of course the little metal button was as immovable as a
mountain. So in the end, after convincing himself that the key could not
be inserted into the lock, he sprang toward the back.

The screen door was not latched, but it might as well have been the
steel door of a bank vault. Miller began to pound on it, shouting:

"Helen! Helen, are you in there? My God, dear, there's something wrong!
You've got to--"

The silence that flowed in again when his voice choked off was the dead
stillness of the tomb. He could hear his voice rustling through the
empty rooms, and at last it came back to him like a taunt: "_Helen!
Helen!_"

CHAPTER II

_Time Stands Still_

For Dave Miller, the world was now a planet of death on which he alone
lived and moved and spoke. Staggered, utterly beaten, he made no attempt
to break into his home. But he did stumble around to the kitchen window
and try to peer in, anxious to see if there was a body on the floor. The
room was in semi-darkness, however, and his straining eyes made out
nothing.

He returned to the front of the house, shambling like a somnambulist.
Seated on the porch steps, head in hands, he slipped into a hell of
regrets. He knew now that his suicide had been no hallucination. He was
dead, all right; and this must be hell or purgatory.

Bitterly he cursed his drinking, that had led him to such a mad thing as
suicide. Suicide! He--Dave Miller--a coward who had taken his own life!
Miller's whole being crawled with revulsion. If he just had the last
year to live over again, he thought fervently.

And yet, through it all, some inner strain kept trying to tell him he
was not dead. This was his own world, all right, and essentially
unchanged. What had happened to it was beyond the pale of mere
guesswork. But this one thing began to be clear: This was a world in
which change or motion of any kind was a foreigner.

* * * * *

Fire would not burn and smoke did not rise. Doors would not open,
liquids were solid. Miller's stubbing toe could not move a pebble, and a
blade of grass easily supported his weight without bending. In other
words, Miller began to understand, change had been stopped as surely as
if a master hand had put a finger on the world's balance wheel.

Miller's ramblings were terminated by the consciousness that he had an
acute headache. His mouth tasted, as Herman used to say after a big
night, as if an army had camped in it.