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. “All we ever had will be buried back in there and all we’ll have left will be our bows and arrows and animal skins. We’ll be taking a one-way road back into the stone age, for ourselves and our children and their children.”

“They know that,” Schroeder said. “We both told them.”