He was getting up when the water hit him.

A startled cry lurched in his throat as the first drop landed on his head, exploding into spray. The second drop smashed across his face with an icy, blinding impact. The third bounced in crystalline fragments off his right shoulder.

With a gasp, he lunged backward across the box, tripping over a crumb. He pitched over onto the carpet of cold white mush, then shoved up quickly his robe coated with it, his hands caked with it. Across from him the drops kept crashing down in a torrent, filling the box with a leaping mist that covered him. He ran.

At the far end of the box he stopped and turned, looking dizzily at the huge drops splattering on the wax paper. He pressed a palm against his skull. It had been like getting hit with a cloth-wrapped sledge hammer.

"Oh, my God," he muttered hoarsely, sliding down the wax-paper wall until he was sitting in the mush, hands pressed to his head, eyes closed, tiny whimperings of pain in his throat.

He had eaten, and his sore throat felt much better. He had drunk the drops of water clinging to the wax paper. Now he was collecting a pile of crumbs.

First he had kicked an opening in the heavy wax paper, then squeezed in behind its rustling smoothness. After eating, he'd begun to carry dry crumbs out, piling them on the bottom of the box.

That done, he kicked and tore out handholds in the wax paper so he could climb back to the top. He made the ascent carrying one or two crumbs at a time, depending on their size. Up the wax-paper ladder, over the lip of the box, down the handholds he had formerly ripped in the paper wrapping of the box. He did that for an hour.

Then he squeezed his way behind the wax-paper lining, searching for any crumbs he might have missed. But he hadn't missed any except for one fragment the size of his little finger, which he picked up and chewed on as he finished his circuit of the box and emerged from the opening again.

He looked over the interior of the box once more, but there was nothing salvageable. He stood in the middle of the cracker ruins, hands on hips, shaking his head. At best, he'd got only two days' food out of all his work. Thursday he would be without any again.

He threw off the thought. He had enough concerns; he'd worry about it when Thursday came. He climbed out of the box.

It was a lot colder outside. He shivered with a hunching up of shoulders. Though he'd wrung out as much as possible, his robe was still wet from the splattering drops.