He sat on the thick tangle of rope, one hand on his pile of hard-won cracker crumbs. They were too heavy to carry all the way down. He'd have to make a dozen trips at least, and that was out of the question. Unable to resist, he picked up a fist-thick crumb and munched on it contentedly while he thought about the problem of getting his food down.

At last, realizing there was only one way, he stood with a sigh and turned back to the box. Should use wax paper, he thought. Well, the hell with that; it was going to last only two days at the most.

With a straining of arm and back muscles, feet braced against the side of the box, he tore off a jagged piece of paper about the size of a small rug. This he dragged back to the edge of the refrigerator top and laid out flat. In the centre of it he arranged his crumbs into a cone-shaped pile, then wrapped them up until he had a tight, carefully sealed package about as high as his knees.

He lay on his stomach peering over the edge of the refrigerator. He was higher off the floor now than he'd been on the distant cliff that marked the boundary of the spider's territory. A long drop for his cargo. Well, they were already crumbs; it would be no loss if they became smaller crumbs. The package wasn't likely to open during the fall; that was all that mattered.

Briefly, despite the cold, he looked out over the cellar.

It certainly made a difference, being fed. The cellar had, for the moment anyway, lost its barren menace. It was a strange, cool land shimmering with rain blurred light, a kingdom of verticals and horizontals, of greys and blacks relieved only by the dusty colours of stored objects. A land of roars and rushings, of intermittent sounds that shook the air like many thunders. His land.

Far below he saw the giant woman looking up at him, still leaning on her rock, frozen for all time in her posture of calculated invitation.

Sighing, he pushed back and stood. No time to waste; it was too cold. He got behind his bundle and, stooping over, pushed the dead weight of it to the edge and shoved it over the brink with a nudge of his foot.

Momentarily on his stomach again, he watched the package's heavy fall, saw it bounce once on the floor, and heard the crunching noise as it came to rest. He smiled. It had held together.

Standing once more, he started around the top of the refrigerator to see if there were anything he might use. He found the newspaper.

It was folded and propped against the cylindrical coil ease. Its lettered faces were covered with dust and part of the sink's leaking had splashed water across it, blotting the letters and eating through the cheap paper. He saw the large letters OST and knew it was a copy of the New York Globe-Post, the paper that had done his story, at least as much of it as he had been able to endure.