THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Illustrated by WEST [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent--including my date with my girl! When the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency--well, I won't go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put the roof on the city, as they say. It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken. But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it--to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this morning--right after the egg yolk--and invited myself down to her place. "Ten o'clock," she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o'clock, she meant ten o'clock. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up. Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened--I'd broken a shoe lace--she refused to speak to me for four days. And then the elevator didn't come. * * * * * Until then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg--I couldn't very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry--and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window--one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag--I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one.