The Sinful Ones

by Fritz Leiber

  “Nothing in particular,” Jane said after a moment. Carr didn’t tell her his thoughts.

  “Anyway,” Jane continued, “Gigolo knew. Sometimes he acted afraid and spat at me, and sometimes he came purring to me in a most affectionate way—then sometimes he watched at the windows and doors for hours, as if he were on guard. I was lost and not one soul tried to save me, not even my man in the park. He, in a way, least of all—because I think he realized the change in me, but still wanted to save his pleasant dream.”

  She took a drink and leaned back. “And then one autumn day when the clouds were low and the fallen leaves crackled under our feet, and we’d walked farther together than ever before, in fact, for once he’d come with me a little way out of the park, and I was pleased at that—well, just then I happened to look across the street and I noticed a spruce young man looking at us. That made me glade too, for it was the first time I remembered anyone seeming to look at both of us together, and I was always hoping that something would break in on us and get us unstuck. I called my friend’s attention to the young man. He peered around through his thick glasses.

  “The next minute he had grabbed me tight above the elbow and was marching me ahead. He didn’t speak until we got around the corner. Then he said in a voice I’d never heard him use before, ‘They’ve seen us. Get home.’

  “I started to ask questions, but he only said, ‘Don’t talk. Go on quickly. Don’t look back.’ He said it in such a fierce strange way that I was frightened and obeyed him.

  “In the hours afterwards my fear grew. I pictured ‘them’ in a hundred horrible ways—if only he’d said more than that one word! I dimly sensed that I had transgressed an awful barrier and I felt a terrible guilt. I went to sleep praying never to see the small dark man again and just be allowed to live my old stupid life the way I was meant to live it.

  “Some time after midnight I awoke with my heart jumping, and there was Gigolo standing on the bedclothes, spitting at the window. I snapped on the light and it showed me, pressed to the dark pane, the smiling face of the young man I’d seen across the street that afternoon. You know him, Carr. The one they call Dris—Driscoll Aimes. He had two hands then. He used them to open the window.”

  Carr looked around the room. He leaned forward.

  “I jumped up and ran to my father’s and mother’s room. I called to them to wake up. I shook them. And then came the most terrible shock of my life. They wouldn’t wake, no matter what I did. Except that they breathed, they might have been dead. I remember pounding my father’s chest and digging my nails into his arms.

  “I knew then what I’d half guessed for some time—that most people weren’t really alive, but only smaller machines in a bigger one. They couldn’t understand you, they couldn’t help you. If the pattern called for sleep, they slept, and you couldn’t do a thing about it.

  “Sometimes I think that even without Gigolo’s warning snarl and the sound of footsteps coming swiftly through the bathroom, I would have rushed out of the apartment, rather than stay a moment longer with those two living corpses who had brought me into the world.”

  Her voice was getting a little high.

  “I darted down the stairs, out of the entry, and into the arms of two other people who were waiting there. You know them, Carr—Miss Hackham and Mr. Wilson. But there was something they hadn’t counted on. Gigolo had raced down the stairs with me and with a squalling cry he shot past my legs and sprang into the air between them, seeming to float on the darkness. It must have rattled them, for they drew back and I managed to dark past them and run down the street. I ran several blocks, turning corners, cutting across lawns, before I dared stop. In fact I only stopped because I couldn’t run any farther. But it was enough. I had lost them.

  “But what was I to do? There was I in the streets in just my nightdress. It was cold. The windows peered. The streetlights whispered. The shadows pawed me. There was always someone crossing a corner two blocks away. I thought of my closest friend, a girl who was at any rate a little closer to me than the others, a girl named Margaret who was studying at the academy. Once in a while I’d gone out with her and her boy-friend. Surely Margaret would take me in, I told myself, surely Margaret would be alive.

  “She lived in a duplex just a few blocks from our apartment. Keeping away from the streetlights as much as I could, I hurried over to it.

  “Her bedroom window was open. I threw some pebbles at it, but nothing happened. I didn’t like to ring. Finally by climbing up on the porch I managed to step from it to her window and crawl inside. She was asleep, breathing easily.

  “By this time I was trying to tell myself that my father and mother had somehow been drugged as part of a plan to kidnap me. But not for long.

  “For you see, I was no more able to rouse Margaret than my parents.

  “I dressed in some of her clothes and climbed out the window and walked the streets until morning.

  “When morning came I tried to go home, but I went carefully and cautiously, spying out my way, and that was lucky, for sitting in a parked automobile not half a block from our door, was Mr .Wilson. I went to the academy and saw Miss Hackman standing at the head of the steps. I went to the park and there, where my small dark man used to wait for me, was Dris.

  “That’s all. Since then I’ve lived as you know.”

  She slumped back in her chair, breathing heavily, still knitting her fingers.

  “But I don’t know,” Carr objected.

  “You know enough. I stole my food. I stole other things. Shall I tell you about my shoplifting? Shoplifting from necessity? Shoplifting for fun? And shoplifting just to keep from going crazy? I stole my sleeping places too. Remember that boarded-up mansion I let you to the first night? I sometimes slept there. I made myself a kind of home on the third floor. And then there was a place on the south side, a queer old castle designed by some crazy millionaire, with cement towers and a sunken garden and theosophical inscriptions and ironwork in mystic designs, all abandoned half-built and fenced with rusty wire. And sometimes I slept in the stacks of the library and places like that. Just an outcast, a waif in the life-machine. Oh, Car, you can’t imagine…yes, perhaps now you can…how utterly alone I was.”

  He nodded. “Still, at least there was one person,” he said slowly. “The small dark man.”

  “That’s right. There was Fred. We did happen to meet again.”

  “I suppose you lived together?” Carr asked softly.

  She looked at him. “No we didn’t. He helped me find places to live, and we’d meet here and there, and he taught me how to play chess—we played for hours and hours—but I never lived with him.”

  Carr hesitated. “But surely he must have tried to make love you,” he said. “I know what you told me about him, but after you had run away and there were only two of you together, outcasts, waifs…”

  She looked down at the floor. “You’re right,” she said, uncomfortably. “He did try to make love to me.”

  “And you didn’t reciprocate?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be angry with me, Jane, but under the circumstances that seems strange. After all, you have only each other.”

  She laughed unhappily.

  “Oh, I would have reciprocated,” she said, “except for one thing, something I found out about him. I don’t like to talk about it, but I suppose I’d better. A few weeks after I ran away and we met again—now both of us knowing where we stood—we had an appointment to meet in another park. I came on him unawares and found him holding a little girl. She hardly seemed conscious of him. She was standing there, flushed from running, her bright eyes on her playmates, about to rush off and join them, and he was sitting on the bench behind her, and he had his arms around her, stroking her, tenderly, but with a look in his eyes as if she were so much wood. Sacred wood, perhaps, but wood.” Jane sucked in her breath. “Another time I watched him on the outside stairs of an apartment, late at night. There was a young woman beside him,
a rather flashily dressed girl. I’d been supposed to meet him but was late. He didn’t see me. I watched him from the shadows. He had his hand on her breasts. After a moment she went inside, and he went in with her. But all that time he didn’t look once at her face, and his hand kept moving slowly. After that I couldn’t bear to have him touch me. In spite of his gentleness and courtesy and understanding, there was a part of him that wanted to take advantage of the life-machine for his private, cold satisfaction—take advantage of the poor dead mechanisms merely because he was aware and they weren’t—take advantage in the way those others take advantage, to play like gods—devils, rather—with the poor earthly puppets? Well, there was a small part of Fred that was like them.” She hesitated. “Even then I might have yielded if he hadn’t approached me in such a guilty way.”

  “What…The child in the park. Was she aware of him?”

  “I think so. A little, anyway. As the animals are. She was not in fear. Just puzzled at first. Then the little girl seemed to experience a kind of strange shuddering ecstasy. Not her own. His ecstasy reflected in her. And not just simply physical ecstasy of the perverted kind which can be comprehended even if abhorred—but a mental thing, a cruel perversion of the mind. The perversion of power—”

  “And the woman, what about her?”

  “She seemed unaware that she was being—loved. Physically, by someone. But there was a wickedly ecstatic look to her, as if she were dreaming some deep evilness.”

  “Huh…nice guy!”

  “Understand,” she went on hurriedly, “the rest of him was really fine—the most comradely sympathy, the highest ideals. He even had, I think, the quixotic notion that he wouldn’t be worthy of me until he had somehow rescued me to my safe life again.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Carr interrupted, looking at Jane dully. “Once you’re outside the pattern—” (As he uttered those words he felt well up within him the longing of a living an for a once meaningful world, now forever meaningless) “—how can you ever get back?”

  “Oh, but you can,” Jane said quickly. “You were back in the pattern, conscious but a part of it, from the time I gave you the powders until you ran away from that party. Even without drugs, it can be done. You’re born with a feeling for the rhythm of life as the machine wants it. You learn to sense it. You automatically do and say what you’re supposed to. You can—”

  The phone rang. For a moment they both sat very still. Carr looked at Jane. Then he slowly reached over and lifted the phone from the cradle. As he did so, the familiarity of the action took possession of him, drawing him back without his realization toward the pattern of his old life.

  “That you, Carr?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Tom.”

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “Look, have you anything on for the night after tomorrow?”

  “Why…no.” Carr caught his breath in surprise. Only now did he realize that he had been answering automatically. He was talking to a machine, he reminded himself—a machine to which dates, and girls and words and all the rest of it, were only a mechanical function.

  “Swell. How about coming dancing with the three of us?”

  “Who do you mean?” (Still, to Carr’s amazement, his answers came almost without his bidding.)

  “You know, Midge’s girl-friend.”

  “Midge’s girl-friend?”

  “Sure, you know—I’ve told you about her half a dozen times.”

  “I remember,” Carr said.

  “Well, are you coming?” (There suddenly seemed to be a phonograph sound, a machine chug, in the voice coming over the phone.)

  Carr hesitated. “I don’t know.” (How was he supposed to answer, he asked himself?)

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” (Again the machine-chug.)

  Still Carr hesitated, painfully. Then, “Well, okay,” he said. (That was the answer that felt right to him.)

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.” (It had been right!)

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll come.”

  “Swell. We’ll pick you up about seven.”

  Carr frowned at the phone wonderingly as he put it down.

  “You see,” Jane told him, “you were part of the pattern then, right back in it, and your answers came naturally. Incidentally, you made a date with me.”

  Carr’s head swiveled around. He stared at her. “What?”

  Jane nodded. “You did. Tom’s girl Midge is that Margaret I told you about. Which makes me Midge’s girl-friend. That’s how I happened to know about General Employment and why I ran in there when I was trying to deceive Miss Hackman. I would have gone to Tom’s desk, except you happened to be the one who didn’t have an applicant, so by going to you I could make Miss Hackman think I was in the pattern. And then it turned out that you weren’t part of the pattern, and still you helped me.”

  Carr looked at her wonderingly. It was very quiet.

  “I wish we could keep that date you just made,” she said. “I wish we could go back to our old lives, now that our meeting there is part of the pattern.”

  “Why can’t we?” Carr asked suddenly. He leaned forward and caught her hand. “You say it’s possible to develop a feel for the pattern, to live according to it even though you’re aware.”

  “You’re forgetting those others,” she reminded him. “They know my place in the pattern. I hope not, but they may guess yours. They’re watching. They’d know if I went back. And then they’d destroy me. For nothing will every satisfy them, until…”

  At that moment they heard a step on the stairs.

  Carr plunged the room into darkness. Jane came to him and they clung silently together, facing the door. No cracks of light showed around it. The burnt-out light-bulb in the hall had not been replaced.

  The steps came closer. A faint and shifting light began to show through the cracks.

  It is frightful to be in a deserted house. Even if the outdoors were a wilderness, its air would still carry that promise of other lives, which the walls of the deserted house bar out.

  But to be in such a house and hear alien footsteps, and know that outside is a deserted city, where the men and women might be wax figures for all the help they could give you, and to know that beyond the deserted city is a deserted world, a deserted universe…

  The footsteps stopped outside the door. There was a soft knocking. Carr’s hands tightened on Jane’s. A pause. The knocking was repeated, louder. Another pause. Again the knocking, louder yet.

  A longer pause. Then a faint scratching that lasted for some time. Then a brief rustling.

  Then the footsteps and light going away. Down the hall. Down the stairs. Silence.

  Carr and Jane swayed. Their breath came in gasps. Carr went to the windows, pulled the drapes too, so that they formed a second barrier behind the shades. Then he struck a match, cupping it in his hand. It flared red, then yellow.

  Jane said, “Look.”

  Thrust under the bottom of the door was a folded sheet of paper.

  Carr picked it up. He struck another match. They read the hastily scribbled note.

  My Angry Passenger,

  If you possibly can, meet me tomorrow evening at seven in front of the public library. Bring Jane, if you know where she is. I’ve made a very important discovery.

  Your Mad Chauffeur.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Black Shape

  FROM BEHIND THE castellated black wall of warehouses, elevators, bridges, and cranes to the west, the setting sun sent a giant spray of dark red fire streaming through the immensity of air above the Chicago River. It bloodily edged the giant shoulders of the skyscrapers crowded around the Michigan Avenue bridge like a herd of gray mammoths stopping by the river for the night. It glared from their many faceted window-eyes to the west, but left those to the east in gloom—the small, wickedly intelligent window-eyes expressing the hard, alien thoughts that cities have been thinking since Ur and Alexandria and Rome. It turned the white tiles of the
Wrigley Tower a delicate salmon pink and the golden trim of the Carbon and Carbide Building a rosy copper.

  Far below the crimson light glimmered on the river, ruddily touched a black motor-barge, gleamed and faintly glittered on the asphalt and cement of the street bordering the river and the huge bridge crossing it, but hardly penetrated the dark rectangles below that were the windows to the bridge below the bridge, the street below the street—that cobbled and concrete underworld of rumbling trucks and parked cars, of coal-dust and dirt, with its own scattering of blinking and neon signs, that lay beneath the northern end of Chicago’s Loop district.

  The same light struck color from the dresses, lost itself in the dark suits, of the streams of figures that moved like tired ants across the upper bridge, the purposeless, irregular cavalcade of tiny figures made tinier and more purposeless yet by the great buildings lowering above them.

  In the heart of this throng, Carr and Jane drifted. Around them, shoulders and elbows eddied, meaningless voices swirled on the deeper currents of sound from the trucks and cars. Occasionally the stream whirled by them a briefcase or a parasol.

  They were carried across the bridge and down the deep canyon beyond, past the black stairheads leading down to the lower-level streets at block intervals. They kept their eyes from the faces of figures around them, though Carr couldn’t help but notice certain oddities, such as a smoking bus with the crowd piling out of it, the figure of a man with a sandwich board, and the shape of a woman leading a large and ungainly black dog.

  Finally they fronted the dark headland of the public library. Here they turned their faces toward each other, as two drivers might before the plunge.

  They moved closer to each other, arm locking arm, hand grasping hand. Then they turned their faces forward and crossed the street. Here the crowd, augmented by streams seeking the Illinois Central pedestrian underpass, was thicker. The figure of the woman with the queer black dog was just ahead. They had taken about a dozen steps when a gap chanced to appear in the mass of bodies ahead of them letting them look down a rather long corridor of empty sidewalk. Carr felt Jane’s hand loosen on his, then tighten sharply.