"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.