respecting what a human had done for one of them.

Schroeder thought of again trying to capture prowler pups--very young
ones--and decided it would be a stupid plan. Such an act would destroy
all that had been done toward winning the trust of the prowlers. It
would be better to wait, even though time was growing short, and find
some other way.

The fall of one hundred and sixty-three came and the suns were
noticeably moving south. That was the fall that his third child, a
girl, was born. She was named Julia, after the Julia of long ago, and
she was of the last generation that would be born in the caves.

Plans were already under way to build a town in the valley a mile from
the caves. The unicorn-proof stockade wall that would enclose it was
already under construction, being made of stone blocks. The houses would
be of diamond-sawed stone, thick-walled, with dead-air spaces between
the double walls to insulate against heat and cold. Tall, wide canopies
of lance tree poles and the palm-like medusabush leaves would be built
over all the houses to supply additional shade.

The woods goats were fully adapted that year and domesticated to such an
extent that they had no desire to migrate with the wild goats. There was
a small herd of them then, enough to supply a limited amount of milk,
cheese and wool.

The adaptation of the unicorns proceeded in the following years, but not
their domestication. It was their nature to be ill-tempered and
treacherous and only the threat of the spears in the hands of their
drivers forced them to work; work that they could have done easily had
they not diverted so much effort each day to trying to turn on their
masters and kill them. Each night they were put in a massive-walled
corral, for they were almost as dangerous as wild unicorns.

The slow, painstaking work on the transmitter continued while the suns
moved farther south each year. The move from the caves to the new town
was made in one hundred and seventy-nine, the year that Schroeder's wife
died.

His two sons were grown and married and Julia, at sixteen, was a woman
by Ragnarok standards; blue-eyed and black-haired as her mother, a
Craig, had been, and strikingly pretty in a wild, reckless way. She
married Will Humbolt that spring, leaving her father alone in the new
house in the new town.

Four months later she came to him to announce with pride and excitement:

"I'm going to have a baby in only six months! If it's a boy h