Space Prison

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  Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the United Statescopyright on this publication was renewed.

  PYRAMIDBOOKSF-77440c

  One of the truly _unusual_ novels of science-fiction--a vivid portrayalof the deadliest planet ever discovered!

  SPACE PRISON

  (original title: THE SURVIVORS)

  Tom Godwin

  AFTER TWO CENTURIES....

  The sound came swiftly nearer, rising in pitch and swelling in volume.Then it broke through the clouds, tall and black and beautifullydeadly--the Gern battle cruiser, come to seek them out and destroy them.

  Humbolt dropped inside the stockade, exulting. For two hundred years hispeople had been waiting for the chance to fight the mighty Gern Empire...

  ... with bows and arrows against blasters and bombs!

  Space Prison

  (original title: The Survivors)

  a science-fiction adventure by

  TOM GODWIN

  PYRAMID BOOKS NEW YORK

  To

  JOE AND BLANCHE KOLARIK,whose friendship and encouragement in the years gone by will never beforgotten.

  SPACE PRISON(original title: _The Survivors_)

  A PYRAMID BOOKpublished by arrangement with Gnome Press, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORYGnome Press edition published 1958Pyramid edition published February 1960Second printing: September 1962

  This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between any characterherein and any person, living or dead; any such resemblance is purelycoincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  _PYRAMID BOOKS are published by Pyramid Publications, Inc. 444 MadisonAvenue, New York 22, New York, U.S.A._

  * * * * *

  PART 1

  * * * * *

  For seven weeks the _Constellation_ had been plunging through hyperspacewith her eight thousand colonists; fleeing like a hunted thing with hercommunicators silenced and her drives moaning and thundering. Up in thecontrol room, Irene had been told, the needles of the dials dancedagainst the red danger lines day and night.

  She lay in bed and listened to the muffled, ceaseless roar of the drivesand felt the singing vibration of the hull. _We should be almost safe bynow_, she thought. _Athena is only forty days away._

  Thinking of the new life awaiting them all made her too restless to liestill any longer. She got up, to sit on the edge of the bed and switchon the light. Dale was gone--he had been summoned to adjust one of themachines in the ship's X-ray room--and Billy was asleep, nothing showingof him above the covers but a crop of brown hair and the furry nose ofhis ragged teddy bear.

  She reached out to straighten the covers, gently, so as not to awakenhim. It happened then, the thing they had all feared.

  From the stern of the ship came a jarring, deafening explosion. The shiplurched violently, girders screamed, and the light flicked out.

  In the darkness she heard a rapid-fire _thunk-thunk-thunk_ as theautomatic guard system slid inter-compartment doors shut againstsections of the ship suddenly airless. The doors were still thuddingshut when another explosion came, from toward the bow. Then there wassilence; a feeling of utter quiet and motionlessness.

  The fingers of fear enclosed her and her mind said to her, like thecold, unpassionate voice of a stranger: _The Gerns have found us._

  The light came on again, a feeble glow, and there was the soft, muffledsound of questioning voices in the other compartments. She dressed, herfingers shaking and clumsy, wishing that Dale would come to reassureher; to tell her that nothing really serious had happened, that it hadnot been the Gerns.

  It was very still in the little compartment--strangely so. She hadfinished dressing when she realized the reason: the air circulationsystem had stopped working.

  That meant the power failure was so great that the air regenerators,themselves, were dead. And there were eight thousand people on the_Constellation_ who would have to have air to live....

  The _Attention_ buzzer sounded shrilly from the public address systemspeakers that were scattered down the ship's corridors. A voice sherecognized as that of Lieutenant Commander Lake spoke:

  "War was declared upon Earth by the Gern Empire ten days ago. Two Gerncruisers have attacked us and their blasters have destroyed the sternand bow of the ship. We are without a drive and without power but for afew emergency batteries. I am the _Constellation_'s only survivingofficer and the Gern commander is boarding us to give me the surrenderterms.

  "None of you will leave your compartments until ordered to do so.Wherever you may be, remain there. This is necessary to avoid confusionand to have as many as possible in known locations for futureinstructions. I repeat: you will not leave your compartments."

  The speaker cut off. She stood without moving and heard again the words:_I am the _Constellation_'s only surviving officer...._

  The Gerns had killed her father.

  He had been second-in-command of the Dunbar expedition that haddiscovered the world of Athena and his knowledge of Athena was valuableto the colonization plans. He had been quartered among the ship'sofficers--and the Gern blast had destroyed that section of the ship.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed again and tried to reorient herself;to accept the fact that her life and the lives of all the others hadabruptly, irrevocably, been changed.

  The Athena Colonization Plan was ended. They had known such a thingmight happen--that was why the _Constellation_ had been made ready forthe voyage in secret and had waited for months for the chance to slipthrough the ring of Gern spy ships; that was why she had raced at fullspeed, with her communicators silenced so there would be no radiationsfor the Gerns to find her by. Only forty days more would have broughtthem to the green and virgin world of Athena, four hundred light-yearsbeyond the outermost boundary of the Gern Empire. There they should havebeen safe from Gern detection for many years to come; for long enough tobuild planetary defenses against attack. And there they would have usedAthena's rich resources to make ships and weapons to defendmineral-depleted Earth against the inexorably increasing inclosure ofthe mighty, coldly calculating colossus that was the Gern Empire.

  Success or failure of the Athena Plan had meant ultimate life or deathfor Earth. They had taken every precaution possible but the Gern spysystem had somehow learned of Athena and the _Constellation_. Now, thecold war was no longer cold and the Plan was dust....

  * * * * *

  Billy sighed and stirred in the little-boy sleep that had not beenbroken by the blasts that had altered the lives of eight thousand peopleand the fate of a world.

  She shook his shoulder and said, "Billy."

  He raised up, so small and young to her eyes that the question in hermind was like an anguished prayer: _Dear God--what do Gerns do tofive-year-old boys?_

  He saw her face, and the dim light, and the sleepiness was suddenly gonefrom him. "What's wrong, Mama? And why are you scared?"

  There was no reason to lie to him.

  "The Gerns found us and stopped us."

  "Oh," he said. In his manner was the grave thoughtfulness of a boy twicehis age, as there always was. "Will they--will they kill us?"

  "Get dressed, honey," she said. "Hurry, so we'll be ready when they letDaddy come back to tell us what to do."

  * * * * *

  They were both ready when the _Attention_ buzzer sounded again in thecorridors. Lake spoke, his tone grim and bitter:

  "There is no power for the air regenerators and within twenty hours wewill start smot
hering to death. Under these circumstances I could not doother than accept the survival terms the Gern commander offered us.

  "He will speak to you now and you will obey his orders without protest.Death is the only alternative."

  Then the voice of the Gern commander came, quick and harsh and brittle:

  "This section of space, together with planet Athena, is an extension ofthe Gern Empire. This ship has deliberately invaded Gern territory intime of war with intent to seize and exploit a Gern world. We arewilling, however, to offer a leniency not required by the circumstances.Terran technicians and skilled workers in certain fields can be used inthe factories we shall build on Athena. The others will not be neededand there is not room on the cruisers to take them.

  "Your occupation records will be used to divide you into two groups: theAcceptables and the Rejects. The Rejects will be taken by the cruisersto an Earth-type planet near here and left, together with the personalpossessions in their compartments and additional, and ample, supplies.The Acceptables will then be taken on to Athena and at a later date thecruisers will return the Rejects to Earth.

  "This division will split families but there will be no resistance to it.Gern guards will be sent immediately to make this division and you willwait in your compartments for them. You will obey their orders promptlyand without annoying them with questions. At the first instance ofresistance or rebellion this offer will be withdrawn and the cruiserswill go their way again."

  * * * * *

  In the silence following the ultimatum she could hear the soft, wordlessmurmur from the other compartments, the undertone of anxiety like a darkthread through it. In every compartment parents and children, brothersand sisters, were seeing one another for the last time....

  The corridor outside rang to the tramp of feet; the sound of a dozenGerns walking with swift military precision. She held her breath, herheart racing, but they went past her door and on to the corridor's end.

  There she could faintly hear them entering compartments, demandingnames, and saying, _"Out--out!"_ Once she heard a Gern say, "Acceptableswill remain inside until further notice. Do not open your doors afterthe Rejects have been taken out."

  Billy touched her on the hand. "Isn't Daddy going to come?"

  "He--he can't right now. We'll see him pretty soon."

  She remembered what the Gern commander had said about the Rejects beingpermitted to take their personal possessions. She had very little timein which to get together what she could carry....

  There were two small bags in the compartment and she hurried to packthem with things she and Dale and Billy might need, not able to knowwhich of them, if any, would be Rejects. Nor could she know whether sheshould put in clothes for a cold world or a hot one. The Gern commanderhad said the Rejects would be left on an Earth-type planet but wherecould it be? The Dunbar Expedition had explored across five hundredlight-years of space and had found only one Earth-type world: Athena.

  The Gerns were almost to her door when she had finished and she heardthem enter the compartments across from her own. There came the hard,curt questions and the command: "Outside--hurry!" A woman said somethingin pleading question and there was the soft thud of a blow and thewords: "Outside--do not ask questions!" A moment later she heard thewoman going down the corridor, trying to hold back her crying.

  Then the Gerns were at her own door.

  She held Billy's hand and waited for them with her heart hammering. Sheheld her head high and composed herself with all the determination shecould muster so that the arrogant Gerns would not see that she wasafraid. Billy stood beside her as tall as his five years would permit,his teddy bear under his arm, and only the way his hand held to hersshowed that he, too, was scared.

  The door was flung open and two Gerns strode in.

  The were big, dark men, with powerful, bulging muscles. They surveyedher and the room with a quick sweep of eyes that were like glitteringobsidian, their mouths thin, cruel slashes in the flat, brutal planes oftheir faces.

  "Your name?" snapped the one who carried a sheaf of occupation records.

  "It's"--she tried to swallow the quaver in her voice and make it cooland unfrightened--"Irene Lois Humbolt--Mrs. Dale Humbolt."

  The Gern glanced at the papers. "Where is your husband?"

  "He was in the X-ray room at--"

  "You are a Reject. Out--down the corridor with the others."

  "My husband--will he be a--"

  _"Outside!"_

  It was the tone of voice that had preceded the blow in the othercompartment and the Gern took a quick step toward her. She seized thetwo bags in one hand, not wanting to release Billy, and swung back tohurry out into the corridor. The other Gern jerked one of the bags fromher hand and flung it to the floor. "Only one bag per person," he said,and gave her an impatient shove that sent her and Billy stumblingthrough the doorway.

  She became part of the Rejects who were being herded like sheep down thecorridors and into the port airlock. There were many children amongthem, the young ones frightened and crying, and often with only oneparent or an older brother or sister to take care of them. And therewere many young ones who had no one at all and were dependent uponstrangers to take their hands and tell them what they must do.

  When she was passing the corridor that led to the X-ray room she saw agroup of Rejects being herded up it. Dale was not among them and sheknew, then, that she and Billy would never see him again.

  * * * * *

  _"Out from the ship--faster--faster----"_

  The commands of the Gern guards snapped like whips around them as sheand the other Rejects crowded and stumbled down the boarding ramp andout onto the rocky ground. There was the pull of a terrible gravity suchas she had never experienced and they were in a bleak, barren valley, acold wind moaning down it and whipping the alkali dust in bitter clouds.Around the valley stood ragged hills, their white tops laying outstreamers of wind-driven snow, and the sky was dark with sunset.

  _"Out from the ship--faster----"_

  It was hard to walk fast in the high gravity, carrying the bag in onehand and holding up all of Billy's weight she could with the other.

  "They lied to us!" a man beside her said to someone. "Let's turn andfight. Let's take----"

  A Gern blaster cracked with a vivid blue flash and the man plungedlifelessly to the ground. She flinched instinctively and fell over anunseen rock, the bag of precious clothes flying from her hand. Shescrambled up again, her left knee half numb, and turned to retrieve it.

  The Gern guard was already upon her, his blaster still in his hand. "Outfrom the ship--faster."

  The barrel of his blaster lashed across the side of her head. "Moveon--move on!"

  She staggered in a blinding blaze of pain and then hurried on, holdingtight to Billy's hand, the wind cutting like knives of ice through herthin clothes and blood running in a trickle down her cheek.

  "He hit you," Billy said. "He hurt you." Then he called the Gern a namethat five-year-old boys were not supposed to know, with a savagery thatfive-year-old boys were not supposed to possess.

  When she stopped at the outer fringe of Rejects she saw that all of themwere out of the cruiser and the guards were going back into it. A halfmile down the valley the other cruiser stood, the Rejects out from itand its boarding ramps already withdrawn.

  When she had buttoned Billy's blouse tighter and wiped the blood fromher face the first blast of the drives came from the farther cruiser.The nearer one blasted a moment later and they lifted together, theirroaring filling the valley. They climbed faster and faster, dwindling asthey went. Then they disappeared in the black sky, their roaring fadedaway, and there was left only the moaning of the wind around her andsomewhere a child crying.

  And somewhere a voice asking, "Where are we? In the name of God--whathave they done to us?"

  She looked at the snow streaming from the ragged hills, felt the hardpull of the gravity, and knew where they were. They
were on Ragnarok,the hell-world of 1.5 gravity and fierce beasts and raging fevers wheremen could not survive. The name came from an old Teutonic myth andmeant: _The last day for gods and men_. The Dunbar Expedition haddiscovered Ragnarok and her father had told her of it, of how it hadkilled six of the eight men who had left the ship and would have killedall of them if they had remained any longer.

  She knew where they were and she knew the Gerns had lied to them andwould never send a ship to take them to Earth. Their abandonment therehad been intended as a death sentence for all of them.

  And Dale was gone and she and Billy would die helpless and alone....

  "It will be dark--so soon." Billy's voice shook with the cold. "If Daddycan't find us in the dark, what will we do?"

  "I don't know," she said. "There's no one to help us and how can Iknow--what we should do----"

  She was from the city. How could she know what to do on an alien,hostile world where armed explorers had died? She had tried to be bravebefore the Gerns but now--now night was at hand and out of it wouldcome terror and death for herself and Billy. They would never see Daleagain, never see Athena or Earth or even the dawn on the world that hadkilled them....

  She tried not to cry, and failed. Billy's cold little hand touched herown, trying to reassure her.

  "Don't cry, Mama. I guess--I guess everybody else is scared, too."

  _Everyone else...._

  She was not alone. How could she have thought she was alone? All aroundher were others, as helpless and uncertain as she. Her story was onlyone out of four thousand.

  "I guess they are, Billy," she said. "I never thought of that, before."

  She knelt to put her arms around him, thinking: _Tears and fear arefutile weapons; they can never bring us any tomorrows. We'll have tofight whatever comes to kill us no matter how scared we are. Forourselves and for our children. Above all else, for our children...._

  "I'm going back to find our clothes," she said. "You wait here for me,in the shelter of that rock, and I won't be gone long."

  Then she told him what he would be too young to really understand.

  "I'm not going to cry any more and I know, now, what I must do. I'mgoing to make sure that there is a tomorrow for you, always, to the lastbreath of my life."

  * * * * *

  The bright blue star dimmed and the others faded away. Dawn touched thesky, bringing with it a coldness that frosted the steel of the rifle inJohn Prentiss's hands and formed beads of ice on his gray mustache.There was a stirring in the area behind him as the weary Rejectsprepared to face the new day and the sound of a child whimpering fromthe cold. There had been no time the evening before to gather wood forfires----

  _"Prowlers!"_

  The warning cry came from an outer guard and black shadows were suddenlysweeping out of the dark dawn.

  They were things that might have been half wolf, half tiger; each ofthem three hundred pounds of incredible ferocity with eyes blazing likeyellow fire in their white-fanged tiger-wolf faces. They came like thewind, in a flowing black wave, and ripped through the outer guard lineas though it had not existed. The inner guards fired in a chatteringroll of gunshots, trying to turn them, and Prentiss's rifle licked outpale tongues of flame as he added his own fire. The prowlers came on,breaking through, but part of them went down and the others were swervedby the fire so that they struck only the outer edge of the area wherethe Rejects were grouped.

  At that distance they blended into the dark ground so that he could notfind them in the sights of his rifle. He could only watch helplessly andsee a dark-haired woman caught in their path, trying to run with a childin her arms and already knowing it was too late. A man was runningtoward her, slow in the high gravity, an axe in his hands and hiscursing a raging, savage snarl. For a moment her white face was turnedin helpless appeal to him and the others; then the prowlers were uponher and she fell, deliberately, going to the ground with her childhugged in her arms beneath her so that her body would protect it.

  The prowlers passed over her, pausing for an instant to slash the lifefrom her, and raced on again. They vanished back into the outerdarkness, the farther guards firing futilely, and there was a silencebut for the distant, hysterical sobbing of a woman.

  It had happened within seconds; the fifth prowler attack that night andthe mildest.

  * * * * *

  Full dawn had come by the time he replaced the guards killed by the lastattack and made the rounds of the other guard lines. He came back by theplace where the prowlers had killed the woman, walking wearily againstthe pull of gravity. She lay with her dark hair tumbled and stained withblood, her white face turned up to the reddening sky, and he saw herclearly for the first time.

  It was Irene.

  He stopped, gripping the cold steel of the rifle and not feeling therear sight as it cut into his hand.

  Irene.... He had not known she was on Ragnarok. He had not seen her inthe darkness of the night and he had hoped she and Billy were safe amongthe Acceptables with Dale.

  There was the sound of footsteps and a bold-faced girl in a red skirtstopped beside him, her glance going over him curiously.

  "The little boy," he asked, "do you know if he's all right?"

  "The prowlers cut up his face but he'll be all right," she said. "I cameback after his clothes."

  "Are you going to look after him?"

  "Someone has to and"--she shrugged her shoulders--"I guess I was softenough to elect myself for the job. Why--was his mother a friend ofyours?"

  "She was my daughter," he said.

  "Oh." For a moment the bold, brassy look was gone from her face, like amask that had slipped. "I'm sorry. And I'll take care of Billy."

  * * * * *

  The first objection to his assumption of leadership occurred an hourlater. The prowlers had withdrawn with the coming of full daylight andwood had been carried from the trees to build fires. Mary, one of thevolunteer cooks, was asking two men to carry her some water when heapproached. The smaller man picked up one of the clumsy containers,hastily improvised from canvas, and started toward the creek. The other,a big, thick-chested man, did not move.

  "We'll have to have water," Mary said. "People are hungry and cold andsick."

  The man continued to squat by the fire, his hands extended to itswarmth. "Name someone else," he said.

  "But----"

  She looked at Prentiss in uncertainty. He went to the thick-chested man,knowing there would be violence and welcoming it as something to helpdrive away the vision of Irene's pale, cold face under the red sky.

  "She asked you to get her some water," he said. "Get it."

  The man looked up at him, studying him with deliberate insolence, thenhe got to his feet, his heavy shoulders hunched challengingly.

  "I'll have to set you straight, old timer," he said. "No one hasappointed you the head cheese around here. Now, there's the containeryou want filled and over there"--he made a small motion with onehand--"is the creek. Do you know what to do?"

  "Yes," he said. "I know what to do."

  He brought the butt of the rifle smashing up. It struck the man underthe chin and there was a sharp cracking sound as his jawbone snapped.For a fraction of a second there was an expression of stupefiedamazement on his face then his eyes glazed and he slumped to the groundwith his broken jaw setting askew.

  "All right," he said to Mary. "Now you go ahead and name somebody else."

  * * * * *

  He found that the prowlers had killed seventy during the night. Onehundred more had died from the Hell Fever that often followed exposureand killed within an hour.

  He went the half mile to the group that had arrived on the secondcruiser as soon as he had eaten a delayed breakfast. He saw, before hehad quite reached the other group, that the _Constellation_'s LieutenantCommander, Vincent Lake, was in charge of it.

  Lake, a tall, hard-jawed man with pa
le blue eyes under pale brows,walked forth to meet him as soon as he recognized him.

  "Glad to see you're still alive," Lake greeted him. "I thought thatsecond Gern blast got you along with the others."

  "I was visiting midship and wasn't home when it happened," he said.

  He looked at Lake's group of Rejects, in their misery and uncertainty somuch like his own, and asked, "How was it last night?"

  "Bad--damned bad," Lake said. "Prowlers and Hell Fever, and no wood forfires. Two hundred died last night."

  "I came down to see if anyone was in charge here and to tell them thatwe'll have to move into the woods at once--today. We'll have plenty ofwood for the fires there, some protection from the wind, and bycombining our defenses we can stand off the prowlers better."

  Lake agreed. When the brief discussion of plans was finished he asked,"How much do you know about Ragnarok?"

  "Not much," Prentiss answered. "We didn't stay to study it very long.There are no heavy metals on Ragnarok's other sun. Its position in theadvance of the resources of any value. We gave Ragnarok a quick surveyand when the sixth man died we marked it on the chart as uninhabitableand went on our way.

  "As you probably know, that bright blue star is Ragnarok's other sun.It's position in the advance of the yellow sun shows the season to beearly spring. When summer comes Ragnarok will swing between the two sunsand the heat will be something no human has ever endured. Nor the cold,when winter comes.

  "I know of no edible plants, although there might be some. There are afew species of rodent-like animals--they're scavengers--and a herbivorewe called the woods goat. The prowlers are the dominant form of life onRagnarok and I suspect their intelligence is a good deal higher than wewould like it to be. There will be a constant battle for survival withthem.

  "There's another animal, not as intelligent as the prowlers but just asdangerous--the unicorn. The unicorns are big and fast and they travel inherds. I haven't seen any here so far--I hope we don't. At the lowerelevations are the swamp crawlers. They're unadulterated nightmares. Ihope they don't go to these higher elevations in the summer. Theprowlers and the Hell Fever, the gravity and heat and cold andstarvation, will be enough for us to have to fight."

  "I see," Lake said. He smiled, a smile that was as bleak as moonlight onan arctic glacier. "Earth-type--remember the promise the Gerns made theRejects?" He looked out across the camp, at the snow whipping from thefrosty hills, at the dead and the dying, and a little girl trying vainlyto awaken her brother.

  "They were condemned, without reason, without a chance to live," hesaid. "So many of them are so young ... and when you're young it's toosoon to have to die."

  * * * * *

  Prentiss returned to his own group. The dead were buried in shallowgraves and inventory was taken of the promised "ample supplies." Thesewere only the few personal possessions the Rejects had been permitted totake plus a small amount of food the Gerns had taken from the_Constellation_'s stores. The Gerns had been forced to provide theRejects with at least a little food--had they openly left them tostarve, the Acceptables, whose families were among the Rejects, mighthave rebelled.

  Inventory of the firearms and ammunition showed the total to bediscouragingly small. They would have to learn how to make and use bowsand arrows as soon as possible.

  With the first party of guards and workmen following him, Prentiss wentto the tributary valley that emptied into the central valley a mile tothe north. It was as good a camp site as could be hoped for; wide andthickly spotted with groves of trees, a creek running down its center.

  The workmen began the construction of shelters and he climbed up theside of the nearer hill. He reached its top, his breath coming fast inthe gravity that was the equivalent of a burden half his own weight, andsaw what the surrounding terrain was like.

  To the south, beyond the barren valley, the land could be seen droppingin its long sweep to the southern lowlands where the unicorns and swampcrawlers lived. To the north the hills climbed gently for miles, thenended under the steeply sloping face of an immense plateau. The plateaureached from western to eastern horizon, still white with the snows ofwinter and looming so high above the world below that the clouds brushedit and half obscured it.

  He went back down the hill as Lake's men appeared. They started work onwhat would be a continuation of his own camp and he told Lake what hehad seen from the hill.

  "We're between the lowlands and the highlands," he said. "This will beas near to a temperate altitude as Ragnarok has. We survive here--orelse. There's no other place for us to go."

  An overcast darkened the sky at noon and the wind died down to almostnothing. There was a feeling of waiting tension in the air and he wentback to the Rejects, to speed their move into the woods. They werealready going in scattered groups, accompanied by prowler guards, butthere was no organization and it would be too long before the last ofthem were safely in the new camp.

  He could not be two places at once--he needed a subleader to oversee themove of the Rejects and their possessions into the woods and theirplacement after they got there.

  He found the man he wanted already helping the Rejects get started: athin, quiet man named Henry Anders who had fought well against theprowlers the night before, even though his determination had beengreater than his marksmanship. He was the type people instinctivelyliked and trusted; a good choice for the subleader whose job it would beto handle the multitude of details in camp while he, Prentiss, and asecond subleader he would select, handled the defense of the camp andthe hunting.

  "I don't like this overcast," he told Anders. "Something's brewing. Geteveryone moved and at work helping build shelters as soon as you can."

  "I can have most of them there within an hour or two," Anders said."Some of the older people, though, will have to take it slow. Thisgravity--it's already getting the hearts of some of them."

  "How are the children taking the gravity?" he asked.

  "The babies and the very young--it's hard to tell about them yet. Butthe children from about four on up get tired quickly, go to sleep, andwhen they wake up they've sort of bounced back out of it."

  "Maybe they can adapt to some extent to this gravity." He thought ofwhat Lake had said that morning: _So many of them are so young ... andwhen you're young it's too soon to have to die._ "Maybe the Gerns made amistake--maybe Terran children aren't as easy to kill as they thought.It's your job and mine and others to give the children the chance toprove the Gerns wrong."

  He went his way again to pass by the place where Julia, the girl who hadbecome Billy's foster-mother, was preparing to go to the new camp.

  It was the second time for him to see Billy that morning. The first timeBilly had still been stunned with grief, and at the sight of hisgrandfather he had been unable to keep from breaking.

  "The Gern hit her," he had sobbed, his torn face bleeding anew as ittwisted in crying. "He hurt her, and Daddy was gone and then--and thenthe other things killed her----"

  But now he had had a little time to accept what had happened and he waschanged. He was someone much older, almost a man, trapped for a while inthe body of a five-year-old boy.

  "I guess this is all, Billy," Julia was saying as she gathered up herscanty possessions and Irene's bag. "Get your teddy bear and we'll go."

  Billy went to his teddy bear and knelt down to pick it up. Then hestopped and said something that sounded like _"No."_ He laid the teddybear back down, wiping a little dust from its face as in a last gestureof farewell, and stood up to face Julia empty-handed.

  "I don't think I'll want to play with my teddy bear any more," he said."I don't think I'll ever want to play at all anymore."

  Then he went to walk beside her, leaving his teddy bear lying on theground behind him and with it leaving forever the tears and laughter ofchildhood.

  * * * * *

  The overcast deepened, and at midafternoon dark storm clouds camedriving in from the west. Efforts were
intensified to complete the movebefore the storm broke, both in his section of the camp and in Lake's.The shelters would be of critical importance and they were being builtof the materials most quickly available; dead limbs, brush, and thelimited amount of canvas and blankets the Rejects had. They would beinadequate protection but there was no time to build anything better.

  It seemed only a few minutes until the black clouds were overhead,rolling and racing at an incredible velocity. With them came the deeproar of the high wind that drove them and the wind on the ground beganto stir restlessly in response, like some monster awakening to the callof its kind.

  Prentiss knew already who he wanted as his other subleader. He found himhard at work helping build shelters; Howard Craig, a powerfully muscledman with a face as hard and grim as a cliff of granite. It had beenCraig who had tried to save Irene from the prowlers that morning withonly an axe as a weapon.

  Prentiss knew him slightly--and Craig still did not know Irene had beenhis daughter. Craig had been one of the field engineers for what wouldhave been the Athena Geological Survey. He had had a wife, a frail,blonde girl who had been the first of all to die of Hell Fever the nightbefore, and he still had their three small children.

  "We'll stop with the shelters we already have built," he told Craig. "Itwill take all the time left to us to reinforce them against the wind. Ineed someone to help me, in addition to Anders. You're the one I want.

  "Send some young and fast-moving men back to last night's camp to cutall the strips of prowler skins they can get. Everything about theshelters will have to be lashed down to something solid. See if you canfind some experienced outdoorsmen to help you check the jobs.

  "And tell Anders that women and children only will be placed in theshelters. There will be no room for anyone else and if any man, nomatter what the excuse, crowds out a woman or child I'll personally killhim."

  "You needn't bother," Craig said. He smiled with savage mirthlessness."I'll be glad to take care of any such incidents."

  Prentiss saw to it that the piles of wood for the guard fires were readyto be lighted when the time came. He ordered all guards to theirstations, there to get what rest they could. They would have no rest atall after darkness came.

  He met Lake at the north end of his own group's camp, where it mergedwith Lake's group and no guard line was needed. Lake told him that hiscamp would be as well prepared as possible under the circumstanceswithin another hour. By then the wind in the trees was growing swiftlystronger, slapping harder and harder at the shelters, and it seemeddoubtful that the storm would hold off for an hour.

  But Lake was given his hour, plus half of another. Then deep dusk came,although it was not quite sundown. Prentiss ordered all the guard fireslighted and all the women and children into the shelters. Fifteenminutes later the storm finally broke.

  It came as a roaring downpour of cold rain. Complete darkness came withit and the wind rose to a velocity that made the trees lean. An hourwent by and the wind increased, smashing at the shelters with a violencethey had not been built to withstand. The prowler skin lashings held butthe canvas and blankets were ripped into streamers that cracked likerifle shots in the wind before they were torn completely loose and flunginto the night.

  One by one the guard fires went out and the rain continued, growingcolder and driven in almost horizontal sheets by the wind. The women andchildren huddled in chilled misery in what meager protection the tornshelters still gave and there was nothing that could be done to helpthem.

  The rain turned to snow at midnight, a howling blizzard through whichPrentiss's light could penetrate but a few feet as he made his rounds.He walked with slogging weariness, forcing himself on. He was no longeryoung--he was fifty--and he had had little rest.

  He had known, of course, that successful leadership would involve moresacrifice on his part than on the part of those he led. He could haveshunned responsibility and his personal welfare would have benefited. Hehad lived on alien worlds almost half his life; with a rifle and a knifehe could have lived, until Ragnarok finally killed him, with much lesseffort than that required of him as leader. But such an action had beenrepugnant to him, unthinkable. What he knew of survival on hostileworlds might help the others to survive.

  So he had assumed command, tolerating no objections and disregarding thefact that he would be shortening his already short time to live onRagnarok. It was, he supposed, some old instinct that forbade theindividual to stand aside and let the group die.

  The snow stopped an hour later and the wind died to a frigid moaning.The clouds thinned, broke apart, and the giant star looked down upon theland with its cold, blue light.

  The prowlers came then.

  They feinted against the east and west guard lines, then hit the southline in massed, ferocious attack. Twenty got through, past theslaughtered south guards, and charged into the interior of the camp. Asthey did so the call, prearranged by him in case of such an event, wentup the guard lines:

  "Emergency guards, east and west--_close in!_"

  In the camp, above the triumphant, demoniac yammering of the prowlers,came the screams of women, the thinner cries of children, and theshouting and cursing of men as they tried to fight the prowlers withknives and clubs. Then the emergency guards--every third man from theeast and west lines--came plunging through the snow, firing as theycame.

  The prowlers launched themselves away from their victims and toward theguards, leaving a woman to stagger aimlessly with blood spurting from asevered artery and splashing dark in the starlight on the blue-whitesnow. The air was filled with the cracking of gunfire and the deep,savage snarling of the prowlers. Half of the prowlers broke through,leaving seven dead guards behind them. The others lay in the snow wherethey had fallen and the surviving emergency guards turned to hurry backto their stations, reloading as they went.

  The wounded woman had crumpled down in the snow and a first aid manknelt over her. He straightened, shaking his head, and joined the othersas they searched for injured among the prowlers' victims.

  They found no injured; only the dead. The prowlers killed with grimefficiency.

  * * * * *

  "John----"

  John Chiara, the young doctor, hurried toward him. His dark eyes wereworried behind his frosted glasses and his eyebrows were coated withice.

  "The wood is soaked," he said. "It's going to be some time before we canget fires going. There are babies that will freeze to death beforethen."

  Prentiss looked at the prowlers lying in the snow and motioned towardthem. "They're warm. Have their guts and lungs taken out."

  "What----"

  Then Chiara's eyes lighted with comprehension and he hurried awaywithout further questions.

  Prentiss went on, to make the rounds of the guards. When he returned hesaw that his order had been obeyed.

  The prowlers lay in the snow as before, their savage faces still twistedin their dying snarls, but snug and warm inside them babies slept.

  * * * * *

  The prowlers attacked again and again and when the wan sun lifted toshine down on the white, frozen land there were five hundred dead inPrentiss's camp: three hundred by Hell Fever and two hundred by prowlerattacks.

  Five hundred--and that had been only one night on Ragnarok.

  Lake reported over six hundred dead. "I hope," he said with bitterhatred, "that the Gerns slept comfortably last night."

  "We'll have to build a wall around the camp to hold out the prowlers,"Prentiss said. "We don't dare keep using up what little ammunition wehave at the rate we've used it the last two nights."

  "That will be a big job in this gravity," Lake said. "We'll have tocrowd both groups in together to let its circumference be as small aspossible."

  It was the way Prentiss had planned to do it. One thing would have to besettled with Lake: there could not be two independent leaders over themerged groups.

  Lake, watching him, said, "I think we can get alo
ng. Alien worlds areyour specialty rather than mine. And according to the Ragnarok law ofaverages, there will be only one of us pretty soon, anyway."

  All were moved to the center of the camp area that day and when theprowlers came that night they found a ring of guards and fires throughwhich they could penetrate only with heavy sacrifices.

  There was warmth to the sun the next morning and the snow began to melt.Work was commenced on the stockade wall. It would have to be twelve feethigh so the prowlers could not jump over it and, since the prowlers hadthe sharp claws and climbing ability of cats, its top would have to besurmounted with a row of sharp outward-and-downward projecting stakes.These would be set in sockets in the top rail and tied down with stripsof prowler skin.

  The trees east of camp were festooned for a great distance with theremnants of canvas and cloth the wind had left there. A party of boys,protected by the usual prowler guards, was sent out to climb the treesand recover it. All of it, down to the smallest fragment, was turnedover to the women who were physically incapable of helping work on thestockade wall. They began patiently sewing the rags and tatters backinto usable form again.

  The first hunting party went out and returned with six of thetawny-yellow sharp-horned woods goats, each as large as an Earth deer.The hunters reported the woods goats to be hard to stalk and dangerouswhen cornered. One hunter was killed and another injured because of notknowing that.

  They also brought in a few of the rabbit-sized scavenger animals. Theywere all legs and teeth and bristly fur, the meat almost inedible. Itwould be a waste of the limited ammunition to shoot any more of them.

  There was a black barked tree which the Dunbar Expedition had called thelance tree because of its slender, straightly outthrust limbs. Its woodwas as hard as hickory and as springy as cedar. Prentiss found twoamateur archers who were sure they could make efficient bows and arrowsout of the lance tree limbs. He gave them the job, together withhelpers.

  The days turned suddenly hot, with nights that still went belowfreezing. The Hell Fever took a constant, relentless toll. They neededadequate shelters--but the dwindling supply of ammunition and thenightly prowler attacks made the need for a stockade wall even moreimperative. The shelters would have to wait.

  He went looking for Dr. Chiara one evening and found him just leavingone of the makeshift shelters.

  A boy lay inside it, his face flushed with Hell Fever and his eyes toobright and too dark as he looked up into the face of his mother who satbeside him. She was dry-eyed and silent as she looked down at him butshe was holding his hand in hers, tightly, desperately, as though shemight that way somehow keep him from leaving her.

  Prentiss walked beside Chiara and when the shelter was behind them heasked, "There's no hope?"

  "None," Chiara said. "There never is with Hell Fever."

  Chiara had changed. He was no longer the stocky, cheerful man he hadbeen on the _Constellation_, whose brown eyes had smiled at the worldthrough thick glasses and who had laughed and joked as he assured hispatients that all would soon be well with them. He was thin and his facewas haggard with worry. He had, in his quiet way, been fully as valiantas any of those who had fought the prowlers. He had worked day and nightto fight a form of death he could not see and against which he had noweapon.

  "The boy is dying," Chiara said. "He knows it and his mother knows it. Itold them the medicine I gave him might help. It was a lie, to try tomake it a little easier for both of them before the end comes. Themedicine I gave him was a salt tablet--that's all I have."

  And then, with the first bitterness Prentiss had ever seen him display,Chiara said, "You call me 'Doctor.' Everyone does. I'm not--I'm only afirst-year intern. I do the best I know how to do but it isn'tenough--it will never be enough."

  "What you have to learn here is something no Earth doctor knows or couldteach you," he said. "You have to have time to learn--and you needequipment and drugs."

  "If I could have antibiotics and other drugs ... I wanted to get asupply from the dispensary but the Gerns wouldn't let me go."

  "Some of the Ragnarok plants might be of value if a person could findthe right ones. I just came from a talk with Anders about that. He'llprovide you with anything possible in the way of equipment and suppliesfor research--anything in the camp you need to try to save lives. He'llbe at your shelter tonight to see what you want. Do you want to try it?"

  "Yes--of course." Chiara's eyes lighted with new hope. "It might take along time to find a cure--maybe we never would--but I'd like to havehelp so I could try. I'd like to be able, some day once again, to say toa scared kid, 'Take this medicine and in the morning you'll be better,'and know I told the truth."

  The nightly prowler attacks continued and the supply of ammunitiondiminished. It would be some time before men were skilled in the use ofthe bows and arrows that were being made; and work on the wall waspushed ahead with all speed possible. No one was exempt from labor on itwho could as much as carry the pointed stakes. Children down to theyoungest worked alongside the men and women.

  The work was made many times more exhausting by the 1.5 gravity. Peoplemoved heavily at their jobs and even at night there was no surcease fromthe gravity. They could only go into a coma-like sleep in which therewas no real rest and from which they awoke tired and aching. Eachmorning there would be some who did not awaken at all, though theirhearts had been sound enough for working on Earth or Athena.

  The killing labor was recognized as necessary, however, and there wereno complaints until the morning he was accosted by Peter Bemmon.

  He had seen Bemmon several times on the _Constellation_; a big,soft-faced man who had attached much importance to his role as a minormember of the Athena Planning Board. But even on the _Constellation_Bemmon had felt he merited a still higher position, and hisingratiating attitude when before his superiors had become one offault-finding insinuations concerning their ability as compared with hiswhen their backs were turned.

  This resentment had taken new form on Ragnarok, where his formerposition was of utterly no importance to anyone and his lack of anyskills or outdoor experience made him only one worker among others.

  The sun was shining mercilessly hot the day Bemmon chose to challengePrentiss's wisdom as leader. Bemmon was cutting and sharpening stakes, ajob the sometimes-too-lenient Anders had given him when Bemmon hadinsisted his heart was on the verge of failure from doing heavier work.Prentiss was in a hurry and would have gone on past him but Bemmonhalted him with a sharp command:

  "You--wait a minute!"

  Bemmon had a hatchet in his hand, but only one stake lay on the ground;and his face was red with anger, not exertion. Prentiss stopped,wondering if Bemmon was going to ask for a broken jaw, and Bemmon cameto him.

  "How long," Bemmon asked, anger making his voice a little thick, "do youthink I'll tolerate this absurd situation?"

  "What situation?" Prentiss asked.

  "This stupid insistence upon confining me to manual labor. I'm thesingle member on Ragnarok of the Athena Planning Board and surely youcan see that this bumbling confusion of these people"--Bemmon indicatedthe hurrying, laboring men, women and children around them--"can betransformed into efficient, organized effort only through propersupervision. Yet my abilities along such lines are ignored and I've beenforced to work as a common laborer--a wood chopper!"

  He flung the hatchet down viciously, into the rocks at his feet,breathing heavily with resentment and challenge. "I demand the respectto which I'm entitled."

  "Look," Prentiss said.

  He pointed to the group just then going past them. A sixteen-year-oldgirl was bent almost double under the weight of the pole she wascarrying, her once pretty face flushed and sweating. Behind her twotwelve-year-old boys were dragging a still larger pole. Behind themcame several small children, each of them carrying as many of thepointed stakes as he or she could walk under, no matter if it was onlyone. All of them were trying to hurry, to accomplish as much aspossible, and no one was complaining even though they were
alreadystaggering with weariness.

  "So you think you're entitled to more respect?" Prentiss asked. "Thosekids would work harder if you were giving them orders from under theshade of a tree--is that what you want?"

  Bemmon's lips thinned and hatred was like a sheen on his face. Prentisslooked from the single stake Bemmon had cut that morning to Bemmon'swhite, unblistered hands. He looked at the hatchet that Bemmon hadthrown down in the rocks and at the V notch broken in its keen-edgedblade. It had been the best of the very few hatchets they had....

  "The next time you even nick that hatchet I'm going to split your skullwith it," he said. "Pick it up and get back to work. I mean _work_.You'll have broken blisters on every finger tonight or you'll go on thelog-carrying force tomorrow. Now, move!"

  What Bemmon had thought to be his wrath deserted him before Prentiss'sfury. He stooped to obey the order but the hatred remained on his faceand when the hatchet was in his hands he made a last attempt to bluster:

  "The day may come when we'll refuse to tolerate any longer your sadisticdisplays of authority."

  "Good," Prentiss said. "Anyone who doesn't like my style is welcome totry to change it--or to try to replace me. With knives or clubs, riflesor broken hatchets, Bemmon--any way you want it and any time you wantit."

  "I----" Bemmon's eyes went from the hatchet in his half raised hand tothe long knife in Prentiss's belt. He swallowed with a convulsive jerkof his Adam's apple and his hatchet-bearing arm suddenly wilted. "Idon't want to fight--to replace you----"

  He swallowed again and his face forced itself into a sickly attempt atan ingratiating smile. "I didn't mean to imply any disrespect for youor the good job you're doing. I'm very sorry."

  Then he hurried away, like a man glad to escape, and began to chopstakes with amazing speed.

  But the sullen hatred had not been concealed by the ingratiating smile;and Prentiss knew Bemmon was a man who would always be his enemy.

  * * * * *

  The days dragged by in the weary routine, but overworked muscles slowlystrengthened and people moved with a little less laborious effort. Onthe twentieth day the wall was finally completed and the camp wasprowler proof.

  But the spring weather was a mad succession of heat and cold and stormthat caused the Hell Fever to take its toll each day and there was norelaxation from the grueling labor. Weatherproof shelters had to bebuilt as rapidly as possible.

  So the work of constructing them began; wearily, sometimes almosthopelessly, but without complaint other than to hate and curse the Gernsmore than ever.

  There was no more trouble from Bemmon; Prentiss had almost forgotten himwhen he was publicly challenged one night by a burly, threatening mannamed Haggar.

  "You've bragged that you'll fight any man who dares disagree with you,"Haggar said loudly. "Well, here I am. We'll use knives and before theyeven have time to bury you tonight I'm goin' to have your stooges kickedout and replaced with men who'll give us competent leadership instead ofblunderin' authoritarianism."

  Prentiss noticed that Haggar seemed to have a little difficultypronouncing the last word, as though he had learned it only recently.

  "I'll be glad to accommodate you," Prentiss said mildly. "Go getyourself a knife."

  Haggar already had one, a long-bladed butcher knife, and the duel began.Haggar was surprisingly adept with his knife but he had never had thetraining and experience in combat that interstellar explorers such asPrentiss had. Haggar was good, but considerably far from good enough.

  Prentiss did not kill him. He had no compunctions about doing such athing, but it would have been an unnecessary waste of needed manpower.He gave Haggar a carefully painful and bloody lesson that thoroughlybanished all his lust for conflict without seriously injuring him. Theduel was over within a minute after it began.

  Bemmon, who had witnessed the challenge with keen interest and thenwatched Haggar's defeat with agitation, became excessively friendly andflattering toward Prentiss afterward. Prentiss felt sure, although hehad no proof, that it had been Bemmon who had spurred the simple-mindedHaggar into challenging him to a duel.

  If so, the sight of what had happened to Haggar must have effectivelydampened Bemmon's desire for revenge because he became almost a modelworker.

  * * * * *

  As Lake had predicted, he and Prentiss worked together well. Lake calmlytook a secondary role, not at all interested in possession of authoritybut only in the survival of the Rejects. He spoke of the surrender ofthe _Constellation_ only once, to say:

  "I knew there could be only Ragnarok in this section of space. I had toorder four thousand people to go like sheep to what was to be theirplace of execution so that four thousand more could live as slaves. Thatwas my last act as an officer."

  Prentiss suspected that Lake found it impossible not to blame himselfsubconsciously for what circumstances had forced him to do. It wasirrational--but conscientious men were quite often a little irrationalin their sense of responsibility.

  Lake had two subleaders: a genial, red-haired man named Ben Barber, whowould have been a farmer on Athena but who made a good subleader onRagnarok; and a lithe, cat-like man named Karl Schroeder.

  Schroeder claimed to be twenty-four but not even the scars on his facecould make him look more than twenty-one. He smiled often, a little toooften. Prentiss had seen smiles like that before. Schroeder was the typewho could smile while he killed a man--and he probably had.

  But, if Schroeder was a born fighter and perhaps killer, they werecharacteristics that he expended entirely upon the prowlers. He wasLake's right hand man; a deadly marksman and utterly without fear.

  One evening, when Lake had given Schroeder some instructions concerningthe next day's activities, Schroeder answered him with the half-mockingsmile and the words, "I'll see that it's done, Commander."

  "Not 'Commander,'" Lake said. "I--all of us--left our ranks, titles andhonors on the _Constellation_. The past is dead for us."

  "I see," Schroeder said. The smile faded away and he looked into Lake'seyes as he asked, "And what about our past dishonors, disgraces andsuch?"

  "They were left on the _Constellation_, too," Lake said. "If anyonewants dishonor he'll have to earn it all over again."

  "That sounds fair," Schroeder said. "That sounds as fair as anyone couldever ask for."

  He turned away and Prentiss saw what he had noticed before: Schroeder'sblack hair was coming out light brown at the roots. It was a color thatwould better match his light complexion and it was the color of hairthat a man named Schrader, wanted by the police on Venus, had had.

  Hair could be dyed, identification cards could be forged--but it was allsomething Prentiss did not care to pry into until and if Schroeder gavehim reason to. Schroeder was a hard and dangerous man, despite hisyouth, and sometimes men of that type, when the chips were down,exhibited a higher sense of duty than the soft men who spoke piously ofrespect for Society--and then were afraid to face danger to protect thesociety and the people they claimed to respect.

  * * * * *

  A lone prowler came on the eleventh night following the wall'scompletion. It came silently, in the dead of night, and it learned howto reach in and tear apart the leather lashings that held the pointedstakes in place and then jerk the stakes out of their sockets. It wasseen as it was removing the third stake--which would have made a largeenough opening for it to come through--and shot. It fell back andmanaged to escape into the woods, although staggering and bleeding.

  The next night the stockade was attacked by dozens of prowlers whosimultaneously began removing the pointed stakes in the same manneremployed by the prowler of the night before. Their attack was turnedback with heavy losses on both sides and with a dismayingly largeexpenditure of precious ammunition.

  There could be no doubt about how the band of prowlers had learned toremove the stakes: the prowler of the night before had told them beforeit died. It was doubtful tha
t the prowlers had a spoken language, butthey had some means of communication. They worked together and they werehighly intelligent, probably about halfway between dog and man.

  The prowlers were going to be an enemy even more formidable thanPrentiss had thought.

  The missing stakes were replaced the next day and the others were tieddown more securely. Once again the camp was prowler proof--but only forso long as armed guards patrolled inside the walls to kill attackingprowlers during the short time it would take them to remove the stakes.

  The hunting parties suffered unusually heavy losses from prowler attacksthat day and that evening, as the guards patrolled inside the walls,Lake said to Prentiss:

  "The prowlers are so damnably persistent. It isn't that they'rehungry--they don't kill us to eat us. They don't have any reason to killus--they just hate us."

  "They have a reason," Prentiss said. "They're doing the same thing we'redoing: fighting for survival."

  Lake's pale brows lifted in question.

  "The prowlers are the rulers of Ragnarok," Prentiss said. "They foughttheir way up here, as men did on Earth, until they're master of everycreature on their world. Even of the unicorns and swamp crawlers. Butnow we've come and they're intelligent enough to know that we'reaccustomed to being the dominant species, ourselves.

  "There can't be two dominant species on the same world--and they knowit. Men or prowlers--in the end one is going to have to go down beforethe other."

  "I suppose you're right," Lake said. He looked at the guards, a fourthof them already reduced to bows and arrows that they had not yet hadtime to learn how to use. "If we win the battle for supremacy it will bea long fight, maybe over a period of centuries. And if the prowlerswin--it may all be over within a year or two."

  * * * * *

  The giant blue star that was the other component of Ragnarok's binarygrew swiftly in size as it preceded the yellow sun farther each morning.When summer came the blue star would be a sun as hot as the yellow sunand Ragnarok would be between them. The yellow sun would burn the landby day and the blue sun would sear it by the night that would not benight. Then would come the brief fall, followed by the long, frozenwinter when the yellow sun would shine pale and cold, far to the south,and the blue sun would be a star again, two hundred and fifty millionmiles away and invisible behind the cold yellow sun.

  The Hell Fever lessened with the completion of the shelters but it stillkilled each day. Chiara and his helpers worked with unfalteringdetermination to find a cure for it but the cure, if there was one,eluded them. The graves in the cemetery were forty long by forty wideand more were added each day. To all the fact became grimly obvious:they were swiftly dying out and they had yet to face Ragnarok at itsworst.

  The old survival instincts asserted themselves and there were marriagesamong the younger ones. One of the first to marry was Julia.

  She stopped to talk to Prentiss one evening. She still wore the redskirt, now faded and patched, but her face was tired and thoughtful andno longer bold.

  "Is it true, John," she asked, "that only a few of us might be able tohave children here and that most of us who tried to have children inthis gravity would die for it?"

  "It's true," he said. "But you already knew that when you married."

  "Yes ... I knew it." There was a little silence. "All my life I've hadfun and done as I pleased. The human race didn't need me and we bothknew it. But now--none of us can be apart from the others or be afraidof anything. If we're selfish and afraid there will come a time when thelast of us will die and there will be nothing on Ragnarok to show wewere ever here.

  "I don't want it to end like that. I want there to be children, to liveafter we're gone. So I'm going to try to have a child. I'm not afraidand I won't be."

  When he did not reply at once she said, almost self-consciously, "Comingfrom me that all sounds a little silly, I suppose."

  "It sounds wise and splendid, Julia," he said, "and it's what I thoughtyou were going to say."

  * * * * *

  Full spring came and the vegetation burst into leaf and bud and bloom,quickly, for its growth instincts knew in their mindless way how shortwas the time to grow and reproduce before the brown death of summercame. The prowlers were suddenly gone one day, to follow the springnorth, and for a week men could walk and work outside the stockadewithout the protection of armed guards.

  Then the new peril appeared, the one they had not expected: theunicorns.

  The stockade wall was a blue-black rectangle behind them and the bluestar burned with the brilliance of a dozen moons, lighting the woods inblue shadow and azure light. Prentiss and the hunter walked a little infront of the two riflemen, winding to keep in the starlit glades.

  "It was on the other side of the next grove of trees," the hunter saidin a low voice. "Fred was getting ready to bring in the rest of thewoods goat. He shouldn't have been more than ten minutes behind me--andit's been over an hour."

  They rounded the grove of trees. At first it seemed there was nothingbefore them but the empty, grassy glade. Then they saw it lying on theground no more than twenty feet in front of them.

  It was--it had been--a man. He was broken and stamped into hideousshapelessness and something had torn off his arms.

  For a moment there was dead silence, then the hunter whispered, _"Whatdid that?"_

  The answer came in a savage, squealing scream and the pound of clovenhooves. A formless shadow beside the trees materialized into a monstrouscharging bulk; a thing like a gigantic gray bull, eight feet tall at theshoulders, with the tusked, snarling head of a boar and the starlightglinting along the curving, vicious length of its single horn.

  _"Unicorn!"_ Prentiss said, and jerked up his rifle.

  The rifles cracked in a ragged volley. The unicorn squealed in fury andstruck the hunter, catching him on its horn and hurling him thirty feet.One of the riflemen went down under the unicorn's hooves, his cry endingalmost as soon as it began.

  The unicorn ripped the sod in deep furrows as it whirled back toPrentiss and the remaining rifleman; not turning in the manner offour-footed beasts of Earth but rearing and spinning on its hind feet.It towered above them as it whirled, the tip of its horn fifteen feetabove the ground and its hooves swinging around like great clubs.

  Prentiss shot again, his sights on what he hoped would be a vital area,and the rifleman shot an instant later.

  The shots went true. The unicorn's swing brought it on around but itcollapsed, falling to the ground with jarring heaviness.

  "We got it!" the rifleman said. "We----"

  It half scrambled to its feet and made a noise; a call that went outthrough the night like the blast of a mighty trumpet. Then it droppedback to the ground, to die while its call was still echoing from thenearer hills.

  From the east came an answering trumpet blast; a trumpeting that wassounded again from the south and from the north. Then there came a lowand muffled drumming, like the pounding of thousands of hooves.

  The rifleman's face was blue-white in the starlight. "The others arecoming--we'll have to run for it!"

  He turned, and began to run toward the distant bulk of the stockade.

  "No!" Prentiss commanded, quick and harsh. "Not the stockade!"

  The rifleman kept running, seeming not to hear him in his panic.Prentiss called to him once more:

  "Not the stockade--_you'll lead the unicorns into it!_"

  Again the rifleman seemed not to hear him.

  The unicorns were coming in sight, converging in from the north and eastand south, the rumble of their hooves swelling to a thunder that filledthe night. The rifleman would reach the stockade only a little ahead ofthem and they would go through the wall as though it had been made ofpaper.

  For a little while the area inside the stockade would be filled withdust, with the squealing of the swirling, charging unicorns and thescreams of the dying. Those inside the stockade would have no chancewhatever of escaping
. Within two minutes it would be over, the lastchild would have been found among the shattered shelters and trampledinto lifeless shapelessness in the bloody ground.

  Within two minutes all human life on Ragnarok would be gone.

  There was only one thing for him to do.

  He dropped to one knee so his aim would be steady and the sights of hisrifle caught the running man's back. He pressed the trigger and therifle cracked viciously as it bucked against his shoulder.

  The man spun and fell hard to the ground. He twisted, to raise himselfup a little and look back, his face white and accusing and unbelieving.

  _"You shot me!"_

  Then he fell forward and lay without moving.

  Prentiss turned back to face the unicorns and to look at the trees inthe nearby grove. He saw what he already knew, they were young trees andtoo small to offer any escape for him. There was no place to run, noplace to hide.

  There was nothing he could do but wait; nothing he could do but stand inthe blue starlight and watch the devil's herd pound toward him andthink, in the last moments of his life, how swiftly and unexpectedlydeath could come to man on Ragnarok.

  * * * * *

  The unicorns held the Rejects prisoners in their stockade the rest ofthe night and all the next day. Lake had seen the shooting of therifleman and had watched the unicorn herd kill John Prentiss and thentrample the dead rifleman.

  He had already given the order to build a quick series of fires aroundthe inside of the stockade walls when the unicorns paused to tear theirvictims to pieces; grunting and squealing in triumph as bones crushedbetween their teeth and they flung the pieces to one side.

  The fires were started and green wood was thrown on them, to make themsmoulder and smoke for as long as possible. Then the unicorns werecoming on to the stockade and every person inside it went into theconcealment of the shelters.

  Lake had already given his last order: There would be absolute quietuntil and if the unicorns left; a quiet that would be enforced with fistor club wherever necessary.

  The unicorns were still outside when morning came. The fires could notbe refueled; the sight of a man moving inside the stockade would bringthe entire herd charging through. The hours dragged by, the smoke fromthe dying fires dwindled to thin streamers. The unicorns grewincreasingly bolder and suspicious, crowding closer to the walls andpeering through the openings between the rails.

  The sun was setting when one of the unicorns trumpeted; a sounddifferent from that of the call to battle. The others threw up theirheads to listen, then they turned and drifted away. Within minutes theentire herd was gone out of sight through the woods, toward the north.

  Lake waited and watched until he was sure the unicorns were gone forgood. Then he ordered the All Clear given and hurried to the south wall,to look down across the barren valley and hope he would not see what heexpected to see.

  Barber came up behind him, to sigh with relief. "That was close. It'shard to make so many people stay absolutely quiet for hour after hour.Especially the children--they don't understand."

  "We'll have to leave," Lake said.

  "Leave?" Barber asked. "We can make this stockade strong enough to holdout unicorns."

  "Look to the south," Lake told him.

  Barber did so and saw what Lake had already seen; a broad, low cloud ofdust moving slowly toward them.

  "Another herd of unicorns," Lake said. "John didn't know theymigrated--the Dunbar Expedition wasn't here long enough to learn that.There'll be herd after herd coming through and no time for us tostrengthen the walls. We'll have to leave tonight."

  * * * * *

  Preparations were made for the departure; preparations that consistedmainly of providing each person with as much in the way of food orsupplies as he or she could carry. In the 1.5 gravity, that was notmuch.

  They left when the blue star rose. They filed out through the northerngate and the rear guard closed it behind them. There was almost noconversation among them. Some of them turned to take a last look at whathad been the only home they had ever known on Ragnarok, then they allfaced forward again, to the northwest, where the foothills of theplateau might offer them sanctuary.

  They found their sanctuary on the second day; a limestone ridgehoney-combed with caves. Men were sent back at once to carry the foodand supplies left in the stockade to the new home.

  They returned, to report that the second herd of unicorns had brokendown the walls and ripped the interior of the stockade into wreckage.Much of the food and supplies had been totally destroyed.

  Lake sent them back twice more to bring everything, down to the lastpiece of bent metal or torn cloth. They would find uses for all of it inthe future.

  * * * * *

  The cave system was extensive, containing room for several times theirnumber. The deeper portions of the caves could not be lived in untilventilation ducts were made, but the outer caves were more thansufficient in number. Work was begun to clear them of fallen rubble, topry down all loose material overhead and to level the floors. A springcame out of the ridge not far from the caves and the approach to thecaves was so narrow and steep that unicorns could scramble up it onlywith difficulty and one at a time. And should they ever reach thenatural terrace in front of the caves they would be too large to enterand could do no more than stand outside and make targets of themselvesfor the bowmen within.

  Anders was in charge of making the caves livable, his working forcerestricted almost entirely to women and children. Lake sent Barber out,with a small detachment of men, to observe the woods goats and learnwhat plants they ate. And then learn, by experimenting, if such plantscould be safely eaten by humans.

  The need for salt would be tremendously increased when summer came.Having once experienced a saltless two weeks in the desert Lake doubtedthat any of them could survive without it. All hunting parties, as wellas Barber's party, were ordered to investigate all deposits that mightcontain salt as well as any stream or pond that was white along thebanks.

  The hunting parties were of paramount importance and they were kept outto the limits of their endurance. Every man physically able to do soaccompanied them. Those who could not kill game could carry it back tothe caves. There was no time to spare; already the unicorns weredecreasing in numbers and the woods goats were ranging farther andfarther north.

  At the end of twenty days Lake went in search of Barber and his party,worried about them. Their mission was one that could be as dangerous asany hunting trip. There was no proof that humans and Ragnarok creatureswere so similar as to guarantee that food for one might not be poisonfor the other. It was a very necessary mission, however; dried meat,alone, would bring grave deficiency diseases during the summer whichdried herbs and fruits would help prevent.

  When he located Barber's party he found Barber lying under a tree, paleand weak from his latest experiment but recovering.

  "I was the guinea pig yesterday," Barber said. "Some little purpleberries that the woods goats nibble at sometimes, maybe to get a touchof some certain vitamin or something. I ate too many, I guess, becausethey hit my heart like the kick of a mule."

  "Did you find anything at all encouraging?" Lake asked.

  "We found four different herbs that are the most violent cathartics youever dreamed of. And a little silvery fern that tastes like vanillaflavored candy and paralyzes you stiff as a board on the third swallow.It's an hour before you come back out of it.

  "But on the good side we found three different kinds of herbs that seemto be all right. We've been digging them up and hanging them in thetrees to dry."

  Lake tried the edible herbs and found them to be something like spinachin taste. There was a chance they might contain the vitamins andminerals needed. Since the hunting parties were living exclusively onmeat he would have to point out the edible herbs to all of them so theywould know what to eat should any of them feel the effects of dietdeficiency.

&nb
sp; He traveled alone as he visited the various hunting parties, findingsuch travel to be safer each day as the dwindling of the unicorns nearedthe vanishing point. It was a safety he did not welcome; it meant thelast of the game would be gone north long before sufficient meat wastaken.

  None of the hunting parties could report good luck. The woods goats,swift and elusive at best, were vanishing with the unicorns. The lastcartridge had been fired and the bowmen, while improving all the time,were far from expert. The unicorns, which should have been their majorsource of meat, were invulnerable to arrows unless shot at short rangein the side of the neck just behind the head. And at short range theunicorns invariably charged and presented no such target.

  He made the long, hard climb up the plateau's southern face, to stand atlast on top. It was treeless, a flat, green table that stretched to thenorth for as far as he could see. A mountain range, still capped withsnow, lay perhaps a hundred miles to the northwest; in the distance itlooked like a white, low-lying cloud on the horizon. No other mountainsor hills marred the endless sweep of the high plain.

  The grass was thick and here and there were little streams of waterproduced by the recently melted snow. It was a paradise land for theherbivores of Ragnarok but for men it was a harsh, forbidding place. Atthat elevation the air was so thin that only a moderate amount ofexertion made the heart and lungs labor painfully. Hard and prolongedexertion would be impossible.

  It seemed unlikely that men could hunt and dare unicorn attacks at suchan elevation but two hunting parties were ahead of him; one under thegrim Craig and one under the reckless Schroeder, both parties strippeddown to the youngest, strongest men among all the Rejects.

  He found Schroeder early one morning, leading his hunters toward a smallband of woods goats. Two unicorns were grazing in between and thehunters were swinging downwind from them. Schroeder saw him coming andwalked back a little way to meet him.

  "Welcome to our breathtaking land," Schroeder greeted him. "How arethings going with the rest of the hunting parties?"

  Schroeder was gaunt and there was weariness beneath his still lithemovements. His whiskers were an untamed sorrel bristling and across hischeekbone was the ugly scar of a half healed wound. Another gash wasripped in his arm and something had battered one ear. He reminded Lakeof a battle-scarred, indomitable tomcat who would never, for as long ashe lived, want to relinquish the joy of conflict and danger.

  "So far," he answered, "you and Craig are the only parties to manage totackle the plateau."

  He asked about Schroeder's luck and learned it had been much better thanthat of the others due to killing three unicorns by a method Schroederhad thought of.

  "Since the bowmen have to be to one side of the unicorns to kill them,"Schroeder said, "it only calls for a man to be the decoy and let theunicorns chase him between the hidden bowmen. If there's no more thanone or two unicorns and if the decoy doesn't have to run very far and ifthe bowmen don't miss it works well."

  "Judging from your beat-up condition," Lake said, "you must have beenthe decoy every time."

  "Well----" Schroeder shrugged his shoulders. "It was my idea."

  "I've been wondering about another way to get in shots at close range,"Lake said. "Take the skin of a woods goat, give it the original shape asnear as possible, and a bowman inside it might be able to fake a grazingwoods goat until he got the shot he wanted.

  "The unicorns might never suspect where the arrows came from," heconcluded. "And then, of course, they might."

  "I'll try it before the day is over, on those two unicorns over there,"Schroeder said. "At this elevation and in this gravity my own method isjust a little bit rough on a man."

  * * * * *

  Lake found Craig and his men several miles to the west, all of themgaunt and bearded as Schroeder had been.

  "We've had hell," Craig said. "It seems that every time we spot a fewwoods goats there will be a dozen unicorns in between. If only we hadrifles for the unicorns...."

  Lake told him of the plan to hide under woods goats' skins and of thedecoy system used by Schroeder.

  "Maybe we won't have to use Schroeder's method," he said. "We'll see ifthe other works--I'll give it the first try."

  This he was not to do. Less than an hour later one of the men who helpeddry the meat and carry it to the caves returned to report the campstricken by a strange, sudden malady that was killing a hundred a day.Dr. Chiara, who had collapsed while driving himself on to care for thesick, was sure it was a deficiency disease. Anders was down with it,helpless, and Bemmon had assumed command; setting up daily work quotasfor those still on their feet and refusing to heed Chiara's requestsconcerning treatment of the disease.

  Lake made the trip back to the caves in a fraction of the length of timeit had taken him to reach the plateau, walking until he was ready todrop and then pausing only for an hour or two of rest. He spottedBarber's camp when coming down off the plateau and he swung to one side,to tell Barber to have a supply of the herbs sent to the caves at once.

  He reached the caves, to find half the camp in bed and the other halfdragging about listlessly at the tasks given them by Bemmon. Anders wasin grave condition, too weak to rise, and Dr. Chiara was dying.

  He squatted down beside Chiara's pallet and knew there could be no hopefor him. On Chiara's pale face and in his eyes was the shadow of his ownforeknowledge.

  "I finally saw what it was"--Chiara's words were very low, hard tohear--"and I told Bemmon what to do. It's a deficiency disease,complicated by the gravity into some form not known on Earth."

  He stopped to rest and Lake waited.

  "Beri-beri--pellagra--we had deficiency diseases on Earth. But none sofatal--so quickly. I told Bemmon--ration out fruits and vegetables toeverybody. Hurry--or it will be too late."

  Again he stopped to rest, the last vestige of color gone from his face.

  "And you?" Lake asked, already knowing the answer.

  "For me--too late. I kept thinking of viruses--should have seen theobvious sooner. Just like----"

  His lips turned up a little at the corners and the Chiara of the deadpast smiled for the last time at Lake.

  "Just like a damned fool intern...."

  That was all, then, and the chamber was suddenly very quiet. Lake stoodup to leave, and to speak the words that Chiara could never hear:

  "We're going to need you and miss you--Doctor."

  * * * * *

  He found Bemmon in the food storage cavern, supervising the work of twoteen-age boys with critical officiousness although he was making no moveto help them. At sight of Lake he hurried forward, the ingratiatingsmile sliding across his face.

  "I'm glad you're back," he said. "I had to take charge when Anders gotsick and he had everything in such a mess. I've been working day andnight to undo his mistakes and get the work properly under way again."

  Lake looked at the two thin-faced boys who had taken advantage of theopportunity to rest. They leaned wearily against the heavy pole tableBemmon had had them moving, their eyes already dull with the incipientsickness and watching him in mute appeal.

  "Have you obeyed Chiara's order?" he asked.

  "Ah--no," Bemmon said. "I felt it best to ignore it."

  "Why?" Lake asked.

  "It would be a senseless waste of our small supply of fruit andvegetable foods to give them to people already dying. I'm afraid"--theingratiating smile came again--"we've been letting him exercise anauthority he isn't entitled to. He's really hardly more than a medicalstudent and his diagnoses are only guesses."

  "He's dead," Lake said flatly. "His last order will be carried out."

  He looked from the two tired boys to Bemmon, contrasting their thinnessand weariness with the way Bemmon's paunch still bulged outward and hisjowls still sagged with their load of fat.

  "I'll send West down to take over in here," he said to Bemmon. "You comewith me. You and I seem to be the only two in good health here andthere'
s plenty of work for us to do."

  The fawning expression vanished from Bemmon's face. "I see," he said."Now that I've turned Anders's muddle into organization, you'll hand myauthority over to another of your favorites and demote me back to commonlabor?"

  "Setting up work quotas for sick and dying people isn't organization,"Lake said. He spoke to the two boys, "Both of you go lie down. West willfind someone else." Then to Bemmon, "Come with me. We're both going towork at common labor."

  They passed by the cave where Bemmon slept. Two boys were just goinginto it, carrying armloads of dried grass to make a mattress underBemmon's pallet. They moved slowly, heavily. Like the two boys in thefood storage cave they were dull-eyed with the beginning of thesickness.

  Lake stopped, to look more closely into the cave and verify somethingelse he thought he had seen: Bemmon had discarded the prowler skins onhis bed and in their place were soft wool blankets; perhaps the onlyunpatched blankets the Rejects possessed.

  "Go back to your caves," he said to the boys. "Go to bed and rest."

  He looked at Bemmon. Bemmon's eyes flickered away, refusing to meet his.

  "What few blankets we have are for babies and the very youngestchildren," he said. His tone was coldly unemotional but he could notkeep his fists from clenching at his sides. "You will return them atonce and sleep on animal skins, as all the men and women do. And if youwant grass for a mattress you will carry it yourself, as even the youngchildren do."

  Bemmon made no answer, his face a sullen red and hatred shining in theeyes that still refused to meet Lake's.

  "Gather up the blankets and return them," Lake said. "Then come on up tothe central cave. We have a lot of work to do."

  He could feel Bemmon's gaze burning against his back as he turned awayand he thought of what John Prentiss had once said:

  "I know he's no good but he never has guts enough to go quite far enoughto give me an excuse to whittle him down."

  * * * * *

  Barber's men arrived the next day, burdened with dried herbs. These weregiven to the seriously ill as a supplement to the ration of fruit andvegetable foods and were given, alone, to those not yet sick. Then camethe period of waiting; of hoping that it was all not too late and toolittle.

  A noticeable change for the better began on the second day. A week wentby and the sick were slowly, steadily, improving. The not-quite-sickwere already back to normal health. There was no longer any doubt: theRagnarok herbs would prevent a recurrence of the disease.

  It was, Lake thought, all so simple once you knew what to do. Hundredshad died, Chiara among them, because they did not have a common herbthat grew at a slightly higher elevation. Not a single life would havebeen lost if he could have looked a week into the future and had theherbs found and taken to the caves that much sooner.

  But the disease had given no warning of its coming. Nothing, onRagnarok, ever seemed to give warning before it killed.

  Another week went by and hunters began to trickle in, gaunt andexhausted, to report all the game going north up the plateau and not asingle creature left below. They were the ones who had tried and failedto withstand the high elevation of the plateau. Only two out of threehunters returned among those who had challenged the plateau. They hadtried, all of them, to the best of their ability and the limits of theirendurance.

  The blue star was by then a small sun and the yellow sun blazed hottereach day. Grass began to brown and wither on the hillsides as the dayswent by and Lake knew summer was very near. The last hunting party, butfor Craig's and Schroeder's, returned. They had very little meat butthey brought with them a large quantity of something almost asimportant: salt.

  They had found a deposit of it in an almost inaccessible region ofcliffs and canyons. "Not even the woods goats can get in there,"Stevens, the leader of that party, said. "If the salt was in anaccessible place there would have been a salt lick there and goats inplenty."

  "If woods goats care for salt the way Earth animals do," Lake said."When fall comes we'll make a salt lick and find out."

  Two more weeks went by and Craig and Schroeder returned with theirsurviving hunters. They had followed the game to the eastern end of thesnow-capped mountain range but there the migration had drawn away fromthem, traveling farther each day than they could travel. They had almostwaited too long before turning back: the grass at the southern end ofthe plateau was turning brown and the streams were dry. They got enoughwater, barely, by digging seep holes in the dry stream beds.

  Lake's method of stalking unicorns under the concealment of a woods goatskin had worked well only a few times. After that the unicorns learnedto swing downwind from any lone woods goats. If they smelled a maninside the goat skin they charged him and killed him.

  With the return of the last hunters everything was done that could bedone in preparation for summer. Inventory was taken of the total foodsupply and it was even smaller than Lake had feared. It would be farfrom enough to last until fall brought the game back from the north andhe instituted rationing much stricter than before.

  The heat increased as the yellow sun blazed hotter and the blue sun grewlarger. Each day the vegetation was browner and a morning came when Lakecould see no green wherever he looked.

  They numbered eleven hundred and ten that morning, out of what had sorecently been four thousand. Eleven hundred and ten thin, hungryscarecrows who, already, could do nothing more than sit listlessly inthe shade and wait for the hell that was coming. He thought of the foodsupply, so pitifully small, and of the months it would have to last. Hesaw the grim, inescapable future for his charges: famine. There wasnothing he could do to prevent it. He could only try to forestallcomplete starvation for all by cutting rations to the bare existencelevel.

  And that would be bare existence for the stronger of them. The weakerwere already doomed.

  He had them all gather in front of the caves that evening when theterrace was in the shadow of the ridge. He stood before them and spoketo them:

  "All of you know we have only a fraction of the amount of food we needto see us through the summer. Tomorrow the present ration will be cut inhalf. That will be enough to live on, just barely. If that cut isn'tmade the food supply will be gone long before fall and all of us willdie.

  "If anyone has any food of any kind it must be turned in to be added tothe total supply. Some of you may have thought of your children andkept a little hidden for them. I can understand why you should dothat--but you must turn it in. There may possibly be some who hid foodfor themselves, personally. If so, I give them the first and lastwarning: turn it in tonight. If any hidden cache of food is found in thefuture the one who hid it will be regarded as a traitor and murderer.

  "All of you, but for the children, will go into the chamber next to theone where the food is stored. Each of you--and there will be noexceptions regardless of how innocent you are--will carry a bulkilyfolded cloth or garment. Each of you will go into the chamber alone.There will be no one in there. You will leave the food you have foldedin the cloth, if any, and go out the other exit and back to your caves.No one will ever know whether the cloth you carried contained food ornot. No one will ever ask.

  "Our survival on this world, if we are to survive at all, can be only byworking and sacrificing together. There can be no selfishness. What anyof you may have done in the past is of no consequence. Tonight we startanew. From now on we trust one another without reserve.

  "There will be one punishment for any who betray that trust--death."

  * * * * *

  Anders set the example by being the first to carry a folded cloth intothe cave. Of them all, Lake heard later, only Bemmon voiced any realindignation; warning all those in his section of the line that the orderwas the first step toward outright dictatorship and a police-and-spysystem in which Lake and the other leaders would deprive them all offreedom and dignity. Bemmon insisted upon exhibiting the emptiness ofthe cloth he carried; an action that, had he succeeded
in persuading theothers to follow his example, would have mercilessly exposed those whodid have food they were returning.

  But no one followed Bemmon's example and no harm was done. As for Lake,he had worries on his mind of much greater importance than Bemmon'senmity.

  * * * * *

  The weeks dragged by, each longer and more terrible to endure than theone before it as the heat steadily increased. Summer solstice arrivedand there was no escape from the heat, even in the deepest caves. Therewas no night; the blue sun rose in the east as the yellow sun set in thewest. There was no life of any kind to be seen, not even an insect.Nothing moved across the burned land but the swirling dust devils andshimmering, distorted mirages.

  The death rate increased with appalling swiftness. The small supply ofcanned and dehydrated milk, fruit and vegetables was reservedexclusively for the children but it was far insufficient in quantity.The Ragnarok herbs prevented any recurrence of the fatal deficiencydisease but they provided virtually no nourishment to help fight theheat and gravity. The stronger of the children lay wasted and listlesson their pallets while the ones not so strong died each day.

  Each day thin and hollow-eyed mothers would come to plead with him tosave their children. "... it would take so little to save his life....Please--before it's too late...."

  But there was so little food left and the time was yet so long untilfall would bring relief from the famine that he could only answer eachof them with a grim and final "No."

  And watch the last hope flicker and die in their eyes and watch themturn away, to go and sit for the last hours beside their children.

  Bemmon became increasingly irritable and complaining as the rationingand heat made existence a misery; insisting that Lake and the otherswere to blame for the food shortage, that their hunting efforts had beenbungling and faint-hearted. And he implied, without actually saying so,that Lake and the others had forbidden him to go near the food chamberbecause they did not want a competent, honest man to check up on whatthey were doing.

  There were six hundred and three of them the blazing afternoon when thegirl, Julia, could stand his constant, vindictive, fault-finding nolonger. Lake heard about it shortly afterward, the way she had turned onBemmon in a flare of temper she could control no longer and said:

  "Whenever your mouth is still you can hear the children who are dyingtoday--but you don't care. All you can think of is yourself. You claimLake and the others were cowards--but you didn't dare hunt with them.You keep insinuating that they're cheating us and eating more than weare--but your belly is the only one that has any fat left on it----"

  She never completed the sentence. Bemmon's face turned livid in sudden,wild fury and he struck her, knocking her against the rock wall so hardthat she slumped unconscious to the ground.

  "She's a liar!" he panted, glaring at the others. "She's a rotten liarand anybody who repeats what she said will get what she got!"

  When Lake learned of what had happened he did not send for Bemmon atonce. He wondered why Bemmon's reaction had been so quick and violentand there seemed to be only one answer:

  Bemmon's belly was still a little fat. There could be but one way hecould have kept it so.

  He summoned Craig, Schroeder, Barber and Anders. They went to thechamber where Bemmon slept and there, almost at once, they found hiscache. He had it buried under his pallet and hidden in cavities alongthe walls; dried meat, dried fruits and milk, canned vegetables. It wasan amount amazingly large and many of the items had presumably beenexhausted during the deficiency disease attack.

  "It looks," Schroeder said, "like he didn't waste any time featheringhis nest when he made himself leader."

  The others said nothing but stood with grim, frozen faces, waiting forLake's next action.

  "Bring Bemmon," Lake said to Craig.

  Craig returned with him two minutes later. Bemmon stiffened at the sightof his unearthed cache and color drained away from his face.

  "Well?" Lake asked.

  "I didn't"--Bemmon swallowed--"I didn't know it was there." And thenquickly, "You can't prove I put it there. You can't prove you didn'tjust now bring it in yourselves to frame me."

  Lake stared at Bemmon, waiting. The others watched Bemmon as Lake wasdoing and no one spoke. The silence deepened and Bemmon began to sweatas he tried to avoid their eyes. He looked again at the damning evidenceand his defiance broke.

  "It--if I hadn't taken it it would have been wasted on people who weredying," he said. He wiped at his sweating face. "I won't ever do itagain--I swear I won't."

  Lake spoke to Craig. "You and Barber take him to the lookout point."

  "What----" Bemmon's protest was cut off as Craig and Barber took him bythe arms and walked him swiftly away.

  Lake turned to Anders. "Get a rope," he ordered.

  Anders paled a little. "A--rope?"

  "What else does he deserve?"

  "Nothing," Anders said. "Not--not after what he did."

  On the way out they passed the place where Julia lay. Bemmon had knockedher against the wall with such force that a sharp projection of rock hadcut a deep gash in her forehead. A woman was wiping the blood from herface and she lay limply, still unconscious; a frail shadow of the boldgirl she had once been with the new life she would try to give them analmost unnoticeable little bulge in her starved thinness.

  * * * * *

  The lookout point was an outjutting spur of the ridge, six hundred feetfrom the caves and in full view of them. A lone tree stood there, itsdead limbs thrust like white arms through the brown foliage of the limbsthat still lived. Craig and Barber waited under the tree, Bemmon betweenthem. The lowering sun shone hot and bright on Bemmon's face as hesquinted back toward the caves at the approach of Lake and the othertwo.

  He twisted to look at Barber. "What is it--why did you bring me here?"There was the tremor of fear in his voice. "What are you going to do tome?"

  Barber did not answer and Bemmon turned back toward Lake. He saw therope in Anders' hand and his face went white with comprehension.

  "No!"

  He threw himself back with a violence that almost tore him loose._"No--no!"_

  Schroeder stepped forward to help hold him and Lake took the rope fromAnders. He fashioned a noose in it while Bemmon struggled and madepanting, animal sounds, his eyes fixed in horrified fascination on therope.

  When the noose was finished he threw the free end of the rope over thewhite limb above Bemmon. He released the noose and Barber caught it, todraw it snug around Bemmon's neck.

  Bemmon stopped struggling then and sagged weakly. For a moment itappeared that he would faint. Then he worked his mouth soundlessly untilwords came:

  "You won't--you can't--really hang me?"

  Lake spoke to him:

  "We're going to hang you. What you stole would have saved the lives often children. You've watched the children cry because they were sohungry and you've watched them become too weak to cry or care any more.You've watched them die each day and each night you've secretly eatenthe food that was supposed to be theirs.

  "We're going to hang you, for the murder of children and the betrayal ofour trust in you. If you have anything to say, say it now."

  "You can't! I had a right to live--to eat what would have been wasted ondying people!" Bemmon twisted to appeal to the ones who held him, hiswords quick and ragged with hysteria. "You can't hang me--I don't wantto die!"

  Craig answered him, with a smile that was like the thin snarl of a wolf:

  "Neither did two of my children."

  Lake nodded to Craig and Schroeder, not waiting any longer. They steppedback to seize the free end of the rope and Bemmon screamed at what wascoming, tearing loose from the grip of Barber.

  Then his scream was abruptly cut off as he was jerked into the air.There was a cracking sound and he kicked spasmodically, his headsetting grotesquely to one side.

  Craig and Schroeder and Barber watched him with hard, exp
ressionlessfaces but Anders turned quickly away, to be suddenly and violently sick.

  "He was the first to betray us," Lake said. "Snub the rope and leave himto swing there. If there are any others like him, they'll know what toexpect."

  The blue sun rose as they went back to the caves. Behind them Bemmonswung and twirled aimlessly on the end of the rope. Two long, paleshadows swung and twirled with him; a yellow one to the west and a blueone to the east.

  Bemmon was buried the next day. Someone cursed his name and someone spiton his grave and then he was part of the dead past as they faced thesuffering ahead of them.

  Julia recovered, although she would always wear a ragged scar on herforehead. Anders, who had worked closely with Chiara and was trying totake his place, quieted her fears by assuring her that the baby shecarried was still too small for there to be much danger of the fallcausing her to lose it.

  Three times during the next month the wind came roaring down out of thenorthwest, bringing a gray dust that filled the sky and enveloped theland in a hot, smothering gloom through which the suns could not beseen.

  Once black clouds gathered in the distance, to pour out a cloudburst.The 1.5 gravity gave the wall of water that swept down the canyon a fargreater force and velocity than it would have had on Earth and bouldersthe size of small houses were tossed into the air and shattered intofragments. But all the rain fell upon the one small area and not a dropfell at the caves.

  One single factor was in their favor and but for it they could not havesurvived such intense, continual heat: there was no humidity. Waterevaporated quickly in the hot, dry air and sweat glands operated at thehighest possible degree of efficiency. As a result they drank enormousquantities of water--the average adult needed five gallons a day. Allcanvas had been converted into water bags and the same principle ofcooling-by-evaporation gave them water that was only warm instead ofsickeningly hot as it would otherwise have been.

  But despite the lack of humidity the heat was still far more intensethan any on Earth. It never ceased, day or night, never let them have amoment's relief. There was a limit to how long human flesh could bear upunder it, no matter how valiant the will. Each day the toll of those whohad reached that limit was greater, like a swiftly rising tide.

  There were three hundred and forty of them, when the first rain came;the rain that meant the end of summer. The yellow sun moved southwardand the blue sun shrank steadily. Grass grew again and the woods goatsreturned, with them the young that had been born in the north, alreadyhalf the size of their mothers.

  For a while there was meat, and green herbs. Then the prowlers came, tomake hunting dangerous. Females with pups were seen but always at agreat distance as though the prowlers, like humans, took no chances withthe lives of their children.

  The unicorns came close behind the first prowlers, their young amazinglylarge and already weaned. Hunting became doubly dangerous then but thebowmen, through necessity, were learning how to use their bows withincreasing skill and deadliness.

  A salt lick for the woods goats was hopefully tried, although Lake feltdubious about it. They learned that salt was something the woods goatscould either take or leave alone. And when hunters were in the vicinitythey left it alone.

  The game was followed for many miles to the south. The hunters returnedthe day the first blizzard came roaring and screaming down over the edgeof the plateau; the blizzard that marked the beginning of the long,frigid winter. By then they were prepared as best they could be. Woodhad been carried in great quantities and the caves fitted with crudedoors and a ventilation system. And they had meat--not as much as theywould need but enough to prevent starvation.

  Lake took inventory of the food supply when the last hunters returnedand held check-up inventories at irregular and unannounced intervals. Hefound no shortages. He had expected none--Bemmon's grave had long sincebeen obliterated by drifting snow but the rope still hung from the deadlimb, the noose swinging and turning in the wind.

  * * * * *

  Anders had made a Ragnarok calendar that spring, from data given him byJohn Prentiss, and he had marked the corresponding Earth dates on it. Bya coincidence, Christmas came near the middle of the winter. There wouldbe the same rationing of food on Christmas day but little brown treeshad been cut for the children and decorated with such ornaments as couldbe made from the materials at hand.

  There was another blizzard roaring down off the plateau Christmasmorning; a white death that thundered and howled outside the caves at atemperature of more than eighty degrees below zero. But inside the cavesit was warm by the fires and under the little brown trees were toys thathad been patiently whittled from wood or sewn from scraps of cloth andanimal skins while the children slept. They were crude and humble toysbut the pale, thin faces of the children were bright with delight whenthey beheld them.

  There was the laughter of children at play, a sound that had not beenheard for many months, and someone singing the old, old songs. For a fewfleeting hours that day, for the first and last time on Ragnarok, therewas the magic of an Earth Christmas.

  That night a child was born to Julia, on a pallet of dried grass andprowler skins. She asked for her baby before she died and they let herhave it.

  "I wasn't afraid, was I?" she asked. "But I wish it wasn't so dark--Iwish I could see my baby before I go."

  They took the baby from her arms when she was gone and removed from itthe blanket that had kept her from learning that her child wasstill-born.

  There were two hundred and fifty of them when the first violent stormsof spring came. By then eighteen children had been born. Sixteen werestill-born, eight of them deformed by the gravity, but two were like anynormal babies on Earth. There was only one difference: the 1.5 gravitydid not seem to affect them as much as it had the Earth-born babies.

  Lake, himself, married that spring; a tall, gray-eyed girl who hadfought alongside the men the night of the storm when the prowlers brokeinto John Prentiss's camp. And Schroeder married, the last of them allto do so.

  That spring Lake sent out two classes of bowmen: those who would use theordinary short bow and those who would use the longbows he had had madethat winter. According to history the English longbowmen of medievaltimes had been without equal in the range and accuracy of their arrowsand such extra-powerful weapons should eliminate close range stalking ofwoods goats and afford better protection from unicorns.

  The longbows worked so well that by mid-spring he could detach Craig andthree others from the hunting and send them on a prospecting expedition.Prentiss had said Ragnarok was devoid of metals but there was the hopeof finding small veins the Dunbar Expedition's instruments had notdetected. They would have to find metal or else, in the end, they wouldgo back into a flint axe stage.

  Craig and his men returned when the blue star was a sun again and theheat was more than men could walk and work in. They had traveledhundreds of miles in their circuit and found no metals.

  "I want to look to the south when fall comes," Craig said. "Maybe itwill be different down there."

  They did not face famine that summer as they had the first summer. Thediet of meat and dried herbs was rough and plain but there was enough ofit.

  Full summer came and the land was again burned and lifeless. There wasnothing to do but sit wearily in the shade and endure the heat, drawingwhat psychological comfort they could from the fact that summer solsticewas past and the suns were creeping south again even though it would bemany weeks before there was any lessening of the heat.

  It was then, and by accident, that Lake discovered there was somethingwrong about the southward movement of the suns.

  He was returning from the lookout that day and he realized it wasexactly a year since he and the others had walked back to the caveswhile Bemmon swung on the limb behind them.

  It was even the same time of day; the blue sun rising in the east behindhim and the yellow sun bright in his face as it touched the westernhorizon before him. He remembered how the
yellow sun had been like thefront sight of a rifle, set in the deepest V notch of the westernhills--

  But now, exactly a year later, it was not in the V notch. It was on thenorth side of the notch.

  He looked to the east, at the blue sun. It seemed to him that it, too,was farther north than it had been although with it he had no landmarkto check by.

  But there was no doubt about the yellow sun: it was going south, as itshould at that time of year, but it was lagging behind schedule. Theonly explanation Lake could think of was one that would mean stillanother threat to their survival; perhaps greater than all the otherscombined.

  The yellow sun dropped completely behind the north slope of the V notchand he went on to the caves. He found Craig and Anders, the only two whomight know anything about Ragnarok's axial tilts, and told them what hehad seen.

  "I made the calendar from the data John gave me," Anders said. "TheDunbar men made observations and computed the length of Ragnarok'syear--I don't think they would have made any mistakes."

  "If they didn't," Lake said, "we're in for something."

  Craig was watching him, closely, thoughtfully. "Like the Ice Ages ofEarth?" he asked.

  Lake nodded and Anders said, "I don't understand."

  "Each year the north pole tilts toward the sun to give us summer andaway from it to give us winter," Lake said. "Which, of course, youknow. But there can be still another kind of axial tilt. On Earth itoccurs at intervals of thousands of years. The tilting that produces thesummers and winters goes on as usual but as the centuries go by thesummer tilt toward the sun grows less, the winter tilt away from itgreater. The north pole leans farther and farther from the sun and icesheets come down out of the north--an Ice Age. Then the north pole'sprogression away from the sun stops and the ice sheets recede as ittilts back toward the sun."

  "I see," Anders said. "And if the same thing is happening here, we'regoing away from an ice age but at a rate thousands of times faster thanon Earth."

  "I don't know whether it's Ragnarok's tilt, alone, or if the orbits ofthe suns around each other add effects of their own over a period ofyears," Lake said. "The Dunbar Expedition wasn't here long enough tocheck up on anything like that."

  "It seemed to me it was hotter this summer than last," Craig said."Maybe only my imagination--but it won't be imagination in a few yearsif the tilt toward the sun continues."

  "The time would come when we'd have to leave here," Lake said. "We'dhave to go north up the plateau each spring. There's no timberthere--nothing but grass and wind and thin air. We'd have to migratesouth each fall."

  "Yes ... migrate." Anders's face was old and weary in the harshreflected light of the blue sun and his hair had turned almost white inthe past year. "Only the young ones could ever adapt enough to go up theplateau to its north portion. The rest of us ... but we haven't manyyears, anyway. Ragnarok is for the young--and if they have to migrateback and forth like animals just to stay alive they will never have timeto accomplish anything or be more than stone age nomads."

  "I wish we could know how long the Big Summer will be that we're goinginto," Craig said. "And how long and cold the Big Winter, when Ragnaroktilts away from the sun. It wouldn't change anything--but I'd like toknow."

  "We'll start making and recording daily observations," Lake said."Maybe the tilt will start back the other way before it's too late."

  * * * * *

  Fall seemed to come a little later that year. Craig went to the south assoon as the weather permitted but there were no minerals there; only themetal-barren hills dwindling in size until they became a prairie thatsloped down and down toward the southern lowlands where all thecreatures of Ragnarok spent the winter.

  "I'll try again to the north when spring comes," Craig said. "Maybe thatmountain on the plateau will have something."

  Winter came, and Elaine died in giving him a son. The loss of Elaine wasan unexpected blow; hurting more than he would ever have thoughtpossible.

  But he had a son ... and it was his responsibility to do whatever hecould to insure the survival of his son and of the sons and daughters ofall the others.

  His outlook altered and he began to think of the future, not in terms ofyears to come but in terms of generations to come. Someday one of theyoung ones would succeed him as leader but the young ones would haveonly childhood memories of Earth. He was the last leader who had knownEarth and the civilization of Earth as a grown man. What he did while hewas leader would incline the destiny of a new race.

  He would have to do whatever was possible for him to do and he wouldhave to begin at once. The years left to him could not be many.

  He was not alone; others in the caves had the same thoughts he hadregarding the future even though none of them had any plan foraccomplishing what they spoke of. West, who had held degrees inphilosophy on Earth, said to Lake one night as they sat together by thefire:

  "Have you noticed the way the children listen when the talk turns towhat used to be on Earth, what might have been on Athena, and what wouldbe if only we could find a way to escape from Ragnarok?"

  "I've noticed," he said.

  "These stories already contain the goal for the future generations,"West went on. "Someday, somehow, they will go to Athena, to kill theGerns there and free the Terran slaves and reclaim Athena as their own."

  He had listened to them talk of the interstellar flight to Athena asthey sat by their fires and worked at making bows and arrows. It wasonly a dream they held, yet without that dream there would be nothingbefore them but the vision of generation after generation living anddying on a world that could never give them more than existence.

  The dream was needed. But it, alone, was not enough. How long, on Earth,had it been from the Neolithic age to advanced civilization--how longfrom the time men were ready to leave their caves until they were readyto go to the stars?

  Twelve thousand years.

  There were men and women among the Rejects who had been specialists invarious fields. There were a few books that had survived the tramplingof the unicorns and others could be written with ink made from the blacklance tree bark upon parchment made from the thin inner skin of unicornhides.

  The knowledge contained in the books and the learning of the Rejectsstill living should be preserved for the future generations. With thehelp of that learning perhaps they really could, someday, somehow,escape from their prison and make Athena their own.

  He told West of what he had been thinking. "We'll have to start aschool," he said. "This winter--tomorrow."

  West nodded in agreement. "And the writings should be commenced as soonas possible. Some of the textbooks will require more time to write thanRagnarok will give the authors."

  A school for the children was started the next day and the writing ofthe books began. The parchment books would serve two purposes. One wouldbe to teach the future generations things that would not only help themsurvive but would help them create a culture of their own as advanced asthe harsh environment and scanty resources of Ragnarok permitted. Theother would be to warn them of the danger of a return of the Gerns andto teach them all that was known about Gerns and their weapons.

  Lake's main contribution would be a lengthy book: TERRAN SPACESHIPS;TYPES AND OPERATION. He postponed its writing, however, to first producea much smaller book but one that might well be more important: INTERIORFEATURES OF A GERN CRUISER. Terran Intelligence knew a little about Gerncruisers and as second-in-command of the _Constellation_ he had seen andstudied a copy of that report. He had an excellent memory for suchthings, almost photographic, and he wrote the text and drew a multitudeof sketches.

  He shook his head ruefully at the result. The text was good but, forclarity, the accompanying illustrations should be accurate and inperspective. And he was definitely not an artist.

  He discovered that Craig could take a pen in his scarred, powerful handand draw with the neat precision of a professional artist. He turned thesketches over to him, together with the mas
s of specifications. Since itmight someday be of such vital importance, he would make four copies ofit. The text was given to a teen-age girl, who would make three morecopies of it....

  Four days later Schroeder handed Lake a text with some rough sketches.The title was: OPERATION OF GERN BLASTERS.

  Not even Intelligence had ever been able to examine a Gern hand blaster.But a man named Schrader, on Venus, had killed a Gern with his ownblaster and then disappeared with both infuriated Gerns andGern-intimidated Venusian police in pursuit. There had been a highreward for his capture....

  He looked it over and said, "I was counting on you giving us this."

  Only the barest trace of surprise showed on Schroeder's face but hiseyes were intently watching Lake. "So you knew all the time who I was?"

  "I knew."

  "Did anyone else on the _Constellation_ know?"

  "You were recognized by one of the ship's officers. You would have beentried in two more days."

  "I see," Schroeder said. "And since I was guilty and couldn't bereturned to Earth or Venus I'd have been executed on the _Constellation_."He smiled sardonically. "And you, as second-in-command, would have been myexecution's master of ceremonies."

  Lake put the parchment sheets back together in their proper order."Sometimes," he said, "a ship's officer has to do things that arecontrary to all his own wishes."

  Schroeder drew a deep breath, his face sombre with the memories he hadkept to himself.

  "It was two years ago when the Gerns were still talking friendship tothe Earth government while they shoved the colonists around on Venus.This Gern ... there was a girl there and he thought he could do what hewanted to her because he was a mighty Gern and she was nothing. He did.That's why I killed him. I had to kill two Venusian police to getaway--that's where I put the rope around my neck."

  "It's not what we did but what we do that we'll live or die by onRagnarok," Lake said. He handed Schroeder the sheets of parchment. "TellCraig to make at least four copies of this. Someday our knowledge ofGern blasters may be something else we'll live or die by."

  * * * * *

  The school and writing were interrupted by the spring hunting. Craigmade his journey to the Plateau's snow-capped mountain but he was unableto keep his promise to prospect it. The plateau was perhaps ten thousandfeet in elevation and the mountain rose another ten thousand feet abovethe plateau. No human could climb such a mountain in a 1.5 gravity.

  "I tried," he told Lake wearily when he came back. "Damn it, I nevertried harder at anything in my life. It was just too much for me. Maybesome of the young ones will be better adapted and can do it when theygrow up."

  Craig brought back several sheets of unusually transparent mica, eachsheet a foot in diameter, and a dozen large water-clear quartz crystals.

  "Float, from higher up on the mountain," he said. "The mica and crystalsare in place up there if we could only reach them. Other minerals,too--I panned traces in the canyon bottoms. But no iron."

  Lake examined the sheets of mica. "We could make windows for the outercaves of these," he said. "Have them double thickness with a wide airspace between, for insulation. As for the quartz crystals...."

  "Optical instruments," Craig said. "Binoculars, microscopes--it wouldtake us a long time to learn how to make glass as clear and flawless asthose crystals. But we have no way of cutting and grinding them."

  Craig went to the east that fall and to the west the next spring. Hereturned from the trip to the west with a twisted knee that would neverlet him go prospecting again.

  "It will take years to find the metals we need," he said. "Theindications are that we never will but I wanted to keep on trying. Now,my damned knee has me chained to these caves...."

  He reconciled himself to his lameness and confinement as best he couldand finished his textbook: GEOLOGY AND MINERAL IDENTIFICATION.

  He also taught a geology class during the winters. It was in the winterof the year four on Ragnarok that a nine-year-old boy entered his class;the silent, scar-faced Billy Humbolt.

  He was by far the youngest of Craig's students, and the most attentive.Lake was present one day when Craig asked, curiously:

  "It's not often a boy your age is so interested in mineralogy andgeology, Billy. Is there something more than just interest?"

  "I have to learn all about minerals," Billy said with matter-of-factseriousness, "so that when I'm grown I can find the metals for us tomake a ship."

  "And then?" Craig asked.

  "And then we'd go to Athena, to kill the Gerns who caused my mother todie, and my grandfather, and Julia, and all the others. And to free myfather and the other slaves if they're still alive."

  "I see," Craig said.

  He did not smile. His face was shadowed and old as he looked at the boyand beyond him; seeing again, perhaps, the frail blonde girl and the twochildren that the first quick, violent months had taken from him.

  "I hope you succeed," he said. "I wish I was young so I could dream ofthe same thing. But I'm not ... so let's get back to the identificationof the ores that will be needed to make a ship to go to Athena and tomake blasters to kill Gerns after you get there."

  Lake had a corral built early the following spring, with camouflagedwings, to trap some of the woods goats when they came. It would be animmense forward step toward conquering their new environment if theycould domesticate the goats and have goat herds near the caves allthrough the year. Gathering enough grass to last a herd of goats throughthe winter would be a problem--but first, before they worried aboutthat, they would have to see if the goats could survive the summer andwinter extremes of heat and cold.

  They trapped ten goats that spring. They built them brushsunshades--before summer was over the winds would have stripped thetrees of most of their dry, brown leaves--and a stream of water wasdiverted through the corral.

  It was all work in vain. The goats died from the heat in early summer,together with the young that had been born.

  When fall came they trapped six more goats. They built them sheltersthat would be as warm as possible and carried them a large supply of thetall grass from along the creek banks; enough to last them through thewinter. But the cold was too much for the goats and the second blizzardkilled them all.

  The next spring and fall, and with much more difficulty, they tried theexperiment with pairs of unicorns. The results were the same.

  Which meant they would remain a race of hunters. Ragnarok would notpermit them to be herdsmen.

  * * * * *

  The years went by, each much like the one before it but for the rapidaging of the Old Ones, as Lake and the others called themselves, and thegrowing up of the Young Ones. No woman among the Old Ones could anylonger have children, but six more normal, healthy children had beenborn. Like the first two, they were not affected by the gravity asEarth-born babies had been.

  Among the Young Ones, Lake saw, was a distinguishable difference. Thosewho had been very young the day the Gerns left them to die had adaptedbetter than those who had been a few years older.

  The environment of Ragnarok had struck at the very young with mercilesssavagery. It had subjected them to a test of survival that was withoutprecedent on Earth. It had killed them by the hundreds but among themhad been those whose young flesh and blood and organs had resisted deathby adapting to the greatest extent possible.

  The day of the Old Ones was almost done and the future would soon be inthe hands of the Young Ones. They were the ninety unconquerables out ofwhat had been four thousand Rejects; the first generation of what wouldbe a new race.

  It seemed to Lake that the years came and went ever faster as the OldOnes dwindled in numbers at an accelerating rate. Anders had died in thesixth year, his heart failing him one night as he worked patiently inhis crude little laboratory at carrying on the work started by Chiara tofind a cure for the Hell Fever. Barber, trying to develop a strain ofherbs that would grow in the lower elevation of the caves, was
killed bya unicorn as he worked in his test plot below the caves. Craig wentlimping out one spring day on the eighth year to look at a new mineral ahunter had found a mile from the caves. A sudden cold rain blew up,chilling him before he could return, and he died of Hell Fever the sameday.

  Schroeder was killed by prowlers the same year, dying with his back to atree and a bloody knife in his hand. It was the way he would have wantedto go--once he had said to Lake:

  "When my times comes I would rather it be against the prowlers. Theyfight hard and kill quick and then they're through with you. They don'ttear you up after you're dead and slobber and gloat over the pieces, theway the unicorns do."

  The springs came a little earlier each year, the falls a little later,and the observations showed the suns progressing steadily northward. Butthe winters, though shorter, were seemingly as cold as ever. The longsummers reached such a degree of heat on the ninth year that Lake knewthey could endure no more than two or three years more of the increasingheat.

  Then, in the summer of the tenth year, the tilting of Ragnarok--theapparent northward progress of the suns--stopped. They were in themiddle of what Craig had called Big Summer and they could endureit--just barely. They would not have to leave the caves.

  The suns started their drift southward. The observations were continuedand carefully recorded. Big Fall was coming and behind it would be BigWinter.

  Big Winter ... the threat of it worried Lake. How far to the south wouldthe suns go--how long would they stay? Would the time come when theplateau would be buried under hundreds of feet of snow and the cavesenclosed in glacial ice?

  There was no way he could ever know or even guess. Only those of thefuture would ever know.

  On the twelfth year only Lake and West were left of the Old Ones. Bythen there were eighty-three left of the Young Ones, eight Ragnarok-bornchildren of the Old Ones and four Ragnarok-born children of the YoungOnes. Not counting himself and West, there were ninety-five of them.

  It was not many to be the beginnings of a race that would face an iceage of unknown proportions and have over them, always, the threat of achance return of the Gerns.

  The winter of the fifteenth year came and he was truly alone, the lastof the Old Ones. White-haired and aged far beyond his years, he wasstill leader. But that winter he could do little other than sit by hisfire and feel the gravity dragging at his heart. He knew, long beforespring, that it was time he chose his successor.

  He had hoped to live to see his son take his place--but Jim was onlythirteen. Among the others was one he had been watching since the day hetold Craig he would find metals to build a ship and kill the Gerns:Bill Humbolt.

  Bill Humbolt was not the oldest among those who would make leaders buthe was the most versatile of them all, the most thoughtful andstubbornly determined. He reminded Lake of that fierce old man who hadbeen his grandfather and had it not been for the scars that twisted hisface into grim ugliness he would have looked much like him.

  A violent storm was roaring outside the caves the night he told theothers that he wanted Bill Humbolt to be his successor. There were noobjections and, without ceremony and with few words, he terminated hisfifteen years of leadership.

  He left the others, his son among them, and went back to the cave wherehe slept. His fire was low, down to dying embers, but he was too tiredto build it up again. He lay down on his pallet and saw, with neithersurprise nor fear, that his time was much nearer than he had thought. Itwas already at hand.

  He lay back and let the lassitude enclose him, not fighting it. He haddone the best he could for the others and now the weary journey wasover.

  His thoughts dissolved into the memory of the day fifteen years before.The roaring of the storm became the thunder of the Gern cruisers as theydisappeared into the gray sky. Four thousand Rejects stood in the coldwind and watched them go, the children not yet understanding that theyhad been condemned to die. Somehow, his own son was among them----

  He tried feebly to rise. There was work to do--a lot of work to do....