A Cold Night for Crying

BY MILTON LESSER

It's much easier to believe than disbelieve, whether it's a truth or an untruth, when you have to. And when the brain and body are weak ...

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The snow sifted silently down, clouds of white confetti in the glare of the street lamps, mantling the streets with white, spilling softly from laden, wind-stirred branches, drifting with the wind and embanking the scars and stumps of buildings that remained of what had been the city.

Mr. Friedlander trudged across the wide, quiet avenues, his bare, balding head burrowed low in his tattered collar for warmth, chin against chest, wet feet numb and stinging with cold inside his torn overshoes which could not be replaced until next winter, and then only if the Karadi did not decrease the clothing ration still further.

All the way home, he conjured fantasies from the white, multi-shaped exhalations of his breath. Here it was the smoke of a good Havana-rolled cigar and there the warm hissing steam from a radiator valve and later the magic-carpet clouds from the funnel of an ocean liner that might take him to far, warm places the Karadi had not reached. Almost, he thought he heard the great sonorous drone of the ship's whistle, but it was the toot of an automobile horn as the sleek vehicle came skidding around a corner, almost running down Mr. Friedlander before it disappeared in the swirling flurries of snow. He thought if he followed the tire tracks before the snow could cover them he would discover in which section of the city these particular Karadi lived, but he shook his fist instead, knowing the gesture would bring, at worst, a reprimand.

In the dim hallway of his tenement, smelling pungently of cabbage and turnips—and from somewhere way in back the faint, unmistakable aroma of beef—Mr. Friedlander shook the snow from his coat and stamped his numb feet before he climbed the three dark flights to his apartment. At each landing he would pause and look with longing and resentment at the door of the unused elevator shaft, then shrug and wonder why the Karadi had denied man even this simple luxury.

On the floor below his own, Mr. Friedlander heard the unmistakable crackling sound of a short-wave radio 

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