nificent salary to its general manager. Only five stories high, it was
squeezed in by low office buildings on either side like an ancient,
narrow-chested old man.

He handed his bags to a bell-hop and stepped into a spacious lobby. It
was decorated with fine furniture, thick carpets and throngs of
expensively undressed people.

The boy put his bags down before a remarkably long room-desk manned by
three white-suited clerks, but Sextus touched his arm. "Just take them
up to the manager's suite, please." The boy eyed him from carnation to
dusty shoes.

"Right off a park bench. It figures, though." He got a key from the desk
clerk, picked up the bags again and they started for the elevator
alcove.

Sextus' practiced eye vacuumed details from the lobby, the well-swept
carpets, freshly emptied sand-jars and the modern elevators. The place
seemed well-ordered and enjoying convention-magnitude business.

He started into the first elevator, but the operator warned, "To Wing
'A' only!" with such a question in his voice that Sextus looked back for
his bellman. That person, a sandy-haired stripling of some
five-feet-four, was trying to wave him on with his head.

"Not that one," he said impatiently. "Over here. Wing 'H'." Then Sextus
noticed there were five elevators on either side of the alcove. Each was
plainly marked with a letter, running from "A" through "J". This was a
new wrinkle. Elevators were a mode of strictly vertical transportation,
meaning, as a safe generality, that they travelled in parallel routes.
Why, then, differentiate for separate wings when they were all grouped
together in the first place?

And, incidentally, why _ten_ elevators for a 200 or so room hotel,
anyway?

They rode to the fourth floor in one-level leaps, stopping to unload
several guests on each floor. The upper floor hall was of modest length,
running fore and aft of the long, narrow building, as he had first sized
it up. Where were all the _wings_--the wings with the separate
elevators?

The boy let him into the light, airy apartment, dropped his bags in the
middle of the floor and started out abruptly. Sextus called him back.

"Yeah, what'll it be--Chief?" His voice was derisive.

"How many rooms do we have here, fellow?"

"Twenny-six hunnerd and all full for the season, so if you'll just leggo
of me--"

"Don't you enjoy your work here?"

"I detest it. Go ahead, fire me, chum. I'm lookin' for an excuse to
clear out."

"Very