would have done a lot to break the monotony, but he found that the thirteenth and fifteenth floors were inaccessible. The doors that led to them from the stairway wouldn't push in and there was no hand-grip to pull them outward. Evidently the hotel management used the method to prevent burglars from having an absurdly easy and unseen access to the apartments. Anyone could leave a floor and use the stairs to reach the hotel lobby, but anyone wishing to go from the lobby to a certain floor or from one floor to another was forced to use the elevator.

Cursing the bad luck, he sat for hours and wondered what he could do. He was restricted to succeeding but separate and identical time intervals, and that was also a physical restriction in effect: ten minutes wasn't long enough to leave that floor of the hotel.

He now thought of boredom as an ugly monster that lurked everywhere about him and waited ... waited to seize him with sharp teeth of inactivity....

Desperate for the sight of another person, he tried to enter the other apartments. There were five on that floor, but of them, only the one next to his own seemed to be occupied. When he knocked, there was no answer, but he pressed an ear against the door and heard the faint sound of running water. Whoever the occupant was, he or she was taking a shower and couldn't hear him no matter how hard he knocked.

It irritated him because the apartment was so close. If he could contact the person somehow, he or she could be reached at the beginning of each cycle and would be a tangible individual to help him fight boredom—not a voice on the telephone, an image on the TV screen or a tiny dot of a person fourteen floors below his window.

By phoning the hotel desk, he learned that a woman named Mary Jeffers rented apartment 1403, and he found her telephone number in the directory.

Dialing the number, he was relieved when she answered within a few minutes. The ringing of the phone was evidently loud enough to penetrate the noise of the shower while his knocking on the door hadn't been.

"Mary Jeffers?" he asked.

"Yes?"

"Mary, are you a college graduate?"

"Yes. Who is this? Why do you want to know?"

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