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.