day. Nearly nothing, Lou, and hunger is a damned potent
instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I
can't see going without food altogether."

* * * * *

He took out a cigarette; he hadn't until then because he didn't want
to interrupt my concentration. "Maybe they get too weak to go out
after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables."

"It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now
really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you know how long it takes to die
of starvation?"

"That depends on age, health, amount of activity--"

"Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!"

"So it takes weeks. Where's the problem--if there is one?"

I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes--old men
seem to use pipes more than anything else, though maybe it'll be
different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see,
and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it
out.

"Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked.

"No. Did you?"

"In a way. All these cases you've been taking me on for the last
couple of years--I've tried to be them. But let's say it's possible to
die of starvation when you have thousands of dollars put away. Let's
say you don't think of scrounging off food stores or working out a way
of freeloading or hitting soup lines. Let's say you stay in your room
and slowly starve to death."

He slowly picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip and flicked it away,
his sharp black eyes poking holes in the situation I'd built up for
him. But he wasn't ready to say anything yet.

"There's charity," I went on, "relief--except for those who have their
dough in banks, where it can be checked on--old age pension,
panhandling, cadging off neighbors."

He said, "We know these cases are hermits. They don't make contact
with anybody."

"Even when they're starting to get real hungry?"

"You've got something, Mark, but that's the wrong tack," he said
thoughtfully. "The point is that _they_ don't have to make contact;
other people know them or about them. Somebody would check after a few
days or a week--the janitor, the landlord, someone in the house or the
neighborhood."

"So they'd be found before they died."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he agreed reluctantly. "They don't
generally have friends, and the relatives are usually so distant, they
hardly know these old people and whether they'r