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 brokenegg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the windowsticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorrylist. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that putthe roof on the city, as they say.
It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you'relucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.
But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd beenbuilding my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up mymind to do it—to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing thismorning—right after the egg yolk—and invited myself down to herplace. "Ten o'clock," she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of thephone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said teno'clock, she meant ten o'clock.
Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or aharridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have afixation 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 onewaited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some otherProject and had blown itself up.
Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for threeyears, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time,shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place fiveminutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd beenkilled. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me fromarriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually hadhappened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for fourdays.
And then the elevator didn't come.
Until then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters fromruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't verywell throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotmentand I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across thatgaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three storiesstraight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposalspeeches, trying to select the most effective one.
I had a Whimsical Approach: "Honey, I see there's a nice littleNon-P apartment available up on one seventy-three." And I had aRomantic Approach: "Darling, I can't live without you at the moment.Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my lifewith you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?" I even had aStraightforward Approach: "Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for atleast a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spendthat time with than you."
Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much lessto anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we