As the first light of dawn filtered into the dome, Toshima rose in bleary-eyed anxiety to awaken Vosnesensky.
“The people in the rover must be warned of this,” he muttered to himself. “There is no time to waste.”
THE LONG WINTER
The blue world was far luckier than its red companion. Closer to Father Sun, bigger, it held its deep oceans of water and protective mantle of air. Life flourished.
Not without interruption, however. Not without calamities. Great creatures took command of the seas, the land, even the air, only to die away completely into utter extinction. At times the hand of death swept the blue world so thoroughly that it was almost emptied of life completely.
Yet each time life struggled back, repopulating the blue world with new and different creatures.
Great sheets of ice marched outward from the poles; massive glaciers came grinding down from the mountains to cover the land with layers of ice miles thick. So much of the oceans’ waters was turned into ice that the level of the sea sank. The blue world turned white and glittering under the pale sun of winters that lasted a hundred thousand years or more.
The cold reached the red world, too.