ew, who had stopped him with
desperate urgency on the street--and then left him cold.

But it didn't matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time since
Burckhardt had worked there, was out for the day--leaving Burckhardt
stuck with the quarterly tax returns.

What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchase
order for a twelve-cubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model,
self-defrosting, list price $625, with a ten per cent "courtesy"
discount--"Because of that _horrid_ affair this morning, Mr.
Burckhardt," she had said.

And he wasn't sure how he could explain it to his wife.

* * * * *

He needn't have worried. As he walked in the front door, his wife said
almost immediately, "I wonder if we can't afford a new freezer, dear.
There was a man here to apologize about that noise and--well, we got
to talking and--"

She had signed a purchase order, too.

It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way up
to bed. But the day wasn't done with him yet. At the head of the
stairs, the weakened spring in the electric light switch refused to
click at all. He snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course,
succeeded in jarring the tumbler out of its pins. The wires shorted
and every light in the house went out.

"Damn!" said Guy Burckhardt.

"Fuse?" His wife shrugged sleepily. "Let it go till the morning,
dear."

Burckhardt shook his head. "You go back to bed. I'll be right along."

It wasn't so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too
restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver,
stumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed
gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an
empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old
fuse.

When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone
of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.

He headed back to the steps, and stopped.

Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright.
He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!

"Son of a gun," said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly.
He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his
thumb and acquired an annoying cut--the edges were _sharp_.

The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a
hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots--everywhere was metal.

The whole