Is That What People Do? by Robert Sheckley

disappeared. Anders was in a gray nothingness, a void. There was nothing around him except shapeless gray. Where was the voice? Gone.
    Anders perceived the illusion behind the grayness, and then there was nothing at all.
    Complete nothingness, and himself within it.
    Where was he? What did it mean? Anders’ mind tried to add it up.
    Impossible. That couldn’t be true.
    Again the score was tabulated, but Anders’ mind couldn’t accept the total. In desperation, the overloaded mind erased the figures, eradicated the knowledge, erased itself.
    “Where am I?”
    In nothingness. Alone.
    Trapped.
    “Who am I?”
    A voice.
    The voice of Anders searched the nothingness, shouted, “Is there anyone here?”
    No answer.
    But there was someone. All directions were the same, yet moving along one he could make contact...with someone. The voice of Anders reached back to someone who could save him, perhaps.
    “Save me,” the voice said to Anders, lying fully dressed on his bed, except for his shoes and black bow tie.

THE NATIVE PROBLEM
    Edward Danton was a misfit. Even as a baby, he had shown pre-antisocial leanings. This should have been sufficient warning to his parents, whose duty it was to take him without delay to a competent prepubescent psychologist. Such a man could have discovered what lay in Danton’s childhood to give him these contra-group tendencies. But Danton’s parents, doubtless dramatizing problems of their own, thought the child would grow out of it.
    He never did.
    In school, Danton got barely passing grades in Group Acculturation, Sibling Fit, Values Recognition, Folkways Judgment, and other subjects which a person must know in order to live serenely in the modern world. Because of his lack of comprehension, Danton could never live serenely in the modern world.
    It took him a while to find this out.
    From his appearance, one would never have guessed Danton’s basic lack of Fit. He was a tall, athletic young man, green-eyed, easygoing. There was a certain something about him which considerably intrigued the girls in his immediate affective environment. In fact, several paid him the highest compliment at their command, which was to consider him as a possible husband.
    But even the flightiest girl could not ignore Danton’s lacks. He was liable to weary after only a few hours of Mass Dancing, when the fun was just beginning. At Twelve-hand Bridge, Danton’s attention frequently wandered and he would be forced to ask for a recount of the bidding, to the disgust of the other eleven players. And he was impossible at Subways.
    He tried hard to master the spirit of that classic game. Locked arm in arm with his teammates, he would thrust forward into a subway car, trying to take possession before another team could storm in the opposite doors.
    His group captain would shout, “Forward, men! We’re taking this car to Rockaway!” And the opposing group captain would scream back, “Never! Rally, boys! It’s Bronx Park or bust!”
    Danton would struggle in the close-packed throng, a fixed smile on his face, worry lines etched around his mouth and eyes. His girl friend of the moment would say, “What’s wrong, Edward? Aren’t you having fun?”
    “Sure I am,” Danton would reply, gasping for breath.
    “But you aren’t!” the girl would cry, perplexed. “Don’t you realize, Edward, that this is the way our ancestors worked off their aggressions? Historians say that the game of Subways averted an all-out hydrogen war. We have those same aggressions and we, too, must resolve them in a suitable social context.”
    “Yeah, I know,” Edward Danton would say. “I really do enjoy this. I—oh, Lord!”
    For at that moment, a third group would come pounding in, arms locked, chanting, “Canarsie, Canarsie, Canarsie!”
    In that way, he would lose another girl friend, for there was obviously no future in Danton. Lack of Fit can never be disguised. It was obvious that Danton would never be happy in the New York