Gordon didn’t say anything. Alex watched him a moment longer then turned his attention to the gauges. Gordon was nineteen. There had always been an Ice Age, so it did not surprise him that the glaciers had crept farther south. Alex thought he remembered a different world-—green, not white-—before his parents brought him upstairs. He wasn’t sure how much of it was genuine childhood memories and how much was movies or photographs in books. The habitats had a fair number of books on tape, brought up when they still got along with the Downers.

The green hills of earth, he thought. Now the glaciers-—not rivers of ice, but vast oceans of ice-—were spreading south at tens of miles a year. Hundreds of miles in some places. In the dictionary, “glacial” meant slow; but Ice Ages came on fast. Ten thousand years ago the glaciers had covered England and most of Europe in less than a century. They’d known that since the sixties . . . though no one had ever seen fit to revise his schoolbooks. But what did that matter? To a school kid a century was forever anyway.

As for Gordon . . . He glanced again at his copilot. Well, what the world is like in our lifetimes is what it should be like forever. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. It was funny to think of groundside environmentalists desperately struggling against Nature, trying to preserve forever the temporary conditions and mayfly species of a brief interglacial. Alex looked again through the cockpit windscreen and sighed.

“We could have stopped it,” he said abruptly.

“Eh?” Gordon gave him a puzzled glance.

“The Ice Age. Big orbiting solar mirrors. More microwave power stations. Sunlight is free. We could have beamed down enough power to stop the ice. Look what one little SUNSAT has done for Winnipeg.”

Do YOU know where AlGore is?