hat day, as the omen seemed to
prophesy.

He was the son of a line of leaders, born to a mother who had fought and
killed a unicorn. He had gone hungry to share what little he had with
the young of Ragnarok's most proud and savage species and Fenrir and
Sigyn would fight beside him on the day he led the forces of the
hell-world in the battle with the Gerns who thought they were gods.

Could the Gerns hope to have a leader to match?

* * * * *

PART 4

* * * * *

John Humbolt, leader, stood on the wide stockade wall and watched the
lowering sun touch the western horizon--far south of where it had set
when he was a child. Big Summer was over and now, in the year two
hundred, they were already three years into Big Fall. The Craigs had
been impassable with snow for five years and the country at the north
end of the plateau, where the iron had been found, had been buried under
never-melting snow and growing glaciers for twenty years.

There came the soft tinkling of ceramic bells as the herd of milk goats
came down off the hills. Two children were following and six prowlers
walked with them, to protect them from wild unicorns.

There were not many of the goats. Each year the winters were longer,
requiring the stocking of a larger supply of hay. The time would come
when the summers would be so short and the winters so long that they
could not keep goats at all. And by then, when Big Winter had closed in
on them, the summer seasons would be too short for the growing of the
orange corn. They would have nothing left but the hunting.

They had, he knew, reached and passed the zenith of the development of
their environment. From a low of forty-nine men, women and children in
dark caves they had risen to a town of six thousand. For a few years
they had had a way of life that was almost a civilization but the
inevitable decline was already under way. The years of frozen sterility
of Big Winter were coming and no amount of determination or ingenuity
could alter them. Six thousand would have to live by hunting--and one
hundred, in the first Big Winter, had found barely enough game.

They would have to migrate in one of two different ways: they could go
to the south as nomad hunters--or they could go to other, fairer, worlds
in ships they took from the Gerns.

The choice was very easy to make and they were almost ready.

In the workshop