Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (54 page)

He was still brooding on the injustice of it at five o'clock, when the
scrubwomen who were coming on duty bounced their aged joints into his
outer office to punch the time clock. "Which one of you," he asked, coming
at them suddenly with an inspiration, "which one of you takes care of the
thirteenth floor?"

"I do."

He drew the woman in the bright green, fringed shawl after him into his
private office. "When did you start cleaning the thirteenth floor, Mrs.
Ritter?"

"Why, the day the new tenants moved in."

"But before that …" He waited, watching her face anxiously.

She smiled, and several wrinkles changed their course. "Before that, Lord
love you, there was no tenants. Not on the thirteenth."

"So …," he prompted.

"So there was nothing to clean."

Blake shrugged and gave up. The scrubwoman started to walk away. He put
his hand on her shoulder and detained her. "What," he asked, staring at
her enviously, "is it like—the thirteenth floor?"

"Like the twelfth. And the tenth. Like any other floor."

"And everyone," he muttered to himself, "gets to go there. Everyone but
me."

He realized with annoyance that he'd spoken too loudly. And that the old
woman was staring at him with her head cocked in sympathy. "Maybe that's
because," she suggested softly, "you have no
reason
to be on the
thirteenth floor."

He was still standing there, absorbing the concept, when she and her
colleagues bumped and clattered their way upstairs with mops, brooms, and
metal pails.

There was a cough and the echo of a cough behind him. He turned. Mr. Tohu
and Mr. Bohu bowed. Actually, they seemed to fold and unfold.

"For the lobby directory," said the tall man, giving Blake a white
business card. "This is how we are to be listed."

G. TOHU & K. BOHU
Specialists in
Intangibles
For
the Trade

Blake struggled, licked his lips, fought his curiosity, and lost. "What
kind of intangibles?"

The tall man looked at the tiny man. The tiny man shrugged. "Soft ones,"
he said.

They walked out.

Blake was positive he saw the tall man pick up the tiny man a moment
before they stepped into the street. But he couldn't see what he did with
him. And then there was the tall man walking down the street all by
himself.

From that day on, Sydney Blake had a hobby. Trying to work out a good
reason for visiting the thirteenth floor. Unfortunately, there just wasn't
any
good
reason so long as the tenants created no nuisances and
paid their rent regularly.

Month in, month out, the tenants paid their rent regularly. And they
created no nuisances. Window washers went up to wash windows. Painters,
plasterers, and carpenters went up to decorate the offices on the
thirteenth floor. Delivery boys staggered up under huge loads of
stationery. Even what were obviously customers went up to the thirteenth
floor, a group of people curiously lacking characteristics in common: they
ranged from poor backward folk in their brogans to flashily dressed
bookmakers; an occasional group of dark-suited, well-tailored gentlemen
discussing interest rates and new bond issues in low, well-bred voices
would ask the elevator operator for Tohu & Bohu. Many, many people
went to the thirteenth floor.

Everyone, Sydney Blake began to think, but Sydney Blake. He'd tried
sneaking up on the thirteenth floor by way of the stairs. He had always
arrived on the fourteenth floor or the twelfth completely winded. Once or
twice, he'd tried stowing away on the elevator with G. Tohu & K. Bohu
themselves. But the car had not been able to find their floor while he was
in the elevator. And they had both turned around and smiled at the spot
where he was trying to stay hidden in the crowd so that he had gone out,
red-faced, and the earliest floor he could.

Once he'd even tried—vainly—to disguise himself as a building
inspector in search of a fire hazard …

Nothing worked. He just had no business on the thirteenth floor.

He thought about the problem day and night. His belly lost its slight
plumpness, his nails their manicure, his very trousers their crease.

And nobody else showed the slightest interest in the tenants of the
thirteenth floor.

Well, there
was
the day that Miss Kerstenberg looked up from her
typewriter. "Is that how they spell their names?" she asked. "T-O-H-U and
B-O-H-U? Funny."

"What's funny?" He pounced on her.

"Those names come from the Hebrew. I know because," she blushed well below
the neckline of her dress, "I teach in a Hebrew School Tuesday, Wednesday,
and Thursday nights. And my family is very religious, so I had a real
orthodox education. I think religion is a good thing, especially for a
girl—"

"
What about those names?
" He was almost dancing around her.

"Well, in the Hebrew Bible, before God created the Earth, the Earth was
tohu
oobohu.
The
oo
means
and.
And
tohu
and
bohu—
gee,
it's hard to translate."

"Try," he implored her. "
Try.
"

"Oh, for example, the usual English translation of
tohu oobohu
is
without form and void.
But
bohu
really means
empty
in
a lot of—"

"Foreigners," he chortled. "I knew they were foreigners. And up to no
good. With names like that."

"I don't agree with you, Mr. Blake," she said very stiffly. "I don't agree
with you at all about those names being no good. Not when they come from
the Hebrew." And she never showed him any friendliness again.

Two weeks later, Blake got a message from the home office of Wellington
Jimm & Sons, Inc., Real Estate, that almost shoved his reason off the
corner of the slippery throne it still occupied. Tohu & Bohu had given
notice. They were quitting the premises at the end of the month.

For a day or so, he walked around talking to himself. The elevator
operators reported hearing him say things like: "They're the most complete
foreigners there could be—they don't even belong in the physical
universe!" The scrubwomen shivered in their locker room as they told each
other of the mad, mad light in his eyes as he'd muttered, with enormous
gestures: "Of course—thirteenth floor. Where else do you think they
could stay, the nonexistent so-and-so's?
Hah!
" And once when Miss
Kerstenberg had caught him glaring at the water cooler and saying,
"They're trying to turn the clock back a couple of billion years and start
all over, I bet.
Filthy
fifth columnists!" she thought tremulously
of notifying the FBI, but decided against it. After all, she reasoned,
once the police start snooping around a place, you never can tell who
they'll send to jail.

And, besides, after a little while, Sydney Blake straightened out. He
began shaving every morning once more and the darkness left his nails. But
he was definitely not the crisp young realtor of yore. There was a
strange, skirling air of triumph about him almost all the time.

Came the last day of the month. All morning, load after load of furniture
had been carried downstairs and trucked away. As the last few packages
came down, Sydney Blake, a fresh flower in his buttonhole, walked up to
the elevator nearest his office and stepped inside.

"Thirteenth floor, if you please," he said clearly and resonantly.

The door slid shut. The elevator rose. It stopped on the thirteenth floor.

"Well, Mr. Blake," said the tall man. "This is a surprise. And what can we
do for you?"

"How do you do, Mr. Tohu?" Blake said to him. "Or is it Bohu?" He turned
to his tiny companion. "And you, Mr. Bohu—or, as the case may be,
Tohu—I hope you are well? Good."

He walked around the empty, airy offices for a little while and just
looked. Even the partitions had been taken down. The three of them were
alone, on the thirteenth floor.

"You have some business with us?" the tall man inquired.

"Of course he has business with us," the tiny man told him crossly. "He
has to have some sort of business with us. Only I wish he'd hurry up and
get it over, whatever it is."

Blake bowed. "Paragraph ten, Section three of your lease:
… the
tenant further agrees that such notice being duly given to the landlord,
an authorized representative of the landlord, such as the resident agent
if there is one on the property, shall have the privilege of examining the
premises before they are vacated by the tenant for the purpose of making
certain that they have been left in good order and condition by the tenant
…
"

"So that's your business," said the tall man thoughtfully.

"It had to be something like that," said the tiny man. "Well, young
fellow, you will please be quick about it."

Sydney Blake strolled about leisurely. Though he felt a prodigious
excitement, he had to admit that there was no apparent difference between
the thirteenth and any other floor. Except—Yes, except—

He ran to a window and looked down. He counted. Twelve floors. He looked
up and counted. Twelve floors. And with the floor he was on, that made
twenty-five. Yet the McGowan was a twenty-four-story building. Where did
that extra floor come from? And how did the building look from the outside
at this precise moment when his head was sticking out of a window on the
thirteenth floor?

He walked back in, staring shrewdly at G. Tohu and K. Bohu. They would
know.

They were standing near the elevator door that was open. An operator,
almost as impatient as the two men in black, said, "
Down? Down?
"

"Well, Mr. Blake," said the tall man. "Are the premises in good condition,
or are they not?"

"Oh, they're in good condition, all right," Blake told him. "But that's
not the point."

"Well,
we
don't care what the point is," said the tiny man to the
tall man. "Let's get out of here."

"Quite," said the tall man. He bent down and picked up his companion. He
folded him once backward and once forward. Then he rolled him up tightly
and shoved him in his right-hand overcoat pocket. He stepped backward into
the elevator. "Coming, Mr. Blake?"

"No, thank you," Blake said. "I've spent far too much time trying to get
up here to leave it this fast."

"Suit yourself," said the tall man. "Down," he told the elevator operator.

When he was all alone on the thirteenth floor, Sydney Blake expanded his
chest. It had taken so long! He walked over to the door of the staircase
that he'd tried to find so many times, and pulled on it. It was stuck.
Funny. He bent down and peered at it closely. It wasn't locked. Just
stuck. Have to get the repairman up to take care of it.

Never could tell. Might have an extra floor to rent in the old McGowan
from now on. Ought to be kept up.

How
did
the building look from the outside? He found himself near
another window and tried to look out. Something stopped him. The window
was open, yet he couldn't push his head past the sill. He went back to the
window he'd looked out of originally. Same difficulty.

And suddenly he understood.

He ran to the elevator and jabbed his fist against the button. He held it
there while his breathing went faster and faster. Through the
diamond-shaped windows on the doors, he could see elevators rising and
elevators descending. But they wouldn't stop on the thirteenth floor.

Because there no longer was a thirteenth floor. Never had been one, in
fact. Who ever heard of a thirteenth floor in the McGowan Building?
…

The End

© 1954 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
,
April 1954.

Frank M. Robinson

It was going to be a great party, Jeff thought, inspecting himself in the
bathroom mirror, even if it had been a pain in the ass to get ready for.
He'd had his sideburns professionally trimmed, but the mustache and beard
he'd had to do himself, shaping the beard carefully so it curled under
just
so
and working on the mustache literally hair by hair to get
it to lie right. But the effect was worth it—far
out,
but not
too far.

He smiled at the mirror and his image smiled back: long brown hair falling
to his shoulders, with the bangs over his forehead curling away just above
the eyebrows, blue eyes shining, teeth even and white, skin a smooth,
healthy tan—say what you wanted to about WASPs, man, but they
weren't hard to look at. He smiled again and the smile caught him and he
tried a few other expressions. The Sincere look, which could move
mountains or, at least, a chick from the living room into the bedroom; the
youthful Anything Is Possible If You Only Believe look; the Help Me! look,
for the older creeps; and, finally, the turn-off one of Irritated
Uninterest. Not bad, not bad at all.

One last smile and he shook his head in pleased amazement.
Damn,
he
was a good-looking bastard! God bless genetics or whatever.

He stepped back from the mirror and smoothed his togalike garment,
carefully draped over his left shoulder and caught just above the ankle.
Great, just great!
He'd picked it up from the Hare Krishna people,
but in another month or so it'd be the "in" thing,
his
thing. He
splashed a little lime lotion on his face, flashed a congratulatory look
at the mirror, then padded into the living room for a final check.

The stereo had been programmed for early Glenn Miller at the start—good
for mood music as well as a laugh—then an old Beatles tape, plus
some country rock around midnight, when everybody was stoned out of his
gourd on grass or wine, and to finish up with, some harpsichord tracks
when people wanted to make out.