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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.