The Ugly Little Boy - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,1

always feel the oncoming snow."

"I wonder if you really did."

"Am I a liar? Is that it?"

"You would have told us, if you knew snow was coming. You would have liked having a sleeping-rug over you as much as anyone else. Even more so, I think."

"So kill me," Silver Cloud said. "I admit everything. I failed to feel the snow on the way. Therefore I failed to give the warning and you woke up with snow on your face. It's a terrible sin. Call the Killing Society, and have them take me behind the hill and hit me twelve times with the ivory club. Do you think I'd care, She Who Knows? I've seen forty winters and a few more. I'm very old and very tired. If you'd like to run the tribe for a while, She Who Knows, I'd be happy to step aside and-"

"Please, Silver Cloud."

"It's true, isn't it? Day by day you grow ever more bright within with great wisdom, and I simply grow old. Take my place. Here. Here." He undid his bearskin mantle of office and thrust it brusquely in her face. "Go on, take it! And the feather cap, the ivory wand, and all the rest. We'll go down below and tell everybody. My time is over. You can be chieftain now. Here! The tribe is yours!"

"You're being foolish. And insincere as well. The day you'll give up the feather cap and the ivory wand is the day we find you cold and stiffen the ground in the morning, not a moment before." She pushed the mantle back at him. "Spare me your grand gestures. I don't have any desire to take your place, now or after you're dead, and you know it."

"Then why have you come up here to bother me about this miserable little snowfall?"

"Because it's the fifth week of summer." "So? We've already discussed this. Snow can come at any time of the year and you're perfectly well aware of that."

"I've looked at the record-sticks. We haven't had snow this late in the year since I was a girl."

"You looked at the record-sticks?" Silver Cloyd asked, taken aback. "This morning, you mean?"

"When else? I woke up, I saw the snow, and it frightened me. So I went to Keeps The Past and asked her to show me the sticks. We counted everything together. Seventeen years ago it snowed in the fifth week of summer. Not since. -Do you know what else happened that summer? Six of our people died in the rhinoceros hunt and four were killed in a stampede of mammoths. Ten deaths in a single summer."

"What are you telling me, She Who Knows?" "I'm not telling you anything. I'm asking you if you think this snow's an omen."

"I think this snow is snow. Nothing more." "Not that the Goddess may be angry with us?" "Ask the Goddess, not me. The Goddess doesn't speak much with me these days."

She Who Knows' mouth quirked in exasperation. "Be serious, Silver Cloud. What if this snow means that there's some sort of danger lying in wait for us here?"

"Look," he said, gesturing grandly toward the valley and the plains. "Do you see danger out there? I see a little snow, yes. Very little. And I also see the People awake and smiling, going about their business, starting forth on another good day. That's what I see, She Who Knows. If you see the anger of the Goddess, show me where it lies." Indeed everything seemed wonderfully peaceful to him down there. In the main encampment the women and girls were building the morning fire. Boys too young to hunt were wandering about nearby, rummaging through the light covering of snow to gather twigs and bits of withered sod to be used as fuel. Off to the left in the domain of the Mothers he saw the babies being given their morning meal-there was Milky Fountain, that inexhaustible woman, with an infant at each breast, and Deep Water was leading the toddlers in a circle game, pausing now to comfort a small boy-Skyfire Face, it was -who had fallen and barked his knee. Behind the place of the Mothers, the three Goddess Women had built a cairn of rocks to serve as a shrine to Her and were very busy at it: one of the priestesses setting out an offering of berries, another pouring onto the bloodstone the blood of the wolf that had been killed yesterday, a third kindling the day-fire. Over on the