The next day when he returned to check on her, he found that her father, aided in his spiritual pilgrimage by a fifth of tequila, had fallen from the fire escape, and was now in a City hospital pending deportation. That was why she had not returned to their room, but remained on the front steps, freed from one hell but confident that another awaited her, which no doubt it did: she had no money, and would soon be evicted. William had bought her breakfast, stolen her a jacket and scarf, then brought her to his mansion of rats, fallen plaster, moldering walls, and warmed by a kerosene heater which only smoked dangerously toward morning. After waiting for three days to be put to work on the streets, she found to her amazement that he neither demanded she sell herself to others or perform sex tricks for him, and had not put a hand on her except in awkward comfort and reassurance. That night she gave herself to him, they made sweet and tender love; and he had done something even more inexplicable. He had cried, and promised to protect her with his life against the bitcheries of poverty and despair that he knew so well. >From that time on they were inseparable, living where they could, doing what they had to do, to survive. William was not, in fact, a junkie, though he came as close to the line without crossing it as any human being ever could. But for Kathy's sake he gave up hard drugs almost completely, finding that with her he no longer needed the barbiturates to sleep, injected amphetamines to feel alive in the night, or alcohol to keep the spiritual agony from killing him. Without the world's help, or even its consent, he pulled himself and his young woman up out of the gutter, and as she had done for him, gave them both a reason to live. But then Armageddon had come, oblivious to his, and everyone's, agonies and ecstasies, bitter triumphs and long defeats. The War, that had been building for centuries from Man's ignorance, and inability to overcome his instinct for violence, finally broke out. The satellite lasers had protected the City for a time, keeping the first wave of missiles off them, for perhaps an hour. But it didn't take a genius to know that New York's famous minutes were numbered. So through the crash of panic-stricken people, trying to evacuate or merely crying, 'Oh, my God!' while still others who had not seen or heard the broadcasts stood about in a daze and tried to understand what was happening, William took Kathy and sought out his friend, Dr. Wilhelm Krause---the black pessimist, partly insane. Looting, too, had broken out, but it was halfhearted, so that even the police, grim soldiers of the street, showed little inclination toward retaliatory violence. The City, for all its noise and seeming activity, was in a strangling state of shock.