Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

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.