Here is how the original magazine blurb in the April 1954 issue of Imagination described the story: "George remembered riding an the El with the sad girl across from him. Then there was nothing-nothing but blackness, and a voice..."

THIS, he thought, is a crazy way to die.

"You're not dying, George. You're just beginning to live."

He started, tried to see her. I didn't say anything!

"Yes you did," she insisted, in that same low voice. "You said, 'This is a crazy way to die-"'

George tried to prop himself up on his elbows-but suddenly he realized that he had no elbows!

"Don't worry, George. Just rest. You'll be all right."

How-where am I?

"Just rest," she repeated, and then she was gone. George thought about her for a long time, before dropping off to sleep.

It was a cold night, and lonely, for George Jameson. He paced the floor of his apartment, back and forth, into the kitchen, into the hall, through the bedroom, back and forth.

"God!" he said, although there was no one there to hear him. "Two years! And where am I?"

Angrily, he reached for his coat. Maybe some fresh air would do him good. He buttoned the coat, fumbled for his overcoat.

Then he walked outdoors.

It was snowing. The clean, white, slippery kind of snow that stays for a while, then quickly turns into Chicago slush. Instinctively, he turned his collar up against the cold, and headed for the El, a sentimental relic of the 20th century just past.

The snow was coming down in big, lazy flakes that caught themselves in the wind and buffeted against his overcoat. Streetlights cast weird shadows across the white. George could hear the faint crunch-crunch his shoes made. Half-turning he looked at his tracks behind him.

"Damn white stuff!" He hunched his shoulders more, pulled his neck down into the folds of his collar. "Puts a pure clean blanket over the whole world-but all you have to do is walk on it and you can see the dirt underneath!"

George climbed the steps to the elevated, bought a ticket to anywhere. Then he sat down and waited for a train.

There was a girl waiting with him. She was pretty. George watched her until the train pulled in, wondering what she was doing wandering around Chicago at this time of night.

She got on the train with him, sat down in the seat across from him. The train whined into motion.

"Hello," she said after a while.

"Hello," he replied, startled by her voice. People on elevated trains don't go around saying "hello" to each other!

"Do you mind awfully much if I talk to you?"

"Go ahead." Nor, he thought, do they ask such questions of strange men.

"Do you ever get lonely here in Chicago?"

George smiled. "Sometimes," he said, "You lonely, kid?"

"Awfully. I like to talk to strangers. Then I don't feel quite so lonely."

"Oh"

She was quiet for a minute, her eyes friendly, but her trim body stiff against the city.

"Don't let the town get you down, kid." He was giving her advice!

She looked at him wistfully. "Maybe it's not so bad. Only the people who are fitted to live in a world like this keep on living. There are a lot of people who don't see it the way we do."

"Could be." She was a strange girl, he thought, to be talking this way. Young, pretty, and fed up already. "Why do you ride the El at night?" he asked.

She smiled. "I can meet people--other lonely people--who don't know me and don't want to pry. I can talk to people, and learn things. And then I never see them again. I can't talk to people in a crowd."

Through the windows he could see the lights of a sleeping city flash by like speeding fireflies. "Never thought of it that way," he said.

Suddenly, without warning, the hurtling elevated car leaped under him. He was thrown to the floor as the car jumped the tracks and twisted upon itself. George saw the lights go off and heard the girl scream--and then her scream was cut off, sharply, by the grinding, tearing crunch of impact.

Blackness.