The Sinful Ones

Chapter Sixteen Stop Running

Wind rushed cleansingly to either side. Dark trees sped. Overhead the stars fought with the edges of the mushroom of Chicago’s smoke. Ahead, Chicago’s massed lights glowed pinkish in the air.

Carr and Jane leaned back side by side, holding hands lightly (more than that would not have felt “right” to them this first time), but with their heads close together, so that when they spoke, their voices were masked by the wind and by the old convertible’s roar and rattle.

They watched the heads of Tom and Midge in the front seat. They looked at the trees and the stars and the pink of Chicago. It seemed to Carr infinitely strange, yet infinitely natural, that he should once again be a normally functioning part of a vast machine that included the stars and sky and earth and trees and Chicago and Tom and Midge and Jane and himself, a machine that produced planted and people and winds and words. He wondered: “What purpose?” He wondered: “How much consciousness?” Looking at Tom and Midge, he wondered: “Is there truly only darkness inside their minds? Are they only pleasant automatons?”

But those were questions that could not be answered, so long as you stayed part of the machine, so long as you held to the pattern, so long as you did or said nothing that did not seem “right.’ And he certainly didn’t want to be anything but part of the machine now.

“It’s been a good first date,” Jane whispered to him. “It makes coming back seem a good thing…even my father and mother, my music, Mayberry. I can almost forget…many things.”

“Better not,” Carr reminded her smilingly. “We’re not altogether safe, you know.”

“But we’re back in our lives. They can’t notice us—the other ‘theys’.”

“If we’re careful,” Carr persisted.

Jane smiled again. “If it doesn’t,” she said. “We’ll meet outside the pattern.”

He squeezed her hand. She looked at him. They were silent for a while. Then, “Why do you suppose it happened to us?” she asked him. “Why should it be you and I that came alive?”

“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe it’s like single atoms. They move, they explode, all by chance, no one knowing why.”

Jane frowned faintly. After a while she said, “I wonder if we haven’t been wrong in some of our guesses. I wonder if perhaps there aren’t more awakened people than we realize, living their lives in a trance, sticking to the pattern, but not just because they’re nothing but machines, not just because their minds are black. It’s so hard to think that Midge and Tom there…”

“Yes,” Carr agreed, remembering something he had momentarily felt at Goldie’s Casablanca, “perhaps there are more than we’ve guessed who are aware, or half aware, who are more than blind machines…”

“Perhaps,” Jane suggested softly, “it’s our job to find them, to rouse them fully.”

“We’d have to be very careful, sound them out delicately,” Carr reminded her.

“Yes. But if we could rouse them, if we could make the machine think more and more…”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s so terrible, Carr, to think of those mean little gangs going around—the ones who would have destroyed us, the ones who saved us without knowing—it’s terrible to think of them as the only awakened forces in the world…”

He agreed. “Though we do have at least one ally,” she remembered.

“Yes. Old Jules.”

For a while they were silent, feeling the rush of the car, watching the darkly gleaming stars keep pace with them.

“I wonder what he was going to tell us,” Jane murmured softly.

“He?”

“Fred. The important thing he thought he’d discovered. Do you suppose it was just that—that we should stop running away, that we should try to rouse the half-awakened ones?”

“Who knows?” said Carr. But in his heart he knew that he agreed with her, he knew that he could never stay wholly a part of the machine, that he would always be venturing outside its preordained patterns, but on guard now, aware of the dangers, aware of the need to do only the “right” thing much of the time, yet always in search of wakened and half-wakened minds.

The old convertible slowed for an intersection. Midge looked back. Her face was rather impudent, her hair kinky and red.

Carr asked himself: face of a dark-lined machine or of a wakened or half-wakened girl?

Midge asked, “What are you two talking about?” Machine-words or alive ones?

The convertible sped on again.

“Oh,” Carr answered, “things.” It somehow seemed the right thing to say.