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“Uh huh,” Studs muttered, watching the girl of team number three holding up the dead weight of her sleep-doped partner, and then he glanced from girl to girl, noticing how their buttocks were like pumped-up balloons.

“Let ‘em hang, Jackie,” someone called out as the male of number nineteen kept pulling up his falling knickers; the marathoner grinned sillily, marched with his knickers draping below his knees.

Studs watched a contestant in a brown sweater reading a newspaper as he walked. He thought, too, that the guys, poor bastards, must be pretty hard up. There they were, for twenty-four hours a day, so close to girls, touching against them, hanging onto them, holding them up, and not being able to get anything. And the girls didn’t look so decent or hard, and probably wouldn’t mind a little. That made it all the tougher.

“I wonder when something is going to happen?” he said to Catherine.

“I guess this is what happens,” she said.

He watched number two, a little fellow with thinning light hair walk with a steadily more pronounced limp. Then he turned his attention to number seven, a solid, broad young lad of almost six feet who was without a partner. He walked, asleep, wagging his head, floundered. His head and shoulders lurched forward. He swerved sidewise. His head jerked back. He staggered like a man hopelessly drunk. He fell against the box seats below Studs. Two contestants turned him around, shoved him slightly. He reeled to the center of the floor, swayed precariously, stumbled to his right, and stood listing. He crumpled, his body hitting the floor with a thud.

“I suppose that guy is finished,” Studs said to Catherine.

“He’s been that way for four days since his partner was forced out with swollen feet,” the fellow beside Studs said.

“The winners will earn their dough,” Studs said.

Amid cheers number seven arose, shaking his head, grinning. He marched in the dragging procession. The orchestra played a snappy tune. The contestants dragged themselves around and around and around.

III

A medium-sized slick, light-haired announcer swayed his girlish hips before the microphone in the center of the floor, and the contestants clustered around him.

“Well, folks, we’re now in our three hundred and thirty-seventh hour of the World’s Championship Super-Marathon contest at the Silver Eagle Ballroom, and as I look around at the boys and girls, I can see that there are no signs of let-up. Game to the core, fighters all, these eighteen couples and two solos are still sticking. And when I say sticking, I mean just that, sticking it out, hour after hour, day after day, battling to win the world’s marathon championship and the thousand-dollar prize which will go to the winning couple. The courage which we see here on the floor daily, even hourly, is something astounding, and it forces us to admire and pay tribute to all these game and courageous contestants out here on the dance floor of the Silver Eagle Ballroom where the World’s Championship Super Dance Marathon is now in its three hundred and sixty-seventh hour.

“Some of the boys here are wide awake, folks, and getting spryer and spryer every minute like the well-known Squirmy Stevens of team number four.”

He glanced at a squat fellow in a crimson jersey and tannish knickers, and the fellow’s dark, heavy-browed, oversized Neanderthal face broke into a grin.

“How about it, Squirmy?”

“Squirmy says he feels like he could eat a couple of beefsteaks and then sleep until next year,” the announcer said into the microphone, and Squirmy performed a brief, hopping dance, drawing applause and smiles when he clowned aside by sagging and bending his knees, creating the effect of deformed walking.

“Well, Squirmy, all you got to do is to strut your stuff longer than anyone else on the floor and you’ll get your wish. And when you do go on that sleep, sweet dreams.”

The contestant with the sore feet and thinning hair spoke to the announcer.

“Joe Hergel here says sleeping is natural