"NEXT STOP, NOWHERE!"

By Dick Purcell

It's logical to assume that an elevator only travels from one floor to another; yet if you think about it—what's between the floors?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy August 1956 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Four persons disappearing from an elevator should have caused concern—even excitement. Especially when the elevator was stuck between two floors. But the thing was handled quite casually. And with good reason. After all, when a thing is not understood the best defense against acknowledging ignorance is to insist that nothing extraordinary happened.

In this case, four persons, a girl and three men, stepped into an elevator in the Kendall Building. They were all headed for the same suite—offices occupied by several medical men. The elevator jammed between the sixth and seventh floors and refused to budge.

The operator, a salty little Brooklynite, swore quietly to himself and pushed the emergency signal. It rang but nothing happened. The operator waited for a few minutes, then spoke in a carefully casual voice, "The blessed engineer is out to supper. Now ain't that the way things always happen? When the blessed engineer goes out to supper the blessed elevator does a blessed sit-down between two floors."

"What—what are we going to do?" This from the very pretty female passenger named Peggy Wilson who was afraid of almost everything and was going to a psychiatrist who was trying to root a dominating mother out of the poor girl's subconscious and put the old lady back in her grave where she belonged.

"We aren't in any danger, miss. We could wait for the engineer but it might be quite a while."

"It looks to me as though we'll have to wait for him," Walter Maltby said. Maltby was an ingrown little man who had had a toothache for three weeks and had finally been driven to the dentist by his dominating wife.

"Oh, no. If one of you guys—men—will boost me through the trap in the roof of the car, I can get to the seventh floor door. I'll crawl out and go down in the basement and move the blessed car to seven by hand."

"Okay," Wilmer Payton said. He was a six-feet-four Greek god with a body close to perfection and a handsome, intelligent face that was nothing more than a spate of false advertising pasted across the front of a vacant head. Wilmer was pretty much of a mental bankrupt. He didn't even own the furniture in his own cerebral attic, the pieces having been placed there by others. He had the look of a rising young executive and was the assistant mail room boy in a large publishing company. And a good one, too. Lately, they had been entrusting him with special delivery letters.

He braced himself and the operator climbed on his shoulders and vanished through the ceiling. A moment later there was a sound of an opening door and a few grunts and scramblings after which the door closed and silence again prevailed.

The three passengers glanced at each other fearfully. The fourth, a small, white-haired man in his late sixties had stood quietly in one corner during the whole procedure. He had a pair of bright black eyes and a look remindful of an alert fox terrier in a basement known to house rats. He was Fleming Carter, a psychiatrist by profession and a student of almost everything by choice. He was an accomplished linguist among other things and translated Sanskrit and Hebrew for the pleasure of it. He was an amateur chemist and also conducted himself ably on a pair of skis.

So the quartette was not lacking in brilliance, Fleming Carter having enough to burnish all four.

He had mentally taken his three fellow-prisoners apart and put them together again when he noticed the girl's trembling and saw her first tears. Only then did he step forward.

"There is no cause for alarm, my dear—none at all. These lifts fairly bristle with safety devices. The insurance companies demand it."

Peggy Wilson turned to him gratefully, a little like a kitten, he thought, which yearned for the reassurance of a soothing hand. She would make a beautiful Persian, he thought. A perfect house pet.

"But to be trapped here—like—like animals," Peggy whimpered. "It's terrible!" She was moving toward Fleming Carter's shoulder, but Wilmer Payton took a single step forward and her head turned quite naturally to his bosom. Fleming Carter smiled and estimated to a nicety the intelligence of any offspring that would result from a mating of these two vacuums.

"It's all right, baby," Wilmer said. "I'll take care of you."

Walter Maltby had troubles of his own. He now voiced them: "Jenny will be furious if we don't get out of here pretty quick. I'm always home for Television Theater and if I don't make it—"

He got no further because at that moment the foundations of the world seemed to give way and the four of them were hurled into a heap on the floor.

Or were they?

This question was in Fleming Carter's mind as Peggy Wilson screamed, Walter Maltby whimpered, and Wilmer Payton bellowed in terror. Had the lift fallen—the building collapsed—an atom bomb exploded? His instincts told him no. This because—while all the outward manifestations of such catastrophes seemed apparent—there was something strangely different about the sudden chaos into which the group had been thrown.

Fleming Carter felt they should all be dead. But they remained very much alive. They should have been at least mangled and maimed. None appeared even scratched.

All this, Carter told himself firmly, was a chaos of the mind and nothing more. It was mental panic of such violence that it was manifesting in the physical. He told himself this while he sought to maintain equilibrium while standing upon nothing and wondering where such a terrific wind could come from in a sheltered elevator shaft.

Then it was over. The hurricane subsided; the floor stiffened beneath them and they were lying in a heap—a heap made interesting by Peggy Wilson's legs sprawled above the others in a very unladylike manner.

Wilmer Payton groaned.

"Shut up," Fleming Carter said sharply. "Don't start a wave of panic and hysteria. You aren't hurt!"

"How the hell do you know I ain't?" Wilmer Payton demanded with childlike docility.