by Fritz Leiber
Standing at the other end of the momentary corridor, facing them was the small dark man with glasses.
He saw them and smiled fantastically. Yielding to an impulse deeper than caution, he raised his hand in a theatrical gesture of greeting.
But then his glance shifted, shortened. He recoiled. His thick glasses flashed as his head jerked back. He clapped his hands to his chest, arms tight against his ribs, as if to protect his heart. Then, as the corridor which chance had brought into existence began swiftly to narrow, he looked again at Carr and Jane with a crouched frantic intentness.
Then, just as the corridor ahead closed, he cried out unintelligibly, bounded into the air like a puppet, and raced off.
Instantly three other figures detached themselves from the intervening crowd and ran after him. Two were men. The third was the woman with the dog.
Without a word, Carr and Jane started after them, stepping faster, faster, faster, until they were running too. Over heads and through holes in the crowd, Carr saw snatches of the chase—the small dark man weaving and ducking as he sough gaps in the crowd, every few steps taking one of those incredible bounds, the three pursuers sprinting after him.
The crowd did not react. No eyes turned, no people sprang aside, no shouts went up, no heads were poked from windows. Even the figures being darted and ducked around, missing being knocked down by inches—they never turned a hair, they went on smiling as sweetly, chattering as vivaciously, and peering as guardedly at good-looking young women, as if nothing had ruffled the charm of the afternoon.
Carr ran faster. The glimpse he caught showed him that the small dark man was holding his own, even beginning to gain. They had passed the library and were in the next block.
Then he saw Mr. Wilson motion urgently to Miss Hackman. She checked her pace and stopped, so that the crowd cut off Carr’s view of her.
A moment later there was a shape taking great effortless bounds—a coal-black wolfish shape that still carried the suggestion of the feline.
The small dark man looked back once, thrust up from the crowd like a hand puppet. Then he ran frantically a few steps farther and darted into a haberdashery store.
The black shape was at his heels.
One second, two, three—then from the store began to come shrill screams of terror and agony that sliced the heart.
Carr felt a great wave of nausea. Here, he saw in an unwilling flash of thought, was an allegory of this universe’s whole history—those screams crying out death and horror and pain, a murderer loose in the house of life, catlike cruelty at the cosmos’ core, destruction holding a match to the earth’s fuse—and the machine-men going about their patterned business with their minds black, their eyes blind, their ears unhearing.
The screams stopped.
Dris, Miss Hackman, and Mr. Wilson reached the store and hurried inside.
Miss Hackman came out after a moment. Her feet dragged. She was looking at the sidewalk. Her complexion wasn’t good. Carr and Jane could see her stomach suddenly jerk in and her shoulders heave forward.
The black shape came out and rubbed against her affectionately, and now Carr recognized it. It was a black cheetah. Miss Hackman averted her eyes and flopped her hand at it. It persisted. She walked off toward the next corner, away from Jane and Carr. She had her hand to her mouth. The black cheetah followed, muzzling her ankles.
Red blotches appeared on her stockings.
Jane and Carr began to back away.
Mr. Wilson came out of the store. He looked around. He saw Miss Hackman and hurried after her.
Carr and Jane continued to back away. They passed a series of chromium fitted windows, recrossed the street behind them, started back along the library. The sidewalk crow, a minute before so think, had now thinned disturbingly.
Mr. Wilson caught up with Miss Hackman. She stopped. He seemed to be expostulating with her and she to be nodding her head abjectly.
“We’ll cut over to the Loop at the next corner,” Carr whispered. Jane nodded.
They turned and walked swiftly along the blank wall of rough stone beneath the library’s recessed windows. They had almost reached the corner when a bus drew up at it and a crowd of sailors came whooping out, their legs working like blue scissors. Carr had fallen back a little. Just as Jane went around the corner the sailors cut in between them. Before he pushed through he took one last backward look.
Driscoll Aimes wasn’t more than thirty feet behind him, stepping along briskly. He saw Carr and Carr saw him. For a moment he stood stock-still. Then he came on with a rush.
Carr turned and ran across the street, straight up Michigan Boulevard, praying that Jane would keep on going and escape notice.
The bright-eyed, sulky-lipped mannequins in the dress shops were more alive than the people around whom he swerved and dodged.
He looked back. He had gained on Driscoll Aimes, who was running easily. And—thank God!—Jane wasn’t in sight.
Carr darted down the iron stairs into the dimness of the lower-level street. The tread clanged under his feet.
Once underground, he kept on running in the same direction. The sidewalk here was about five feet above the cobbled street, level with the tops of the cars parked side by side in a continuous row. At intersections it descended by steps and ascended again. Two blocks ahead, rectangular windows of twilight indicated the embankment and the river.
At the end of the last block, Carr darted another backward look. Dris was not in sight, but, bounding along the tops of the parked cars, as if their painted metal were a more congenial surface to its feet than the concrete of the sidewalk, came the black cheetah.
Carr remembered the screams that had come from the haberdashery.
He plunged down the last steps, darted in front of a truck that dribbled ashes, and sprinted toward the embankment. Behind him he could hear a rhythmical padding.
He burst into the twilight of the embankment.
Without checking his pace, he crossed it and dove toward the oily water.
He had a glimpse of black pilings rushing by. His head was struck a heavy blow. There was a rush of pain.
He was conscious of the coldness of the water, of the weight of his clothes, of fading light, of nothingness.
Chapter Fourteen
The Cleared Vision
FIRST THERE WAS a throbbing. Then the throbbing split into two parts: pain and a slow rocking. Then several sensations: The reek of burning oil and water-rotted wood. The feel of blankets against naked skin. A swaying light. A low ceiling. A general ache. A faint nausea.
Then the realization that all this centered in one person and that person was himself.
Then a great misty oval above him that slowly unblurred into a face. A huge pale face with wide heavy jaws that suggested glandular dysfunction. A wide mouth with pendant underlip and yellowed teeth. Heavily seamed cheeks, a bashed-in nose, cavernous eye-sockets with large unwinking eyes, the whites faintly muddied. Tufty black eyebrows shot with gray. Above, a great white dome of forehead. The expression was one of brooding solitude.
Carr felt a big hand under his shoulders lifting him effortlessly. A thick glass was gently pushed against his lips.
“Here.”
It was whisky and water. Carr drank it in small swallows. Then he looked at the face again. He recognized the giant bargeman who had once looked up at him on the bridge. He guessed he was in the cabin of the black motor-barge.
But he didn’t want to think. It wasn’t the pain so much as a general sick listlessness. He was content to lie back in the blankets.
The bargeman stood up. He was so tall that in spite of his stooping, his head barely missed the small, curved beams that supported the roof of the cabin, and from one of which a flaring oil lamp hung.
“You’ll live, all right,” he said in a rumbling voice. “Though I wouldn’t have sworn to it when I fished you out. How’d you get in that fix anyway? Who was it you bothered? I suppose you went around stirring things up, like m
ost of the other fools. The gang don’t like that. It spoils their show. You ought to learn to live quiet, like I do.” And he reached out a big splay-fingered hand and poured himself a drink of whisky in the tumbler from which Carr had drunk.
The paint on the walls was blackened and peeling. At the far end was a small cookstove, a pantry, a sink, and a rusty watertank bracketed to the ceiling. At the same height were several ventilation slits but Carr couldn’t see out of them. He noticed his clothes drying on a short washline. Opposite the bunk was a wide sliding door, shut. There were several chests and boxes about. Next to the door was a bookcase made of fruit crates. It was packed with thick volumes. Tacked to the wall wherever space allowed were pictures of prizefighters, cut from newspapers, and cheap reproductions of engravings and etchings by Dore and Goya.
The bargeman poured himself another drink of whisky and sat down in a gray unpainted chair. He scratched the hair on his chest where it brushed out around his undershirt. He frowned at Carr.
“How’d you catch on, anyway?” He sat forward, elbows on knees. “Most folks don’t, you know. They can’t.”
He paused, as if to let his words sink in. Then, “It happened to me pretty sudden,” he continued. “My name’s Jules. Old Jules. I used to be a sailor, but I liked to think I’d go to one of the big libraries and make them get me all sorts of books. Philosophy, metaphysics,” he split the syllables carefully, “science, even a little religion, I’d read in them and try to figure out the world. What was it all about, anyway? Why was I here? What was the point in the whole business of getting born and working and dying? What was the use of it? Why’d it have to go on and on?
“And why’d it have to be so damn complicated? Why all the building and tearing down? Why’d there have to be cities, with crowded streets and busses and cable cars and electric cars and big openwork steel boxes built to the sky to be hung with stone and wood—my only friend got killed falling off one of those steel boxkites. Shouldn’t there be a simpler way of doing it all? Why did things have to be so mixed up that a man like myself couldn’t have a single clear decent thought?”
Carr listened dreamily. The whisky was taking effect. His head didn’t ache so badly now.
“More’n that, why weren’t people a real part of the world?” the other continued, taking a gulp of whiskey from the glass. “Why didn’t they show more honest-to-God response? Yes, that was it—response. For instance, when you slept with a woman, why was it something you had, and she didn’t? Why, when you went to a prize fight, were the bruisers only so much meat, and the crowd a lot of little screaming popinjays? Why was a war nothing but marching and blather and bother? Why’d everybody have to go through their whole lives so dead, doing everything so methodical and prissy, like they was a Sunday School picnic or an orphan’s parade?”
He rubbed the back of his neck and pulled his chair a little closer.
“And then all of a sudden, when I was reading one of the science books, it come to me. The answer was all there, printed out plain to see, only nobody could see it. It was just this: Nobody was really alive. Back of other people’s foreheads there wasn’t any real thoughts…just nerves, just wheels. You didn’t need thoughts or minds, or love or fear, to explain things. The whole universe—stars and man and dirt and worms and atoms, the whole shooting match—was just one big engine.”
He finished his drink.
Carr turned his head a little so that he could see the bargeman more clearly. It almost soothed him to hear the horrors of the last few days spoken out so casually.
“So there it was all laid out for me,” the bargeman continued. “That was why there was no honest-to-God response in people. They were just machines. The fighters was just machines made for fighting. The people that watched them was just machines for stamping and screaming and swearing. A woman was just a loving machine, all nicely adjusted to give you a good time…but the farthest start was nearer to you than the mind behind that mouth you kissed.
“D’ja get what I mean? People just machines, set to do a certain job and then die. If you kept on being the machine you were supposed to be, well and good. Then your actions fitted with other people’s. But if you didn’t, if you started doing something else, then the others didn’t respond. They just went on doing what was called for. It wouldn’t matter what you did, they’d just go on making the motions they were set to make. They might be set to make love, and you might decide you wanted to fight. Then they’d go on making love while you fought them. Or it might happen the other way. Somebody might be talking about Edison. And you’d happen to say something about Ingersoll. But he’d just go on talking about Edison. You were all alone!”
He slewed around in his chair and poured himself another whisky.
“All alone. Except for a few others—not more than one in a hundred thousand, I guess—who wake up and figure things out. But they go crazy and run themselves to death, or else turn mean. Mostly they turn mean. They get a cheap little kick out of pushing things around that can’t push back. All over the world you’ll find them—little gangs of three or four, half a dozen—who’ve waked up, just to get their cheap kicks. Maybe it’s a couple of coppers in Frisco, a schoolteacher in K.C., some artists in New York, some rich kids in Florida, some undertakers in London—who’ve found out that all the people walking around are just dead folks and to be treated no decenter. Maybe it’s a couple of guards over at one of those death-camps they had in Europe, who see how bad things are and get their fun out of making it a little worse. Just a little. A mean little. They don’t dare to really destroy in a big way, because they know they machine feeds them and tends them, and because they’re always scared they’ll be noticed by gangs like themselves and wiped out; It’s fear drives them, always fear. They haven’t the guts to really wreck the whole shebang, but they get a kick out of scribbling their dirty pictures on it, out of meddling and messing with it. I’ve seen some of their fun, as they call it, sometimes hidden away, sometimes in the open streets. It’s lousy and rotten.
“You’ve seen a clerk dressing a figure in a store window, fiddling around with it? Well, suppose he slapped its face. Suppose a kid struck pins in a toy pussy-cat, or threw pepper in the eyes of a doll. Like that. Lousy and rotten. No decent live man would have anything to do with it. He’d either go back to his place in the machine and act out the part set for him, or else he’s hide away like me and live as quiet as he could, not stirring things up.”
He looked at Carr from under his arched and ragged brows. “What are you going to do? You’re young. Why don’t you go back to your place in the machine and sweat it out that way?”
Carr tried to lift himself up a little. The room rocked and blurred. “I can’t,” he heard himself whispering, “because the ones after me know my place. And there’s a girl. They know her place too…if they haven’t found her already.”
The bargeman leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Who are they?” he asked. “What gang? What do they look like?”
Carr heard himself describing Miss Hackman, Mr. Wilson, and Driscoll Aimes. When he was part way through, the bargeman interrupted him.
“I know them. A mean lot. I’ve seen that bitchy black cat of theirs.”
He slopped the rest of the whisky into his tumbler, drank, then sat working his big-knuckled hands. Finally he heaved himself up. The tumbler rolled across the floor. He lurched to the door, slid it open wide. The darkness and the noises of the city flowed in. He looked around.
“You go back,” he mumbled at Carr. “You and your girl go on back. Don’t worry about anything. Leave it to me, leave it to Old Jules. I got connections.” He flapped his big hand at Car. “You go back.” Then he stumbled through the door and slid it to behind him.
Carr sat up, biting his lips against the sudden rush of dizziness. He got his legs over the edge of the bunk and sat there, the cool air drifting along his skin, the walls of the cabin advancing and retreating and every now and then erupting in a coruscation of bright spar
ks.
After a while he stood up, holing on to the edge of the bunk. As soon as his eyes quieted down he made his way across the cabin, remembering to stoop, until his fingers reached his clothes where they were hanging, stiff from the water. He dressed slowly and clumsily like a child. His trousers were stuck together and he had to run his hands down the legs.
He heard the distant hooting of a ship on the lake. He finished dressing and stood smoothing out his clothes. Then he made his way to the door, with difficulty slid it open, and stepped out onto the narrow deck.
The late night-sounds of Chicago enfolded him—the lonesome purr of traffic, the jangling of a bell, the rattle of an elevated train crossing the Well Street bridge, the rumble of unidentified machinery. Across the river, Carr saw three or four sets of headlights probing their way along the two levels of Wacker Drive, a red warning light on the embankment, a few patches of lighted window in the towering buildings, and their reflections wriggling like quicksilver on the black water.
Carr realized that the barge was moored to the embankment. Only he was standing on the side of the barge away from it. With groggy care he made his way around the deck, by the stern, found the embankment, peered over the rail, saw hardly a foot of water between him and the stone. He waited a moment, got his legs over the rail, steadied himself.
Just then a great red glow flamed up behind him, turning the nearer bricks of the embankment bright almost as day. Clutching the rail spasmodically, pressing his legs against it to steady himself, Carr turned his head. He saw the bargeman standing at the prow with a railroad flare sizzling in his hand. Against the black river, the lower half of his huge body cut off by the low cabin, his back in the shadow, his lumpy muscles and great face and tangled hair reflecting the blinding red light, he looked like some torchbearer in the inferno, some signalman on the Styx. He saw Carr. Seven times he whirled the torch in a circle, then seven times more, then he sent it whirling high in the air.
