"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.