Sharon Froman understood his glance. She threw her blanket over the old man and said, "He'll be all right." She stretched stiffly. "The old woman's taking forever," she said. Arthur Chesbro said firmly, "Mrs. Chesbro will be the next to go downstairs. To find her clothes and put them on." Polly Chesbro grinned amiably. "This thing _is_ scratchy," she said. Groff leaned out and peered through the mist. All he could tell was that there was water below; how much of it the enigmatic surface did not say. Mrs. Goudeket puffed up the stairs, a big carton in her arms. "Cheese wafers," she announced. "Somebody open them." Polly glided to the door, sculptural in her improvised robe, and went down the stairs. McCue, with the appetite of youth and an athlete, tore open the corrugated cardboard and began gobbling wafers from the first carton he came to. "Manners, Dickie." Sharon Froman smiled. He swallowed his mouthful convulsively and eyed her. "Help yourself," he said coldly. "You're no cripple." "Why _Dickie_," she purred. "After all we've _been_ to each other!" Mrs. Goudeket looked up. "What's this?" she snapped. Sharon looked amused and said nothing. "I don't know what she's talking about," McCue said. The tone automatically indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced him for unlawful cohabitation. "I'll talk to you later," Mrs. Goudeket promised grimly. Dick McCue found the cheese wafers were ashes in his mouth. He chewed mechanically and wondered how he had managed to get simultaneously on all these s.o.b. lists when all he wanted was a little innocent fun for free-- He glanced at Sharon sullenly and saw she was chatting animatedly with Chesbro about a publicity campaign enlisting all media, the possibility of newspaper and magazine space and radio-TV time being donated if they played their cards right. "Tear their heartstrings out," she urged. "Get editorials; I've got some contacts in New York. You'd be The Man Who Saved the Valley, Mr. Chesbro." "Call me Arthur," he said. "We're going to be working closely together; I can see that. My prestige and your ideas--" Polly Chesbro came upstairs in her suit and raincoat; they were wrinkled and damply steaming out the smell of wool but they were no longer sopping. She was carrying her blanket; she draped it over the sighing form of the burgess. His breathing was almost a crow. "He'll never make it without penicillin fast," she commented, helped herself to a box of the wafers and began to eat methodically.