The Sinful Ones

Chapter Twelve Bleached Prostitute

Carr gazed up at huge, grainy photogenic enlargements of women in brassieres and pants painted bright orange. A sign screamed, “Girls and More Girls!”

Around him, lone dreary figures of men slouched purposely.

He realized that he was on South State Street, and that he had been searching for Jane Gregg through the nightmares of Chicago and his own mind ever since he had fled stealthily from Marcia’s apartment some hours ago.

Jane was the only person in the world for him now. The only person who would answer when he spoke. The only person behind whose forehead there was an inner light.

Except for a few others best not thought of.

He had gone to every place he and Jane had been, fruitlessly. Now he had come to one place he remembered her speaking of.

Around him the signs glared, the dance music groaned, the automatons slouched through the dirty shadows. Chicago, city of death, mindless metropolis, peopled by millions of machines of flesh and bone that walked and worked and uttered phonograph words and rusted and went to the scrap heap.

Dead city in a dead universe. Dead city through which he was doomed to search forever, futilely.

He was glad that the nightmares inside his mind had helped to shut it out.

For a fleeting moment he had a vision of Marcia’s face as he had last seen it. He expected the stuff behind the forehead of the vision to ooze from the eyes in black tears.

He passed a slot-like store that said TATTOOING, then a jumbled window with three dingy gilt balls over head. In front of it lounged two figures of men in dark slickers. They somehow stood out from the other dreary automatons.

As he crossed the street, a taxicab drew up ahead of him at a dull-windowed drugstore. The fat figure of the driver squeezed out and hurried inside. As Carr passed the drugstore, he noticed him dialing at an open phone. A line of dirty collar was creased between greasy-coated bulky shoulders and thick red neck. He heard the motor softly chugging.

Ahead lights thinned, sidewalks became emptier, as South State approached the black veil of the railway yards. He passed the figure of a woman. The face was shadowed by an awning, but he could see the shoulder-length hair, the glossy black dress tight over the hips and thighs, and the long bare legs.

He passed a sign that read: IDENTIFICATION PHOTOS AT ALL HOURS. He passed a black-windowed bar that said: CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT.

He thought: I will search for Jane forever and never find her. I will search for Jane…

Carr stopped.

…I will search for Jane…

Carr turned around.

No, it couldn’t be, he thought. This one’s hair is blonde, and the hips wing commonly in the tight black dress.

But if he disregarded those two things…

The hair had been unevenly blonde. It could be, undoubtedly was, bleached.

The walk could be assumed.

He was beginning to think it was Jane.

Just then his glance flickered beyond the shoulder-brushing blonde hair.

A long black convertible drew up to the curb just this side of the taxi, parking the wrong way. Out of it stepped the handless man.

On the other side of the street, just opposite the girl in black, stood Miss Hackman. She was wearing a green sports suit and hat. She glanced quickly both ways, then started across.

Halfway between Carr and the girl in black, Mr. Wilson stepped out of a dark doorway.

Carr felt as if his heart were being squeezed. This was the finish, he thought. The end of Jane’s long, terrified flight. The kill.

Unless…

The three pursuers closed in slowly, confidently The girl in black didn’t turn or stop, but she seemed to slow down just a trifle.

Unless something happened to convince them that he and Jane were automatons like the rest. Unless he and Jane could put on an act that would deceive them.

It could be done. They’d always been doubtful about Jane.

But she couldn’t do it alone. She couldn’t put on an act by herself. But with him…

The three figures continued to close in. Miss Hackman was smiling.

Carr wet his lips and whistled twice, with an appreciative chromatic descent at the end of each blast.

The girl in black stopped.

Carr slouched toward her swiftly.

The girl in black turned around. He saw Jane’s white face, framed by that ridiculous blonde hair.

“Hello, kid,” he called saluting her with a wave of his fingers.

“Hello,” she replied. Her heavily lipsticked mouth smiled. She still swayed a little as she waited for him.

Passing Mr. Wilson, Carr reached her a moment before the others did. He did not look at them, but he could sense them closing in behind him and Jane, forming a dark semicircle.

“Doing anything tonight?” he asked Jane.

Her chin described a little movement, not quite a nod. She studied him up and down. “Maybe.”

“They’re faking!” Miss Hackman’s whisper was very faint. It seemed to detach itself from her lips and glide toward his ear like an insect.

“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, and 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.”

“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.