generator and waterwheel were
still there, frozen in a tomb of ice.

For three years the glacier had been growing before the caves and the
plateau's southern face had been buried under snow for ten years. Only a
few woods goats ever came as far north as the country south of the caves
and they stayed only during the brief period between the last snow of
spring and the first snow of fall. Their winter home was somewhere down
near the equator. What had been called the Southern Lowlands was a
frozen, lifeless waste.

Once they had thought about going to the valley in the chasm where the
mockers would be hibernating in their warm caves. But even if they could
have gone up the plateau and performed the incredible feat of crossing
the glacier-covered, blizzard-ripped Craigs, they would have found no
food in the mockers' valley--only a little corn the mockers had stored
away, which would soon have been exhausted.

There was no place for them to live but in the caves or as nomads
migrating with the animals. And if they migrated to the equator each
year they would have to leave behind them all the books and tools and
everything that might someday have given them a civilized way of life
and might someday have shown them how to escape from their prison.

He looked again to the south where the halo should be, thinking: _They
should have made their decision in there by now. I'm their leader--but I
can't force them to stay here against their will. I could only ask them
to consider what it would mean if we left here._

Snow creaked underfoot as he moved restlessly. He saw something lying
under the blanket of frost and went to it. It was an arrow that someone
had dropped. He picked it up, carefully, because the intense cold had
made the shaft as brittle as glass. It would regain its normal strength
when taken into the caves----

There was the sound of steps and Fred Schroeder came out of the tunnel,
dressed as he was dressed in bulky furs. Schroeder looked to the south
and said, "It seems to be starting to get a little lighter there."

He saw that it was; a small, faint paling of the black sky.

"They talked over what you and I told them," Schroeder said. "And about
how we've struggled to stay here this long and how, even if the sun
should stop drifting south this year, it will be years of ice and cold
at the caves before Big Spring comes."

"If we leave here the glacier will cover the caves and fill them with
ice," he said.