The Sinful Ones

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.

Author’s Afterward

Of all my novels, the unluckiest, the most ill-starred and dogged by misfortune was undoubtedly the one I began early in 1943 and ended about ten years later in two quite different versions, the longer The Sinful Ones and the shorter You’re All Alone.

Imagine January 1943. I’d just celebrated Pearl Harbor (the subconscious thrives on death, destruction and dread) by writing my first two novels and they’d just been published in the two pulp magazines edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., Conjure Wife in Unknown and Gather, Darkness! in Astounding Stories. Mid-war. As an otherwise unemployed writer, though with wife and small child, I was beginning to worry about being drafted, but I still had that fear well in hand. What’s more, my subconscious was boiling up again.

I was fascinated by the idea of a person (or people) who lived in the stacks of a big public library (much as they did in big department stores in John Collier’s grand short story “Evening Primrose”). It promised a delightfully melancholy atmosphere, spookiness, all sorts of fantasy devices and endless literary allusions. I thought of combining it with the old philosophical query of solipsism: “Are other people really alive at all? Are there minds like yours behind the faces?” Which tied in nicely with the question of whether behaviourism was an adequate human psychology: mind described entirely in terms of human action without regard for feeling and thought.

So there I was safely launched on a third novel! I swiftly finished four chapters and as I’d profitably done with my first two books, I sent them off to Campbell in New York City (I was in Santa Monica Canyon, California) for his approval an suggestions.

His reply devastated me. Unknown, now Unknown Worlds, was ceasing publication because of the paper shortage. He’d be taking no more supernatural stories or novels. And that essentially meant, in the publishing world of those days, there was no market for my new novel anywhere. Astounding Stories took only science fiction. Weird Tales bough no novels or serials and had been picky about even my shorter offerings. Book publication?—a pulp writer never thought of that, and as a matter of fact, few publishers wanted supernatural tales them, while paperbacks as we know them did not exist.

That was the first bad-luck stroke and probably the shrewdest. If only the news of Unknown’s demise had held off for as little as two months! Then I’d have had the book finished and whatever happened then, the material would have been skimmed off my roiling unconscious and that part of me fresh and clean again.

I should have finished the book anyhow, but time and courage had run out on me. I abandoned it and collapsed into a precision inspector’s berth at Douglas Aircraft, Santa Monica plant, continuing to write short stories and poetry at a much-reduced rate.

After the war, and still feeling very keenly the literary defeat the way had finally handed me, I got out the four chapters, wondering what to do with them. A fantasy-writer friend read them carefully and agreed with me that hardcover book publication was the best thing to aim for, especially since the situation had improved a little there. William Sloane, whose brilliant supernatural novels To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water had had considerable success, had launched a new publishing house which would favor that genre.