“If they didn’t,” Lake said, “we’re in for something.”
Craig was watching him, closely, thoughtfully. “Like the Ice Ages of Earth?” he asked. Lake nodded and Anders said, “I don’t understand.”
“Each year the north pole tilts toward the sun to give us summer and away from it to give us winter,” Lake said. “Which, of course, you know. But there can be still another kind of axial tilt. On Earth it occurs at intervals of thousands of years. The tilting that produces the summers and winters goes on as usual but as the centuries go by the summer tilt toward the sun grows less, the winter tilt away from it greater. The north pole leans farther and farther from the sun and ice sheets come down out of the north—an Ice Age. Then the north pole’s progression away from the sun stops and the ice sheets recede as it tilts back toward the sun.”
“I see,” Anders said. “And if the same thing is happening here, we’re going away from an ice age but at a rate thousands of times faster than on Earth.”
“I don’t know whether it’s Ragnarok’s tilt, alone, or if the orbits of the suns around each other add effects of their own over a period of years,” Lake said. “The Dunbar Expedition wasn’t here long enough to check up on anything like that.”
“It seemed to me it was hotter this summer than last,” Craig said. “Maybe only my imagination—but it won’t be imagination in a few years if the tilt toward the sun continues.”
“The time would come when we’d have to leave here,” Lake said. “We’d have to go north up the plateau each spring. There’s no timber there—nothing but grass and wind and thin air. We’d have to migrate south each fall.”
“Yes … migrate.” Anders’s face was old and weary in the harsh reflected light of the blue sun and his hair had turned almost white in the past year. “Only the young ones could ever adapt enough to go up the plateau to its north portion. The rest of us … but we haven’t many years, anyway. Ragnarok is for the young—and if they have to migrate back and forth like animals just to stay alive they will never have time to accomplish anything or be more than stone age nomads.”
“I wish we could know how long the Big Summer will be that we’re going into,” Craig said.
“And how long and cold the Big Winter, when Ragnarok tilts away from the sun. It wouldn’t change anything—but I’d like to know.”
“We’ll start making and recording daily observations,” Lake said. “Maybe the tilt will start back the other way before it’s too late.”
*
*
*
Fall seemed to come a little later that year. Craig went to the south as soon as the weather permitted but there were no minerals there; only the metal-barren hills dwindling in size until they became a prairie that sloped down and down toward the southern lowlands where all the creatures of Ragnarok spent the winter.
“I’ll try again to the north when spring comes,” Craig said. “Maybe that mountain on the plateau will have something.”
Winter came, and Elaine died in giving him a son. The loss of Elaine was an unexpected blow; hurting more than he would ever have thought possible.
But he had a son … and it was his responsibility to do whatever he could to insure the survival of his son and of the sons and daughters of all the others. His outlook altered and he began to think of the future, not in terms of years to come but in terms of generations to come. Someday one of the young ones would succeed him as leader but the young ones would have only childhood memories of Earth. He was the last leader who had known Earth and the civilization of Earth as a grown man. What he did while he was leader would incline the destiny of a new race.
He would have to do whatever was possible for him to do and he would have to begin at once. The years left to him could not be many.
He was not alone; others in the caves had the same thoughts he had regarding the future even though none of them had any plan for accomplishing what they spoke of. West, who had held degrees in philosophy on Earth, said to Lake one night as they sat together by the fire:
“Have you noticed the way the children listen when the talk turns to what used to be on Earth, what might have been on Athena, and what would be if only we could find a way to escape Ragnarok?”
“I’ve noticed,” he said.
