"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.

"Because I'm not and no one else seems to be and we all fell the same
distance."

Fleming Carter began to extricate himself from the pack. This
necessitated pressing rather personally against Peggy Wilson. He did
what he had to do and then drew the girl's skirt down as gently and
hastily as possible. He was relieved to find she was in no shape to
care what anyone did with her skirt.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, the elevator operator, upon finding he could not move the
elevator, returned to reassure the occupants. He went to the seventh
floor and called down very cheerily, "Everything's all right, folks. If
this'd happened before six o'clock there'd be plenty of blessed people
around, but it's almost seven and the engineer ain't back from supper
yet. It won't be but a little while though, and then--"

The operator became aware that only silence answered him. Had they been
scared dumb? "You--hey you--down there--"

More silence. The operator frowned and crawled down into the shaft. He
looked through the trap. Empty. "Well I'll be damned!" he said. And
because an obvious situation was covered by an obvious answer, added,
"All four of them crawled out and went home. Funny they couldn't stick
around a few minutes."

He did not ponder the difficulties involved in such an escape. The only
direction they could have gone was up and out on the seventh floor. He
thus accepted the obvious. And his only thought on the subject was that
he'd like to have been the one to boost the girl up.

Later, he bawled the engineer out and that was that so far as he was
concerned.

But the situation was far less simple for the four passengers. As
Fleming Carter struggled to his feet, Walter Maltby used his leg for a
ladder and came erect also and said, "I'll bet Jenny will sue somebody
for this! Jenny won't let them get away with it! Not for a minute."

Wilmer Payton was also on his feet looking dully about him. Fleming
Carter said, "Why don't you help the lady, young man? I'm sure she
would appreciate the courtesy from you more than myself or--?"

He looked questioningly at the other male member of the quartette.

"Walter Maltby--and as I was saying, Jenny will never--"

"I'm sure she won't."

"What happened?" Wilmer Payton asked of no one in particular as he
hauled Peggy Wilson to her feet.

The girl was biting her lip, trying hard to be brave. "The elevator
must have fallen. It's a wonder we weren't all killed!"

They agreed. All save Fleming Carter who was looking around with bright
interest. "It seems to me that we are no longer in the elevator."

Walter Maltby's jaw dropped. "No longer in the--"

"This is a somewhat larger area. And I fail to see any walls. Also, the
ceiling seems to have vanished."

The other three gazed about in shocked silence and the truth of Fleming
Carter's statements dawned on them. No walls, no ceiling. Nothing but
hard earth under their feet and a high blue sky above.

"Why we're out--out in the country!" Peggy Wilson babbled.

"I agree," Fleming Carter said. "But let's not get panicky. We are
still alive and unhurt."

"But I don't understand it," Walter Maltby said, plaintively. "I just
don't understand it."

Fleming Carter regarded the little man with pity. No Jenny around to
reassure the little man with her domineering bulk. Carter knew as a
matter of course that Jenny would be both bulky and domineering.

Carter looked about him. They were out in open country--that was
obvious. There was a huge sun and a huge blue sky and huge clouds
floating overhead. Everything in place but something very wrong.

Things were just too big.

That was it, Carter told himself. The size of this new world was far
out of proportion to the size of him and his new friends. They were
all standing in coarse grass that reached their knees--high grass--but
Carter realized instantly that the grass was not high. They themselves
were short!

       *       *       *       *       *

Wilmer Payton, holding Peggy Wilson in the crook of one arm, looked
about through eyes that obviously sent no intelligent messages to his
brain. He turned them on Carter and said, "I don't get any of this."

"I think I know what happened," Carter said.

This even caught the interest of Walter Maltby who was wondering what
Jenny would have to say about his not arriving home on schedule. "What
_did_ happen?"

"We've fallen--or were snatched--through some sort of a space-time
warp."

Wilmer Payton gaped idiotically and said, "We did _which_ through a
_what_?"

Fleming Carter seemed not to hear. He was staring pensively at the
thick blades of grass that brushed his knees. "There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio--" he mused.

"There ain't nobody here named Horatio," Wilmer said sullenly.

"Excuse me. My mind was wandering," Carter's mind was not wandering at
all, however. He said, "There are certain unexplained phenomena that
are believed to have happened in our world. People have been known to
disappear mysteriously and those who remain behind formulate theories
as to the how and the why of their vanishing. It is believed by some
that people can be moved, under certain conditions from one plane of
existence to another--that there are many of these so-called planes of
existence where many and varied peoples live and breathe upon them.

"Of course, no proof has ever been found for these theories because
the vanished persons never came back to testify, but--" Carter stopped
suddenly and regarded the three with a touch of compassion. "You
haven't the least idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

"I'm afraid not," Walter Maltby said timidly.

"Well, never mind. Perhaps I don't either. In any case, existence is
its own excuse for accepting any locale. Suffice it to say we are now
in a world that was not built for us--a world for creatures of far
greater dimensions than ourselves--and how we got here is really of
little importance."

Peggy Wilson was now snugly in Wilmer Payton's arms, her head tight
against his chest. Wilmer was just opening his mouth to say something
when, over the slope of the land, a huge form appeared. There was
nothing mystifying about it. The creature was obviously a man. He
wore rather strange loose clothing that, Carter thought, had some
resemblance to those of the ancient Greeks. But otherwise there was
nothing different about him except his size. As he approached, Fleming
Carter estimated that Wilmer Payton--the tallest of the four--would
about come to the top of his odd sandal-like footgear.

There was no panic now--the three being completely frozen with terror
and Carter statue-quiet and sharply alert. The giant, he was sure,
would pass within two hundred yards of them. A distance dangerously
close considering the man's size.

Still, Carter was optimistic. There was no reason why the giant should
see them. As things were, they could certainly hope to be overlooked.

But Peggy Wilson dashed this hope as the pressure within her became too
strong to contain and broke out in the form of a scream.

The giant stopped, took a few quick steps in their direction and was
upon them. Carter knew then, that they were lost. A huge hand swooped
down and lifted Walter Maltby into the air. Far above, Carter saw the
terrified Maltby being transferred carefully to the giant's other
hand. Now Wilmer Payton and Peggy Wilson were running blindly in two
directions, Peggy having been suddenly deserted by her protector. Twice
more the huge hand descended and the two also vanished into the vast
palm.

Apparently, the giant overlooked Fleming Carter who had stood quite
still during the whole time. But Carter made a swift decision based
more on charity than good sense. Somehow, he could not leave those
three to their fate. So he cried out and waved his arms. "Just a
moment! You overlooked me!"

The hand swooped down again as the giant saw him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Carter Fleming found himself resting comfortably with his face against
someone's back. Otherwise he was completely surrounded by soft flesh.
He realized they were being handled carefully however so he felt that
death, while definitely a threat had been at least postponed. He
wondered about the others, so close to him and yet so far away so far
as contact was concerned. He knew the terror that raced through their
minds and he pitied them....

The giant was continuing on, Carter decided, and he endured the ride as
best he could.

Then it terminated suddenly as Carter and the others were very gently
tumbled into a room. The room had no ceiling but this situation was
speedily remedied when a ceiling was lowered and set into place above
them. In the resulting darkness, Carter heard Peggy Wilson sobbing and
various unintelligible noises from Maltby and Payton. Then the room
began suddenly to move in haphazard directions.

Possibly this was finally the end, but Fleming Carter could not bring
himself to think so. Because even though the room pitched and tossed,
Carter felt it was being done rather gently by the giant hands.

Then it was over. The room settled down and remained on solid base.
Immediately there was a rending sound and a vast finger was thrust
through the wall just below ceiling level. The finger was withdrawn but
only to reappear when thrust through the other side.

It vanished again and the two resulting holes let in ample air and
light.

For a few moments Carter and the other three sat motionless, waiting.
Something was going on outside the room--the room itself moving
slightly--but the violent tossing was evidently over.

Peggy Wilson spoke first--or rather, sobbed. "Where are we?"

"I'm sure I don't know, my dear, but if I stood on the young man's
shoulders I could look out through one of those openings and perhaps
learn a little something."

"You want me to lift you?" Wilmer Payton said dully.

"That is the general idea," Carter replied in a gentle voice.

Wilmer braced himself against the wall and Carter clambered to his
shoulders and cautiously pushed his head through the opening. He
remained thus for quite a while--until Wilmer Payton began moving
restlessly. Then he clambered down.

They waited for him to speak but he said nothing. He stared at the hole
with a look of amazement upon his face as though, for the first time
the wonder of this strange transition had struck him forcibly. Then
he turned his eyes upon his three companions and there was a look in
his eyes that had not been there before; personal, yet impersonally
analytical. A hard look to read, so they could have no way of knowing
that he was trying to forecast how they would react to the fate that
awaited them.

"Well," Wilmer Payton demanded impatiently. "Did you see anything?"

"Yes. This is not a room. It is a huge box of some sort. It is bound
around on all sides by what looks like red carpeting of a width used
in hallways. I believe such carpetings are called runners. Attached to
the top is a large white sail although it appears to be made of paper
rather than canvas." He was watching them closely as he spoke.

"It took you all that time to see those things?" Walter Maltby asked a
trifle plaintively.

"No. There were other things."

At this point Peggy Wilson, coming out of her shock, began to
cry hysterically. "My God! What's to become of us? We'll all be
killed--murdered!"

"I don't think so," Carter said.

"Then we'll be held prisoner. That will be just as bad!"

"In a sense, you will be held prisoner--but I don't think it will be
bad. I think our jailer will probably be a rather kindly person who
will give us every consideration."

"How could a jailer do that?" Peggy Wilson moaned.

       *       *       *       *       *

Carter laid a hand upon her shoulder. "Consider, my dear. All your life
you have needed a mother. Now you will have the equivalent of one." He
turned to Walter Maltby. "And you. You have learned to function only as
a result of a dominating wife's promptings. Our jailer will fill that
role for you."

Lastly he regarded Wilmer Payton. "You, young man will be directed and
guided. You will not have need of the brain power with which you are
not equipped.

"All of you will be content. None will have any decisions to make--all
will be taken care of. Can you think of a more pleasant destiny?"

Walter Maltby said, "You're talking in circles. Talking but not saying
anything!"

Carter had turned away, smiling. "This is very strange. We were
transported to another plane, but not snatched up willy-nilly. There
was a pattern behind it. Three people admirably suited to their new
fate."

Wilmer Payton seized Fleming Carter by the arm and whirled him around.
"Will you please tell us what you're talking about?"

"Of course," Carter said quietly. "To speak the absolute truth, we are
in a box. The box is tied with a wide red ribbon. The thing I called
a sail is in reality a greeting card upon which certain words are
written; words not too difficult to decipher."

"Well, go on--what are the words."

"In English, they would read--'Happy Birthday, Darling.' You are
someone's birthday present."

Peggy's face was ashen. "You speak of _us_," she whispered. "How well
suited _we_ are for this fate. What about yourself?"

Carter smiled. "I expect this to be the most interesting period of my
life," he said. "You see, the present is for me. I picked it out."

And as they watched in stunned amazement, Carter began to grow.