Fritz Leiber: The Sinful Ones

“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.”