“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.
My Angry Passenger,
If you possibly can, meet me tomorrow evening at seven in front of the public library. Bring Jane, if you know where she is. I’ve made a very important discovery.
Your Mad Chauffeur.
Chapter Thirteen
The Black Shape
From behind the castellated black wall of warehouses, elevators, bridges, and cranes to the west, the setting sun sent a giant spray of dark red fire streaming through the immensity of air above the Chicago River. It bloodily edged the giant shoulders of the skyscrapers crowded around the Michigan Avenue bridge like a herd of gray mammoths stopping by the river for the night. It glared from their many faceted window-eyes to the west, but left those to the east in gloom—the small, wickedly intelligent window-eyes expressing the hard, alien thoughts that cities have been thinking since Ur and Alexandria and Rome. It turned the white tiles of the Wrigley Tower a delicate salmon pink and the golden trim of the Carbon and Carbide Building a rosy copper.
Far below the crimson light glimmered on the river, ruddily touched a black motor-barge, gleamed and faintly glittered on the asphalt and cement of the street bordering the river and the huge bridge crossing it, but hardly penetrated the dark rectangles below that were the windows to the bridge below the bridge, the street below the street—that cobbled and concrete underworld of rumbling trucks and parked cars, of coal-dust and dirt, with its own scattering of blinking and neon signs, that lay beneath the northern end of Chicago’s Loop district.