Roderick Wayne saw them thus as he walked home along the river. They were trotting rapidly along the other side. He hailed them, and they stopped, and the boy stared curiously, almost wonderingly. Wayne knew that attitude, though Alaric was only a grotesque outline against the fantastically red sky. He knew that his son was looking and looking at him, as if trying to focus, as if trying to remember who the—stranger—was. And the old pain lay deep in him, though he called out loudly enough: “Come on over, Al!”

Wayne had had a hard day’s work in the shop, and he was tired. Fixing machinery was a long jump down from teaching mathematics in Southvale College, but the whole world had fallen and men survived as best they could in its ruins. He was better off than most—couldn’t complain.

Of old he had been wont to stroll along the river that traversed the campus, each evening after classes, smoking his pipe and swinging his cane, thinking perhaps of what Karen would have for supper or of the stark impersonal beauty of the latest development in quantum mechanics—two topics not as unrelated as one might suppose. The quiet summer evenings were not to be spent in worry or petty plans for the next day, there was always too much time for that. He simply walked along in his loose-jointed way, breathing tobacco smoke and the cool still air, watching the tall old trees mirror themselves in the river or the molten gold and copper of sunset. There would be a few students on the broad smooth lawns who would hail him in a friendly way, for Bugsy Wayne was well liked; otherwise only the river and himself and the evening star.

But that was sixteen or more years ago, and his memories of that time were dim by now, blurred in a tidal wave of savage, resistless events. The brief, the incredible nightmare of a war that wiped out every important city in the world in a couple of months—its protracted aftermath of disease, starvation, battle, work, woe, and the twisting of human destiny—it covered those earlier experiences, distorted them like rocks seen through a flowing stream. Now the campus stood in ruinous desolation, cattle staked out in the long grass, crumbling empty buildings staring with blind eyes at the shards of civilization.

After the cities went, and the deliberately spread diseases and blights shattered the world’s culture into fratricidal savages fighting for the scraps, there was no more need of professors but a desperate shortage of mechanics and technicians. Southvale, by-passed by war, a college town in the agricultural Midwest, drew into itself a tight communistic dictatorship defending what it had with blood and death. It was cruel, that no-admission policy. There had been open battles with wandering starvelings. But the plagues were kept out, and they had saved enough food for most of them to survive even that first terrible winter after the war-strewn blights and insects had devoured the crops. But farm machinery had to be kept going. It had to be converted to horse, ox, and human power when gasoline gave out. So Wayne was assigned to the machine shop and, somewhat to his own surprise, turned out to be an excellent technician. His talents for robbing now useless tractors and automobiles in search of spare parts for the literally priceless food machines got his nickname changed to Cannibal, and he rose to general superintendent.