"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. "Yes, back to wherever men are beginning to band together and rebuild. South, I suppose. We might have to hunt for a long time, but we'd find it." There was a long silence. A curious look of sympathy came into the other man's face. "You've got the dreams," he told Thorn, making his croaking voice gentle. "I get them myself, so strong that I can make myself believe for a while that everything's the way it was. But it's just the dreams. Nobody's banding together. Nobody's going to rebuild civilization, unless"--his hand indicated something beyond the fire--"unless it's those devils out there." XI. He who lets fortunetellers shape his decisions, follows a chartless course. Artemidorus of Cilicia Alternate waves of guilt and almost unbearable excitement washed Clawly I as he hurried through the deserted corridors of the Blue Lorraine toward the office of Oktav. In grimmest seriousness he wondered whether his own fancied role of mad Pied Piper had not come true, whether his mind--and those of Firemoor and his other accomplices in the Martian hoax--were not already more than half usurped by diabolically mischievous mentalities whose only purpose, or pleasure, was to see a sane world reduced to chaos.