"NEXT STOP, NOWHERE!"

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.