You're All Alone (illustrated)

You're All Alone (illustrated) by Fritz Leiber Page B

Book: You're All Alone (illustrated) by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online
Authors: Fritz Leiber
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gaps for the invisible man’s remarks. For if yesterday’s big fear were true and the world were a machine, and if he’d jumped out of his place in the machine when he ran away from Marcia last night to be with Jane—
    “ ’Bye now, darling,” Marcia said. “Be properly grateful.”
    “Wait a minute, Marcia,” he said, speaking rapidly. “Do you actually mean—”
    But the phone clicked and started to buzz, and Tom Elvested came gallumphing over.
    “Look,” Tom said, “I know it was too short notice when I asked you to go out with me and Midge and Jane Gregg last night. But now you’ve seen what a charming girl she is, how about the four of us getting together Saturday?”
    “Well . . .” Carr said confusedly, hardly knowing what Tom had been saying.
    “Swell,” Tom told him. “It’s a date.”
    “Wait a minute, Tom,” Carr said rapidly. “Is this Jane Gregg a slim girl with long untidy dark hair?”
    But Tom had returned to his own desk, and an applicant was approaching Carr’s.
    SOMEHOW CARR got through the afternoon. His mind kept jumping around in a funny way. He kept seeing the pulp magazines in the rack downstairs. For several minutes he was bothered by something gray poking around the end of one of the benches in the waiting room, until he realized it was a woman’s handbag. And there was the constant fear that he’d lose contact with the people he was interviewing, that the questions and answers would stop agreeing.
    With a skimp of relief he watched the last applicant depart. It was a minute past quitting time and the other interviewers were already hurrying for their hats and wraps. His glance lit on a scrap of pencil by the wire basket on his desk. He rolled it toward him with one finger. It was fiercely chewed, making him think of nails bitten to the quick. He recognized it as Jane’s. He rolled it back and forth.
    He stood up. The office had emptied itself while he’d been sitting there. The cleaning woman, dry mop over her shoulder, was pushing in a cart for the wastepaper. She ignored him. He grabbed his hat and walked out past her, tramped down the stairs.
    Outside the day had stayed sparklingly fair, so that the streets were flooded with a soft white light that imparted a subdued carnival atmosphere to the eager hurry of the rush hour. Carr felt a touch of dancing, adventurous excitement add itself to his tension. Instead of heading over to Michigan Boulevard, he took a more direct route north, crossing the sluggish river by one of the blacker, more nakedly-girdered bridges.
    Beyond the river, the street slanted downward into a region of beaneries, secondhand magazine stores, small saloons, drugstores with screaming displays laid out six months ago. This kept up for some eight or ten blocks without much change except an increasing number of cramped nightclubs with tautly smiling photographs of the nearly naked girls who presumably dispensed the “continuous entertainment.”
    Then in one block, by the stern sorcery of zoning laws, the squalid neighborhood was transformed into a wealthy residential section of heavy-set houses with thickly curtained windows and untrod lawns suggesting the cleared areas around forts.
    If memory served him right, Jane’s house lay just a block and a left turn ahead. He quickened his step. He rounded the corner.
    He came to a high iron fence with brick pillars, to a tall iron gate. There was a yellow chalk-mark high on one pillar—a cross with dots between the arms.
    He stopped dead, stared, took a backward step.
    This couldn’t be. He must have made a mistake.
    But his memory of the gate—and especially of the chalk-mark—made that impossible.
    The sinking sun suddenly sent a spectral yellow afterglow, illuminating everything clearly.
    A gravel drive led up to just the sort of big stone mansion he had imagined—turreted, slate-roofed, heavy-eaved, in the style of the 1890’s.
    But the gate and fence were rusty, tall weeds encroached on the

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