"All we ever had will be buried back in there and all
we'll have left will be our bows and arrows and animal skins. We'll be
taking a one-way road back into the stone age, for ourselves and our
children and their children."

"They know that," Schroeder said. "We both told them."

He paused. They watched the sky to the south turn lighter. The northern
lights flamed unnoticed behind them as the pale halo of the invisible
sun slowly brightened to its maximum. Their faces were white with
near-freezing then and they turned to go back into the caves. "They had
made their decision," Schroeder went on. "I guess you and I did them an
injustice when we thought they had lost their determination, when we
thought they might want to hand their children a flint axe and say,
'Here--take this and let it be the symbol of all you are or all you will
ever be.'

"Their decision was unanimous--we'll stay for as long as it's possible
for us to survive here."

* * * * *

Howard Lake listened to Teacher Morgan West read from the diary of
Walter Humbolt, written during the terrible winter of thirty-five years
before:

_"Each morning the light to the south was brighter. On the seventh
morning we saw the sun--and it was not due until the eighth morning!

"It will be years before we can stop fighting the enclosure of the
glacier but we have reached and passed the dead of Big Winter. We have
reached the bottom and the only direction we can go in the future is
up._

"And so," West said, closing the book, "we are here in the caves tonight
because of the stubbornness of Humbolt and Schroeder and all the others.
Had they thought only of their own welfare, had they conceded defeat and
gone into the migratory way of life, we would be sitting beside grass
campfires somewhere to the south tonight, our way of life containing no
plans or aspirations greater than to follow the game back and forth
through the years.

"Now, let's go outside to finish tonight's lesson."

Teacher West led the way into the starlit night just outside the caves,
Howard Lake and the other children following him. West pointed to the
sky where the star group they called the Athena Constellation blazed
like a huge arrowhead high in the east.

"There," he said, "beyond the top of the arrowhead, is where we were
going when the Gerns stopped us a hundred and twenty years ago and left
us to die on Ragnarok. It's so far that Athena's sun can't be s