by Fritz Leiber
“I 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 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 high. Carr looked uneasily down the empty, book-lined aisles.
“I darted down the front stairs and there, peering at our mailbox, I saw an older man. You know him too, Carr. Wilson. He looked at me through the glass panel of the inner door and then he looked at my nightdress, and then he smiled like the young man on the ladder.
“With steps pounding down the stairs there was only one way for me to go. I ran down through the basement, past the stone wash tubs and the padlocked storage rooms, and out into the dirty cement area-way. And there, standing in the alley, in the light of one high naked bulb, I saw my fairy godmother.”
CARR BLINKED. She smiled thinly and said, “Oh yes, my fairy godmother, just like Cinderella’s, come to rescue me. A tall beautiful golden-haired woman in a golden evening dress. There was a black band around her wrist, like the strap of a handbag.
“Then I saw that the black band was a leash, and at the other end of the leash was a huge hound that stood high as her waist and was dirty gray like the fence behind them. It was snuffing at the rubbish.
“Then Hackman—for of course it was she—saw me crouching under the back porches and her lips formed in a smile, but it was different from the men’s smiles, because it was at the thought that the hound would get me before the men.
“Just at that moment Gigolo shot past my legs with a squalling cry and hurtled off down the alley. With a great bound the hound was after him, dragging my fairy godmother after him stumbling and slipping, ignoring her curses and frantic commands, dirtying her lovely golden gown. And I was racing off in the opposite direction, the hound’s baying filling my ears.
“I ran for blocks, turning corners, cutting across lawns, before I stopped—and then only because I couldn’t run any farther. But it was enough. I seemed to have got away.
“But what was I to do? I was cold. The windows peered. The street lights whispered. The shadows pawed. There was always someone crossing a corner two blocks away. I thought of a girlfriend who was at least a little closer to me than the others, a girl named Midge who was studying at the music academy.
“She lived in a duplex, just a few blocks away. Keeping out of the light as much as I could, I hurried over to it. Her bedroom window was open a little. I threw some pebbles at it, but nothing happened. I didn’t like to ring. Finally I managed to step from the porch to her window and crawl inside. She was asleep, breathing easily.
“By this time I was telling myself that my father and mother had been drugged as part of a plan to kidnap me. But not for long.
“For, you see, I was no more able to rouse Midge than my parents.
“I dressed in some of her clothes and climbed out the window and walked the streets until morning. Then I tried to go home, but I went cautiously, spying out the way, and that was lucky, for in a parked automobile across from our apartment sat Wilson. I went to the academy and saw 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.
“And then I knew for sure.”
“Knew what?” Carr asked after a pause.
She looked at him. “You know,” she said. “You told me yourself in front of the Art Institute.”
“What?” Carr repeated uneasily.
Her face seemed incredibly tiny as she sat hunched on her stool, her brown suit shading into the background. The stacks were silent, the mutter of the city was inaudible, a scampering mouse at the other end of the building might have been heard. In all directions the narrowing aisles stretched off. All around them was the pressure of the hundreds of thousands of books. But always the tunneling gaps, the peepholes, the gaps between the books.
And then, one by one, moving in on them, the lights in the stacks began to wink out.
“Just that everything’s dead,” Jane whispered. “Just that people are corpses. You don’t have to have the psychologists tell you that consciousness is unnecessary. You don’t have to listen to the scientists who say that everything’s atoms. All you have to do is read the schoolbooks, the school-books written by dead minds the same way a newspaper is printed by dead metal. They all tell you the same thing—that the universe is just a big machine.”
CHAPTER XIII
If you can’t get back to your place in the machine, your chances are slim, brother. By being smart and never making a mistake, you may be able to stay alive. But it’s lonely work, even if you’ve got a buddy . . .
“NO,” CARR breathed.
All the lights had gone out except the one above their heads, which seemed to glow like some limpid eye.
Jane smiled at him crookedly. “But you told me that yourself,” she repeated, “not knowing half of what you know now. Just a big machine, that’s all it is. Except every now and then a mind awakens, or is awakened by another mind. One in a million. If the wakened mind keeps to its place in the machine, it may be safe. But if it leaves its place, God help it!”
“Why?” Carr asked unwillingly. “Because the pattern won’t change for it—and the minds that have wakened first will hunt it down and destroy it. Or else they’ll corrupt it.”
“Why should that be?” Carr demanded. “Why wouldn’t the wakened minds want to waken other minds, more and more of them, until the whole machine’s awake?”
Jane’s lips shaped themselves in a sneer. “Because that isn’t the way wakened minds operate—and besides, they can’t waken other minds, except in a few lucky cases by a tremendous and uncontrollable effort of will. But they don’t want to waken other minds, except to torture them. They’re selfish and frightened and mad with desire. They glory in being able to do whatever they want, no matter how cruel or obscene, in a dead world that can’t stop them.” (There sprang into Carr’s mind the memory of the four men with black hats and the dead-alive mannequin.) “They’re deathly afraid of rivals stealing their privileged position—and every wakened mind is a rival, to be corrupted and joined with them in their selfishness, or else destroyed. All they can see is the prey and the loot.”
“No,” Carr breathed, “I can’t believe it.”
“Can’t believe it!” Again Jane smiled crookedly. “If you’d seen and known what I’ve seen and known this past year—”
“Year?” Carr said incredulously.
“Yes, it’s that long since I ran away from my fairy godmother. Give me another drink. No, more. And take some yourself. Yes, a whole year.”
She drank greedily and looked at him for a while. “Do you know Chicago, Carr? I do. I know it like a big museum, with all sorts of interesting dead things in the showcases and the animated exhibits. At times it’s almost restful. And at times it’s almost beautiful, like an elaborate automaton set before a European king. Only every once in a great while you see someone else in the museum, perhaps at the end of a long corridor. You might call them the museum guards, for they don’t want you to be there. And you can’t go home from the museum, you have to live there forever. Is there anything left in the bottle?”
“A little,” he said. “No, enough for two.”
“I’ve lived a year in the museum,” she continued, receiving the paper cup from him. “I’ve slept in parks, in empty furnished flats, in department store display rooms, in that boarded-up old Beddoes mansion, on leather couches in clubs and waiting rooms that are closed at night, on stolen campbeds in offices and warehouses—but not in empty hotel rooms, for you can’t tell when they’ll be occupied.
I’ve stolen food from delicatessens, snatched it from the plates of people who couldn’t see me or anything, gone straight into the kitchens of the most expensive restaurants—and hooked candy bars from drugstore stands. Shall I tell you about the blind crowds I’ve threaded through, the unseeing trucks I’ve dodged, the time I got blood-poisoning and cured it myself behind a prescription counter, the theaters I’ve haunted, the churches I’ve crept into, the els I’ve ridden back and forth for hours, the books I’ve read down here—and all of it alone?”
“Still, you had one person,” Carr said slowly. “The small dark man with glasses.”
“That’s right,” she said bitterly, “we did meet again.”
“I suppose you lived together?” Carr asked simply.
SHE LOOKED at him. “No, we didn’t. We’d meet here and there, and he taught me how to play chess—we played for days and days—but I never lived with him.”
Carr hesitated. “But surely he must have tried to make love to you,” he said. “And when you realized there was no one in the whole world but the two of you . . .”
“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 that seems strange. After all, you had only each other.”
She laughed unhappily. “Oh, I would have reciprocated, except for 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, I met him in another park. I came on him unawares and found him holding a little girl. She was standing there, flushed from running, looking very alive, her bright eyes on her playmates, about to rush off and join them. He was sitting on the bench behind her and he had his arm lightly around her and he was stroking her body very 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. “After that I couldn’t bear to have him touch me. In spite of all his gentleness and understanding, there was a part of him that wanted to take advantage of the big machine for his cold private satisfactions—take advantage of poor dead mechanisms because he was aware and they weren’t. You’ve seen the same thing, Carr, in the eyes of Wilson and Hackman and Dris—that desire to degrade, to play like gods (devils, rather) with the poor earthly puppets? Well, something’s corrupting my friend in the same way. He’s never told me. But I know.”
Carr said, “I heard Wilson tell Hackman that your friend had once been hers. It made her very angry.”
“I might have guessed,” Jane said softly. “That’s where the nasty streak in him comes from. And that’s why they’re hunting him—because they’re afraid he’ll betray them to . . . still others.”
“To the four men with black hats?” Carr asked.
She looked at him with a new fear in her eyes. “I never heard of them,” she said.
“Go on,” Carr urged.
“He must have run away from Hackman and Wilson and Dris,” she said, her eyes seeing things distant. “And then, because he was lonely, he was drawn to me, one girl picked from a million. He didn’t want to wake me, because he lacked the courage to love me or corrupt me, either. So he half wakened me, wanting to keep me in a dream world forever.”
She looked at Carr unsmilingly. “I never wanted to do anything like that to you,” she said. “I came to you in desperation, when I was followed by Hackman. I ran into the office because I knew the place from Midge’s boyfriend working there. The applicant’s chair at your desk was empty. I thought you were just another puppet, but I hoped to fool Hackman by pretending to be part of the pattern around you.
“For you see, Carr, they’d never seen me clearly. Hackman couldn’t be sure I was the girl in the alley, though I must have looked enough like her to make Hackman suspicious. And they don’t like to use violent methods of testing whether a person is awake, because they don’t want to disturb the world too much and they’re afraid of attracting the attention of . . . still others. Though in the end she took the risk of slapping my face—and of course I had to walk on without noticing, like a machine.
“But as soon as I realized you were awake, Carr, I did my best to keep you out of it. I knew the only safe thing for you would be to stay in your pattern.”
“How can a wakened person stay in his pattern?” Carr demanded.
“It can be done,” Jane assured him. “Haven’t you managed to stay in your pattern most of the time, even since you’ve known or at least suspected? Haven’t you been able to do and say the right things at your office, even when you were terribly afraid that you couldn’t?”
He had to admit that was so.
“Why, even I could go back to my pattern tomorrow,” Jane continued, “go back to my parents and Mayberry Street and the academy, except—another drink, please—” (There were only drops, but they shared them) “—except that they know about me now, they know my pattern and so they’d be able to get me if I should go back.
“So I did my best to keep you out of it,” she hurried on. “The first time I warned you and went away from you. Then that night, when you came to me with all your suspicions of the truth, I laughed at them and I did everything I could to convince you they were unreal . . . and I left you again.”
“But even the first time,” Carr said gently, “you left me that note, telling me where I could meet you.”
SHE LOOKED away from him. “I wasn’t strong enough to make a complete break. I pretended to myself you’d find that first note too silly to bother about. There’s an unscrupulous part of my mind that does things I really don’t want to . . . or perhaps that I really want to. The second time it made me drop that envelope with my address in front of the Beddoes house, where you’d remember it and find it the next evening.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, “how did you know I picked it up the next evening?”
“Because I was watching you,” she admitted, dropping her gaze.
“Watching me?”
“Yes through a crack in one of the boarded-up windows.”
“But why didn’t you come out when you saw me?” Carr asked.
“I didn’t want you to find me again. But I was worried about you and when I saw you pick up that envelope I knew what you were going to do. So I followed you.”
“To Mayberry?”
She nodded. “When you went in I waited outside, hiding in the shadows across the street, until Hackman and Wilson came. Then I ran around through the alley—”
“Remembering what had been there the last time?” Carr interrupted.
She grinned nervously, “—and went up the back stairs. I found you and my friend in the bedroom. He’d just hit you. Hackman and Wilson were killing Gigolo in the front hall—”
“Your cat?”
She shut her eyes. “Yes, Gigolo’s dead.”
She went on after a moment, “While they were doing that I told my friend who you were and we carried you down the back way to his car and . . .”
“How did your friend happen to be there in the first place?” he asked.
“He has queer habits,” she said uncomfortably, “a sort of morbid sentimentality about objects connected with me. He often goes to my room, though I’m never there.”
“All right, so you carried me down to his roadster,” Carr said.
“And then we found your address in your pocketbook and drove you back to your room and put you to bed. I wanted to stay though I knew it wouldn’t be safe for you, but my friend said you’d be all right, so—”
“—you departed,” he finished for her, “after writing me that letter and leaving me those powders. What were they, by the way?”
“Just two sleeping tablets crushed up,” she told him. “I hoped they’d get you started right the day after, help you get back into the pattern. Sleeping tablets are very useful there.” He shook his head. “I can’t get back into the pattern, Jane.”
She leaned toward him. “
But you can, Carr. They don’t know anything about you. They may suspect, but they can’t be sure. If you stay in the pattern—your old job, your old girl—they’ll forget their suspicions.”
“I don’t think I could manage it.
I’d crack up,” he said, adding in lower tones, “Besides, I wouldn’t leave you.”
“But I’m lost forever,” she protested. “You aren’t. You still have a safe path through life. You don’t have to stay in the dark museum.”
HE LOOKED around at the actual darkness of the stacks and for the first time it all really hit him. Chicago a dead city, empty as the aisles around them, but here and there at great intervals the faintest of evil rustlings. Hundreds of blocks of death, or non-life, and here two motes of awareness.
“No,” he said slowly, “I won’t go back.”
“But you can’t help me,” she told him. “You’ll only make it harder.” She looked down. “It isn’t because I think you can help me that the unscrupulous part of my mind keeps drawing you back.”
“We could go far away,” Carr said. “We’d still be out of the pattern. More conspicuously than ever. And there would be other gangs.”
“But at the worst these awakened ones are only people, Jane.”
“You think so?” she said scornfully. “You don’t think their minds are strong with the evil wisdom of the wakened, passed down from wakened mind to mind for centuries?”
“But there must be some decent wakened people in the world.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of any, only the cruel little gangs.”
“There’d at least be your friend to help us,” he persisted.
