Thorn studied him. He was smaller and moved with a limp, but beard, skin, and clothing were like Thorn's. The screwed-up face was not familiar. The darting, red-rimmed eyes below the jutting brows were not altogether sane. Thorn's presence seemed to put him on edge, to shake his emotions to the core. Every time he snapped shut his cracked, nervous lips, Thorn felt that he dammed up a torrent of babblingly eager talk.
He asked Thorn, "Where did you come from?"
"A cave in the ravine," Thorn replied, wondering how much to tell. "What's your story?"
The man looked at him queerly. He trembled. Then the cracked lips opened.
To Thorn, squatting there behind the crackling fence of flame, staring out into a night that was black except for the occasional red hint of eyes, it seemed that what he heard was what he had always known.
"My name was Darkington. I was a geology student. What saved me was that I was in the mountains when the power broke loose. I guess we all knew about the power, didn't we? It was in the air. We'd always known that some day someone would find out what it was behind gravity and electricity and magnetism"—he stumbled over the long words—"and the more they tried to hush it up, the surer we were that someone had found out. I guess they shouldn't have tried to hush it up. I guess intelligent creatures can't back out of their destiny like that.
"But anyway I was in the mountains when the power broke loose and ate up all the metal it could reach. Our party was laid up by the fumes, and two of them died. Afterwards some of us started out to try to contact other survivors, but the fumes were worse where we went and some more died and the rest broke up. I got in with a gang that was trying to make a go of farming just north of the volcano belt, but we made a lot of mistakes and then came the first of the long winters and finished off all our plans and made us realize that the weather had all gone different, what with the exposed raw rock taking all the carbon dioxide out of the air, and not enough green stuff left to replace it. After that I drifted around and took up with different scavenging gangs, but when the cannibalism started and the cats and dogs began to get really dangerous, I headed north and made it to the glaciers. Since then I've just hung on, like you see me."
He turned to Thorn. Already his voice was hoarse. Like nervous hunger, his eagerness to talk had not carried him far.
Thorn shook his head, peering beyond the fire. "There must be a way," he said slowly. "Admittedly it would be difficult and we'd risk our lives, but still there must be a way."
"A way?" the other asked blankly.