You're All Alone (illustrated)

by Fritz Leiber

  Carr frowned grotesquely. “. . . walleyed blonde . . .”—that must be the woman who had watched. But as for the other three—“. . . small dark man with glasses may be your friend . . .”—why, it sounded like a charade.

  “Carr, if you can spare a moment . . .” Carr recognized Tom Elvested’s voice but for the moment he ignored it. He started to turn over the paper to see if the frightened girl had scribbled anything on the other side, when—

  “. . . I would like to introduce Jane Gregg,” Tom finished.

  Carr looked around at Tom—and forgot everything else.

  Big Tom Elvested was smiling fatuously. “Jane,” he said, “this is Carr Mackay. Carr, this is Jane.” And he moved his hand in the gesture of one who gives a friendly squeeze to the elbow of the person standing beside him.

  Only there was no person standing beside him.

  Where Tom’s gesture had indicated Jane Gregg should be standing, there was only empty air.

  Tom’s smiling face went from empty air to Carr and back again. He said, “I’ve been wanting to get you two together for a long time.”

  Carr almost laughed, there was something so droll about the realism of Tom’s actions. He remembered the pantomimes in the acting class at college, when you pretended to eat a dinner or drive an automobile, without any props, just going through the motions. In that class Tom Elvested would have rated an A-plus.

  Tom nodded his head and coyly asked the empty air, “And does he seem as interesting, now that you’ve actually met him?”

  Suddenly Carr didn’t want to laugh at all. If there was anything big Tom Elvested ordinarily wasn’t, it was an actor.

  “She’s a cute little trick, isn’t she, Carr?” Tom continued, giving the air another playful pat.

  Carr moved forward, incidently running a hand through the air, which was quite as empty as it looked. “Cut the kidding, Tom,” he said.

  Tom merely rocked on his heels, like an elephant being silly. Once again his hand moved out, this time to flick the air at a point a foot higher. “And such lovely hair. I always go for the page boy style myself.”

  “Cut it out, Tom, please,” Carr said seriously.

  “Of course, maybe she’s a little young for you,” Tom babbled on.

  “Cut it out!” Carr snapped. His face was hardly a foot from Tom’s, but Tom didn’t seem to see him at all. Instead he kept looking through Carr toward where Carr had been standing before. And he kept on playfully patting the air.

  “Oh yes,” he assured the air with a smirk, “Carr’s quite a wolf. That’s the reason he had those few gray hairs. They’re a wolf insignia. You’ll have to watch your step with him.”

  “Cut it out!” Carr repeated angrily and grabbed Tom firmly by the shoulders.

  What happened made Carr wish he hadn’t. Tom Elvested’s face grew strained and red, like an enraged baby’s. An intense throbbing was transmitted to Carr’s hands. And from Tom’s lips came a mounting, meaningless mutter, like a sound tape running backwards.

  CARR JERKED away. He felt craven and weak, as helpless as a child. He edged off until there were three desks between himself and Tom, and he was standing behind Ernie Acosta, who was busy with a client.

  He could hardly bring his voice to a whisper.

  “Ernie, something’s happened to Tom. I want you to help me.”

  Ernie didn’t look up.

  “Ernie,” he repeated, louder, “I need your help.”

  Ernie continued to talk to his client. Across the room Carr saw a gray-mustached man walking briskly. He hurried over to him, glancing back apprehensively at Tom, who was still standing there red-faced and softly babbling.

  “Dr. Wexler,” he blurted, “I’m afraid Tom Elvested’s had some sort of attack. Would you—?”

  But Dr. Wexler walked on without slackening his pace and disappeared through the black curtains of the eye-testing cubicle.

  At that instant, as Carr watched the black curtains swing together, a sudden spasm of extreme terror seized him. As if something huge and hostile were poised behind him, he dared not make a move.

  His feelings were like those of a man in a waxworks museum, who speaks to a guide only to find that he has addressed one of the wax figures.

  His paralyzed thoughts, suddenly working like lightning, snatched at that idea.

  What if the whole world were like a waxworks museum? In motion, of course, like clockworks, but utterly mindless, purposeless, mechanical.

  What if a wax figure named Jane Gregg had come alive and moved from her place—or merely been removed, unalive, as a toy is lifted out of a shop window? What if the whole show was going on without her, because the whole show was just a machine and didn’t know or care whether a figure named Jane Gregg was there or not?

  That would explain Tom Elvested going through the motions of an introduction—one mechanical figure carrying on just as well without its partner.

  What if the frightened girl had been a mechanical figure come alive and out of her place in the machine—and desperately trying to pretend that she was in her place, because something suspected her? That would fit with the things she’d said.

  What if he, Carr Mackay, a mechanical figure like the others, had come alive and stepped out of his place? That would explain why Ernie and Dr. Wexler had disregarded him.

  What if it really were true? The whole universe a mindless machine. People just mindless parts of that machine. Only a very few of them really conscious, really alive.

  What if the ends of the earth were nearer to you than the mind you thought lay behind the face you spoke to?

  What if the things people said, the things that seemed to mean so much to you, were something recorded on a kind of phonograph disk a million million years ago?

  What if you were all alone?

  Very, very slowly (Carr felt that if he made a quick move, the huge and hostile something poised behind him would grab) he looked around the office. Everything was proceeding normally: murmur-murmur, rat-a-tat-tat, click-click, (and outside rumble-rumble.)

  Just like a machine.

  “WHAT DID you do if you found that the whole world was a machine, and that you were out of your proper place in it?”

  There was only one thing to do.

  Still very, very slowly, Carr edged back to his desk. Tom Elvested had gone back to his own desk and sat down, was leafing through some record cards. He did not look up.

  The dumpy man in blue jeans was still sitting in front of Carr’s desk. He was talking at Carr’s empty chair.

  “So you really figure you can get me a job in magnetic at Norcross Aircraft?” he was saying. “That’ll be swell.”

  The mechanical interview had been going on just as well without the interviewer.

  Carr cringed down into his chair. With shaking fingers he picked up the last application folder and read again, “Jimmie Kozacs. Age 43.” The dumpy man looked about that age. Then, further down, “Magnetic Inspector.”

  The dumpy man stood up and plucked something invisible from the air, squinted at it, and remarked, “So all I got to do is show them this at the gate?”

  “Yes, Mr. Kozacs,” Carr heard himself whisper in a cracked voice.

  “Swell,” said the dumpy man. “Thanks a lot, er . . .” (He glanced at the nameplate on Carr’s desk) “. . . Mr. Mackay. Aw, don’t get up. Well, thanks a lot.”

  The dumpy man thrust out his hand. With a great effort, Carr thrust his own hand into it. He felt his fingers clamped and pumped up and down, as if by rubber-padded machinery.

  “Good luck, Mr. Kozacs,” he croaked.

  The dumpy man nodded and walked off.

  Yes, there was only one thing to do.

  A creature with a toothbrush mustache and a salesman’s smile and eczema scars half-hidden by powder was approaching the chair the dumpy man had vacated. Carr snatched up the next folder—there were two or three in the wire basket now—and braced himself.

  . . . one thing. You could go to y
our place in the machine and pretend to be part of it, so that the huge and hostile something wouldn’t notice you were alive.

  The creature with the toothbrush mustache seated itself without asking.

  “Mr. Weston, I believe,” Carr quavered, consulting the folder.

  “That’s right,” the creature replied.

  From the next desk Tom Elvested gave Carr a big mechanical grin and a meaningless wink, just like a ventriloquist’s giant dummy.

  CHAPTER III

  Sure, that’s the secret—the world’s just a big engine. All matter, no, mind. You doubt it? Look at a big-city crowd. They don’t see you, brother. They don’t see anything. They’re just parts of a big engine . . .

  BY THE time five-fifteen came and Carr hurried down the brass-edged steps, taking them three at a time, and darted across the lobby and pushed through the squirrel cage of the revolving door, he had mastered his terror—or at least made a good start toward rationalizing his one big fear.

  Perhaps he had just happened to meet a half dozen psychotics in one day—after all, employment offices have more of a lunatic fringe than most businesses.

  Perhaps he had suffered some peculiar hallucinations, including the illusion that he’d been talking loudly when he’d just been whispering.

  Perhaps most of it had been an elaborate practical joke—Tom and Ernie were both great kidders.

  But when he stepped out of the revolving door into a pandemonium of honking, clanking, whistling, shouting—faces that leaped, elbows that jostled, lights that glared—he found that all his rationalizations rang hollow. There was something terribly like a machine in the swift pound of Chicago’s rush-hour rhythm, he thought as he plunged into it.

  Perhaps thinking of people solely as clients of General Employment was what was wrong with him, he tried to persuade himself with grim humor. For so long he had been thinking of people as mere human raw material, as window dummies to be put on display or routed back to the storeroom, that now they were having their revenge on him, by acting as if he didn’t exist.

  He reached Michigan Boulevard. The wall of empty space on the other side, fronting the wall of buildings on this, hinted at the lake beyond. The Art Institute traced a classic pattern against the gray sky. The air carried a trace of freshness from the morning’s rain.

  Carr turned north, stepping out briskly. For the first time in two hours he began to think of Marcia—and that was a good defense against any sort of fear. He pictured her as he’d last seen her, in an exquisitely tailored black suit and stockings that were a faint dark glow on pale flesh.

  But just then his attention was diverted to a small man walking a little way ahead of him at an equally fast pace. Carr’s legs were considerably longer, but the small man had a peculiar skip to his stride. He was constantly weaving, seeking the open channels in the crowd.

  Carr felt a surge of curiosity. He was tempted to increase his pace so that he could get a look at the stranger’s face.

  At that moment the small man whirled around. Carr stopped. The small man peered at him through horn-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses. Then a look of extreme horror crossed the stranger’s swarthy face. For a moment he crouched as if paralyzed. Then he turned and darted away, dancing past people, scurrying from side to side, finally whisking out of sight around the next corner like a puppet jerked offstage.

  Carr wanted to laugh wildly. The frightened girl had written, “But the small dark man with glasses may be your friend.” He certainly hadn’t acted that way!

  Someone bumped into Carr from behind and he started forward again. It was as if the governor of a machine, temporarily out of order, had begun to function. He was back in the rush-hour rhythm.

  He looked down the next cross street, but the small dark man was nowhere in sight.

  Carr smiled. It occurred to him that he really had no good reason to believe that this had been the frightened girl’s small dark man. After all, there must be tens of thousands of small dark men with glasses in the world.

  BUT HE found he couldn’t laugh off the incident quite that easily. Not that it brought back the one big fear, but that it reawakened the earlier mood that the frightened girl had evoked—a mood of frustrated excitement, as if all around him there were a hidden world alive with mystery and wonder to which he couldn’t quite find the door.

  His memory fixed on the frightened girl. He pictured her as a college kid, the sort who would cut classes in order to sit on the brink of a fountain and argue with some young man about the meaning of art. With pencil smudges on her cheeks. The picture fitted, all right. Only consider the howling naiveté of her wondering whether she had “awakened” him.

  And yet even that question might cut a lot deeper than you’d think. Wasn’t there a sense in which he actually was unawakened?—a person who’d dodged life, who’d always had that sense of a vastly richer and more vivid existence just out of reach.

  For that matter, didn’t most people live their lives without really ever awakening—as dull as worms, as mechanical as insects, their thoughts spoonfed to them by newspaper and radio? Couldn’t robots perform the much over-rated business of living just as well?

  As he asked himself that question, the big fear returned. The life drained out of the bobbing faces around him. The scissoring of the many legs became no less mechanical than the spinning of the wheels beyond the curb. The smoky pattern of light and darkness that was Chicago became the dark metal of a giant machine. And once again there was the feeling of something huge and hostile poised behind him.

  Back in the office he had found the one thing to do when that feeling struck—go to his place in the machine and pretend to be part of it. But out here what was his place?

  He knew in a general way what he had to do. Go home, change, pick up Marcia. But by what route and at what speed?

  Each step involved a decision. Should it be fast or slow? Should you glance at shop windows, or keep your eyes fixed ahead? Should you turn at the next corner? If you did, it might change your whole life. Or if you didn’t. If you stopped and tried to decide, if you loitered, you might be lost.

  But perhaps you were supposed to loiter. Perhaps you were supposed to stop dead, letting the crowd surge past you. Perhaps you were supposed to grin at the robots with twitching lips, gathering your breath for an ear-splitting scream, inviting the pounce of that huge and hostile something.

  Or perhaps you were only supposed to go on, step after dragging step, toward the bridge.

  CHAPTER IV

  A big engine—only every now and then one of the parts comes alive, for no more reason than a radioactive atom pops. That come-alive part is up against a big problem, brother. Don’t envy him or her . . .

  BY THE time Carr had crossed the big windy bridge and threaded his way through the dark streets of the Near North Side to the old brown-stone house in which he rented a room, he had once more mastered the big fear. The hallway was musty and dim. He hurried up the ornately balustraded stairs, relic of the opulent days of the 1890’s. A small stained glass window, mostly patches of dark red and purple, gave the only light.

  Just as he reached the turn, he thought he saw himself coming toward himself in the gloom. A moment later he recognized the figure for his reflection in the huge old mirror, its frame still showing glints of gilt, that occupied most of the wall space of the landing.

  But still he stood there, staring at the dark-engulfed image of a tall, rather slightly built man with light hair and small, regular features.

  There he was—Carr Mackay. And all around him was an unknown universe. And just what, in that universe, did Carr Mackay mean or matter? What was the real significance of the dark rhythm that was rushing him through life at an ever hastening pace toward a grave somewhere? Did it have any significance—especially when any break in the rhythm could make it seem so dead and purposeless, an endless marching and countermarching of marionettes?

  He ran blindly past his reflection up the stairs.

  In the
hall above it was darker still. A bulb had burned out and not been replaced. He felt his way down the corridor and unlocked the tall door of his room.

  It was high-ceilinged and comfortable, with rich old woodwork that ten layers of cheap paint couldn’t quite spoil. There was even an ancient gas fixture swinging out from the wall, though it probably hadn’t been used for anything the last thirty years except cooking on the sly. Carr tried to let the place take him and cradle him in its suggestion of the familiar and his life with Marcia and her crowd, make him forget that lost Carr Mackay down there in the mirror. There were his golf clubs in the corner, the box for shirt studs with the theater program beside it, the sleek military hairbrushes Marcia had given him. But tonight they seemed as arbitrary and poignantly useless an assortment of objects as those placed in an Egyptian tomb, to accompany their owner on his long trek through the underworld.

  They were not as alive, even, as the long-unopened box of chessmen or the tarnished silver half-pint flask.

  He slung his brown suit on a hanger, hung it in the closet, and reached down his blue suit, still in its wrapper from the cleaner’s.

  There in the gloom he seemed to see the face of the frightened girl. He could make out the hunted eyes, the thin features, the nervous lips.

  She knew the doorway to the hidden world, the answer to the question the dark-engulfed Mackay had been asking.

  The imagined lips parted, as if she were about to speak.

  With an angry exhalation of held breath, Carr jerked back into the room. What could he be thinking? It was only in wistful books that men of thirty-nine fell in love with moody, mysterious, coltish college girls. Or were caught up in the glamorously sinister intrigues that existed solely in such girls’ hot-house brains.

  He put on his blue suit, then started to transfer to it the stuff in the pockets of the brown one. He came upon the note the frightened girl had scribbled. He must have shoved it there when Tom Elvested had started misbehaving. He turned it over and saw that he hadn’t read all of it.