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bundling their belongings aboard. There was nowhere they could go until morning; the energy accumulators of the sleds were solar-powered, and had long since run down, so that a couple of hours of charging by daylight would be necessary before they could get going. And morning was still three or four hours away.
    Roy Veeder and Ted Callison pitched a tent, and some of them settled down to wait for sunrise. Jim was still too restless to sleep. He had had nothing but quick naps for the past two days, and fatigue made his red-rimmed eyes raw and foggy, but the wonder of the white new world burned the sleep from him, and left him throbbing with excitement, tense as a coiled spring.
    He walked away from the group, moving cautiously, his booted feet sinking half a foot or more into the loose, drifting snow before they struck the reassuring solidity of the glacier beneath. The cold air assailed his lungs, stung his nostrils. But it was a joy to breathe it. There was a freshness about it that dizzied him; it was as tangy and sweet as new wine. He halted in the snow, a hundred feet from his party, and looked out across the wasteland of ice.
    It was flat, a vast plateau. Once, he knew, there had been rolling farmland here, hills and valleys, tree-clad hummocks, winding brooks cutting through the fields. He had seen the pictures of the world as it had been, so that he had some idea of what all those abstract concepts meant, those empty words, "hill" and "valley," "tree" and "brook." For more than three hundred years no New Yorker had seen hill or valley, tree or brook.
    And none would now, Jim thought. The glacier, that great leveler, had drawn its white bulk over everything, smothering the world like a vast all-embracing beast. Here, in what had been the eastern part of the United States, the mile-thick ice sheet had created a uniform flatland. Jim knew that somewhere, thousands of miles to the west, the bare fangs of giant mountains stuck out high above the ice, but not here. The highest natural features in this part of the country were no more than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet high, and they were gone, buried without a trace, without causing so much as a bulge in the surface of the glacier.
    When the ice finally retreated, the raw, wounded land would be revealed. The glacier, sluggishly rolling down, had scraped topsoil and landmarks away, pushed them far to the south, deposited them in the terminal moraines, the great heaps of rubble that marked the southern border of the ice field. The land that one day would be freed from the glaciers grip would bear little resemblance to the thriving, populous zone of cities and towns that it had been, centuries ago.
    And there, to the east-there the continent sloped off to meet the sea, or what had been the sea before the world grew cold. Was the Atlantic frozen? Would they be able to make the three-thousand-mile crossing safely, on pack ice? They would know soon enough, Jim thought. If the sleds worked, it would be only a short journey to the shore zone.
    Footsteps crunched in the snow behind him. Jim turned.
    "Hello, Carl. Big, isn't it?"
    "Terrifying."
    "Wish you had stayed in New York?"
    "No," Carl said. "I'm glad I came."
    Jim said, "Do you always do things on the spur of the moment like that, Carl?"
    Carl chuckled. "Not really. It was just that-well, I'd been wondering for a long time: Was I doing anything important with my life? I mean, being a policeman. I hadn't taken any real training for any kind of profession, so I guess it was my own fault. But even though policemen are necessary in society, you don't get much feeling that you're contributing anything."
    "I don't know," Jim said. "Somebody's got to maintain order."
    "I suppose. But the job was boring me. I felt restless. And then, after my father died, I had no family left, no ties in New York. Things were hatching in me. And then suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. To get out, to join your group, to see the upper world."