ith the others. Luckily he had been able to escape to the
drains. That was three years ago and now they had forgotten him.

His later excursions to the upper level of the city had been made under
cover of darkness--and he never ventured out unless his food supply
dwindled. Water was provided by rain during the wet-months--and by
bottled liquids during the dry.

He had built his one-room structure directly to the side of an overhead
grating--not close enough to risk their seeing it, but close enough for
light to seep in during the sunlight hours. He missed the warm feel of
open sun on his body almost as much as he missed the companionship of
others, but he could not think of risking himself above the drains by
day.

Sometimes he got insane thoughts. Sometimes, when the loneliness closed
in like an immense fist and he could no longer stand the sound of his
own voice, he would think of bringing one of them down with him, into
the drains. One at a time, they could be handled. Then he'd remember
their sharp savage eyes, their animal ferocity, and he would realize
that the idea was impossible. If one of their kind disappeared, suddenly
and without trace, others would certainly become suspicious, begin to
search for him--and it would all be over.

Lewis Stillman settled back into his pillow, pulling the blankets tight
about his body. He closed his eyes and tried not to listen to the
distant screams, pipings and reedy cries filtering down from the street
above his head.

Finally he slept.

* * * * *

He spent the afternoon with paper women. He lingered over the pages of
some yellowed fashion magazines, looking at all the beautifully
photographed models in their fine clothes. All slim and enchanting,
these page-women, with their cool enticing eyes and perfect smiles, all
grace and softness and glitter and swirled cloth. He touched their
images with gentle fingers, stroking the tawny paper hair, as though, by
some magic formula, he might imbue them with life. It was easy to
imagine that these women had never really lived at all--that they were
simply painted, in microscopic detail, by sly artists to give the
illusion of photos. He didn't like to think about these women and how
they died.

That evening Lewis Stillman watched the moon, round and high and yellow
in the night sky, and he thought of his father, and of the long hikes
through the moonlit Maine countryside, of hunting trips and wa