As his wildly clutching fingers scraped in vain against the smooth moss-slick sides of the well, he looked up with a last desperate hope and there silhouetted above him, like a fiend from hell, was the remorseless shape of the cat, gazing steadily downward with a glow of triumph in its yellow eyes. He started to scream again, but his fingers lost their frail grip on the mossy stones and he sank out of sight beneath the surface of green scum. THE DUMP Pulling aside the dingy kitchen curtain, she looked out. "It's starting again," she said tensely. To the north, a scant mile from the house, a great greasy billow of black smoke rolled skyward. Squealing sea gulls flapped over huge mounds of smouldering trash. Although she couldn't see them from the window, the woman knew that the reeking wasteland literally crawled with an army of voracious rats. Somehow, the omniscient, all-encompassing State had overlooked the dump. In its dynamic zeal to provide prefabs, food capsules and carefully edited newstapes for all citizens, the State may have bypassed the dump temporarily. There was a rumor to the effect, however, that the wasteland had been deliberately preserved as a sort of monstrous museum area, a "See-how-things-used-to-be" tourist attraction. In any event, in the very midst of marvels of efficiency, exactitude and unending impersonal energy, there it remained, a sour, rat-sluiced tract carefully shunned by the average State citizen. If people still existed in the dump itself, or even in its immediate environs, it was generally conceded that it was their own fault. The State always stood ready to house and feed the indigent. Broken springs groaned as the man arose from a cot. He shook his head. "Wish you'd relax, Lucy. Little smoke ain't hurtin' you none." She turned, eyes bright with anger. "_Little smoke!_" she repeated. "Smoke that seeps right through the shingles into the house! Smoke that gets in your lungs, in your hair, in your food, in your clothes--even in your skin! I tell you I've had enough of smoke and cinders and rats--and sea gulls! Sea gulls! Hah! Those dirty birds screeching like hungry cats all the time. They're dump gulls. Garbage gulls! I'd like to wring their filthy necks!" Slipping into a threadbare jacket, the man started toward the kitchen door. "You sure get worked up over nothin'. Sea gulls got to live, like everything else." The woman's voice rose in fury. "I suppose you'd say the rats have got to live too! You'd even defend the rats!" The man paused, his hand on the door knob. He looked aggrieved. "Why that ain't fair, Lucy. We fight the rats. You know that." "You fight them!" she mocked. "Well, let me tell you something! You're losing the fight! The rats are winning! They're taking over! There must be a million out there!"