d in the time of the Third Empire. There is no record of
this planet during the Fourth, but by the beginning of the Fifth
Empire, less than a thousand years ago, things here were very much as
they are now."

"There are other worlds which have Ice-Fathers," Salvadro explained.
"They are all worlds having one pole or the other in open water,
surrounded by land. When the polar sea is warmed by water from the
tropics, snow falls on the lands around, and more falls in winter than
melts in summer, and so is an Ice-Father formed. Then, when the polar
sea is all frozen, no more snow falls, and the Ice-Father melts faster
than it grows, and finally vanishes. And then, when warm water comes
into the polar sea again, more snow falls, and it starts over again.
On a world like this, it takes fifteen or twenty thousand years from
one Ice-Father to the next."

"I never heard that there had been another Ice-Father, before this
one. But then, I only know the stories told by the old men, when I was
a boy. I suppose that was before the first people came in starships to
this world."

The two men of Dremna looked at one another oddly, and he wondered, as
he unfastened the brass catches on the box, if he had said something
foolish, and then he had the box open, and lifted out the Crown. He
was glad, now, that Salvadro had brought in the new lumicon, as he put
the box aside and set the Crown on the black bearskin. The golden
circlet and the four arches of gold above it were clean and bright,
and the jewels were splendid in the light. Salvadro and Dranigo were
looking at it wide-eyed. Vahr Farg's son was open-mouthed.

"Great Universe! Will you look at that diamond on the top!" Salvadro
was saying.

"That's not the work of any Galactic art-period," Dranigo declared.
"That thing goes back to the Pre-Interstellar Era." And for a while he
talked excitedly to Salvadro.

"Tell me, Keeper," Salvadro said at length, "how much do you know
about the Crown? Where did it come from; who made it; who were the
first Keepers?"

He shook his head. "I only know what my father told me, when I was a
boy. Now I am an old man, and some things I have forgotten. But my
father was Runch, Raud's son, who was the son of Yorn, the son of
Raud, the son of Runch." He went back six more generations, then
faltered and stopped. "Beyond that, the names have been lost. But I do
know that for a long time the Crown was in a city to the north of
here, and before that it