"Look . . . look . . . look . . ." with every breath, like a sobbing groan.
And Varley was a diminishing, shapeless mass on the floor.
"Oh, God, let me out of here!" screamed one of the business men.
But there was no way out. No doors opened onto the shaft here. All in the cage were doomed to stay and watch the spectacle that would haunt them till they died.
On the cage floor there was a blue-gray fedora hat, and a mound of blackened substance that was almost small enough to have been contained in it.
Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven. . . . The cage descended with its horrible, unchangeable slowness.
Twenty-five, twenty-four . . .
On the floor was Varley's hat. That was all.
The operator was last to go. Eleven, ten, the red numerals on the frosted glass panel read. Then his inert body joined the senseless forms of the others on the floor.
The cage hit the lobby level. Smoothly, marvelous mechanisms devised by man's ingenuity, the doors opened by themselves; opened, and revealed seven fainting figures—around a gray-blue fedora hat.
Three o'clock.
On the stage of the city's leading theater, the show, Burn Me Down, was in the middle of the first act of its matinee performance.
The show was a musical comedy, built around a famous comedian. His songs and dances and patter carried it. To see him, and him alone, the crowds came. Worth millions, shrewd, and at the same time as common as the least who saw him from the galleries, he was the idol of the stage.
He sat on a stool in the wings now, chin on fist, moodily watching the revue dance of twenty bare-legged girls billed as the world's most beautiful. His heavy black eyebrows were down in a straight line over eyes like ink-spots behind comedy horn-rimmed glasses. His slight, lithe body was tense.
"Your cue in a minute, Mr. Croy," warned the manager.
"Hell, don't you suppose I know it?" snapped the comedian.
Then his scowl disappeared for a moment. "Sorry."
The manager stared. Croy's good humor and even temper were proverbial in the theater. No one had ever seen him act like this before.
"Anything wrong?" he asked.
"Yeah, I don't feel so hot," said Croy, scowling again. "Rather, I feel too hot! Like I was burning up with a fever or something."
He passed a handkerchief over his forehead.
"And I feel like trouble's coming," he added. He took a rabbit's foot from his vest pocket and squeezed it. "Heavy trouble."
The manager bit his lip. Croy was the hit of the show—was the show.
"Knock off for the afternoon if you feel bad," he advised. "We'll have Charley do your stuff. We can get away with it at a matinee"
"And have the mob on your neck," interrupted Croy, without false modesty. "It's me they come to see. I'll go on with it, and have a rest afterward. . . ."
The twenty girls swept forward in a last pirouette and danced toward the wings. Croy stood up.
"It must be a fever," he muttered, mopping at his face again. "Never felt like this before, though."
The stage door attendant burst into the wings and ran toward the manager. The manager started to reprimand him
