This time the sniffle worked its way through the cushions of her bosom and exploded tinily at her nose.

Mary Ann Carthington crooned back sympathetically. “Shall I ring for the jumper, Mrs. Brucks?”

“I’m crazy?” Mrs. Brucks shot back at her angrily. “A little walk down the hall, I need that headache-maker? A little walk I can walk.”

She started for the door rapidly before the girl could summon the upsetting device which exploded you from one place to another and left you with your head swimming and your stomach splashing. But she paused for a moment and took a last wistful look at the room before leaving it. While it was by no means a cozy five-room apartment in the Bronx, she’d spent almost every minute of her two weeks in the future here, and for all of its peculiar furniture and oddly colored walls, she hated to leave it. At least here nothing rippled along the floor, nothing reached out from the walls; here was as much sanity as you could find in the twenty-fifth century.

Then she swallowed hard, said “Ah-h!” with regretful finality and closed the door behind her. She walked rapidly along the corridor, being careful to stay in the exact middle, the greatest distance possible from the bumpy writhing walls on either side.

At a point in the corridor where one purple wall flowed restlessly around a stable yellow square, she stopped. She put her mouth, fixed in a scowl of distaste, to the square. “Mr. Winthrop?” she inquired tentatively.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Mrs. Brucks!” the square boomed back at her. “Long time no see. Come right in, Mrs. Brucks.”