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PYRAMID
BOOKS
F-774
40c

One of the truly _unusual_ novels of science-fiction--a vivid portrayal
of 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 beautifully
deadly--the Gern battle cruiser, come to seek them out and destroy them.

Humbolt dropped inside the stockade, exulting. For two hundred years his
people 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 be
forgotten.

SPACE PRISON
(original title: _The Survivors_)

A PYRAMID BOOK
published by arrangement with Gnome Press, Inc.

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

This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character
herein and any person, living or dead; any such resemblance is purely
coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

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

                 PART 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light came on again, a feeble glow, and there was the soft, muffled
sound of questioning voices in the other compartments. She dressed, her
fingers shaking and clumsy, wishing that Dale would come to reassure
her; to tell her that nothing really serious had happened, that it had
not been the Gerns.

It was very still in the little compartment--strangely so. She had
finished dressing when she realized the reason: the air circulation
system 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 system
speakers that were scattered down the ship's corridors. A voice she
recognized as that of Lieutenant Commander Lake spoke:

"War was declared upon Earth by the Gern Empire ten days ago. Two Gern
cruisers have attacked us and their blasters have destroyed the stern
and bow of the ship. We are without a drive and without power but for a
few emergency batteries. I am the _Constellation_'s only surviving
officer and the Gern commander is boarding us to give me the surrender
terms.

"None of you will leave your compartments until ordered to do so.
Wherever you may be, remain there. This is necessary to avoid confusion
and to have as many as possible in known locations for future
instructions. 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 had
discovered the world of Athena and his knowledge of Athena was valuable
to the colonization plans. He had been quartered among the ship's
officers--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 had
abruptly, irrevocably, been changed.

The Athena Colonization Plan was ended. They had known such a thing
might happen--that was why the _Constellation_ had been made ready for
the voyage in secret and had waited for months for the chance to slip
through the ring of Gern spy ships; that was why she had raced at full
speed, with her communicators silenced so there would be no radiations
for the Gerns to find her by. Only forty days more would have brought
them to the green and virgin world of Athena, four hundred light-years
beyond the outermost boundary of the Gern Empire. There they should have
been safe from Gern detection for many years to come; for long enough to
build planetary defenses against attack. And there they would have used
Athena's rich resources to make ships and weapons to defend
mineral-depleted Earth against the inexorably increasing inclosure of
the mighty, coldly calculating colossus that was the Gern Empire.

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

Billy sighed and stirred in the little-boy sleep that had not been
broken by the blasts that had altered the lives of eight thousand people
and 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 her
mind was like an anguished prayer: _Dear God--what do Gerns do to
five-year-old boys?_

He saw her face, and the dim light, and the sleepiness was suddenly gone
from 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 twice
his age, as there always was. "Will they--will they kill us?"

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

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

"There is no power for the air regenerators and within twenty hours we
will start smothering to death. Under these circumstances I could not do
other 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 of
the Gern Empire. This ship has deliberately invaded Gern territory in
time of war with intent to seize and exploit a Gern world. We are
willing, however, to offer a leniency not required by the circumstances.
Terran technicians and skilled workers in certain fields can be used in
the factories we shall build on Athena. The others will not be needed
and there is not room on the cruisers to take them.

"Your occupation records will be used to divide you into two groups: the
Acceptables and the Rejects. The Rejects will be taken by the cruisers
to an Earth-type planet near here and left, together with the personal
possessions in their compartments and additional, and ample, supplies.
The Acceptables will then be taken on to Athena and at a later date the
cruisers 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 will
wait in your compartments for them. You will obey their orders promptly
and without annoying them with questions. At the first instance of
resistance or rebellion this offer will be withdrawn and the cruisers
will go their way again."

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

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

There she could faintly hear them entering compartments, demanding
names, and saying, _"Out--out!"_ Once she heard a Gern say, "Acceptables
will remain inside until further notice. Do not open your doors after
the 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 being
permitted to take their personal possessions. She had very little time
in which to get together what she could carry....

There were two small bags in the compartment and she hurried to pack
them with things she and Dale and Billy might need, not able to know
which of them, if any, would be Rejects. Nor could she know whether she
should put in clothes for a cold world or a hot one. The Gern commander
had said the Rejects would be left on an Earth-type planet but where
could it be? The Dunbar Expedition had explored across five hundred
light-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 heard
them enter the compartments across from her own. There came the hard,
curt questions and the command: "Outside--hurry!" A woman said something
in pleading question and there was the soft thud of a blow and the
words: "Outside--do not ask questions!" A moment later she heard the
woman 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. She
held her head high and composed herself with all the determination she
could muster so that the arrogant Gerns would not see that she was
afraid. 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 hers
showed 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 surveyed
her and the room with a quick sweep of eyes that were like glittering
obsidian, their mouths thin, cruel slashes in the flat, brutal planes of
their 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 cool
and 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 other
compartment and the Gern took a quick step toward her. She seized the
two bags in one hand, not wanting to release Billy, and swung back to
hurry out into the corridor. The other Gern jerked one of the bags from
her 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 stumbling
through the doorway.

She became part of the Rejects who were being herded like sheep down the
corridors and into the port airlock. There were many children among
them, the young ones frightened and crying, and often with only one
parent or an older brother or sister to take care of them. And there
were many young ones who had no one at all and were dependent upon
strangers 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 a
group of Rejects being herded up it. Dale was not among them and she
knew, 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 she
and the other Rejects crowded and stumbled down the boarding ramp and
out onto the rocky ground. There was the pull of a terrible gravity such
as she had never experienced and they were in a bleak, barren valley, a
cold wind moaning down it and whipping the alkali dust in bitter clouds.
Around the valley stood ragged hills, their white tops laying out
streamers 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 one
hand 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 and
fight. Let's take----"

A Gern blaster cracked with a vivid blue flash and the man plunged
lifelessly to the ground. She flinched instinctively and fell over an
unseen rock, the bag of precious clothes flying from her hand. She
scrambled 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. "Out
from the ship--faster."

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked at the snow streaming from the ragged hills, felt the hard
pull 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 where
men could not survive. The name came from an old Teutonic myth and
meant: _The last day for gods and men_. The Dunbar Expedition had
discovered Ragnarok and her father had told her of it, of how it had
killed six of the eight men who had left the ship and would have killed
all of them if they had remained any longer.

She knew where they were and she knew the Gerns had lied to them and
would never send a ship to take them to Earth. Their abandonment there
had 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 Daddy
can'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 I
know--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 brave
before the Gerns but now--now night was at hand and out of it would
come terror and death for herself and Billy. They would never see Dale
again, never see Athena or Earth or even the dawn on the world that had
killed them....

She tried not to cry, and failed. Billy's cold little hand touched her
own, 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 around
her were others, as helpless and uncertain as she. Her story was only
one 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 are
futile weapons; they can never bring us any tomorrows. We'll have to
fight whatever comes to kill us no matter how scared we are. For
ourselves 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'm
going to make sure that there is a tomorrow for you, always, to the last
breath of my life."

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

_"Prowlers!"_

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

They were things that might have been half wolf, half tiger; each of
them three hundred pounds of incredible ferocity with eyes blazing like
yellow fire in their white-fanged tiger-wolf faces. They came like the
wind, in a flowing black wave, and ripped through the outer guard line
as though it had not existed. The inner guards fired in a chattering
roll of gunshots, trying to turn them, and Prentiss's rifle licked out
pale 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 swerved
by the fire so that they struck only the outer edge of the area where
the Rejects were grouped.

At that distance they blended into the dark ground so that he could not
find them in the sights of his rifle. He could only watch helplessly and
see a dark-haired woman caught in their path, trying to run with a child
in her arms and already knowing it was too late. A man was running
toward her, slow in the high gravity, an axe in his hands and his
cursing a raging, savage snarl. For a moment her white face was turned
in helpless appeal to him and the others; then the prowlers were upon
her and she fell, deliberately, going to the ground with her child
hugged in her arms beneath her so that her body would protect it.

The prowlers passed over her, pausing for an instant to slash the life
from her, and raced on again. They vanished back into the outer
darkness, the farther guards firing futilely, and there was a silence
but for the distant, hysterical sobbing of a woman.

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

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

It was Irene.

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

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

There was the sound of footsteps and a bold-faced girl in a red skirt
stopped 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 came
back after his clothes."

"Are you going to look after him?"

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

"She was my daughter," he said.

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

The first objection to his assumption of leadership occurred an hour
later. The prowlers had withdrawn with the coming of full daylight and
wood had been carried from the trees to build fires. Mary, one of the
volunteer cooks, was asking two men to carry her some water when he
approached. 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 and
sick."

The man continued to squat by the fire, his hands extended to its
warmth. "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 help
drive 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, then
he got to his feet, his heavy shoulders hunched challengingly.

"I'll have to set you straight, old timer," he said. "No one has
appointed you the head cheese around here. Now, there's the container
you want filled and over there"--he made a small motion with one
hand--"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 under
the chin and there was a sharp cracking sound as his jawbone snapped.
For a fraction of a second there was an expression of stupefied
amazement on his face then his eyes glazed and he slumped to the ground
with 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. One
hundred more had died from the Hell Fever that often followed exposure
and killed within an hour.

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

Lake, a tall, hard-jawed man with pale 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 that
second 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 so
much like his own, and asked, "How was it last night?"

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

"I came down to see if anyone was in charge here and to tell them that
we'll have to move into the woods at once--today. We'll have plenty of
wood for the fires there, some protection from the wind, and by
combining 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 the
advance of the resources of any value. We gave Ragnarok a quick survey
and when the sixth man died we marked it on the chart as uninhabitable
and 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 be
early spring. When summer comes Ragnarok will swing between the two suns
and 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 a
few species of rodent-like animals--they're scavengers--and a herbivore
we called the woods goat. The prowlers are the dominant form of life on
Ragnarok and I suspect their intelligence is a good deal higher than we
would like it to be. There will be a constant battle for survival with
them.

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

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

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

Prentiss returned to his own group. The dead were buried in shallow
graves and inventory was taken of the promised "ample supplies." These
were only the few personal possessions the Rejects had been permitted to
take plus a small amount of food the Gerns had taken from the
_Constellation_'s stores. The Gerns had been forced to provide the
Rejects with at least a little food--had they openly left them to
starve, the Acceptables, whose families were among the Rejects, might
have rebelled.

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

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

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

To the south, beyond the barren valley, the land could be seen dropping
in its long sweep to the southern lowlands where the unicorns and swamp
crawlers lived. To the north the hills climbed gently for miles, then
ended under the steeply sloping face of an immense plateau. The plateau
reached from western to eastern horizon, still white with the snows of
winter and looming so high above the world below that the clouds brushed
it and half obscured it.

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

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

An overcast darkened the sky at noon and the wind died down to almost
nothing. There was a feeling of waiting tension in the air and he went
back to the Rejects, to speed their move into the woods. They were
already going in scattered groups, accompanied by prowler guards, but
there was no organization and it would be too long before the last of
them were safely in the new camp.

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

He found the man he wanted already helping the Rejects get started: a
thin, quiet man named Henry Anders who had fought well against the
prowlers the night before, even though his determination had been
greater than his marksmanship. He was the type people instinctively
liked and trusted; a good choice for the subleader whose job it would be
to handle the multitude of details in camp while he, Prentiss, and a
second subleader he would select, handled the defense of the camp and
the hunting.

"I don't like this overcast," he told Anders. "Something's brewing. Get
everyone 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. This
gravity--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. But
the children from about four on up get tired quickly, go to sleep, and
when they wake up they've sort of bounced back out of it."

"Maybe they can adapt to some extent to this gravity." He thought of
what Lake had said that morning: _So many of them are so young ... and
when you're young it's too soon to have to die._ "Maybe the Gerns made a
mistake--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 to
prove the Gerns wrong."

He went his way again to pass by the place where Julia, the girl who had
become 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 time
Billy had still been stunned with grief, and at the sight of his
grandfather he had been unable to keep from breaking.

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

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

"I guess this is all, Billy," Julia was saying as she gathered up her
scanty 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 he
stopped and said something that sounded like _"No."_ He laid the teddy
bear back down, wiping a little dust from its face as in a last gesture
of 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 the
ground behind him and with it leaving forever the tears and laughter of
childhood.

The overcast deepened, and at midafternoon dark storm clouds came
driving in from the west. Efforts were intensified to complete the move
before 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 built
of the materials most quickly available; dead limbs, brush, and the
limited amount of canvas and blankets the Rejects had. They would be
inadequate 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 deep
roar of the high wind that drove them and the wind on the ground began
to stir restlessly in response, like some monster awakening to the call
of its kind.

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

Prentiss knew him slightly--and Craig still did not know Irene had been
his daughter. Craig had been one of the field engineers for what would
have 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 night
before, and he still had their three small children.

"We'll stop with the shelters we already have built," he told Craig. "It
will take all the time left to us to reinforce them against the wind. I
need 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 cut
all the strips of prowler skins they can get. Everything about the
shelters will have to be lashed down to something solid. See if you can
find some experienced outdoorsmen to help you check the jobs.

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

"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 ready
to be lighted when the time came. He ordered all guards to their
stations, there to get what rest they could. They would have no rest at
all after darkness came.

He met Lake at the north end of his own group's camp, where it merged
with Lake's group and no guard line was needed. Lake told him that his
camp would be as well prepared as possible under the circumstances
within another hour. By then the wind in the trees was growing swiftly
stronger, slapping harder and harder at the shelters, and it seemed
doubtful 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 fires
lighted and all the women and children into the shelters. Fifteen
minutes later the storm finally broke.

It came as a roaring downpour of cold rain. Complete darkness came with
it and the wind rose to a velocity that made the trees lean. An hour
went by and the wind increased, smashing at the shelters with a violence
they had not been built to withstand. The prowler skin lashings held but
the canvas and blankets were ripped into streamers that cracked like
rifle shots in the wind before they were torn completely loose and flung
into the night.

One by one the guard fires went out and the rain continued, growing
colder and driven in almost horizontal sheets by the wind. The women and
children huddled in chilled misery in what meager protection the torn
shelters still gave and there was nothing that could be done to help
them.

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

He had known, of course, that successful leadership would involve more
sacrifice on his part than on the part of those he led. He could have
shunned responsibility and his personal welfare would have benefited. He
had lived on alien worlds almost half his life; with a rifle and a knife
he could have lived, until Ragnarok finally killed him, with much less
effort than that required of him as leader. But such an action had been
repugnant to him, unthinkable. What he knew of survival on hostile
worlds might help the others to survive.

So he had assumed command, tolerating no objections and disregarding the
fact that he would be shortening his already short time to live on
Ragnarok. It was, he supposed, some old instinct that forbade the
individual 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 the
land with its cold, blue light.

The prowlers came then.

They feinted against the east and west guard lines, then hit the south
line in massed, ferocious attack. Twenty got through, past the
slaughtered south guards, and charged into the interior of the camp. As
they did so the call, prearranged by him in case of such an event, went
up 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 the
shouting and cursing of men as they tried to fight the prowlers with
knives and clubs. Then the emergency guards--every third man from the
east and west lines--came plunging through the snow, firing as they
came.

The prowlers launched themselves away from their victims and toward the
guards, leaving a woman to stagger aimlessly with blood spurting from a
severed artery and splashing dark in the starlight on the blue-white
snow. 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 where
they had fallen and the surviving emergency guards turned to hurry back
to their stations, reloading as they went.

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

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

"John----"

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

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

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

"What----"

Then Chiara's eyes lighted with comprehension and he hurried away
without further questions.

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

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

The prowlers attacked again and again and when the wan sun lifted to
shine down on the white, frozen land there were five hundred dead in
Prentiss's camp: three hundred by Hell Fever and two hundred by prowler
attacks.

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

Lake reported over six hundred dead. "I hope," he said with bitter
hatred, "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 we
have 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 to
crowd both groups in together to let its circumference be as small as
possible."

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

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

All were moved to the center of the camp area that day and when the
prowlers came that night they found a ring of guards and fires through
which 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 feet
high so the prowlers could not jump over it and, since the prowlers had
the sharp claws and climbing ability of cats, its top would have to be
surmounted with a row of sharp outward-and-downward projecting stakes.
These would be set in sockets in the top rail and tied down with strips
of prowler skin.

The trees east of camp were festooned for a great distance with the
remnants 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 trees
and recover it. All of it, down to the smallest fragment, was turned
over to the women who were physically incapable of helping work on the
stockade wall. They began patiently sewing the rags and tatters back
into usable form again.

The first hunting party went out and returned with six of the
tawny-yellow sharp-horned woods goats, each as large as an Earth deer.
The hunters reported the woods goats to be hard to stalk and dangerous
when cornered. One hunter was killed and another injured because of not
knowing that.

They also brought in a few of the rabbit-sized scavenger animals. They
were all legs and teeth and bristly fur, the meat almost inedible. It
would 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 the
lance tree because of its slender, straightly outthrust limbs. Its wood
was as hard as hickory and as springy as cedar. Prentiss found two
amateur archers who were sure they could make efficient bows and arrows
out of the lance tree limbs. He gave them the job, together with
helpers.

The days turned suddenly hot, with nights that still went below
freezing. The Hell Fever took a constant, relentless toll. They needed
adequate shelters--but the dwindling supply of ammunition and the
nightly prowler attacks made the need for a stockade wall even more
imperative. The shelters would have to wait.

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

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

Prentiss walked beside Chiara and when the shelter was behind them he
asked, "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 had
been on the _Constellation_, whose brown eyes had smiled at the world
through thick glasses and who had laughed and joked as he assured his
patients that all would soon be well with them. He was thin and his face
was haggard with worry. He had, in his quiet way, been fully as valiant
as any of those who had fought the prowlers. He had worked day and night
to fight a form of death he could not see and against which he had no
weapon.

"The boy is dying," Chiara said. "He knows it and his mother knows it. I
told them the medicine I gave him might help. It was a lie, to try to
make it a little easier for both of them before the end comes. The
medicine 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 a
first-year intern. I do the best I know how to do but it isn't
enough--it will never be enough."

"What you have to learn here is something no Earth doctor knows or could
teach you," he said. "You have to have time to learn--and you need
equipment and drugs."

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

"Some of the Ragnarok plants might be of value if a person could find
the right ones. I just came from a talk with Anders about that. He'll
provide you with anything possible in the way of equipment and supplies
for research--anything in the camp you need to try to save lives. He'll
be 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 a
long time to find a cure--maybe we never would--but I'd like to have
help so I could try. I'd like to be able, some day once again, to say to
a 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 ammunition
diminished. It would be some time before men were skilled in the use of
the bows and arrows that were being made; and work on the wall was
pushed ahead with all speed possible. No one was exempt from labor on it
who could as much as carry the pointed stakes. Children down to the
youngest worked alongside the men and women.

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

The killing labor was recognized as necessary, however, and there were
no 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 minor
member of the Athena Planning Board. But even on the _Constellation_
Bemmon had felt he merited a still higher position, and his
ingratiating attitude when before his superiors had become one of
fault-finding insinuations concerning their ability as compared with his
when their backs were turned.

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

The sun was shining mercilessly hot the day Bemmon chose to challenge
Prentiss's wisdom as leader. Bemmon was cutting and sharpening stakes, a
job the sometimes-too-lenient Anders had given him when Bemmon had
insisted 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 Bemmon
halted 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 came
to him.

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

"What situation?" Prentiss asked.

"This stupid insistence upon confining me to manual labor. I'm the
single member on Ragnarok of the Athena Planning Board and surely you
can see that this bumbling confusion of these people"--Bemmon indicated
the hurrying, laboring men, women and children around them--"can be
transformed into efficient, organized effort only through proper
supervision. Yet my abilities along such lines are ignored and I've been
forced 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 respect
to which I'm entitled."

"Look," Prentiss said.

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

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

Bemmon's lips thinned and hatred was like a sheen on his face. Prentiss
looked from the single stake Bemmon had cut that morning to Bemmon's
white, unblistered hands. He looked at the hatchet that Bemmon had
thrown down in the rocks and at the V notch broken in its keen-edged
blade. 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 skull
with 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 the
log-carrying force tomorrow. Now, move!"

What Bemmon had thought to be his wrath deserted him before Prentiss's
fury. He stooped to obey the order but the hatred remained on his face
and 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 sadistic
displays of authority."

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

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

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

Then he hurried away, like a man glad to escape, and began to chop
stakes 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 slowly
strengthened and people moved with a little less laborious effort. On
the twentieth day the wall was finally completed and the camp was
prowler proof.

But the spring weather was a mad succession of heat and cold and storm
that caused the Hell Fever to take its toll each day and there was no
relaxation from the grueling labor. Weatherproof shelters had to be
built as rapidly as possible.

So the work of constructing them began; wearily, sometimes almost
hopelessly, but without complaint other than to hate and curse the Gerns
more than ever.

There was no more trouble from Bemmon; Prentiss had almost forgotten him
when he was publicly challenged one night by a burly, threatening man
named 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 they
even have time to bury you tonight I'm goin' to have your stooges kicked
out and replaced with men who'll give us competent leadership instead of
blunderin' authoritarianism."

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

"I'll be glad to accommodate you," Prentiss said mildly. "Go get
yourself 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 the
training and experience in combat that interstellar explorers such as
Prentiss had. Haggar was good, but considerably far from good enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next night the stockade was attacked by dozens of prowlers who
simultaneously began removing the pointed stakes in the same manner
employed by the prowler of the night before. Their attack was turned
back with heavy losses on both sides and with a dismayingly large
expenditure of precious ammunition.

There could be no doubt about how the band of prowlers had learned to
remove the stakes: the prowler of the night before had told them before
it died. It was doubtful that the prowlers had a spoken language, but
they had some means of communication. They worked together and they were
highly intelligent, probably about halfway between dog and man.

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

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

The hunting parties suffered unusually heavy losses from prowler attacks
that 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're
hungry--they don't kill us to eat us. They don't have any reason to kill
us--they just hate us."

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

Lake's pale brows lifted in question.

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

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

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

The giant blue star that was the other component of Ragnarok's binary
grew 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 sun
and Ragnarok would be between them. The yellow sun would burn the land
by day and the blue sun would sear it by the night that would not be
night. Then would come the brief fall, followed by the long, frozen
winter 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 million
miles away and invisible behind the cold yellow sun.

The Hell Fever lessened with the completion of the shelters but it still
killed each day. Chiara and his helpers worked with unfaltering
determination 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 wide
and 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 its
worst.

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

She stopped to talk to Prentiss one evening. She still wore the red
skirt, now faded and patched, but her face was tired and thoughtful and
no longer bold.

"Is it true, John," she asked, "that only a few of us might be able to
have children here and that most of us who tried to have children in
this 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 had
fun and done as I pleased. The human race didn't need me and we both
knew it. But now--none of us can be apart from the others or be afraid
of anything. If we're selfish and afraid there will come a time when the
last of us will die and there will be nothing on Ragnarok to show we
were ever here.

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

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

"It sounds wise and splendid, Julia," he said, "and it's what I thought
you 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 short
was the time to grow and reproduce before the brown death of summer
came. The prowlers were suddenly gone one day, to follow the spring
north, and for a week men could walk and work outside the stockade
without the protection of armed guards.

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

The stockade wall was a blue-black rectangle behind them and the blue
star burned with the brilliance of a dozen moons, lighting the woods in
blue shadow and azure light. Prentiss and the hunter walked a little in
front 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 said
in a low voice. "Fred was getting ready to bring in the rest of the
woods goat. He shouldn't have been more than ten minutes behind me--and
it's been over an hour."

They rounded the grove of trees. At first it seemed there was nothing
before them but the empty, grassy glade. Then they saw it lying on the
ground no more than twenty feet in front of them.

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

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

The answer came in a savage, squealing scream and the pound of cloven
hooves. A formless shadow beside the trees materialized into a monstrous
charging bulk; a thing like a gigantic gray bull, eight feet tall at the
shoulders, with the tusked, snarling head of a boar and the starlight
glinting 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 and
struck 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 ending
almost as soon as it began.

The unicorn ripped the sod in deep furrows as it whirled back to
Prentiss and the remaining rifleman; not turning in the manner of
four-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 feet
above 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 it
collapsed, 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 out
through the night like the blast of a mighty trumpet. Then it dropped
back to the ground, to die while its call was still echoing from the
nearer hills.

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

The rifleman's face was blue-white in the starlight. "The others are
coming--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 east
and south, the rumble of their hooves swelling to a thunder that filled
the night. The rifleman would reach the stockade only a little ahead of
them and they would go through the wall as though it had been made of
paper.

For a little while the area inside the stockade would be filled with
dust, with the squealing of the swirling, charging unicorns and the
screams of the dying. Those inside the stockade would have no chance
whatever of escaping. Within two minutes it would be over, the last
child would have been found among the shattered shelters and trampled
into 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 his
rifle caught the running man's back. He pressed the trigger and the
rifle cracked viciously as it bucked against his shoulder.

The man spun and fell hard to the ground. He twisted, to raise himself
up 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 in
the nearby grove. He saw what he already knew, they were young trees and
too small to offer any escape for him. There was no place to run, no
place to hide.

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

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

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

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

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

The unicorns were still outside when morning came. The fires could not
be refueled; the sight of a man moving inside the stockade would bring
the entire herd charging through. The hours dragged by, the smoke from
the dying fires dwindled to thin streamers. The unicorns grew
increasingly bolder and suspicious, crowding closer to the walls and
peering through the openings between the rails.

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

Lake waited and watched until he was sure the unicorns were gone for
good. 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 he
expected to see.

Barber came up behind him, to sigh with relief. "That was close. It's
hard 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 hold
out unicorns."

"Look to the south," Lake told him.

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

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

Preparations were made for the departure; preparations that consisted
mainly of providing each person with as much in the way of food or
supplies as he or she could carry. In the 1.5 gravity, that was not
much.

They left when the blue star rose. They filed out through the northern
gate and the rear guard closed it behind them. There was almost no
conversation among them. Some of them turned to take a last look at what
had been the only home they had ever known on Ragnarok, then they all
faced forward again, to the northwest, where the foothills of the
plateau might offer them sanctuary.

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

They returned, to report that the second herd of unicorns had broken
down 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 last
piece of bent metal or torn cloth. They would find uses for all of it in
the future.

The cave system was extensive, containing room for several times their
number. The deeper portions of the caves could not be lived in until
ventilation ducts were made, but the outer caves were more than
sufficient in number. Work was begun to clear them of fallen rubble, to
pry down all loose material overhead and to level the floors. A spring
came out of the ridge not far from the caves and the approach to the
caves was so narrow and steep that unicorns could scramble up it only
with difficulty and one at a time. And should they ever reach the
natural terrace in front of the caves they would be too large to enter
and could do no more than stand outside and make targets of themselves
for the bowmen within.

Anders was in charge of making the caves livable, his working force
restricted almost entirely to women and children. Lake sent Barber out,
with a small detachment of men, to observe the woods goats and learn
what plants they ate. And then learn, by experimenting, if such plants
could 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 doubted
that any of them could survive without it. All hunting parties, as well
as Barber's party, were ordered to investigate all deposits that might
contain salt as well as any stream or pond that was white along the
banks.

The hunting parties were of paramount importance and they were kept out
to the limits of their endurance. Every man physically able to do so
accompanied them. Those who could not kill game could carry it back to
the caves. There was no time to spare; already the unicorns were
decreasing in numbers and the woods goats were ranging farther and
farther 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 as
any hunting trip. There was no proof that humans and Ragnarok creatures
were so similar as to guarantee that food for one might not be poison
for the other. It was a very necessary mission, however; dried meat,
alone, would bring grave deficiency diseases during the summer which
dried herbs and fruits would help prevent.

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

"I was the guinea pig yesterday," Barber said. "Some little purple
berries that the woods goats nibble at sometimes, maybe to get a touch
of some certain vitamin or something. I ate too many, I guess, because
they 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 you
ever dreamed of. And a little silvery fern that tastes like vanilla
flavored 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 seem
to be all right. We've been digging them up and hanging them in the
trees to dry."

Lake tried the edible herbs and found them to be something like spinach
in taste. There was a chance they might contain the vitamins and
minerals needed. Since the hunting parties were living exclusively on
meat he would have to point out the edible herbs to all of them so they
would know what to eat should any of them feel the effects of diet
deficiency.

He traveled alone as he visited the various hunting parties, finding
such travel to be safer each day as the dwindling of the unicorns neared
the vanishing point. It was a safety he did not welcome; it meant the
last of the game would be gone north long before sufficient meat was
taken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He asked about Schroeder's luck and learned it had been much better than
that of the others due to killing three unicorns by a method Schroeder
had 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 the
unicorns chase him between the hidden bowmen. If there's no more than
one or two unicorns and if the decoy doesn't have to run very far and if
the bowmen don't miss it works well."

"Judging from your beat-up condition," Lake said, "you must have been
the 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 as
near as possible, and a bowman inside it might be able to fake a grazing
woods goat until he got the shot he wanted.

"The unicorns might never suspect where the arrows came from," he
concluded. "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 is
just a little bit rough on a man."

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

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

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

"Maybe we won't have to use Schroeder's method," he said. "We'll see if
the 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 helped
dry the meat and carry it to the caves returned to report the camp
stricken by a strange, sudden malady that was killing a hundred a day.
Dr. Chiara, who had collapsed while driving himself on to care for the
sick, was sure it was a deficiency disease. Anders was down with it,
helpless, and Bemmon had assumed command; setting up daily work quotas
for those still on their feet and refusing to heed Chiara's requests
concerning treatment of the disease.

Lake made the trip back to the caves in a fraction of the length of time
it had taken him to reach the plateau, walking until he was ready to
drop and then pausing only for an hour or two of rest. He spotted
Barber'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 half
dragging about listlessly at the tasks given them by Bemmon. Anders was
in grave condition, too weak to rise, and Dr. Chiara was dying.

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

"I finally saw what it was"--Chiara's words were very low, hard to
hear--"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 so
fatal--so quickly. I told Bemmon--ration out fruits and vegetables to
everybody. 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 the
obvious sooner. Just like----"

His lips turned up a little at the corners and the Chiara of the dead
past 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 stood
up 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 two
teen-age boys with critical officiousness although he was making no move
to help them. At sight of Lake he hurried forward, the ingratiating
smile sliding across his face.

"I'm glad you're back," he said. "I had to take charge when Anders got
sick and he had everything in such a mess. I've been working day and
night 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 the
opportunity to rest. They leaned wearily against the heavy pole table
Bemmon had had them moving, their eyes already dull with the incipient
sickness 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 and
vegetable foods to give them to people already dying. I'm afraid"--the
ingratiating smile came again--"we've been letting him exercise an
authority he isn't entitled to. He's really hardly more than a medical
student 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 thinness
and weariness with the way Bemmon's paunch still bulged outward and his
jowls still sagged with their load of fat.

"I'll send West down to take over in here," he said to Bemmon. "You come
with me. You and I seem to be the only two in good health here and
there'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 my
authority over to another of your favorites and demote me back to common
labor?"

"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 will
find someone else." Then to Bemmon, "Come with me. We're both going to
work at common labor."

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

Lake stopped, to look more closely into the cave and verify something
else he thought he had seen: Bemmon had discarded the prowler skins on
his bed and in their place were soft wool blankets; perhaps the only
unpatched 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 youngest
children," he said. His tone was coldly unemotional but he could not
keep his fists from clenching at his sides. "You will return them at
once and sleep on animal skins, as all the men and women do. And if you
want grass for a mattress you will carry it yourself, as even the young
children do."

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

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

He could feel Bemmon's gaze burning against his back as he turned away
and 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 enough
to give me an excuse to whittle him down."

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

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

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

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

Another week went by and hunters began to trickle in, gaunt and
exhausted, to report all the game going north up the plateau and not a
single creature left below. They were the ones who had tried and failed
to withstand the high elevation of the plateau. Only two out of three
hunters returned among those who had challenged the plateau. They had
tried, all of them, to the best of their ability and the limits of their
endurance.

The blue star was by then a small sun and the yellow sun blazed hotter
each day. Grass began to brown and wither on the hillsides as the days
went by and Lake knew summer was very near. The last hunting party, but
for Craig's and Schroeder's, returned. They had very little meat but
they brought with them a large quantity of something almost as
important: salt.

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

"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 their
surviving hunters. They had followed the game to the eastern end of the
snow-capped mountain range but there the migration had drawn away from
them, traveling farther each day than they could travel. They had almost
waited too long before turning back: the grass at the southern end of
the plateau was turning brown and the streams were dry. They got enough
water, barely, by digging seep holes in the dry stream beds.

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

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

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

They numbered eleven hundred and ten that morning, out of what had so
recently been four thousand. Eleven hundred and ten thin, hungry
scarecrows who, already, could do nothing more than sit listlessly in
the shade and wait for the hell that was coming. He thought of the food
supply, so pitifully small, and of the months it would have to last. He
saw the grim, inescapable future for his charges: famine. There was
nothing he could do to prevent it. He could only try to forestall
complete starvation for all by cutting rations to the bare existence
level.

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

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

"All of you know we have only a fraction of the amount of food we need
to see us through the summer. Tomorrow the present ration will be cut in
half. That will be enough to live on, just barely. If that cut isn't
made the food supply will be gone long before fall and all of us will
die.

"If anyone has any food of any kind it must be turned in to be added to
the total supply. Some of you may have thought of your children and
kept a little hidden for them. I can understand why you should do
that--but you must turn it in. There may possibly be some who hid food
for themselves, personally. If so, I give them the first and last
warning: turn it in tonight. If any hidden cache of food is found in the
future 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 the
one where the food is stored. Each of you--and there will be no
exceptions regardless of how innocent you are--will carry a bulkily
folded 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 folded
in 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 or
not. No one will ever ask.

"Our survival on this world, if we are to survive at all, can be only by
working and sacrificing together. There can be no selfishness. What any
of you may have done in the past is of no consequence. Tonight we start
anew. 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 into
the cave. Of them all, Lake heard later, only Bemmon voiced any real
indignation; warning all those in his section of the line that the order
was the first step toward outright dictatorship and a police-and-spy
system in which Lake and the other leaders would deprive them all of
freedom and dignity. Bemmon insisted upon exhibiting the emptiness of
the cloth he carried; an action that, had he succeeded in persuading the
others to follow his example, would have mercilessly exposed those who
did 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's
enmity.

The weeks dragged by, each longer and more terrible to endure than the
one before it as the heat steadily increased. Summer solstice arrived
and there was no escape from the heat, even in the deepest caves. There
was no night; the blue sun rose in the east as the yellow sun set in the
west. 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 and
shimmering, distorted mirages.

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

Each day thin and hollow-eyed mothers would come to plead with him to
save 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 until
fall would bring relief from the famine that he could only answer each
of them with a grim and final "No."

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

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

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

"Whenever your mouth is still you can hear the children who are dying
today--but you don't care. All you can think of is yourself. You claim
Lake 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 we
are--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 hard
that she slumped unconscious to the ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Bring Bemmon," Lake said to Craig.

Craig returned with him two minutes later. Bemmon stiffened at the sight
of 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 then
quickly, "You can't prove I put it there. You can't prove you didn't
just now bring it in yourselves to frame me."

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

"It--if I hadn't taken it it would have been wasted on people who were
dying," he said. He wiped at his sweating face. "I won't ever do it
again--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 by
the 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 knocked
her against the wall with such force that a sharp projection of rock had
cut a deep gash in her forehead. A woman was wiping the blood from her
face and she lay limply, still unconscious; a frail shadow of the bold
girl she had once been with the new life she would try to give them an
almost unnoticeable little bulge in her starved thinness.

The lookout point was an outjutting spur of the ridge, six hundred feet
from the caves and in full view of them. A lone tree stood there, its
dead limbs thrust like white arms through the brown foliage of the limbs
that still lived. Craig and Barber waited under the tree, Bemmon between
them. The lowering sun shone hot and bright on Bemmon's face as he
squinted back toward the caves at the approach of Lake and the other
two.

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 to
me?"

Barber did not answer and Bemmon turned back toward Lake. He saw the
rope 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 from
Anders. He fashioned a noose in it while Bemmon struggled and made
panting, animal sounds, his eyes fixed in horrified fascination on the
rope.

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

Bemmon stopped struggling then and sagged weakly. For a moment it
appeared that he would faint. Then he worked his mouth soundlessly until
words 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 of
ten children. You've watched the children cry because they were so
hungry 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 eaten
the food that was supposed to be theirs.

"We're going to hang you, for the murder of children and the betrayal of
our 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 on
dying people!" Bemmon twisted to appeal to the ones who held him, his
words quick and ragged with hysteria. "You can't hang me--I don't want
to 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 stepped
back to seize the free end of the rope and Bemmon screamed at what was
coming, 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 head
setting grotesquely to one side.

Craig and Schroeder and Barber watched him with hard, expressionless
faces 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 him
to swing there. If there are any others like him, they'll know what to
expect."

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

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

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

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

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 far
greater force and velocity than it would have had on Earth and boulders
the size of small houses were tossed into the air and shattered into
fragments. But all the rain fell upon the one small area and not a drop
fell at the caves.

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

But despite the lack of humidity the heat was still far more intense
than any on Earth. It never ceased, day or night, never let them have a
moment's relief. There was a limit to how long human flesh could bear up
under it, no matter how valiant the will. Each day the toll of those who
had 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 southward
and the blue sun shrank steadily. Grass grew again and the woods goats
returned, with them the young that had been born in the north, already
half the size of their mothers.

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

The unicorns came close behind the first prowlers, their young amazingly
large and already weaned. Hunting became doubly dangerous then but the
bowmen, through necessity, were learning how to use their bows with
increasing skill and deadliness.

A salt lick for the woods goats was hopefully tried, although Lake felt
dubious about it. They learned that salt was something the woods goats
could either take or leave alone. And when hunters were in the vicinity
they left it alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were two hundred and fifty of them when the first violent storms
of spring came. By then eighteen children had been born. Sixteen were
still-born, eight of them deformed by the gravity, but two were like any
normal babies on Earth. There was only one difference: the 1.5 gravity
did 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 had
fought alongside the men the night of the storm when the prowlers broke
into John Prentiss's camp. And Schroeder married, the last of them all
to do so.

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

The longbows worked so well that by mid-spring he could detach Craig and
three others from the hunting and send them on a prospecting expedition.
Prentiss had said Ragnarok was devoid of metals but there was the hope
of finding small veins the Dunbar Expedition's instruments had not
detected. They would have to find metal or else, in the end, they would
go back into a flint axe stage.

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

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

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

Full summer came and the land was again burned and lifeless. There was
nothing to do but sit wearily in the shade and endure the heat, drawing
what psychological comfort they could from the fact that summer solstice
was past and the suns were creeping south again even though it would be
many weeks before there was any lessening of the heat.

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

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

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

But now, exactly a year later, it was not in the V notch. It was on the
north 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 landmark
to check by.

But there was no doubt about the yellow sun: it was going south, as it
should at that time of year, but it was lagging behind schedule. The
only explanation Lake could think of was one that would mean still
another threat to their survival; perhaps greater than all the others
combined.

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

"I made the calendar from the data John gave me," Anders said. "The
Dunbar men made observations and computed the length of Ragnarok's
year--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 of
Earth?" he asked.

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

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

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

"I don't know whether it's Ragnarok's tilt, alone, or if the orbits of
the suns around each other add effects of their own over a period of
years," Lake said. "The Dunbar Expedition wasn't here long enough to
check 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 years
if the tilt toward the sun continues."

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

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

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

"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 as
soon as the weather permitted but there were no minerals there; only the
metal-barren hills dwindling in size until they became a prairie that
sloped down and down toward the southern lowlands where all the
creatures of Ragnarok spent the winter.

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

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

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

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

He would have to do whatever was possible for him to do and he would
have 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 had
regarding the future even though none of them had any plan for
accomplishing what they spoke of. West, who had held degrees in
philosophy on Earth, said to Lake one night as they sat together by the
fire:

"Have you noticed the way the children listen when the talk turns to
what used to be on Earth, what might have been on Athena, and what would
be 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 the
Gerns there and free the Terran slaves and reclaim Athena as their own."

He had listened to them talk of the interstellar flight to Athena as
they sat by their fires and worked at making bows and arrows. It was
only a dream they held, yet without that dream there would be nothing
before them but the vision of generation after generation living and
dying 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 long
from the time men were ready to leave their caves until they were ready
to go to the stars?

Twelve thousand years.

There were men and women among the Rejects who had been specialists in
various fields. There were a few books that had survived the trampling
of the unicorns and others could be written with ink made from the black
lance tree bark upon parchment made from the thin inner skin of unicorn
hides.

The knowledge contained in the books and the learning of the Rejects
still living should be preserved for the future generations. With the
help 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 a
school," he said. "This winter--tomorrow."

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

A school for the children was started the next day and the writing of
the books began. The parchment books would serve two purposes. One would
be to teach the future generations things that would not only help them
survive but would help them create a culture of their own as advanced as
the harsh environment and scanty resources of Ragnarok permitted. The
other would be to warn them of the danger of a return of the Gerns and
to 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 produce
a much smaller book but one that might well be more important: INTERIOR
FEATURES OF A GERN CRUISER. Terran Intelligence knew a little about Gern
cruisers and as second-in-command of the _Constellation_ he had seen and
studied a copy of that report. He had an excellent memory for such
things, almost photographic, and he wrote the text and drew a multitude
of sketches.

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

He discovered that Craig could take a pen in his scarred, powerful hand
and draw with the neat precision of a professional artist. He turned the
sketches over to him, together with the mass of specifications. Since it
might someday be of such vital importance, he would make four copies of
it. The text was given to a teen-age girl, who would make three more
copies 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 own
blaster and then disappeared with both infuriated Gerns and
Gern-intimidated Venusian police in pursuit. There had been a high
reward 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 his
eyes 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 been
tried in two more days."

"I see," Schroeder said. "And since I was guilty and couldn't be
returned to Earth or Venus I'd have been executed on the _Constellation_."
He smiled sardonically. "And you, as second-in-command, would have been my
execution'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 are
contrary to all his own wishes."

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

"It was two years ago when the Gerns were still talking friendship to
the Earth government while they shoved the colonists around on Venus.
This Gern ... there was a girl there and he thought he could do what he
wanted 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 get
away--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 on
Ragnarok," Lake said. He handed Schroeder the sheets of parchment. "Tell
Craig to make at least four copies of this. Someday our knowledge of
Gern blasters may be something else we'll live or die by."

The school and writing were interrupted by the spring hunting. Craig
made his journey to the Plateau's snow-capped mountain but he was unable
to keep his promise to prospect it. The plateau was perhaps ten thousand
feet in elevation and the mountain rose another ten thousand feet above
the 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 never
tried harder at anything in my life. It was just too much for me. Maybe
some of the young ones will be better adapted and can do it when they
grow up."

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

"Float, from higher up on the mountain," he said. "The mica and crystals
are 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 outer
caves of these," he said. "Have them double thickness with a wide air
space between, for insulation. As for the quartz crystals...."

"Optical instruments," Craig said. "Binoculars, microscopes--it would
take us a long time to learn how to make glass as clear and flawless as
those 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. He
returned from the trip to the west with a twisted knee that would never
let him go prospecting again.

"It will take years to find the metals we need," he said. "The
indications 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 could
and finished his textbook: GEOLOGY AND MINERAL IDENTIFICATION.

He also taught a geology class during the winters. It was in the winter
of 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 and
geology, Billy. Is there something more than just interest?"

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

"And then?" Craig asked.

"And then we'd go to Athena, to kill the Gerns who caused my mother to
die, and my grandfather, and Julia, and all the others. And to free my
father 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 boy
and beyond him; seeing again, perhaps, the frail blonde girl and the two
children 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 of
the same thing. But I'm not ... so let's get back to the identification
of the ores that will be needed to make a ship to go to Athena and to
make blasters to kill Gerns after you get there."

Lake had a corral built early the following spring, with camouflaged
wings, to trap some of the woods goats when they came. It would be an
immense forward step toward conquering their new environment if they
could domesticate the goats and have goat herds near the caves all
through the year. Gathering enough grass to last a herd of goats through
the winter would be a problem--but first, before they worried about
that, they would have to see if the goats could survive the summer and
winter extremes of heat and cold.

They trapped ten goats that spring. They built them brush
sunshades--before summer was over the winds would have stripped the
trees of most of their dry, brown leaves--and a stream of water was
diverted 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 shelters
that would be as warm as possible and carried them a large supply of the
tall grass from along the creek banks; enough to last them through the
winter. But the cold was too much for the goats and the second blizzard
killed them all.

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

Which meant they would remain a race of hunters. Ragnarok would not
permit them to be herdsmen.

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

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

The environment of Ragnarok had struck at the very young with merciless
savagery. It had subjected them to a test of survival that was without
precedent on Earth. It had killed them by the hundreds but among them
had been those whose young flesh and blood and organs had resisted death
by adapting to the greatest extent possible.

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

It seemed to Lake that the years came and went ever faster as the Old
Ones dwindled in numbers at an accelerating rate. Anders had died in the
sixth year, his heart failing him one night as he worked patiently in
his crude little laboratory at carrying on the work started by Chiara to
find a cure for the Hell Fever. Barber, trying to develop a strain of
herbs that would grow in the lower elevation of the caves, was killed by
a unicorn as he worked in his test plot below the caves. Craig went
limping out one spring day on the eighth year to look at a new mineral a
hunter 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 same
day.

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

"When my times comes I would rather it be against the prowlers. They
fight hard and kill quick and then they're through with you. They don't
tear you up after you're dead and slobber and gloat over the pieces, the
way 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. But
the winters, though shorter, were seemingly as cold as ever. The long
summers reached such a degree of heat on the ninth year that Lake knew
they could endure no more than two or three years more of the increasing
heat.

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

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

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

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

On the twelfth year only Lake and West were left of the Old Ones. By
then there were eighty-three left of the Young Ones, eight Ragnarok-born
children of the Old Ones and four Ragnarok-born children of the Young
Ones. 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 ice
age of unknown proportions and have over them, always, the threat of a
chance return of the Gerns.

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

He had hoped to live to see his son take his place--but Jim was only
thirteen. Among the others was one he had been watching since the day he
told 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 but
he was the most versatile of them all, the most thoughtful and
stubbornly determined. He reminded Lake of that fierce old man who had
been his grandfather and had it not been for the scars that twisted his
face into grim ugliness he would have looked much like him.

A violent storm was roaring outside the caves the night he told the
others that he wanted Bill Humbolt to be his successor. There were no
objections and, without ceremony and with few words, he terminated his
fifteen years of leadership.

He left the others, his son among them, and went back to the cave where
he slept. His fire was low, down to dying embers, but he was too tired
to build it up again. He lay down on his pallet and saw, with neither
surprise nor fear, that his time was much nearer than he had thought. It
was already at hand.

He lay back and let the lassitude enclose him, not fighting it. He had
done the best he could for the others and now the weary journey was
over.

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 they
disappeared into the gray sky. Four thousand Rejects stood in the cold
wind and watched them go, the children not yet understanding that they
had 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....

                 PART 2

It was early morning as Bill Humbolt sat by the fire in his cave and