Free Time of the Great Freeze by Robert Silverberg Page B

normally ruddy cheeks red with cold and redder still from embarrassment. As he disappeared into the tent, Jim heard him exclaim something about, "Wrong kind of foundation, that's the trouble!"
    Once again, they guarded themselves in shifts during the night, but no wolves came to harass them this time. Jim had been lucky the first night, drawing the dawn shift so that he could sleep most of the night without interruption, but the fates were against him tonight. He and Dom Hannon picked short straws and had to take the middle shift, which meant sleeping a few hours, then being awakened to stand sentry, and back to sleep-if possible-afterward.
    It was an uneventful night. Jim began to get the picture of the ice-world as being populated by sparse groups of nomads, tribes that gave each other plenty of elbowroom, and by roaming bands of animals whose numbers were not very great, since the land could not support them. The wolves probably fed on the moose, and the moose, Chet had told them, fed on the tiny green and red plants that miraculously grew right on the surface of the ice, and the hunters fed on the moose and most likely on the wolves as well. There did not seem to be any birds, and Jim found that disappointing. The idea that animals actually could fly had always seemed fantastic to him when he read about it in books dealing with life of the pre-Ice Age, and he had hoped to see birds in flight when he left New York. But there were none here, at least not so far as any of them had yet seen.
    * * *
    The next day was warm, almost summery compared with the last two. The sun was bright in the clear blue sky, and the temperature climbed well above freezing, so that most of yesterday's snow melted and turned to slush that went splashing outward as the runners of the sled cut through it. They made good time, traveling almost forty miles before they had to stop to recharge. In their three days so far, they had covered only eighty miles, and at that rate it would take ages to reach London. But the sleds were accumulating power; each sunny day, they increased the backlog, storing away more energy than they actually used for travel, so that in a few days more they would be able to use the sleds eight to ten hours at a stretch, on a bright day, and still have nearly as much power in storage as when they started.
    On the fourth morning, they spied a distant encampment of nomads, far out to the south-dark dots on the horizon, nothing more. It might have been a herd of moose or a pack of wolves, but that smoke could plainly be seen rising to the sky. So the nomads had fire-some of them, at least.
    "What do they use for fuel?" Jim asked. "There's no wood here, no coal…"
    "They must bum animal oils," Ted Callison suggested.
    It struck Jim as an eerie life these people must lead-without metal, without real fuel, without books, without plastics, without synthetics. Yet they survived. The glaciers had covered the United States for century upon century, and still the stubborn bands of huntsmen endured. Of course, as his father had said, they had probably not been in the area all along. During the worst part of the Ice Age, some two hundred years back, when the sun scarcely shone and the temperature rarely rose as high as zero, not even these hardy wanderers could have survived. They must have gone south and then wandered north fifty or a hundred years ago, perhaps forced into the colder regions by unfriendly peoples living in the relatively warm parts of the world.
    As they ventured onward during the day, Jim began to notice something odd happening to the glacier over which they were traveling. It appeared to be sloping, ever so gently, toward the east.
    He said nothing about it for a while, for he was not certain that he really saw what he thought he was seeing. Possibly it was only some trick of perspective, or some folly of his eyes, brought on by staring too intently at empty white wastelands. Still, the impression persisted, and as he