Chapter 3

Matt woke slowly, feeling his mind at great peace. As he became more awake, he realized why he felt so peaceful. Kathy was sitting in a semi-doze, her back against the landing-pad wall, her legs out in front of her. Matt's head was lying on the very top of her right thigh, the side of his head resting against her hip. Her left hand was idly caressing his head, from temple to ear, and her right hand was under his jacket and resting on his left breast. Matt sighed at how wonderfully secure it felt to have his left nipple cupped in the warmth of the palm of her hand.

"Oh... Hi, Matt! Welcome back! How are you feeling?" asked Kathy, continuing to hold his breast and gently pet his head.

"I'm feeling okay now, thanks. How long was I out?"

"About two hours. It's a little after 5 pm now. Are you sure you're okay?"

"More than okay. It feels wonderful to be held and petted like this. I want to apologize for fainting, leaving you alone. I've never done that before... I don't think I hurt myself when I fell though, lucky..."

"Oh, don't apologize. I was a few seconds from fainting myself. I was really losing it! I have never been gripped by hysteria like that! Your fainting actually saved me. I caught you, you didn't fall. Caring for you gave my mind something else to focus on. You turned peaceful, too, after I started to pet you. Just sleeping, I think, not really knocked out. I thought I would just let you rest... You have a very fit body. Lots of nice muscles! Do you work out a lot?"

"Yeah. I was on the varsity wrestling team in college. Still try to hit the gym daily. I was admiring you too, when you tried to run up the escalator. You were so graceful and beautiful!"

"Thank you... I like to swim and jog a lot..."

Matt sighed, and realized he really should get up. He rose and gently kissed Kathy's cheek, and then sat by her side, both looking up at the descending escalator before them. "Kathy, how high would you guess each switchback is, two stories?"

"I don't have to guess, I know. I have a 6-inch ruler in my handbag. Do you see the faint diamond pattern in the polished metal walls of the escalator, between the stairs and the moving handrail? The diamonds are exactly 8" vertical and 6" horizontal point to point. They provide a reference grid for counting distance. Each escalator leg is exactly a 30 foot vertical drop over a 20 foot horizontal run."

"Wait! 30 feet? Each story of the Morningstar Tower is 12 feet. That would make each leg of the escalators 2.5 stories. That's absurd!"

"Exactly! It's absurd! There are doors on each landing-pad! Where the hell do the doors lead to, the ones that should be opening into the floor supports between stories? It makes no sense! I've done some calculations, Matt, on the S curve. I realize now why I failed to climb it. The hypotenuse of the 30 ft by 20 ft right triangle is just over 36 ft. The sum of the x and y displacements is 50 ft. The length of the path of the S curve must be somewhere in between. My best guess is 44 ft. If it's exactly 44 ft and makes the trip in exactly 10 seconds, then the stairs are traveling at 4.4 ft/second, which is exactly 3 mph."

"Now Matt, take a close look at the most vertical part of the S curve. I think it's close to a 4 ft/sec vertical drop. That's eight feet in two seconds. Imagine being on a Stairmaster, and trying to climb at a floor-per-two-second speed. The human body just isn't designed to put out energy that fast. And you have to raise your body weight eight feet every two seconds just to hold your position. To make progress up, you would have to move even faster."

"Yeah..." Matt stood up and walked to the escalator. "There's less than an inch between the moving handrails and the base switchback wall. No hope of climbing there." Matt walked over to the locked door and looked at it closely for a while. "And here are another two weird things. The doorknob isn't just locked, it's a solid piece of steel flowing directly from the door. It will never turn. And the inscription BOTTOM FLOOR EXIT ONLY. It's absurd. It's engraved directly into the frame of the door. Nobody would post a sign like that, one so permanent. What if you wanted a different policy..."

"Take a look at the air vents, Matt, and the light panel."

"How the hell was this put together? There are no screws! The grid in front of the air vent flows directly out of the wall... How the hell was this put together? The light panel? It's the one thing that looks normal to me. What am I missing?"

"You can't tell by looking. The covering panel looks light and flimsy, but it's not. I tried to scratch it with a key, with all my might. Couldn't mark it at all."

Matt returned to sit by Kathy's side. "The biggest impossibility, of course, is that these escalators are totally silent. I feel no vibration at all from them. Totally impossible. How could we have been so stupid not to notice the impossibility? Not even notice that each drop was 2.5 stories?"

"Because they're the size we're used to seeing! Most escalators we see cover department store stories, where the vertical distance probably is close to 30 ft. And we also expect stairwells to open to every floor. Lost in our amazement of how beautiful these horrors first appeared, we both didn't see the disconnect... I'm really terrified. I don't want to pound on another door! I don't know who or what may open it..."

Matt put his arms around Kathy and kissed her. Kathy returned the kiss and the hug, they both sat silently with each other. "Well" said Kathy after awhile, "how would you like a bit of good news? Look at this!" Kathy opened her handbag and pulled out a full 1-liter bottle of spring water. "Thirsty?"

"Actually, yes. My throat feels really dry."

"Mine too. Just take a single swallow. Move it around your mouth before swallowing."