A voracious flea biting hard into a very sensitive portion of her body awakened Dr. Erica Arenstein. Grumbling curses and wishing for the umpteenth time that the nearby brook would thaw so that she might have herself a thorough wash and chide Merle Bowley and the other surviving Ganik bullies into doing likewise, she clawed at her crotch. Finally managing to dislodge the pesky parasite, she drew her legs up tight once more, snuggled against Bowley’s warm back and sought the sleep from which the pain of the fleabite had torn her.
As the wind howled around the rocks of the mountain, she reflected that she and the small party of survivors of the once-huge main bunch of Ganiks had been lucky as sin to chance across this smallish, low-ceilinged cave; although even the shortest of them could only enter and proceed about it at a crouch, while most of them were required to do so on all fours, those same circumstances made it—the fore part of it, anyway—possible to heat to somewhere barely above freezing with a trench fire and slate reflectors. With a higher roof and - consequently more space to absorb the heat, they all would likely have long since frozen to death of a frigid night, despite huddling together like a litter of puppies under the blankets and the ill-cured, smelly bearskins.
Their escape itself had been a very close thing, with the vanguard of the Kuhmbuhluhn force to be heard entering the outer section of the caverns even as she and the twenty-odd men clambered up the makeshift ladder in the narrow airshaft which those ancients who had enlarged and improved upon the natural caverns had bored through the living rock. They had emerged from their climb upon the north face of the mountain, well enough armed and supplied, but all afoot in a country that was now the undisputed domain of their enemies.
But the resourceful woods- and mountain-wise Ganiks had not stayed long afoot. By the time Erica had slyly guided them to the westernmost edge of the ruin of shattered rocks, splintered trees and shifted earth that once had been a plateau called the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn—a period of some four days and nights—all were mounted bareback on small mountain ponies.
Although the body that Erica inhabited was that of an Ahrmehnee woman in the mid-twenties—shapely, vibrant and rather toothsome—it was not the body in which her consciousness had been first born. Erica had often had to think very hard to recall just what that first husk that had contained her had looked like, for it had been dust for almost a millennium now.
She was one of a group of scientists which had, a bare two years before the man-made catastrophe which almost exterminated mankind and plunged most of the survivors back into barbarism and savagery, developed and perfected a device for the transference of minds between bodies. While radiation and plagues extirpated whole populations and races of mankind, while roving mobs of maddened, starving people scoured the face of the earth, Erica and the others had sealed themselves within the main complex of the J&R Kennedy Memorial Research Center—a large proportion of which had been built underground anyway—situated between Gainesville and Tallahassee, Florida, and carried on their various projects.
Via powerful transceivers, the group had kept abreast of the rampant insanities afoot across the rest of the continent and world as long as anyone continued to transmit. Blindly, the men and women listened to the destruction and death of city after city, country after country, as hunger and violence and disease brought civilization first to its knees, then to its death. After a short while, the steadily dwindling number of broadcasters were widely scattered and were located mostly in out-of-the-way places.
The majority of the residents of the Center were multilingual, and this fact was of great help in communication, for signals sometimes came, toward the last, in obscure 4an-guages and dialects.
For a few weeks, they were in daily contact with the captain of a Russian trawler in the North Atlantic, until lack of fuel and supplies and a near mutiny of his crew forced him to seek his home port; then they never heard from him again. Another Russian station, this one somewhere in the Caucasus region, stayed on the air sporadically for almost a year, broadcasting in Russ, Armenian, Farsi, Turkish and Georgian; from the natures of the final transmissions, the Center personnel assumed that one or more of the plagues had finally wiped out the distant facility.
This was what assuredly happened at their last U.S. contact—a military installation of so hush-hush a nature that they never knew its exact location. The last North American contact was with a field biologist in far-northern Canada; that one ceased suddenly in the midst of a sentence and could never again be raised.
Another such contact—a Japanese whaler and its factory ship, cruising in Antarctic waters—announced its intention of essaying a passage of the Straits of Magellan and never again broadcasted or acknowledged a transmission.
At the end of the second year, only three stations were still broadcasting on any sort of regular schedule—one in Uppington, Union of South Africa, one in southeastern Siberia and one in Queensland, Australia. By the end of the third year after the Center had been sealed, even these few were becoming unrelievedly silent.
After five years, the director, Dr. David Sternheimer, had unsealed the Center and sent out well-armed patrols into the surrounding areas. Their mission was not only to reconnoiter but, if possible, to bring back prisoners—young, healthy men and women, boys and girls, who had survived the plagues. The teams had met with notable success, and it was into these plague-proof younger bodies that Sternheimer and the rest had transferred their minds, driving out and away from the Center all of the confused or insane consciousnesses now in occupancy of much older bodies which mostly were dying of one or more of the plagues.
As time bore on, Center patrols brought in more and more of the scattered pockets of survivors to settle around the Center, engaging in farming and stock-breeding and unaware that they were, themselves, breeding stock of a sort… not at first, not in the beginning.
Slowly, as their strength of numbers waxed, as their shops and small manufactories repaired or refurbished garnered firearms, fabricated ammunition and explosives, the folk of the Center were able to vastly expand their holdings of land and to bring many more subjects under their suzerainty. Within less than two hundred years, Sternheimer and his fellows felt that they were strong enough to push on northward and eastward into the rich agricultural lands of what had been the state of Georgia.
And they had done so, not moving as rapidly as they might have done with their disciplined troops and superior arms and the coordination of long-distance communications, preferring rather to consolidate their gains as they advanced, which was the method proved through their earlier, Florida conquests.
Their way took time, a great deal of time. Cities, towns, hamlets, even the larger farms, when once conquered or taken over had to be carefully searched for still-usable artifacts, for books of any description, for the thousands of minutiae for want of which the Center industries might one day grind to a halt. Once found, these items must be sifted by experts, packed and sent back south along with the hostages. For their hostages, they took as first choices skilled craftsmen and/or persons capable of reading and writing. Sometimes they removed entire populations to Florida, replacing them with an equal number of folk whose preceding generations had all lived and died under the sway of the Center.
For this reason, they had not advanced far when the invaders—thousands of them—landed at points all along the Atlantic Seaboard, established strong beachheads and began to fight their way inland. Where possible, the aliens pro-ceeded up rivers, supported and supplied by their shallow-draft ships and boats.