Time and Again by Jack Finney, Paul Hecht

people, but in the next-to-last a dozen dressmaker's dummies stood ranged beside the instructor's desk. On the seat of one of the chairs lay a pile of white cardboard boxes that looked as though they might contain clothes.
    Again we were walking briskly along skylighted corridors past numbered doors and black-and-white nameplates: D.W. McELROY; AN. BURKE AND HELEN FRIEDMAN, ACCOUNTING; N.O. DEMPSTER; FILE ROOM B. Rube was spoken to by, and he replied to, nearly everyone we passed; the men were more often than not dressed informally, wearing sweaters, sport coats, sport shirts, although some wore suits and ties. The women and girls, some very nice-looking, dressed the way they usually do in offices. Two men in overalls edged past us, pushing a heavy wooden handcart, trundling a motor or piece of machinery of some sort, partly covered by a tarpaulin. Then Rube stopped at a door no different from any of the others except that it was labeled with only a number, no nameplate. He opened it, gesturing me in first.
    A man behind a small desk was on his feet before my foot crossed the threshold; it was a bare little anteroom, the desk and chair and nothing else in it. Rube said, "Morning, Fred," and the man said, "Morning, sir." He wore a green nylon zipper jacket, his shirt was open at the neck, and he had no insignia or weapon I could see, but I knew he was a guard: He had the shoulders, chest, neck, and wrists of a powerful man, and the only thing he was doing in here was reading a copy of Esquire.
    Set flush in the wall behind the desk was a steel door. It was knobless, and along one edge were three brass keyholes spaced a few inches apart. Rube brought out a key ring, selected a key, then walked around the desk, inserted the key in the topmost lock, and turned it. From his watch pocket he took a single key, pushed it into the middle keyhole, and turned. The guard stood waiting beside him, and now the guard inserted a key in the bottom keyhole, turned it and pulled the door open with the key. Rube removed his two keys and gestured me in through the open door before him. He followed, and the door swung solidly shut behind us. I heard the multiple click of the locks engaging, and we were standing in a space hardly larger than a big closet, dimly lighted by an overhead bulb in a wire cage. Then I saw that we were at the top of a circular metal staircase.
    Rube leading the way, we walked down for maybe ten feet, almost in darkness at first but descending into light; from the last stair we stepped onto a metal-grill floor. Except for the metal floor we were in a space very much like the one we had just come from. Along two walls ran a narrow unpainted wood shelf; on this lay a dozen pairs of shapeless boots made of inch-thick gray felt. They were awkward-looking things made to come up over the ankles, with buckles like galoshes. Rube said, "They pull over your shoes; find a pair that fits well enough so they won't drop off." He nodded at a metal door before us. "Once we go in, it has to be quiet, quiet, quiet all the way. No loud or sharp sounds, though we can talk softly; the sound seems to go up."
    I nodded; my pulse, I knew, wouldn't be normal now. What in the hell were we going to see? We fastened the buckles of our boots — they were clumsy and too warm — then Rube pushed open the door, a heavy swinging door without knob or lock, and we stepped out, the door swinging shut behind us without a squeak.
    We were standing on a catwalk, a narrower extension of the metal-grill floor on the other side of the door just behind us. Only a waist-high railing of steel rods that seemed too thin to me prevented our falling over the edge. My hand was gripping the top rail far more tightly than necessary, but I couldn't relax it and I didn't feel like walking on, because the catwalk under our feet was part of a vast spider web of metal-grill walks hanging in the air over an enormous block-square, five-story-deep well of space, the walks