At last the roaring diminished, the drumming rain on the roof slackened off. Neither Tim nor Hawk budged an inch, though. Not until it became completely quiet out there.

“Do you think it’s over?” Tim whispered.

Hawk shook his head. “Maybe.”

They heard a bird chirping outside. Hawk scrambled to his feet and went to the window on the other side of the Prof’s bed. He eased the shutter open a crack, then flung it all the way back. Bright sunshine streamed into the room. Tim noticed a trickle of water that had leaked through the window and its shutter, dripping down the wall to make a puddle on the bare wooden floor.

The Prof seemed to be sleeping soundly, but as they tiptoed out of the bedroom, he opened one eye and said, “Check outside. See what damage it’s done.”

A big pine had fallen across the house’s low roof; that had been the crash they’d heard. The water pipe from the cistern was broken, but the cistern itself—dug into the ground—was unharmed except for a lot of leaves and debris that had been blown into it.

The next morning the Prof felt strong enough to get up, and he led the boys on a more detailed inspection tour. The solar panels were caked with dirt and leaves, but otherwise unhurt. The boys set to cleaning them while the Prof mended the broken water pipe.

By nightfall the damage had been repaired and the house was back to normal. But not the Prof. He moved slowly, painfully, his breathing was labored. He was sick, even Tim could see that.

“Back in the old days,” he said in a rasping whisper over the dinner table, “I’d go to the local clinic and get some pills to lower my blood pressure. Or an EGF injection to grow new arteries.” He shook his head sadly. “Now I can only sit around like an old man waiting to die.”

The boys couldn’t leave him, not in his weakened condition. Besides, the Prof said they’d be better off waiting until the spring tornado season was over.

“No guarantee you won’t run into a twister during the summer, of course,” he told them. “But it’s safer if you wait a bit.”

He taught them as much as he could about his computers and the electrical systems he’d rigged to power the house. Tim knew how to read some, so the Prof gave him books while he began to teach Hawk about reading and writing.

“The memory of the human race is in these books,” he said, almost every day. “What’s left of it, that is.”

The boys worked his little vegetable patch and picked berries and hunted down game while the Prof stayed at home, too weak to exert himself. He showed the boys how to use his high-powered bow and Tim bagged a young boar all by himself.

One morning well into the summertime, the Prof couldn’t get out of his bed. Tim saw that his face was gray and soaked in sweat, his breathing rapid and shallow. He seemed to be in great pain.

He looked up at the boys and tried to smile. “I guess I’m . . . going to become immortal . . . the old-fashioned way.”

Hawk swallowed hard and Tim could see he was fighting to hold back tears.

“Nothing you can do . . . for me,” the Prof said, his voice so weak that Tim had to bend over him to hear it.

“Just rest,” Tim said. “You rest up and you’ll get better.”

“Not likely.”

Neither boy knew what else to say, what else to do.

“I bequeath my island to you two,” the Prof whispered. “It’s all yours, boys.”

Hawk nodded.

“But you . . . you really ought to warn . . . your people,” he gasped, “about the ice . . .”

He closed his eyes. His labored breathing stopped.

That evening, after they had buried the Prof, Tim asked Hawk, “Do you think we oughtta go back and tell our folks?”

Hawk snapped, “No.”

“But the Prof said—”

“He was a crazy old man. We go back home and all we’ll get is a whippin’ for runnin’ away.”

“But we oughtta tell them,” Tim insisted. “Warn them.”

“About something that ain’t gonna happen until we’re grandfathers? Something that probably won’t happen at all?”

“But—”

“We got a good place here. The crazy old coot left it to us and we’d be fools to leave it.”

“What about Colorado?”

“We’ll get there next year. Or maybe the year after. And if we don’t like it there we can always come back here.”

For the first time in his life, Tim not only felt that Hawk was wrong, but he decided to do something about it.

“Okay,” he said. “You stay. I’m goin’ back.”

“You’re as crazy as he was!”

“I’ll come back here. I’m just goin’ to warn them and then I’ll come back.”

Hawk made a snorting noise. “If they leave any skin on your hide.”

For a week Tim patched up their boat and its ragged sail and filled it with provisions. The morning he was set to cast off, Hawk came to the pebbly beach with him.

“I guess this is good-bye for a while,” Tim said.

“Don’t be a dumbbell,” Hawk groused. “I’m goin’ with you.”

Tim felt a rush of joy. “You are?”

“You’d get yourself lost out there. Some sea monster would have you for lunch.”

“We can always come back here again,” Tim said, grunting, as they pushed the boat into the water.

“Yeah, sure.”

“We hafta warn them, Hawk. We just hafta.”

“Shut up and haul out the sail.”

For several days they sailed north and east, back along the way they had come. The weather was sultry, the sun blazing like molten iron out of a cloudless sky.