Lou had to get back on duty. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do except worry my way through this tangle. He headed back to Headquarters and I went over to the park and sat in the sun, warming myself and trying to think like a senile psychotic who would rather die of starvation than spend a few cents for food. I didn't get anywhere, naturally. There are too many ways of beating starvation, too many chances of being found before it's too late. And the fresh ink, over half a century old.... * * * * * I took to hanging around banks, hoping I'd see someone come in with an old bankbook that had fresh ink from 50 years before. Lou was some help there--he convinced the guards and tellers that I wasn't an old-looking guy casing the place for a gang, and even got the tellers to watch out for particularly dark ink in ancient bankbooks. I stuck at it for a month, although there were a few stage calls that didn't turn out right, and one radio and two TV parts, which did and kept me going. I was almost glad the stage parts hadn't been given to me; they'd have interrupted my outside work. After a month without a thing turning up at the banks, though, I went back to my two rooms in the theatrical hotel one night, tired and discouraged, and I found Lou there. I expected him to give me another talk on dropping the whole thing; he'd been doing that for a couple of weeks now, every time we got together. I felt too low to put up an argument. But Lou was holding back his excitement--acting like a cop, you know, instead of projecting his feelings--and he couldn't haul me out to his car as fast as he probably wanted me to go. "Been trying to get in touch with you all day, Mark. Some old guy was found wandering around, dazed and suffering from malnutrition, with $17,000 in cash inside the lining of his jacket." "_Alive?_" I asked, shocked right into eagerness again. "Just barely. They're trying intravenous feeding to pull him through. I don't think he'll make it." "For God's sake, let's get there before he conks out!" Lou raced me to the City Hospital and up to the ward. There was a scrawny old man in a bed, nothing but a papery skin stretched thin over a face like a skull and a body like a Halloween skeleton, shivering as if he was cold. I knew it wasn't the cold. The medics were injecting a heart stimulant into him and he was vibrating like a rattletrap car racing over a gravel road. "Who are you?" I practically yelled, grabbing his skinny arm. "What happened to you?" He went on shaking with his eyes closed and his mouth open. "Ah, hell!" I said, disgusted. "He's in a coma." "He might start talking," Lou told me. "I fixed it up so you can sit here and listen in case he does." "So I can listen to delirious ravings, you mean."