one and the future would soon be in
the hands of the Young Ones. They were the ninety unconquerables out of
what had been four thousand Rejects; the first generation of what would
be a new race.

It seemed to Lake that the years came and went ever faster as the Old
Ones dwindled in numbers at an accelerating rate. Anders had died in the
sixth year, his heart failing him one night as he worked patiently in
his crude little laboratory at carrying on the work started by Chiara to
find a cure for the Hell Fever. Barber, trying to develop a strain of
herbs that would grow in the lower elevation of the caves, was killed by
a unicorn as he worked in his test plot below the caves. Craig went
limping out one spring day on the eighth year to look at a new mineral a
hunter had found a mile from the caves. A sudden cold rain blew up,
chilling him before he could return, and he died of Hell Fever the same
day.

Schroeder was killed by prowlers the same year, dying with his back to a
tree and a bloody knife in his hand. It was the way he would have wanted
to go--once he had said to Lake:

"When my times comes I would rather it be against the prowlers. They
fight hard and kill quick and then they're through with you. They don't
tear you up after you're dead and slobber and gloat over the pieces, the
way the unicorns do."

The springs came a little earlier each year, the falls a little later,
and the observations showed the suns progressing steadily northward. But
the winters, though shorter, were seemingly as cold as ever. The long
summers reached such a degree of heat on the ninth year that Lake knew
they could endure no more than two or three years more of the increasing
heat.

Then, in the summer of the tenth year, the tilting of Ragnarok--the
apparent northward progress of the suns--stopped. They were in the
middle of what Craig had called Big Summer and they could endure
it--just barely. They would not have to leave the caves.

The suns started their drift southward. The observations were continued
and carefully recorded. Big Fall was coming and behind it would be Big
Winter.

Big Winter ... the threat of it worried Lake. How far to the south would
the suns go--how long would they stay? Would the time come when the
plateau would be buried under hundreds of feet of snow and the caves
enclosed in glacial ice?

There was no way he could ever know or even guess. Only those of the
future would ever know.

On the twelfth y