tion. The slow, sure evacuation of the passing decades
leaves wing-room in a man's head for stirring memories.

The withered man looked up again. The woman in the green uniform was
smiling at him through parted, almost twisted lips.

"I suppose that this time of year is the worst for you, isn't it?" she
asked sympathetically. The first requirement of a good geriatrician was
sympathy and understanding. She determined to try harder to understand.

The old man made no answer, only staring at her face. But his eyes were
blank--seeing, yet blind to all around him. She frowned for a moment as
she looked at him. The unnatural hairlessness of his body puzzled her,
making it difficult for her to understand him while the thought was in
her mind--that and the trouble she had getting through to him.

She stared at him as if to pierce the blankness of his gaze. Behind his
eyes lay the emptiness of age, the open wound of stifled years.

"I'll move you over to the window, Mr. Symmes," she told him in soothing
tones, her smile reappearing. "Then you can look out and see all the
people. Won't that be fun?"

Picking up a box from the table, she adjusted a dial. The chair in which
he was sitting rose slightly from the floor and positioned itself in
front of the window. The woman walked to the wall beside him and
corrected the visual index of the glass to match the weakness of the old
man's eyes.

"See, down there? Just look at them pushing about."

A rabble of faces swam on the glass in front of him, faces of unfamiliar
people, all of them unknown and unknowable to him.

Inside him the whisper of the wings mounted in pitch with a whining,
leathery sound. The images of dead faces came flying up, careening
across his mind, mingling and merging with the faces of the living. The
glass became an anomalous torrent of faces.

Dead faces....

* * * * *

Four walls around him, bare to the point of boredom. Through the barred
window, the throbbing throat of the crowd talked to him. His young body
took it in, his young mind accepted it, catalogued it and pushed it out
of consciousness. And for each individual voice there was an individual
face, staring up at his cell from the comparative safety of outside.
Young Oliver Symmes could not see the faces from where he sat, waiting,
but he could sense them.

There came a feel of hands on his shoulder; his reverie was interrupted.
Arms under his raised him to h