crashing as he blundered around wildly in the dark.

"The shelter," he yelled hoarsely. "The shelter!"

She followed him unerringly in the dark, to the stairs, without stumbling. When she found him at the bottom of the stairs in the tunnel leading to the private air-raid shelter, he was whimpering and shivering violently.

"Two hours—two hours—two hours—" he whispered, over and over.

She could tell by the way he said it that it meant something else to him, not two hours, but something infinitely longer, unendurably longer, some kind of awful forever.

She helped him into the shelter and closed the thick door. She couldn't understand that kind of loneliness. She had stood in the black lonely closet for years. She had worked alone. She could understand the loneliness of being without love. But this fear of his—it had no meaning for her.

And as she looked at Kelsey cowering in the corner of the shelter, she realized something else—Kelsey himself had very little meaning. He was not what he had seemed. He was empty. He was hollow. He wasn't quite real. That was what his fear was; a fear of discovering he had nothing inside; a horror of the absence of something you could create inside yourself only by being alone.

Alice knew that now. Maybe she had always known it, but now she admitted it to herself.

The shelter was a small square room lined with concrete and lead and steel. There was a large supply of food, and a method of reprocessing the air. A person could live in it for a long time. Alice knew she could. She would have loved being there just with Kelsey, but Kelsey was empty, and there was no way he could give her back her love, nothing in him he could use to share loneliness with her.

"Two hours—"

"But I love you," she said weakly. "We have one another. We can talk. We can tell one another all about—"

"No Tevee," Kelsey whispered. "We can't get out! No one can get in! Two hours!"

The screaming was in the shelter walls. It quivered in the floor and ceiling and walls. But there was really no sound. Nothing could penetrate here; no sound or light. Kelsey looked around the small enclosure. "It may be longer—"

"It's only a warning," Alice said. "There may not be a real air-raid at all."

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