Mr. Frost peeled a banana and popped it whole into his mouth. It was the first time in five hundred years that a human being had tasted a banana. Exactly what the mutant overlords had against bananas was unclear. But the threat of summary execution was enough to keep humans from not only planting, selling or eating bananas, but also from asking questions about them. Thus no human knew that bananas -- alone in the plant kingdom -- had a neurotoxin that was deadly to the mutant overlords, but completely harmless to humans.

That was, until Mr. Frost came along. He came from a long line of banana planters. He was working on his banana plantation on the very day and at the very minute in which the icy comet carrying the mutant overlords hit the earth. The area directly under the impact zone was completely devastated. But Mr. Frost's plantation was a good hundred and fifty kilometers away from ground zero, in Central Jamaica. When the two thousand meter high avalanche buried him, his plantationand in fact, half of Jamaica, he barely had enough time to think what was happening.

That was five hundred years ago. The ice had preserved Mr. Frost and his bananas fabulously. And it had taken five hundred years for the one mile thick layer of ice to melt away under the now dimmed Jamaican sun. Had it not for the impact cloud that still circled the Earth, the sun would have melted the ice in five years. That it did not, was a mixed blessing. It allowed the mutant overlords to take over Earth -- somethingthey could not have done so easily if the comet had not created their home world's climate on earth. On the other hand, had the ice melted quickly, sea levels would have risen so high that, according to some calculations, only the Himalayas, the Rockies and the Andies would have been above sea level.