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

hard thing to do. Once a mind wakes up, it’s got an itch to know the whole truth . . .
    A BLACK sea was churning in front of Carr, but he couldn’t look out into it because there was a row of lights just a little way beyond his feet, so bright that they made his head ache violently. He danced about in pain, flapping his arms. It seemed a degrading thing to be doing, even if he were in pain, so he tried to stop, but he couldn’t.
    Eventually his agonized prancing turned him around and he saw behind him a forest of dark shabby trees and between them glimpses of an unconvincing dingy gray sky. Then he whirled a little way farther and saw that Jane was beside him, dancing as madly as he. She still wore her sweater, but her skirt had become short and tight, like a flapper’s, and there were bright pats of rouge on her cheeks. She looked floppy as a French doll.
    The pain in his head lessened and he made a violent effort to stop his frantic dancing so he could go over and stop hers, but it was no use. Then for the first time he noticed thin black cords going up from his wrists and knees. He rolled his eyes and saw that there were others going up from his shoulders and head and the small of his back. He followed them up with his eyes and saw that they were attached to a huge wooden cross way up. A giant hand gripped the cross, making it waggle. Above it, filling the roof of the sky, was the ruddy face of Wilson.
    Carr looked down quickly. He was thankful the footlights were so bright that he couldn’t see anything of the silent audience.
    Then a thin, high screaming started and the cords stopped tugging at him, so that at least he didn’t have to dance. A steady pull on his ear turned his head slowly around, so that he was looking into the forest. The same thing was happening to Jane. The screaming grew and there bounded fantastically from the forest, the cords jerking him higher than his head, the puppet of the small dark man with glasses. His face was carved in an expression of rat-like fear. He fell in a disjointed heap at Carr’s feet and pawed at Carr with his stiff hands. He kept gibbering something Carr couldn’t understand. Every once in a while he would turn and point the way he had come and gibber the louder and scrabble the more frantically at Carr’s chest.
    Finally his backward looks became a comically terrified head-wagging and he resumed his flight, bounding off the stage in a single leap.
    Carr and Jane continued to stare at the forest.
    Then she said, in a high squeaking voice, “Oh save me!” and came tripping over to him and flung her corded arms loosely around his neck and he felt his jaw move on a string through his head and heard a falsetto voice that came from above reply, “I will, my princess.”
    Then he pawed around on the ground as if he were hunting for something and she clung to him in a silly way, impeding his efforts. Finally a cord that went up his sleeve pulled a little sword into his hand. Then he saw something coming out of the forest, something that wasn’t nice.
    It was a very large hound, colored a little darker slate gray than the sky, with red eyes and a huge tusky jaw.
    But what was nasty about it as it came nosing through the trees was that, although there were cords attached to it at the proper points, they were all slack. It reached the edge of the forest and lifted its head and fixed its red eyes on them.
    There followed a ridiculous battle in which the hound pretended to attack Carr and Jane, and he flailed about him with his sword. At one point the hound grabbed Jane’s arm in its teeth and he poked at it, but it was all make-believe. Then he made a wilder lunge and the hound turned over on its back and pretended to die, but all the while its red eyes looked at him knowingly.
    THEN, AS he and Jane embraced woodenly, the curtain swished down without the least applause from the silent audience, and he and Jane were twitched high into the air. A hand with red-lacquered nails