hand on
the butt of his pistol, looking sternly at Dorita. If any of them tried
to dispute his claim, it would be she. But instead, she gave him the
nearest thing to a real smile that had crossed her face in years.

"You are Dard," she told him; "you lead us, now."

"But of course Dard leads! Hasn't he always led us?" Varnis wanted to
know. "Then what's all the argument about? And tomorrow he's going to
take us to Tareesh, and we'll have houses and ground-cars and aircraft
and gardens and lights, and all the lovely things we want. Aren't you,
Dard?"

"Yes, Varnis; I will take you all to Tareesh, to all the wonderful
things," Dard, son of Dard, promised, for such was the rule about
Varnis.

Then he looked down from the pass into the country beyond. There were
lower mountains, below, and foothills, and a wide blue valley, and,
beyond that, distant peaks reared jaggedly against the sky. He pointed
with his father's axe.

"We go down that way," he said.

* * * * *

So they went, down, and on, and on, and on. The last cartridge was
fired; the last sliver of Doorshan metal wore out or rusted away. By
then, however, they had learned to make chipped stone, and bone, and
reindeer-horn, serve their needs. Century after century, millennium
after millennium, they followed the game-herds from birth to death, and
birth replenished their numbers faster than death depleted. Bands grew
in numbers and split; young men rebelled against the rule of the old and
took their women and children elsewhere.

They hunted down the hairy Neanderthalers, and exterminated them
ruthlessly, the origin of their implacable hatred lost in legend. All
that they remembered, in the misty, confused, way that one remembers a
dream, was that there had once been a time of happiness and plenty, and
that there was a goal to which they would some day attain. They left the
mountains--were they the Caucasus? The Alps? The Pamirs?--and spread
outward, conquering as they went.

We find their bones, and their stone weapons, and their crude paintings,
in the caves of Cro-Magnon and Grimaldi and Altimira and Mas-d'Azil; the
deep layers of horse and reindeer and mammoth bones at their
feasting-place at Solutre. We wonder how and whence a race so like our
own came into a world of brutish sub-humans.

Just as we wonder, too, at the network of canals which radiate from the
polar caps of our sister planet, and speculate on the possib