iency
disease but they provided virtually no nourishment to help fight the
heat and gravity. The stronger of the children lay wasted and listless
on their pallets while the ones not so strong died each day.

Each day thin and hollow-eyed mothers would come to plead with him to
save their children. "... it would take so little to save his life....
Please--before it's too late...."

But there was so little food left and the time was yet so long until
fall would bring relief from the famine that he could only answer each
of them with a grim and final "No."

And watch the last hope flicker and die in their eyes and watch them
turn away, to go and sit for the last hours beside their children.

Bemmon became increasingly irritable and complaining as the rationing
and heat made existence a misery; insisting that Lake and the others
were to blame for the food shortage, that their hunting efforts had been
bungling and faint-hearted. And he implied, without actually saying so,
that Lake and the others had forbidden him to go near the food chamber
because they did not want a competent, honest man to check up on what
they were doing.

There were six hundred and three of them the blazing afternoon when the
girl, Julia, could stand his constant, vindictive, fault-finding no
longer. Lake heard about it shortly afterward, the way she had turned on
Bemmon in a flare of temper she could control no longer and said:

"Whenever your mouth is still you can hear the children who are dying
today--but you don't care. All you can think of is yourself. You claim
Lake and the others were cowards--but you didn't dare hunt with them.
You keep insinuating that they're cheating us and eating more than we
are--but your belly is the only one that has any fat left on it----"

She never completed the sentence. Bemmon's face turned livid in sudden,
wild fury and he struck her, knocking her against the rock wall so hard
that she slumped unconscious to the ground.

"She's a liar!" he panted, glaring at the others. "She's a rotten liar
and anybody who repeats what she said will get what she got!"

When Lake learned of what had happened he did not send for Bemmon at
once. He wondered why Bemmon's reaction had been so quick and violent
and there seemed to be only one answer:

Bemmon's belly was still a little fat. There could be but one way he
could have kept it so.

He summoned Craig, Schroeder, Barber and Anders. They went to the
chamber where Be