Danniels put his palm to the brick wall, scaling posters, and turned. The clean-cut young man smiled disarmingly. "I saw you in at Paul's. You'll never make it home under your own power. Better let me take you in my cab." Danniels knocked him out on his feet with a clean right cross. He blinked down at the boy. Self-preservation had become instinctive with him during his months as a wandering Jonah. Gnawing at his under lip, he studied the twisted way the supposed cabbie lay. If he really were.... Danniels patted the man down and brought something out of a hip pocket. He inspected the leather blackjack, weighing it critically in his hand. It slid out of his palm and thudded heavily on the cracked sidewalk. Danniels shrugged and grinned and moved unsteadily away. Towards the lake. The lake looked gray and winterish. There was no help for it. Danniels swung his leg over the rust-spotted railing and looked down to where the water lapped at crumbling bricks blotched with green. He peered out over the water. Only a few miles to the beach where he had left the car parked in the undergrowth. He would have preferred to use the little sub, but he could swim it if he had to. The surface below showed clearly in the globe lights. Danniels dived. Before he hit the water, he remembered that he should have taken off some of his clothes. When he parted the icy foam with his body, he knew he had committed suicide. And he realized that that had been what he intended to do all along. * * * * * There was something in the lake holding him, and it had a twelve-foot reach. It kept holding on to him under the surface of green ice and begging him for help. He couldn't breathe, and he couldn't help. Of the two, not being able to help seemed the worse. Not breathing wasn't so bad.... It hurt to breathe. It choked him. It was very unpleasant to breathe. He had much preferred not breathing to this.... Some time later, he opened his eyes. A small, round-faced man was staring down at him through slender-framed spectacles. For a moment he thought it was the man in whose face he had smashed the car door at the diner weeks before. But this man was different--among other things his glasses were gold, not silver. Yet he was also the same. Danniels knew the signs of the Wolf Pack. "How's your foot?" the little man asked in a surprisingly full-bodied voice. Danniels instantly became aware of a dull sub-pain sensation in the toes of his left foot. He looked over the crest of his chest and saw the foot, naked below the cuff of his wrinkled trousers. The three smaller toes were red. No, maroon. A red so dark it was almost black. Fainter streaks of red shot away from the toes, following the tendon. Danniels swallowed. "The foot doesn't _feel_ so bad, but I think it _is_." "We may have to operate," the small man said eagerly. "How did I get out of the lake?"