You're All Alone (illustrated) by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online Page A

open the gate enough to get through.
    “Please don’t come in with me,” she whispered. “And please don’t stay and watch.”
    Carr thought he knew why. She didn’t want him to watch the lights wink agitatedly on, perhaps hear the beginning of an anxious tirade. It was her last crumb of freedom—to leave him with the illusion she was free.
    He took her in his arms. He felt in the darkness the tears on her cold cheek wetting his. Then she had broken away. There were footsteps running up a gravel drive. He turned and walked swiftly away.
    In the sky, between the pale streets, was the first paleness of dawn.

CHAPTER VII
Keep looking straight ahead, brother. It doesn’t do to get too nosy. You may see things going on in the big engine that’ll make you wish you’d never come alive . . .
    THROUGH SLITTED, sleep-heavy eyes Carr saw the clock holding up both hands in horror. The room was drenched in sunshine.
    But he did not hurl himself out of bed, tear into his clothes, and rush downtown, just because it was half past eleven.
    Instead he yawned and closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of self-confidence that filled him. He had a profound sense of being back on the right track.
    Odd that a queer neurotic girl could give you so much. But nice.
    Grinning, he got up and leisurely bathed and shaved.
    He’d have breakfast downtown, he decided. Something a little special. Then amble over to the office about the time his regular lunch hour ended.
    He even thought of permitting himself the luxury of taking a cab to the Loop. But as soon as he got outside he changed his mind. The sun and the air, and the blue of lake and sky, and the general feeling of muscle-stretching spring, when even old people crawl out of their holes, were too enticing. He felt fresh. Plenty of time. He’d walk.
    The city showed him her best profile. As if he were a god briefly sojourning on earth, he found pleasure in inspecting the shifting scene and’ the passing people.
    They seemed to feel as good as he did. Even the ones hurrying fastest somehow gave the impression of strolling. Carr enjoyed sliding past them like a stick drifting in a slow, whimsical current.
    If life has a rhythm, he thought, it has sunk to a lazy summer murmur from the strings.
    His mind played idly with last night’s events. He wondered if he could find Jane’s imposing home again. He decided he probably could, but felt no curiosity. Already she was beginning to seem like a girl in a dream. They’d met, helped each other, parted. A proper episode.
    He came to the bridge. Down on the sparkling river deckhands were washing an excursion steamer. The skyscrapers rose up clean and gray, Cities, he thought, could be lovely places at time, so huge and yet so bright and sane and filled with crowds of people among whom you were indistinguishable and therefore secure. Undoubtedly this was the pleasantest half-hour he’d had in months. To crown it, he decided he’d drop into one of the big department stores and make some totally unnecessary purchase. Necktie perhaps. Say a new blue.
    Inside the store the crowd was thicker. Pausing to spy out the proper counter, Carr had the faintest feeling of oppressiveness. For a moment he felt the impulse to hurry outside. But he smiled at it. He located the neckties—they were across the huge room—and started toward them. But before he’d got halfway he stopped again, this time to enjoy a sight as humorously bizarre as a cartoon in The New Yorker.
    Down the center aisle, their eyes fixed stonily ahead, avoiding the shoppers with a casual adroitness, marched four youngish men carrying a window-display mannequin. The four men were wearing identical light-weight black overcoats and black snap-brim hats which looked as if they’d just been purchased this morning. The two in front each held an ankle, the two in back a shoulder. The mannequin was dressed in an ultra-stylish olive green suit, the face and hands were finished in some realistic nude