as obscure to Ross. In fact,
he no longer cared, save that a hard rebel core deep inside him would
not let him give up as long as his legs could move and he had a scrap of
conscious will left in him. It was more difficult to walk now. He
skidded and went down twice more. Then, the last time he slipped, he
sledded past the man who led him, sliding down the slope of a
glass-slick slope. He lay at the foot, unable to get up. Through the
haze and deadening blanket of the cold he knew that he was being pulled
about, shaken, generally mishandled; but this time he could not respond.
Someone snapped open the rings about his wrists.

There was a call, echoing eerily across the ice. The fumbling about his
body changed to a tugging and once more he was sent rolling down the
slope. But the rope was now gone from his throat, and his arms were
free. This time when he brought up hard against an obstruction he was
not followed.

Ross's conscious mind--that portion of him that was Rossa, the
trader--was content to lie there, to yield to the lethargy born of the
frigid world about him. But the subconscious Ross Murdock of the Project
prodded at him. He had always had a certain cold hatred which could
crystalize and become a spur. Once it had been hatred of circumstances
and authority; now it became hatred for those who had led him into this
wilderness with the purpose, as he knew now, of leaving him to freeze
and die.

Ross pulled his hands under him. Though there was no feeling in them,
they obeyed his will clumsily. He levered himself up and looked around.
He lay in a narrow crevicelike cut, partly walled in by earth so frozen
as to resemble steel. Crusted over it in long streaks from above were
tongues of ice. To remain here was to serve his captors' purpose.

Ross inched his way to his feet. This opening, which was intended as his
grave, was not so deep as the men had thought it in their hurry to be
rid of him. He believed that he could climb out if he could make his
body answer to his determination.

Somehow Ross made that supreme effort and came again to the rutted path
from which they had tumbled him. Even if he could, there was no sense in
going along that rutted trail, for it led back to the ice-encased
building from which he had been brought. They had thrust him out to
die; they would not take him in.

But a road so well marked must have some goal, and in hopes that he
might find shelter at the other end, Ross turned to