"There's no time to talk about that now. You come with me and get a little sleep, and then we'll have to put you to work."
I laughed. "All right. What kind of work?"
"Finding people who escaped the catastrophe and are now starving to death.
"No, not here, of course. We have plenty of supplies and are getting more all the time. This settlement is practically part of Upernavik. The town proper was too near the coast to be quite safe. All of us who could get away from the United States made for this point. The scientists agreed that there would be more chance of escaping here than any place else we could reach."
"How many got away?"
He shook his head. "No way of telling. People started in everything that could fly and came down all over. Most of them are done for. Those who succeeded in landing in out-of-the-way places are the ones we are trying to rescue now."
"How many reached here?"
"About three thousand."
"Everybody else in the United States dead?"
"Most of them, I'm afraid, though we don't know definitely yet. There are six hundred planes here, and we're using them to locate any people still living. That is, we're using about half of them for that. The others we have to use in getting fuel and supplies."