Some molds help
prevent wounds from festering.... How is he?"

"Better, I think," Mathild murmured. "But he's still feverish. I don't
think we'll be able to move on today."

Honath was unsure whether to be pleased or disturbed. Certainly he was
far from anxious to leave the cave, where they seemed at least to be
reasonably comfortable. Possibly they would also be reasonably safe, for
the low-roofed hole almost surely still smelt of megatherium, and
intruders would recognize the smell--as the men from the attic world
could not--and keep their distance. They would have no way of knowing
that the cat had only been a cub and that it had vacated the premises,
though of course the odor would fade before long.

Yet it was important to move on, to cross the Great Range if possible,
and in the end to wind their way back to the world where they belonged.
And to win vindication, no matter how long it took. Even should it prove
relatively easy to survive in Hell--and there were few signs of that,
thus far--the only proper course was to fight until the attic world was
totally regained. After all, it would have been the easy and the
comfortable thing, back there at the very beginning, to have kept one's
incipient heresies to oneself and remained on comfortable terms with
one's neighbors. But Honath had spoken up, and so had the rest of them,
in their fashions.

It was the ancient internal battle between what Honath wanted to do, and
what he knew he ought to do. He had never heard of Kant and the
Categorical Imperative, but he knew well enough which side of his nature
would win in the long run. But it had been a cruel joke of heredity
which had fastened a sense of duty onto a lazy nature. It made even
small decisions egregiously painful.

But for the moment at least, the decision was out of his hands. Alaskon
was too sick to be moved. In addition, the strong beams of sunlight
which had been glaring in across the floor of the cave were dimming by
the instant, and there was a distant, premonitory growl of thunder.

"Then we'll stay here," he said. "It's going to rain again, and hard
this time. Once it's falling in earnest, I can go out and pick us some
fruit--it'll screen me even if anything is prowling around in it. And I
won't have to go as far as the stream for water, as long as the rain
keeps up."

The rain, as it turned out, kept up all day, in a growing downpour which
completely curtained the mouth of the cave by early aft