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flipped through a U-beam and a serpentine movement of light across the wall traced the elevator’s obedient rise.
    “You see, it wasn’t just that matter of prohibitory regulations,” Phy launched out hurriedly. “There were lots of other things that never did work out like your official reports indicated. Departmental budgets for instance. The reports showed, I know, that appropriations for Extraterrestrial Research were being regularly slashed. Actually, in your ten years of office, they increased tenfold. Of course, there was no way for you to know that. You couldn’t be all over the world at once and see each separate launching of supra-stratospheric rockets.”
    The moving light became stationary. A seam dilated. Carrsbury stepped into the elevator. He debated sending Hartman back. Poor babbling Phy was no menace. Still—
the cunning of the insane
. He decided against it, reached out and flipped the control beam at the sector which would bring them to the hundredth and top floor. The door snipped softly shut. The cage became a surging darkness in which floor numerals winked softly. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.
    “And then there was the Military Service. You had it sharply curtailed.”
    “Of course I did.” Sheer weariness stung Carrsbury into talk. “There’s only one country in the world. Obviously, the only military requirement is an adequate police force. To say nothing of the risks involved in putting weapons into the hands of the present world population.”
    “I know,” Phy’s answer came guiltily from the darkness. “Still, what’s happened is that, unknown to you, the Military Service has been increased in size, and recently four rocket squadrons have been added.”
    Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.
Humor him
. “Why?”
    “Well, you see we’ve found out that Earth is being reconnoitered.
    Maybe from Mars. Maybe hostile. Have to be prepared. We didn’t tell you… well, because we were afraid it might excite you.“
    The voice trailed off. Carrsbury shut his eyes. How long, he asked himself, how long? He realized with dull surprise that
in
the last hour people like Phy, endured for ten years, had become unutterably weary to him. For the moment even the thought of the conference over which he would soon be presiding, the conference that was to usher in a sane world, failed to stir him. Reaction to success? To the end of a ten years’ tension?
    “Do you know how many floors there are in this building?”
    Carrsbury was not immediately conscious of the new note in Phy’s voice, but he reacted to it.
    “One hundred,” he replied promptly.
    “Then,” asked Phy, “just where are we?”
    Carrsbury opened his eyes to the darkness. One hundred twenty-seven, blinked the floor numeral. One hundred twenty-eight. One hundred twenty-nine.
    Something cold dragged at Carrsbury’s stomach, pulled at his brain. He felt as if his mind were being slowly and irresistibly twisted. He thought of hidden dimensions, of unsuspected holes in space. Something remembered from elementary physics danced through his thoughts: If it were possible for an elevator to keep moving upward with uniform acceleration, no one inside an elevator could determine whether the effects they were experiencing were due to acceleration or to gravity—whether the elevator were standing motionless on some planet or shooting up at everincreasing velocity through free space.
    One hundred forty-one. One hundred forty-two.
    “Or as if you were rising through consciousness into an unsuspected realm of mentality lying above,” suggested Phy
in
his new voice, with its hint of gentle laughter.
    One hundred forty-six. One hundred forty-seven. It was slowing now. One hundred forty-nine. One hundred fifty. It had stopped.
    This was some trick. The thought was like cold water in Carrsbury’s face. Some cunning childish trick of Phy’s. An easy thing to hocus the numerals. Carrsbury groped irascibly about in the darkness, encountered the