to complete a calculation. “Sure,” she said, looking up at him with a suddenly unambiguous smile.
“Pickup!” Miss Hackman’s whisper was faint as before, and as contemptuous. “I never saw anything so amateurish. It’s like a highschool play.”
Carr slid his arm around Jane’s, took her hand. He started with her down the street, toward the brighter lights. He heard the footsteps of the three keeping pace.
“But it’s obviously the girl!” Miss Hackman’s whisper was a trifle louder. “She’s just bleached her hair and trying to pass as a whore.”
As if she feared Carr might turn, Jane’s hand tightened spasmodically on his.
“You can’t be sure,” whispered Mr. Wilson. “Lots of people look alike. We’ve been fooled before. What do you say, Dris?”
“It’s the man all right,” the whispered voice of the handless man responded. “But I followed him for a while tonight and I think he’s okay.”
“But if it’s the same man…?” Miss Hackman objected. “Remember I saw him with the girl at the employment office.”
“Yes,” Mr. Wilson responded, “and we decided that she’d tricked us there and he wasn’t a real accomplice at all. Which should indicate that this can’t be the girl.”
Carr felt the whispers falling about them like the folds of a spiderweb. He said loudly to Jane, “You look swell, kid.”
“You don’t look so bad yourself,” she replied.
Carr shifted his arm around her waist, brushing her hips as he did. But his eyes were searching the street ahead. The scene had no changed. The machinery of Nickel Heaven was in full blast. The two men in dark slickers across the street had been joined by two more. The taxi in front of the drugstore was still chugging. Fringing the field of his vision to either side, were blurred bobbing segments of Mr. Wilson’s panama hat and pinstriped paunch and Miss Hackman’s green gabardine shirt and nyloned legs.
“You agree with me about the girl, don’t you Dris?” Mr. Wilson asked.
“I think so.” But this time the handless man’s voice lacked assurance. “But I can’t be sure, because…well I’m not absolutely sure about the man. It’s just possible that he fooled me.”
Miss Hackman leaped at the opportunity. “Exactly. And I think they’re still faking. Let me test them.”
Through the skimpy dress Carr felt Jane shaking.
“Put that away!” Mr. Wilson whispered sharply.
“I will not,” Miss Hackman replied.
They were almost at the corner. They were passing the black convertible. The figure of a bleary-eyed man in a faded blue shirt lurched up onto the curb and came weaving across the sidewalk. Carr steered Jane out of his way.
“Disgusting,” Jane said.
“I’d have taken a crack at him if he’d bumped you.”
“Oh, he’s drunk,” Jane said.
“I’d have taken a crack at him anyway,” Carr asserted, but he was no longer looking at her. The cab driver had come hurrying out of the drugstore.
“Come on, kid,” said Carr suddenly, stepping ahead and pulling Jane after him. “Here’s where we start to travel fast.”
“Oh, swell,” breathed Jane. Her eyes went wide as she looked at the taxi. They hurried toward it.
Beyond the corner, the men in dark slickers left the pawnshop window and headed toward them.
Miss Hackman’s whisper was almost a wail. “They’re getting away. You’ve got to let me test them.”
The cab driver ducked his head to get in. Simultaneously car reached for the door.
“It might be better…” came Dris’ voice.
Cold as ice, Carr held the door for Jane. From the corner of his eye he saw Miss Hackman’s hand. In it was one of the stiff daggerlike pins from her hat.
“Well…” began Mr. Wilson. Then, in an altogether different voice, still whispered, but tense with agitation and surprise, “No! Look! Quick, we’ve got to get out of here!”
Carr stepped in after Jane, slammed the door, dropped into the seat. The taxi jerked forward, but behind them he heard a more powerful motor roar into life.
He ventured a quick look back.
The black convertible was speeding down South State, away from them.
At the curb they had left stood a knot of men in dark slickers.
Carr unlocked the door to his room, hurried to the windows, pulled down the shades, went back to the door, looked down the dark hall, listened for a few moments, finally locked and bolted the door.
Only then did he switch on the light.
“Do you really think it’s safe here?” Jane asked him. Framed by an amateurishly bleached hair, her face looked small and tomboyish.
“Safer than taking our chances somewhere else,” he told her. “I don’t think they know my address yet.” He frowned. “What do you suppose scared them off at the end?”
“I didn’t know they were scared of anything,” she said.
“There were those men in slickers…” he began doubtfully.
“They aren’t scared of men,” she told him, her gaze straying toward the bolted door.
“I’ll get us a drink,” he said.
As he added water to whisky in the bathroom he remembered the motionless head and fat neck of the thing driving the taxi as they had slipped out at a red light near La Salle and Grand. Everything around him grew distorted-looking and horribly solid. It seemed to him impossible, in a universe of recalcitrant mechanisms, that he should be able to unscrew the cap of a whiskey bottle, to turn a faucet, even to push aside the thick air as, the dingy white floor seeming to rock under his feet, he dizzily fought his way out into the bedroom.
Jane sprang toward him.
“It’s all impossible,” he assured her gaspingly. “We’re both insane.”
She grabbed his arm above the elbow, squeezed it. “I’ve said that to Fred,” she told him unpityingly, “many times. And to myself.”
He squeezed his eyelids. The floor steadied under him. She took one of the drinks from him. He drank a mouthful from the other.
“An insane delusion could be shared…” he began.
She just looked at him.
“But if we aren’t insane,” he continued tormentedly, “what’s made the world this way? Have machines infected men, turning them into things like themselves? Or has man’s belief in a completely materialistic universe made it just that? Or…” He hesitated “…has the world always been this way—just a meaningless mechanical toy?”
She shrugged.
“But why should we be the ones to awaken?” he went on with growing agitation. “Why, of all the billions, should we two be the ones to grow minds, to become aware?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“If we only knew how it happened to us, we might have some idea…” He looked at her. “Jane,” he said, “how did it happen to you? When did you first find out?”
“That’s a long story…”
“Tell it to me.”
“…and I’m not sure it explains anything.”
“Never mind, Jane. Tell it to me.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “Very well,” she said softly. She sat down on the edge of the bed, almost formally, and took a sip of her drink.
“You must think of my childhood,” she began, “as an empty, overprotected, middle-class upbringing in a city apartment. You must think of me as unhappy and frightened and lonely, with a few girl friends whom I though silly and ignorant and at the same time more knowing than myself.
“And then my parents—familiar creatures I was terribly tied to but with whom I had no real contact. They seemed to go unhappily through a
daily routine as sterile as death. They got excited over newspaper stories that didn’t have anything to do with them. And yet they were blind to a thousand strange and amazing things that were happening right around them.
“The whole world was a mystery to me, and a rather ugly one. I didn’t know what people were after, why they did the things they did, what secret rules they were obeying. I didn’t know that there were neither rules nor purposes, only mechanical motions. I used to take long walks alone, trying to figure it out, down by the river, or in the park.” She paused. “It was in the park that I met the man with glasses.”
Carr looked up. “What’s happened to him now?” he asked nervously.
She shrugged. “I haven’t any idea. The last time I saw him was when you came to the library.”
“You say you first met him in the park?”
“I didn’t exactly meet him,” she replied. “I just noticed him watching me. Usually from a distance—from another path in the park, or across the lagoon, or through a crowd of people. He’d watch me and follow me for a way and then drift out of sight and maybe turn up farther on.” She hesitated. “I had no idea, of course, that he was already outside the machine—I mean Life—and attracted to me because I could sometimes ee him and so must be half awakened to consciousness. But suspicious and afraid of me too and wating to make sure of me first.
“I sometimes thought he was something I’d made up in my mind. He had the oddest way of fading into the shrubbery, of slipping behind people, of disappearing when there seemed to be no place to disappear to. He reminded me of my cat Gigolo in one of his prowling moods, when one moment he’d be lying on the cushion looking at me, and the next peeking in from the hall—and no memory at all in my mind of his moving from one place to the other. Yes, it was like that. I had the feeling that I could blink the small dark man on and off, if you can understand that. I know now that was because I was sometimes almost fully awake to consciousness—when I’d see him—and then almost asleep again. I wouldn’t think of him again until he popped up the next day.
“That was the inertia of the machine asserting itself. Because the machine—the big machine called Life—always wants you to live according to the preordained pattern, even if you do grow a mind; in a sort of trance, as it were. That’s why it’s so easy to forget what you experience outside the pattern, why a simply drug like the chloral hydrate I gave you in the powders made you forget. The machine wanted me to forget the small dark man.”
“Did you ever try to speak to him?” Carr asked. He felt calmer now. Jane’s young voice soothed.
“Didn’t I tell you how timid I was? I pretended not to notice him. Besides, I knew that strange men who followed girls must never be given a chance of getting them alone. Though I don’t think I was ever frightened of him that way. He looked so small and respectful. Actually I suppose I began to feel romantic about him.” She took a swallow of her drink.
Carr had finished his. “Well?”
“Oh, he kept coming closer and then one day he walked up and spoke to me. ‘Would you mind if I walked with you for a while?’ he asked. I gulped and managed to say, ‘No.’ That’s all. He just walked along beside me. It was a long while before he even touched my arm. But that didn’t matter. It was what he said that was important. You’ll never believe the thrill it gave me. He talked very quietly, rather hesitatingly, but everything he said went straight to my heart. He knew the thoughts inside me I’d never told anyone—how mysterious and puzzling life was, how alone you felt, how other people sometimes seemed just like animals or machines, how dead and menacing their eyes were. And he knew the little things in my mind too—how the piano keys looked like champing teeth, how common words came to be just queer artistic designs, how snores at night sounded like far-away railroad trains and railroad trains like snores. Of course now I know that it was rather easy for him to guess those things, partly because he knew we were both outside the life-machine, even though I didn’t.
“After we had walked for a while the first day I saw two of my girl friends ahead. He said, ‘I’ll leave you now.’ and I got that queer blinking feeling and he went off. I was glad, because I wouldn’t have know how to introduce him.
“That first walk set a pattern. We’d always meet and part in the same way. And I still had the oddest trouble remembering him and of course I never mentioned him to a soul. Away from the park I’d say, ‘You dreamed him, Jane,’ almost meaning it. But the next afternoon Id’ go to the park and he’d appear and I’d walk with him and have the feeling of a friend seeing into my mind. It went on that way for quite a while.”
Carr got up and took he glass. He noticed that one of the window shades had about an inch of blackness under it and he went over and pulled it down to the sill.
“And then things changed?” he asked as he made more drinks.
“In a way.”
“Did he start to make love to you?”
“No. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps thing would have been better if he had. But he couldn’t. Because, you see, he was trying to do a very difficult and delicate thing. He wanted me to exist both inside the life-machine and out of it at the same time, without my knowing it. Away from the park I’d just be part of the machine, going through the required motions in a sort of trance. Then at the park with him, I’d break the pattern, but without spoiling the pattern of the rest of my life. Because at that park I’d have just been wandering by myself most of the time, and if he saw I was about to meet someone else, bringing me back into the pattern, he could always drift off.
“He wanted me for a friend, because he was all alone, but he didn’t want me alone with him in his dangerous existence, where he’d have to be responsible for me.
“All this meant that he had to be very careful about our meetings and I’d have to be careful about them too. He made me understand, though he didn’t exactly say so, that our walks together were governed by magic rules and everything would be spoiled if they were once broken. For instance, I must never hurry to meet him. It must always happen as if by accident. We must never try to go any special place together. We must talk as familiarly as the closest friends and yet never ask each other our names, and he must always leave me without warning and without arranging when or where we were to meet again. As if everything happened by a quiet, fatalistic enchantment.
“Actually he was trying to drive along beside a part of my life’s pattern, an unknown intruder, while I was to be his dream-child, or dream-love, you might say, whom he had awakened, but left entranced in the pattern of her old life, not really changed.
“But he couldn’t do it. Not for long. As it turned out, things had to change. No matter how had he tried, he couldn’t conceal from me that there was something horribly important behind what was happening so idly. I sensed a terrible, mute tension inside him. Even when his voice was gentlest and most impersonal I could feel that seething flood of energy, locked up, frustrated, useless. Eventually it began to seep over into me. We’d be walking along slowly and for no good reason my heart would begin to pound, I could hardly breathe, there’d be a ringing in my ears, and little spasms of tension would race up and down me. And all the while he’d be talking ever so calmly. It was awful.
“Perhaps if he ha made love to me…though of course that would have spoiled his whole plan, and, from his point of view, exposed me to dangers that he didn’t feel he had the right to make me share. Still, perhaps if he’d have spoken to me frankly, told me exactly how things were, asked me to share his miserable, hunted life with him, it would have been better.
“But he didn’t. And then things began to get much worse.”
Carr gave her another drink. “How do you mean?”
Jane looked up at him. Now that she was caught up in her story, she looked younger than ever, and then unevenly blond hair, heavy lipstick, and tight black dress seemed ludicrous, as if she’d fixed herself that way for an adolescent joke.
“We were stuck, that’s what it amounted to, a
nd we began to rot. I suppose that’s the meaning of decadence—it never springs from action but from avoiding action. At any rate, all those things he said, that had at first delighted me because they matched my thoughts, now began to terrify me. Because, you see, I believed that those queer thoughts of mine were just quirks of my mind, and that by sharing them with someone Id’ get rid of them. I kept waiting for him to tell me how silly and baseless they were. But he never did. Instead, I began to see from the way he talked that my queer thoughts weren’t illusions at all, but the ultimate truth about the real world. Nothing did mean anything. Snores actually were a kind of engine-puffing and printed words had no more real meaning than wind-tracings in sand. Other people weren’t alive, really alive, like you were, except perhaps for a few ghostlike kindred souls. You were all alone.
“I had discovered his great secret, you see, in spite of all his attempts to hide it from me. Though I didn’t tell him that I knew.
‘Now the walks in the park did begin to affect the rest of my life. Not so much as to change its pattern, of course, but its moods. All day I’d be plunged in gloom. My father and mother seemed a million miles away, my classes at the academy the most unbearable stupidity in the world. I couldn’t read books although I studied the words ever so closely. I didn’t understand some of the things I said, the mere appearance of a building or a street could frighten me, and sometimes in the middle of my practicing I’d snatch my hands away as if the keys had bitten me. Though, as I say, this didn’t change the pattern of my life and of course no one noticed—how could they, parts of a machine in a machine world?—except Gigolo my cat.”
She looked at Carr strangely. “Some animals are really alive, you know, just like some people. Perhaps they catch it from the people. They look at you when you’re outside the pattern, and then you know.”
“I know,” said Carr. “Gigolo looked at me once.”
“And not only cats,” Jane said.
“What do you mean?” Carr asked uneasily. He had remembered Miss Hackman’s references to “the beast.”
