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.