Escape From Hell by Larry Niven

is this place?” Rosemary asked.
    I shook my head. “Never saw it before. There’s a sign.”
    SUBMIT DESIGN PROPOSALS INSIDE
    “Design proposals?” I said.
    “I know! Allen, it’s a contest. They have a contest for the design of the buildings to replace the World Trade Center. It’s supposed to be a memorial for all those who were killed, a monument, but the land’s valuable, and everyone wants to do something with it. They keep coming up with new ideas.”
    We went inside.
    Inside it looked much bigger, one big room with cubicles and a long hall through them to a door at the far end. Almost every cubicle had people in it, at least two, sometimes more. They looked through big stacks of blueprints. Every now and then everyone in the cubicle would vanish, poof! Just gone. When I tried to talk to people they ignored me, or shouted. “Can’t you see we’re busy! Go find another inspector!”
    We went down the central corridor toward the far door.
    People were coming in the door. They all carried blueprints and they’d rush down to find an empty cubicle to spread out their blueprints on the drafting tables. Others would come join them in the cubicle. They’d all shout at each other.
    I couldn’t stand this. I led Rosemary into one of the empty cubicles and waited. There was a stack of blueprints already on the drafting table. They looked to be for a skyscraper, but none of the drawings made any sense to me. “Can you read these things?” I asked Rosemary.
    “No.”
    “Me, neither. They don’t seem right, but I don’t know why.”
    Two men came in with more blueprints. They spread them out on top of ours and invited us to look.
    “What are we looking for?” I asked.
    “Hey, Mac, we don’t have much time! Look at this, will you?” He was a big guy, burly, dressed in work pants and a short–sleeved shirt and a hard hat, and he was all business. “Come on, come on, we have to find the flaws!”
    “Why are we doing this?” Rosemary asked.
    A woman came in. Short hair, knee–length skirt, stockings and heels, but everything was filthy. There was mud in her hair. “Quick, oh, please, quick!” She was frantically tracing out designs on the blueprint. The drawings were changing as she moved her finger over them! “Look, maybe this was it, maybe I got it, I think I have it!”
    “You sure?” The burly man sounded doubtful. He looked up at me. “Hey, Mac, what do you think?”
    “Sure, looks good,” I said, for no reason.
    “All right! We’ll go for this.”
    Everything changed. We were in another room. Bare steel, no furniture. There was a window looking out on Hell far below. We were near the top of a very tall building. Rosemary was gibbering. “Allen, where are we? What’s happening?”
    “What is happening?” I asked the burly man. “I’m Allen Carpenter. I —”
    “Hey, I read your books. Gus Bateman. You’re new here, then?”
    “Yes. Where are we?”
    “In the new World Trade Center. Maybe — maybe this one will stay!”
    “Maybe it will stay?”
    “You are new. I thought you were dead a long time ago.”
    “I was, but what are we talking about?”
    “If we get the right design it stays up, and we get to stay here and — oh shit!”
    Something snapped below us, a girder maybe. Floor and walls shuddered. Outer walls broke free and slid. Then it all turned transparent, and the floor started to fall away from us, and we were in midair, supported by nothing, and falling.
    Bateman screamed, “Somebody has to be in charge of choosing a design!” His arms, legs, head made a five–pointed star.
    I kept thinking I’d done this before, and wondering if I’d end up in a bottle the way I had the last time. It took forever to hit the ground.
    I wasn’t in a bottle. I just couldn’t move. Every bone was shattered. It hurt, as bad as it had hurt when I was blown to pieces. I knew I’d heal, but what I really wanted was to pass out.
    Rosemary was in a fetal position next to me. There