An endless chain of worlds, one behind the other. A ring around the Sun.

He hadn't finished reading the story, he remembered; something had distracted him and he'd laid the paper down. Smoking the cigarette down to its final shred, he wished that he had read it all. For Aldridge might have been right. This might be the next world after the old, familiar Earth, the next link on an endless chain of earths.

He tried to puzzle out the logic of such a ring of worlds, but he gave it up, for he had no idea of why it should be so.

Say, then, that this was Earth No. Two, the next earth behind the original Earth which he had left behind. Say, then, that in topographical features the earths would resemble one another, not exactly like one another perhaps, but very close in their topography, with little differences here and there, each magnified in turn until probably a matter of ten earths back the change would become noticeable. But this was only the second earth and perhaps its features were but little changed, and on old Earth he had been somewhere in Illinois and this, he told himself, was the kind of land the ancient Illinois would have been.

As a boy of eight he had gone into a land where there had been a garden and a house in a grove of trees and maybe this was the very earth he had visited then. If that were so, the house might still be there. And in later years he had walked an enchanted valley and it, too, might have been this earth, and if that were true, then there was another Preston house on this very earth, exactly like the one which stood so proudly in the Earth of his childhood.

There was a chance, he told himself. A slim chance, but the only chance he had…

He'd head for the Preston house, toward the northwest, retracing on foot the many miles he had driven since leaving his boyhood home. He knew there was little reason to believe there'd be any Preston house, little reason to think anything other than that he was trapped in an empty, lonely world. But he shut his mind to reason, for this was the only hope he had.

He checked the sun and saw that it had climbed higher in the sky, and that meant that it was morning and not afternoon and by that he knew which was west, and that was all he needed.

He set off, striding down the hill, heading for the north-west, toward the one hope he had in all the world.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

WELL before dark, he picked a camping site, a grove through which ran a stream.

He took off his shirt and tied it to the stick to form a crude seine, then went down to a small pool in the creek and after some experimenting found how to use the seine to the best advantage. At the end of an hour, he had five good-sized fish.

He cleaned the fish with his pocket knife and lit the fire with a single match and congratulated himself upon his woodsmanship.

He cooked one of the fish and ate it. It was not an easy thing to eat, for he had no salt and the cooking was very far from expert — part of the fish was singed by flame, part of the rest was raw. But he was ravenous and it didn't taste too bad until the edge was off his hunger. After that it was a hard job choking down the rest, but he forced himself to do it, for he knew that he faced hard days ahead and to get through them he must keep his belly filled.

By this time darkness had fallen and he huddled beside the fire. He tried to think, but he was too tired for thinking. He caught himself dozing as he sat.

He slept, awoke to find the fire almost out and the night still dark, built up the fire with cold sweat breaking out on him. The fire was for protection as well as warmth and cooking and on the day's march he had seen not only wolves, but bear as well, and once a tawny shape had run through one of the groves as he passed through, moving too fast for him to make out what it was.

He woke again and dawn was in the sky. He built up the fire and cooked the rest of the fish. He ate one and then part of another, tucked the others, messy as they were, into his pocket. He would need food, he knew, throughout the day, and he did not want to waste the time to stop and make a fire.

He hunted around the grove and found a stout, straight stick, tested it with his weight and knew that it was sound. It would serve him for a walking staff and might be of some use as a club if he were called upon to defend himself. He checked his pockets to see that he was leaving nothing behind. He had his pocket knife and the matches and they were the important things. He wrapped the matches carefully in his handkerchief, then took off his undershirt and added it to the handkerchief. If he were caught in rain or fell in crossing a creek, the wrappings might help to keep the matches dry. And he needed those matches. He doubted very seriously that he could make fire with struck flint or by the Boy Scout bow and arrow method.

He was off before the sun was up, slogging northwestward, but going slower than he had gone the day before, for now he realized that it was not speed, but stamina that counted. To wear himself out in these first few days of hiking would be silly.

He lost some time making a wide detour in the afternoon around a fair-sized herd of buffalo. He camped that night in another grove, having stopped an hour or so earlier beside a stream to catch another supply of fish with his shirt-and-staff seine. In the grove he found a few bushes of dewberries, with some fruit still on them, so he had dessert as well as fish.

The sun came up and he moved on again. The sun descended.

And another day began and he went on. And another and another.

He caught fish. He found berries. He found a deer that had been freshly killed, no doubt by some animal that his appearance had scared off. Hacking away with his pocket knife, he cut as many ragged hunks of venison as he could carry. Even without salt, the meat was a welcome change from fish. He even learned to eat a little of it raw, hacking off a mouthful and chewing it methodically as he walked along. He had to discard the last of the meat when it got so high that be couldn't live with it.

He lost track of time. He had no idea how many miles he had covered, now how far he might be from the place where he was heading, nor even if he could find it at all.

His shoes broke open and he stuffed them with dried grass and bound them together with strips cut off his trouser legs.

One day he knelt to drink at a pool and in the glass-clear water saw a strange face staring back at him. With a shock he realized that it was his own face, that of a bearded man, ragged and dirty and with the lines of fatigue upon him.

The days came and went. He moved ahead, northwestward. He kept putting first one foot out and then the other, moving almost automatically. The sun burned him at first and the burn turned to a tan. He crossed a wide, deep river on a log. It took a long time to get across and once the log almost spun and spilled him, but he made it.

He kept going on. There was nothing else to do.

He walked through an empty land, with no sign of habitation, although it was a land that was well suited for human occupation. The soil was rich and the grass grew tall and thick and the trees, which sprang skyward from groves along the watercourses, were straight and towered high into the sky.

Then one day, just before sunset, he topped a rise and saw the land fall away beneath his feet, sweeping downward toward the far-off ribbon of a river that he thought he recognized.

But it was not the river which held his attention, but the flash of setting sun on metal, on a large area of metal far down the sloping land.

He put up his hand and shielded his eyes against the sunlight and tried to make out what it was, but it was too far far away and it shone too brightly.