only
broken and burned-out odds and ends. It will take about fifty years--it
can't be helped."

Fifty years ... but that would bring the Gerns before Big Winter came
again. And there was the rapidly increasing chance that a Gern cruiser
would at any day intercept the first signals. They were already more
than halfway to Athena.

"Melt down the generator," he said. "Start making a bigger one. Tomorrow
men will go out after bauxite and cryolite and four of us will go up the
plateau to look for iron."

* * * * *

Lake selected Gene Taylor, Tony Chiara and Steve Schroeder to go with
him. They were well on their way by daylight the next morning, on the
shoulder of each of them a mocker which observed the activity and new
scenes with bright, interested eyes.

They traveled light, since they would have fresh meat all the way, and
carried herbs and corn only for the mockers. Once, generations before,
it had been necessary for men to eat herbs to prevent deficiency
diseases but now the deficiency diseases, like Hell Fever, were unknown
to them.

They carried no compasses since the radiations of the two suns
constantly created magnetic storms that caused compass needles to swing
as much as twenty degrees within an hour. Each of them carried a pair
of powerful binoculars, however; binoculars that had been diamond-carved
from the ivory-like black unicorn horn and set with lenses and prisms of
diamond-cut quartz.

The foremost bands of woods goats followed the advance of spring up the
plateau and they followed the woods goats. They could not go ahead of
the goats--the goats were already pressing close behind the melting of
the snow. No hills or ridges were seen as the weeks went by and it
seemed to Lake that they would walk forever across the endless rolling
floor of the plain.

Early summer came and they walked across a land that was green and
pleasantly cool at a time when the vegetation around the caves would be
burned brown and lifeless. The woods goats grew less in number then as
some of them stopped for the rest of the summer in their chosen
latitudes.

They continued on and at last they saw, far to the north, what seemed to
be an almost infinitesimal bulge on the horizon. They reached it two
days later; a land of rolling green hills, scarred here and there with
ragged outcroppings of rock, and a land that climbed slowly and steadily
higher as it went into the north.

They camped t