* * * * *
It was early morning as Bill Humbolt sat by the fire in his cave and
studied the map Craig had made of the plateau's mountain. Craig had left
the mountain nameless and he dipped his pen in ink to write: _Craig
Mountains_.
"Bill----"
Delmont Anders entered very quietly, what he had to tell already evident
on his face.
"He died last night, Bill."
It was something he had been expecting to come at any time but the lack
of surprise did not diminish the sense of loss. Lake had been the last
of the Old Ones, the last of those who had worked and fought and
shortened the years of their lives that the Young Ones might have a
chance to live. Now he was gone--now a brief era was ended, a valiant,
bloody chapter written and finished.
And he was the new leader who would decree how the next chapter should
be written, only four years older than the boy who was looking at him
with an unconscious appeal for reassurance on his face....
"You'd better tell Jim," he said. "Then, a little later, I want to talk
to everyone about the things we'll start doing as soon as spring comes."
"You mean, the hunting?" Delmont asked.
"No--more than just the hunting."
He sat for a while after Delmont left, looking back down the years that
had preceded that day, back to that first morning on Ragnarok.
He had set a goal for himself that morning when he left his toy bear in
the dust behind him and walked beside Julia into the new and perilous
way of life. He had promised himself that some day he would watch the
Gerns die and beg for mercy as they died and he would give them the same
mercy they had given his mother.
As he grew older he realized that his hatred, alone, was a futile thing.
There would have to be a way of leaving Ragnarok and there would have to
be weapons with which to fight the Gerns. These would be things
impossible and beyond his reach unless he had the help of all the others
in united, coordinated effort.
To make certain of that united effort he would have to be their leader.
So for eleven years he had studied and trained until there was no one
who could use a bow or spear quite as well as he could, no one who could
travel as far in a day or spot a unicorn ambush as quickly. And there
was no one, with the exception of George Ord, who had studied as many
textbooks as he had.
He had reached his first goal--he was leader. For all of them there
existed the second goal: the hope of someday leaving Ragnarok and taking
Athena from the Gerns. For many of them, perhaps, it was only wishful
dreaming but for him it was the prime driving force of his life.
There was so much for them to do and their lives were so short in which
to do it. For so long as he was leader they would not waste a day in
idle wishing....
* * * * *
When the others were gathered to hear what he had to say he spoke to
them:
"We're going to continue where the Old Ones had to leave off. We're
better adapted than they were and we're going to find metals to make a
ship if there are any to be found.
"Somewhere on Ragnarok, on the northwest side of a range similar to the
Craig Mountains on the plateau, is a deep valley that the Dunbar
Expedition called the Chasm. They didn't investigate it closely since
their instruments showed no metals there but they saw strata in one
place that was red; an iron discoloration. Maybe we can find a vein
there that was too small for them to have paid any attention to. So
we'll go over the Craigs as soon as the snow melts from them."
"That will be in early summer," George Ord said, his black eyes
thoughtful. "Whoever goes will have to time their return for either just
before the prowlers and unicorns come back from the north or wait until
they've all migrated down off the plateau."
It was something Humbolt had been thinking about and wishing they could
remedy. Men could elude unicorn attacks wherever there were trees large
enough to offer safety and even prowler attacks could be warded off
wherever there were trees for refuge; spears holding back the prowlers
who would climb the trees while arrows picked off the ones on the
ground. But there were no trees on the plateau, and to be caught by a
band of prowlers or unicorns there was certain death for any small party
of two or three. For that reason no small parties had ever gone up on
the plateau except when the unicorns and prowlers were gone or nearly
so. It was an inconvenience and it would continue for as long as their
weapons were the slow-to-reload bows.
"You're supposed to be our combination inventor-craftsman," he said to
George. "No one else can compare with you in that respect. Besides,
you're not exactly enthusiastic about such hard work as mountain
climbing. So from now on you'll do the kind of work you're best fitted
for. Your first job is to make us a better bow. Make it like a crossbow,
with a sliding action to draw and cock the string and with a magazine of
arrows mounted on top of it."
George studied the idea thoughtfully. "The general principle is simple,"
he said. "I'll see what I can do."
"How many of us will go over the Craig Mountains, Bill?" Dan Barber
asked.
"You and I," Humbolt answered. "A three-man party under Bob Craig will
go into the Western Hills and another party under Johnny Stevens will go
into the Eastern Hills."
He looked toward the adjoining cave where the guns had been stored for
so long, coated with unicorn tallow to protect them from rust.
"We could make gun powder if we could find a deposit of saltpeter. We
already know where there's a little sulphur. The guns would have to be
converted to flintlocks, though, since we don't have what we need for
cartridge priming material. Worse, we'd have to use ceramic bullets.
They would be inefficient--too light, and destructive to the bores. But
we would need powder for mining if we ever found any iron. And, if we
can't have metal bullets to shoot the Gerns, we can have bombs to blast
them with."
"Suppose," Johnny Stevens said, "that we never do find the metals to
make a ship. How will we ever leave Ragnarok if that happens?"
"There's another way--a possible way--of leaving here without a ship of
our own. If there are no metals we'll have to try it."
"Why wait?" Bob Craig demanded. "Why not try it now?"
"Because the odds would be about ten thousand to one in favor of the
Gerns. But we'll try it if everything else fails."
* * * * *
George made, altered, and rejected four different types of crossbows
before he perfected a reloading bow that met his critical approval. He
brought it to where Humbolt stood outside the caves early one spring day
when the grass was sending up the first green shoots on the southern
hillsides and the long winter was finally dying.
"Here it is," he said, handing Humbolt the bow. "Try it."
He took it, noting the fine balance of it. Projecting down from the
center of the bow, at right angles to it, was a stock shaped to fit the
grip of the left hand. Under the crossbar was a sliding stock for the
right hand, shaped like the butt of a pistol and fitted with a trigger.
Mounted slightly above and to one side of the crossbar was a magazine
containing ten short arrows.
The pistol grip was in position near the forestock. He pulled it back
the length of the crossbar and it brought the string with it, stretching
it taut. There was a click as the trigger mechanism locked the bowstring
in place and at the same time a concealed spring arrangement shoved an
arrow into place against the string.
He took quick aim at a distant tree and pressed the trigger. There was a
twang as the arrow was ejected. He jerked the sliding pistol grip
forward and back to reload, pressing the trigger an instant later.
Another arrow went its way.
By the time he had fired the tenth arrow in the magazine he was shooting
at the rate of one arrow per second. On the trunk of the distant tree,
like a bristle of stiff whiskers, the ten arrows were driven deep into
the wood in an area no larger than the chest of a prowler or head of a
unicorn.
"This is better than I hoped for," he said to George. "One man with one
of these would equal six men with ordinary bows."
"I'm going to add another feature," George said. "Bundles of arrows, ten
to the bundle in special holders, to carry in the quivers. To reload the
magazine you'd just slap down a new bundle of arrows, in no more time
than it would take to put one arrow in an ordinary bow. I figured that
with practice a man should be able to get off forty arrows in not much
more than twenty seconds."
George took the bow and went back in the cave to add his new feature.
Humbolt stared after him, thinking, _If he can make something like that
out of wood and unicorn gut, what would he be able to give us if he
could have metal?_
Perhaps George would never have the opportunity to show what he could do
with metal. But Humbolt already felt sure that George's genius would, if
it ever became necessary, make possible the alternate plan for leaving
Ragnarok.
* * * * *
The weeks dragged into months and at last enough snow was gone from the
Craigs that Humbolt and Dan Barber could start. They met no opposition.
The prowlers had long since disappeared into the north and the unicorns
were very scarce. They had no occasion to test the effectiveness of the
new automatic crossbows in combat; a lack of opportunity that irked
Barber.
"Any other time, if we had ordinary bows," he complained, "the unicorns
would be popping up to charge us from all directions."
"Don't fret," Humbolt consoled him. "This fall, when we come back, they
will be."
They reached the mountain and stopped near its foot where a creek came
down, its water high and muddy with melting snows. There they hunted
until they had obtained all the meat they could carry. They would see no
more game when they went up the mountain's canyons. A poisonous weed
replaced most of the grass in all the canyons and the animals of
Ragnarok had learned long before to shun the mountain.
They found the canyon that Craig and his men had tried to explore and
started up it. It was there that Craig had discovered the quartz and
mica and so far as he had been able to tell the head of that canyon
would be the lowest of all the passes over the mountain.
The canyon went up the mountain diagonally so that the climb was not
steep although it was constant. They began to see mica and quartz
crystals in the creek bed and at noon on the second day they passed the
last stunted tree. Nothing grew higher than that point but the thorny
poison weeds and they were scarce.
The air was noticeably thinner there and their burdens heavier. A short
distance beyond they came to a small rock monument; Craig's turn-back
point.
The next day they found the quartz crystals in place. A mile farther was
the vein the mica had come from. Of the other minerals Craig had hoped
to find, however, there were only traces.
The fourth day was an eternity of struggling up the now-steeper canyon
under loads that seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds; forcing their
protesting legs to carry them fifty steps at a time, at the end of which
they would stop to rest while their lungs labored to suck in the thin
air in quick, panting breaths.
It would have been much easier to have gone around the mountain. But the
Chasm was supposed to be like a huge cavity scooped out of the plateau
beyond the mountain, rimmed with sheer cliffs a mile high. Only on the
side next to the mountain was there a slope leading down into it.
They stopped for the night where the creek ended in a small spring.
There the snow still clung to the canyon's walls and there the canyon
curved, offering them the promise of the summit just around the bend as
it had been doing all day.
The sun was hot and bright the next morning as they made their slow way
on again. The canyon straightened, the steep walls of it flattening out
to make a pair of ragged shoulders with a saddle between them.
They climbed to the summit of the saddle and there, suddenly before
them, was the other side of the world--and the Chasm.
Far below them was a plateau, stretching endlessly like the one they had
left behind them. But the chasm dominated all else. It was a gigantic,
sheer-walled valley, a hundred miles long by forty miles wide, sunk deep
in the plateau with the tops of its mile-high walls level with the floor
of the plateau. The mountain under them dropped swiftly away, sloping
down and down to the level of the plateau and then on, down and down
again, to the bottom of the chasm that was so deep its floor was half
hidden by the morning shadows.
"My God!" Barber said. "It must be over three miles under us to the
bottom, on the vertical. Ten miles of thirty-three per cent grade--if we
go down we'll never get out again."
"You can turn back here if you want to," Humbolt said.
"Turn back?" Barber's red whiskers seemed to bristle. "Who in hell said
anything about turning back?"
"Nobody," Humbolt said, smiling a little at Barber's quick flash of
anger.
He studied the chasm, wishing that they could have some way of cutting
the quartz crystals and making binoculars. It was a long way to look
with the naked eye....
Here and there the chasm thrust out arms into the plateau. All the arms
were short, however, and even at their heads the cliffs were vertical.
The morning shadows prevented a clear view of much of the chasm and he
could see no sign of the red-stained strata that they were searching
for.
In the southwest corner of the chasm, far away and almost imperceptible,
he saw a faint cloud rising up from the chasm's floor. It was impossible
to tell what it was and it faded away as he watched.
Barber saw it, too, and said, "It looked like smoke. Do you suppose
there could be people--or some kind of intelligent things--living down
there?"
"It might have been the vapor from hot springs, condensed by the cool
morning air," he said. "Whatever it was, we'll look into it when we get
there."
The climb down the steep slope into the chasm was swifter than that up
the canyon but no more pleasant. Carrying a heavy pack down such a grade
exerted a torturous strain upon the backs of the legs.
The heat increased steadily as they descended. They reached the floor of
the valley the next day and the noonday heat was so great that Humbolt
wondered if they might not have trapped themselves into what the summer
would soon transform into a monstrous oven where no life at all could
exist. There could never be any choice, of course--the mountains were
passable only when the weather was hot.
The floor of the valley was silt, sand and gravel--they would find
nothing there. They set out on a circuit of the chasm's walls, following
along close to the base.
In many places the mile-high walls were without a single ledge to break
their vertical faces. When they came to the first such place they saw
that the ground near the base was riddled with queer little pits, like
tiny craters of the moon. As they looked there was a crack like a cannon
shot and the ground beside them erupted into an explosion of sand and
gravel. When the dust had cleared away there was a new crater where none
had been before.
Humbolt wiped the blood from his face where a flying fragment had cut it
and said, "The heat of the sun loosens rocks up on the rim. When one
falls a mile in a one point five gravity, it's traveling like a meteor."
They went on, through the danger zone. As with the peril of the chasm's
heat, there was no choice. Only by observing the material that littered
the base of the cliffs could they know what minerals, if any, might be
above them.
On the fifteenth day they saw the red-stained stratum. Humbolt quickened
his pace, hurrying forward in advance of Barber. The stratum was too
high up on the wall to be reached but it was not necessary to examine it
in place--the base of the cliff was piled thick with fragments from it.
He felt the first touch of discouragement as he looked at them. They
were a sandstone, light in weight. The iron present was only what the
Dunbar Expedition had thought it to be; a mere discoloration.
They made their way slowly along the foot of the cliff, examining piece
after piece in the hope of finding something more than iron stains.
There was no variation, however, and a mile farther on they came to the
end of the red stratum. Beyond that point the rocks were gray, without a
vestige of iron.
"So that," Barber said, looking back the way they had come, "is what we
were going to build a ship out of--iron stains!"
Humbolt did not answer. For him it was more than a disappointment. It
was the death of a dream he had held since the year he was nine and had
heard that the Dunbar Expedition had seen iron-stained rock in a deep
chasm--the only iron-stained rock on the face of Ragnarok. Surely, he
had thought, there would be enough iron there to build a small ship. For
eleven years he had worked toward the day when he would find it. Now, he
had found it--and it was nothing. The ship was as far away as ever....
But discouragement was as useless as iron-stained sandstone. He shook it
off and turned to Barber.
"Let's go," he said. "Maybe we'll find something by the time we circle
the chasm."
For seven days they risked the danger of death from downward plunging
rocks and found nothing. On the eighth day they found the treasure that
was not treasure.
They stopped for the evening just within the mouth of one of the chasm's
tributaries. Humbolt went out to get a drink where a trickle of water
ran through the sand and as he knelt down he saw the flash of something
red under him, almost buried in the sand.
He lifted it out. It was a stone half the size of his hand; darkly
translucent and glowing in the light of the setting sun like blood.
It was a ruby.
He looked, and saw another gleam a little farther up the stream. It was
another ruby, almost as large as the first one. Near it was a flawless
blue sapphire. Scattered here and there were smaller rubies and
sapphires, down to the size of grains of sand.
He went farther upstream and saw specimens of still another stone. They
were colorless but burning with internal fires. He rubbed one of them
hard across the ruby he still carried and there was a gritting sound as
it cut a deep scratch in the ruby.
"I'll be damned," he said aloud.
There was only one stone hard enough to cut a ruby--the diamond.
* * * * *
It was almost dark when he returned to where Barber was resting beside
their packs.
"What did you find to keep you out so late?" Barber asked curiously.
He dropped a double handful of rubies, sapphires and diamonds at
Barber's feet.
"Take a look," he said. "On a civilized world what you see there would
buy us a ship without our having to lift a finger. Here they're just
pretty rocks.
"Except the diamonds," he added "At least we now have something to cut
those quartz crystals with."
* * * * *
They took only a few of the rubies and sapphires the next morning but
they gathered more of the diamonds, looking in particular for the
gray-black and ugly but very hard and tough carbonado variety. Then they
resumed their circling of the chasm's walls.
The heat continued its steady increase as the days went by. Only at
night was there any relief from it and the nights were growing swiftly
shorter as the blue sun rose earlier each morning. When the yellow sun
rose the chasm became a blazing furnace around the edge of which they
crept like ants in some gigantic oven.
There was no life in any form to be seen; no animal or bush or blade of
grass. There was only the barren floor of the chasm, made a harsh green
shade by the two suns and writhing and undulating with heat waves like a
nightmare sea, while above them the towering cliffs shimmered, too, and
sometimes seemed to be leaning far out over their heads and already
falling down upon them.
They found no more minerals of any kind and they came at last to the
place where they had seen the smoke or vapor.
* * * * *
There the walls of the chasm drew back to form a little valley a mile
long by half a mile wide. The walls did not drop vertically to the floor
there but sloped out at the base into a fantastic formation of natural
roofs and arches that reached almost to the center of the valley from
each side. Green things grew in the shade under the arches and sparkling
waterfalls cascaded down over many of them. A small creek carried the
water out of the valley, going out into the chasm a little way before
the hot sands absorbed it.
They stood and watched for some time, but there was no movement in the
valley other than the waving of the green plants as a breeze stirred
them. Once the breeze shifted to bring them the fresh, sweet scent of
growing things and urge them to come closer.
"A place like that doesn't belong here," Barber said in a low voice.
"But it's there. I wonder what else is there?"
"Shade and cool water," Humbolt said. "And maybe things that don't like
strangers. Let's go find out."
They watched warily as they walked, their crossbows in their hands. At
the closer range they saw that the roofs and arches were the outer
remains of a system of natural caves that went back into the valley's
walls. The green vegetation grew wherever the roofs gave part-time
shade, consisting mainly of a holly-leafed bush with purple flowers and
a tall plant resembling corn.
Under some of the roofs the corn was mature, the orange colored grains
visible. Under others it was no more than half grown. He saw the reason
and said to Barber:
"There are both warm and cold springs here. The plants watered by the
warm springs would grow almost the year around; the ones watered by the
cold springs only in the summer. And what we saw from the mountain top
would have been vapor rising from the warm springs."
They passed under arch after arch without seeing any life. When they
came to the valley's upper end and still had seen nothing it seemed
evident that there was little danger of an encounter with any
intelligent-and-hostile creatures. Apparently nothing at all lived in
the little valley.
Humbolt stopped under a broad arch where the breeze was made cool and
moist by the spray of water it had come through. Barber went on, to look
under the adjoining arch.
Caves led into the wall from both arches and as he stood there Humbolt
saw something lying in the mouth of the nearest cave. It was a little
mound of orange corn; lying in a neat pile as though whatever had left
it there had intended to come back after it.
He looked toward the other arch but Barber was somewhere out of sight.
He doubted that whatever had left the corn could be much of a
menace--dangerous animals were more apt to eat flesh than corn--but he
went to the cave with his crossbow ready.
He stopped at the mouth of the cave to let his eyes become accustomed to
the darkness inside it. As he did so the things inside came out to meet
him.
They emerged into full view; six little animals the size of squirrels,
each of them a different color. They walked on short hind legs like
miniature bears and the dark eyes in the bear-chipmunk faces were fixed
on him with intense interest. They stopped five feet in front of him,
there to stand in a neat row and continue the fascinated staring up at
him.
The yellow one in the center scratched absently at its stomach with a
furry paw and he lowered the bow, feeling a little foolish at having
bothered to raise it against animals so small and harmless.
Then he half brought it up again as the yellow one opened its mouth and
said in a tone that held distinct anticipation:
"I think we'll eat you for supper."
He darted glances to right and left but there was nothing near him
except the six little animals. The yellow one, having spoken, was
staring silently at him with only curiosity on its furry face. He
wondered if some miasma or some scent from the vegetation in the valley
had warped his mind into sudden insanity and asked:
"You think you'll do what?"
It opened its mouth again, to stutter, "I--I----" Then, with a note of
alarm, _"Hey...."_
It said no more and the next sound was that of Barber hurrying toward
him and calling, "Hey--Bill--where are you?"
"Here," he answered, and he was already sure that he knew why the little
animal had spoken to him.
Barber came up and saw the six chipmunk-bears. "Six of them!" he
exclaimed. "There's one in the next cave--the damned thing spoke to me!"
"I thought so," he replied. "You told it we'd have it for supper and
then it said, 'You think you'll do what?' didn't it?"
Barber's face showed surprise. "How did you know that?"
"They're telepathic between one another," he said. "The yellow one there
repeated what the one you spoke to heard you say and it repeated what
the yellow one heard me say. It has to be telepathy between them."
"Telepathy----" Barber stared at the six little animals, who stared back
with their fascinated curiosity undiminished. "But why should they want
to repeat aloud what they receive telepathically?"
"I don't know. Maybe at some stage in their evolution only part of them
were telepaths and the telepaths broadcasted danger warnings to the
others that way. So far as that goes, why does a parrot repeat what it
hears?"
There was a scurry of movement behind Barber and another of the little
animals, a white one, hurried past them. It went to the yellow one and
they stood close together as they stared up. Apparently they were
mates....
"That's the other one--those are the two that mocked us," Barber said,
and thereby gave them the name by which they would be known: mockers.
* * * * *
The mockers were fresh meat--but they accepted the humans with such
friendliness and trust that Barber lost all his desire to have one for
supper or for any other time. They had a limited supply of dried meat
and there would be plenty of orange corn. They would not go hungry.
They discovered that the mockers had living quarters in both the cool
caves and the ones warmed by the hot springs. There was evidence that
they hibernated during the winters in the warm caves.
There were no minerals in the mockers' valley and they set out to
continue their circuit of the chasm. They did not get far until the heat
had become so great that the chasm's tributaries began going dry. They
turned back then, to wait in the little valley until the fall rains
came.
* * * * *
When the long summer was ended by the first rain they resumed their
journey. They took a supply of the orange corn and two of the mockers;
the yellow one and its mate. The other mockers watched them leave,
standing silent and solemn in front of their caves as though they feared
they might never see their two fellows or the humans again.
The two mockers were pleasant company, riding on their shoulders and
chattering any nonsense that came to mind. And sometimes saying things
that were not at all nonsense, making Humbolt wonder if mockers could
partly read human minds and dimly understand the meaning of some of the
things they said.
They found a place where saltpeter was very thinly and erratically
distributed. They scraped off all the films of it that were visible and
procured a small amount. They completed their circuit and reached the
foot of the long, steep slope of the Craigs without finding anything
more.
It was an awesome climb that lay before them; up a grade so steep and
barred with so many low ledges that when their legs refused to carry
them farther they crawled. The heat was still very serious and there
would be no water until they came to the spring beyond the mountain's
summit. A burning wind, born on the blazing floor of the chasm, followed
them up the mountain all day. Their leather canteens were almost dry
when night came and they were no more than a third of the way to the
top.
The mockers had become silent as the elevation increased and when they
stopped for the night Humbolt saw that they would never live to cross
the mountain. They were breathing fast, their hearts racing, as they
tried to extract enough oxygen from the thin air. They drank a few drops
of water but they would not touch the corn he offered them.
The white mocker died at midmorning the next day as they stopped for a
rest. The yellow one crawled feebly to her side and died a few minutes
later.
"So that's that," Humbolt said, looking down at them. "The only things
on Ragnarok that ever trusted us and wanted to be our friends--and we
killed them."
They drank the last of their water and went on. They made dry camp that
night and dreams of cold streams of water tormented their exhausted
sleep. The next day was a hellish eternity in which they walked and fell
and crawled and walked and fell again.
Barber weakened steadily, his breathing growing to a rattling panting.
He spoke once that afternoon, to try to smile with dry, swollen lips and
say between his panting gasps, "It would be hell--to have to die--so
thirsty like this."
After that he fell with increasing frequency, each time slower and
weaker in getting up again. Half a mile short of the summit he fell for
the last time. He tried to get up, failed, and tried to crawl. He failed
at that, too, and collapsed face down in the rocky soil.
Humbolt went to him and said between his own labored intakes of breath,
"Wait, Dan--I'll go on--bring you back water."
Barber raised himself with a great effort and looked up. "No use," he
said. "My heart--too much----"
He fell forward again and that time he was very still, his desperate
panting no more.
* * * * *
It seemed to Humbolt that it was half a lifetime later that he finally
reached the spring and the cold, clear water. He drank, the most
ecstatic pleasure he had ever experienced in his life. Then the pleasure
drained away as he seemed to see Dan Barber trying to smile and seemed
to hear him say, "It would be hell--to have to die--so thirsty like
this."
He rested for two days before he was in condition to continue on his
way. He reached the plateau and saw that the woods goats had been
migrating south for some time. On the second morning he climbed up a
gentle roll in the plain and met three unicorns face to face.
They charged at once, squealing with anticipation. Had he been equipped
with an ordinary bow he would have been killed within seconds. But the
automatic crossbow poured a rain of arrows into the faces of the
unicorns that caused them to swing aside in pain and enraged
astonishment. The moment they had swung enough to expose the area just
behind their heads the arrows became fatal.
One unicorn escaped, three arrows bristling in its face. It watched him
from a distance for a little while, squealing and shaking its head in
baffled fury. Then it turned and disappeared over a swell in the plain,
running like a deer.
He resumed his southward march, hurrying faster than before. The unicorn
had headed north and that could be for but one purpose: to bring enough
reinforcements to finish the job.
* * * * *
He reached the caves at night. No one was up but George Ord, working
late in his combination workshop-laboratory.
George looked up at the sound of his entrance and saw that he was alone.
"So Dan didn't make it?" he asked.
"The chasm got him," he answered. And then, wearily, "The chasm--we
found the damned thing."
"The red stratum----"
"It was only iron stains."
"I made a little pilot smelter while you were gone," George said. "I was
hoping the red stratum would be ore. The other prospecting parties--none
of them found anything."
"We'll try again next spring," he said. "We'll find it somewhere, no
matter how long it takes."
"Our time may not be so long. The observations show the sun to be
farther south than ever."
"Then we'll make double use of the time we do have. We'll cut the
hunting parties to the limit and send out more prospecting parties.
We're going to have a ship to meet the Gerns again."
"Sometimes," George said, his black eyes studying him thoughtfully, "I
think that's all you live for, Bill: for the day when you can kill
Gerns."
George said it as a statement of a fact, without censure, but Humbolt
could not keep an edge of harshness out of his voice as he answered:
"For as long as I'm leader that's all we're all going to live for."
He followed the game south that fall, taking with him Bob Craig and
young Anders. Hundreds of miles south of the caves they came to the
lowlands; a land of much water and vegetation and vast herds of unicorns
and woods goats. It was an exceedingly dangerous country, due to the
concentration of unicorns and prowlers, and only the automatic crossbows
combined with never ceasing vigilance enabled them to survive.
There they saw the crawlers; hideous things that crawled on multiple
legs like three-ton centipedes, their mouths set with six mandibles and
dripping a stinking saliva. The bite of a crawler was poisonous,
instantly paralyzing even to a unicorn, though not instantly killing
them. The crawlers ate their victims at once, however, ripping the
helpless and still living flesh from its bones.
Although the unicorns feared the crawlers, the prowlers hated them with
a fanatical intensity and made use of their superior quickness to kill
every crawler they found; ripping at the crawler until the crawler, in
an insanity of rage, bit itself and died of its own poison.
They had taken one of the powerful longbows with them, in addition to
their crossbows, and they killed a crawler with it one day. As they did
so a band of twenty prowlers came suddenly upon them.
Twenty prowlers, with the advantage of surprise at short range, could
have slaughtered them. Instead, the prowlers continued on their way
without as much as a challenging snarl.
"Now why," Bob Craig wondered, "did they do that?"
"They saw we had just killed a crawler," Humbolt said. "The crawlers are
their enemies and I guess letting us live was their way of showing
appreciation."
Their further explorations of the lowlands revealed no minerals--nothing
but alluvial material of unknown depth--and there was no reason to stay
longer except that return to the caves was impossible until spring came.
They built attack-proof shelters in the trees and settled down to wait
out the winter.
They started north with the first wave of woods goats, nothing but lack
of success to show for their months of time and effort.
When they were almost to the caves they came to the barren valley where
the Gerns had herded the Rejects out of the cruisers and to the place
where the stockade had been. It was a lonely place, the stockade walls
fallen and scattered and the graves of Humbolt's mother and all the
others long since obliterated by the hooves of the unicorn legions.
Bitter memories were reawakened, tinged by the years with nostalgia,
and the stockade was far behind them before the dark mood left him.
The orange corn was planted that spring and the number of prospecting
parties was doubled.
The corn sprouted, grew feebly, and died before maturity. The
prospecting parties returned one by one, each to report no success. He
decided, that fall, that time was too precious to waste--they would have
to use the alternate plan he had spoken of.
He went to George Ord and asked him if it would be possible to build a
hyperspace transmitter with the materials they had.
"It's the one way we could have a chance to leave here without a ship of
our own," he said. "By luring a Gern cruiser here and then taking it
away from them."
George shook his head. "A hyperspace transmitter _might_ be built, given
enough years of time. But it would be useless without power. It would
take a generator of such size that we'd have to melt down every gun,
knife, axe, every piece of steel and iron we have. And then we'd be five
hundred pounds short. On top of that, we'd have to have at least three
hundred pounds more of copper for additional wire."
"I didn't realize it would take such a large generator," he said after a
silence. "I was sure we could have a transmitter."
"Get me the metal and we can," George said. He sighed restlessly and
there was almost hatred in his eyes as he looked at the inclosing walls
of the cave. "You're not the only one who would like to leave our
prison. Get me eight hundred pounds of copper and iron and I'll make the
transmitter, some way."
Eight hundred pounds of metal.... On Ragnarok that was like asking for
the sun.
The years went by and each year there was the same determined effort,
the same lack of success. And each year the suns were farther south,
marking the coming of the end of any efforts other than the one to
survive.
In the year thirty, when fall came earlier than ever before, he was
forced to admit to himself the bleak and bitter fact: he and the others
were not of the generation that would escape from Ragnarok. They were
Earth-born--they were not adapted to Ragnarok and could not scour a
world of 1.5 gravity for metals that might not exist.
And vengeance was a luxury he could not have.
A question grew in his mind where there had been only his hatred for the
Gerns before. _What would become of the future generations on Ragnarok?_
With the question a scene from his childhood kept coming back to him; a
late summer evening in the first year on Ragnarok and Julia sitting
beside him in the warm starlight....
"You're my son, Billy," she had said. "The first I ever had. Now, before
so very long, maybe I'll have another one."
Hesitantly, not wanting to believe, he had asked, "What some of them
said about how you might die then--it won't really happen, will it,
Julia?"
"It ... might." Then her arm had gone around him and she had said, "If I
do I'll leave in my place a life that's more important than mine ever
was.
"Remember me, Billy, and this evening, and what I said to you, if you
should ever be leader. Remember that it's only through the children that
we can ever survive and whip this world. Protect them while they're
small and helpless and teach them to fight and be afraid of nothing when
they're a little older. Never, never let them forget how they came to be
on Ragnarok. Someday, even if it's a hundred years from now, the Gerns
will come again and they must be ready to fight, for their freedom and
for their lives."
He had been too young then to understand how truly she had spoken and
when he was old enough his hatred for the Gerns had blinded him to
everything but his own desires. Now, he could see....
The children of each generation would be better adapted to Ragnarok and
full adaptation would eventually come. But all the generations of the
future would be potential slaves of the Gern Empire, free only so long
as they remained unnoticed.
It was inconceivable that the Gerns should never pass by Ragnarok
through all time to come. And when they finally came the slow,
uneventful progression of decades and centuries might have brought a
false sense of security to the people of Ragnarok, might have turned the
stories of what the Gerns did to the Rejects into legends and then into
myths that no one any longer believed.
The Gerns would have to be brought to Ragnarok before that could happen.
* * * * *
He went to George Ord again and said:
"There's one kind of transmitter we could make a generator for--a plain
normal-space transmitter, dot-dash, without a receiver."
George laid down the diamond cutting wheel he had been working on.
"It would take two hundred years for the signal to get to Athena at the
speed of light," he said. "Then, forty days after it got there, a Gern
cruiser would come hell-bent to investigate."
"I want the ones of the future to know that the Gerns will be here no
later than two hundred years from now. And with always the chance that a
Gern cruiser in space might pick up the signal at any time before then."
"I see," George said. "The sword of Damocles hanging over their heads,
to make them remember."
"You know what would happen to them if they ever forgot. You're as old
as I am--you know what the Gerns did to us."
"I'm older than you are," George said. "I was nine when the Gerns left
us here. They kept my father and mother and my sister was only three. I
tried to keep her warm by holding her but the Hell Fever got her that
first night. She was too young to understand why I couldn't help her
more...."
Hatred burned in his eyes at the memory, like some fire that had been
banked but had never died. "Yes, I remember the Gerns and what they did.
I wouldn't want it to have to happen to others--the transmitter will be
made so that it won't."
* * * * *
The guns were melted down, together with other items of iron and steel,
to make the castings for the generator. Ceramic pipes were made to carry
water from the spring to a waterwheel. The long, slow job of converting
the miscellany of electronic devices, many of them broken, into the
components of a transmitter proceeded.
It was five years before the transmitter was ready for testing. It was
early fall of the year thirty-five then, and the water that gushed from
the pipe splashed in cold drops against Humbolt as the waterwheel was
set in motion.
The generator began to hum and George observed the output of it and the
transmitter as registered by the various meters he had made.
"Weak, but it will reach the Gern monitor station on Athena," he said,
"It's ready to send--what do you want to say?"
"Make it something short," he said. "Make it, _'Ragnarok calling.'_"
George poised his finger over the transmitting key. "This will set
forces in motion that can never be recalled. What we do here this
morning is going to cause a lot of Gerns--or Ragnarok people--to die."
"It will be the Gerns who die," he said. "Send the signal."
"Like you, I believe the same thing," George said. "I have to believe it
because that's the way I want it to be. I hope we're right. It's
something we'll never know."
He began depressing the key.
* * * * *
A boy was given the job of operating the key and the signal went out
daily until the freezing of winter stopped the waterwheel that powered
the generator.
The sending of the signals was resumed when spring came and the
prospecting parties continued their vain search for metals.
The suns continued moving south and each year the springs came later,
the falls earlier. In the spring of forty-five he saw that he would have
to make his final decision.
By then they had dwindled until they numbered only sixty-eight; the
Young Ones gray and rapidly growing old. There was no longer any use to
continue the prospecting--if any metals were to be found they were at
the north end of the plateau where the snow no longer melted during the
summer. They were too few to do more than prepare for what the Old Ones
had feared they might have to face--Big Winter. That would require the
work of all of them.
Sheets of mica were brought down from the Craigs, the summits of which
were deeply buried under snow even in midsummer. Stoves were made of
fireclay and mica, which would give both heat and light and would be
more efficient than the open fireplaces. The innermost caves were
prepared for occupation, with multiple doors to hold out the cold and
with laboriously excavated ventilation ducts and smoke outlets.
There were sixty of them in the fall of fifty, when all had been done
that could be done to prepare for what might come.
* * * * *
"There aren't many of the Earth-born left now," Bob Craig said to him
one night as they sat in the flickering light of a stove. "And there
hasn't been time for there to be many of the Ragnarok-born. The Gerns
wouldn't get many slaves if they should come now."
"They could use however many they found," he answered. "The younger
ones, who are the best adapted to this gravity, would be exceptionally
strong and quick on a one-gravity world. There are dangerous jobs where
a strong, quick slave is a lot more efficient and expendable than
complex, expensive machines."
"And they would want some specimens for scientific study," Jim Lake
said. "They would want to cut into the young ones and see how they're
built that they're adapted to this one and a half gravity world."
He smiled with the cold mirthlessness that always reminded Humbolt of
his father--of the Lake who had been the _Constellation_'s lieutenant
commander. "According to the books the Gerns never did try to make it a
secret that when a Gern doctor or biologist cuts into the muscles or
organs of a non-Gern to see what makes them tick, he wants them to be
still alive and ticking as he does so."
Seventeen-year-old Don Chiara spoke, to say slowly, thoughtfully:
"Slavery and vivisection.... If the Gerns should come now when there are
so few of us, and if we should fight the best we could and lose, it
would be better for whoever was the last of us left to put a knife in
the hearts of the women and children than to let the Gerns have them."
No one made any answer. There was no answer to make, no alternative to
suggest.
"In the future there will be more of us and it will be different," he
said at last. "On Earth the Gerns were always stronger and faster than
humans but when the Gerns come to Ragnarok they're going to find a race
that isn't really human any more. They're going to find a race before
which they'll be like woods goats before prowlers."
"If only they don't come too soon," Craig said.
"That was the chance that had to be taken," he replied.
He wondered again as he spoke, as he had wondered so often in the past
years, if he had given them all their death sentence when he ordered the
transmitter built. Yet, the future generations could not be permitted to
forget ... and steel could not be tempered without first thrusting it
into the fire.
* * * * *
He was the last of the Young Ones when he awoke one night in the fall of
fifty-six and found himself burning with the Hell Fever. He did not
summon any of the others. They could do nothing for him and he had
already done all he could for them.
He had done all he could for them ... and now he would leave forty-nine
men, women and children to face the unknown forces of Big Winter while
over them hung the sword he had forged; the increasing danger of
detection by the Gerns.
The question came again, sharp with the knowledge that it was far too
late for him to change any of it. _Did I arrange the execution of my
people?_
Then, through the red haze of the fever, Julia spoke to him out of the
past; sitting again beside him in the summer twilight and saying:
_Remember me, Billy, and this evening, and what I said to you ... teach
them to fight and be afraid of nothing ... never let them forget how
they came to be on Ragnarok...._
She seemed very near and real and the doubt faded and was gone. _Teach
them to fight ... never let them forget...._ The men of Ragnarok were
only fur-clad hunters who crouched in caves but they would grow in
numbers as time went by. Each generation would be stronger than the
generation before it and he had set forces in motion that would bring
the last generation the trial of combat and the opportunity for freedom.
How well they fought on that day would determine their destiny but he
was certain, once again, what that destiny would be.
It would be to walk as conquerors before beaten and humbled Gerns.
* * * * *
It was winter of the year eighty-five and the temperature was one
hundred and six degrees below zero. Walter Humbolt stood in front of the
ice tunnel that led back through the glacier to the caves and looked up
into the sky.
It was noon but there was no sun in the starlit sky. Many weeks before
the sun had slipped below the southern horizon. For a little while a dim
halo had marked its passage each day; then that, too, had faded away.
But now it was time for the halo to appear again, to herald the sun's
returning.
Frost filled the sky, making the stars flicker as it swirled endlessly
downward. He blinked against it, his eyelashes trying to freeze to his
lower eyelids at the movement, and turned to look at the north.
There the northern lights were a gigantic curtain that filled a third of
the sky, rippling and waving in folds that pulsated in red and green,
rose and lavender and violet. Their reflection gleamed on the glacier
that sloped down from the caves and glowed softly on the other glacier;
the one that covered the transmitter station. The transmitter had long
ago been taken into the caves but the generator and waterwheel were
still there, frozen in a tomb of ice.
For three years the glacier had been growing before the caves and the
plateau's southern face had been buried under snow for ten years. Only a
few woods goats ever came as far north as the country south of the caves
and they stayed only during the brief period between the last snow of
spring and the first snow of fall. Their winter home was somewhere down
near the equator. What had been called the Southern Lowlands was a
frozen, lifeless waste.
Once they had thought about going to the valley in the chasm where the
mockers would be hibernating in their warm caves. But even if they could
have gone up the plateau and performed the incredible feat of crossing
the glacier-covered, blizzard-ripped Craigs, they would have found no
food in the mockers' valley--only a little corn the mockers had stored
away, which would soon have been exhausted.
There was no place for them to live but in the caves or as nomads
migrating with the animals. And if they migrated to the equator each
year they would have to leave behind them all the books and tools and
everything that might someday have given them a civilized way of life
and might someday have shown them how to escape from their prison.
He looked again to the south where the halo should be, thinking: _They
should have made their decision in there by now. I'm their leader--but I
can't force them to stay here against their will. I could only ask them
to consider what it would mean if we left here._
Snow creaked underfoot as he moved restlessly. He saw something lying
under the blanket of frost and went to it. It was an arrow that someone
had dropped. He picked it up, carefully, because the intense cold had
made the shaft as brittle as glass. It would regain its normal strength
when taken into the caves----
There was the sound of steps and Fred Schroeder came out of the tunnel,
dressed as he was dressed in bulky furs. Schroeder looked to the south
and said, "It seems to be starting to get a little lighter there."
He saw that it was; a small, faint paling of the black sky.
"They talked over what you and I told them," Schroeder said. "And about
how we've struggled to stay here this long and how, even if the sun
should stop drifting south this year, it will be years of ice and cold
at the caves before Big Spring comes."
"If we leave here the glacier will cover the caves and fill them with
ice," he said. "All we ever had will be buried back in there and all
we'll have left will be our bows and arrows and animal skins. We'll be
taking a one-way road back into the stone age, for ourselves and our
children and their children."
"They know that," Schroeder said. "We both told them."
He paused. They watched the sky to the south turn lighter. The northern
lights flamed unnoticed behind them as the pale halo of the invisible
sun slowly brightened to its maximum. Their faces were white with
near-freezing then and they turned to go back into the caves. "They had
made their decision," Schroeder went on. "I guess you and I did them an
injustice when we thought they had lost their determination, when we
thought they might want to hand their children a flint axe and say,
'Here--take this and let it be the symbol of all you are or all you will
ever be.'
"Their decision was unanimous--we'll stay for as long as it's possible
for us to survive here."
* * * * *
Howard Lake listened to Teacher Morgan West read from the diary of
Walter Humbolt, written during the terrible winter of thirty-five years
before:
_"Each morning the light to the south was brighter. On the seventh
morning we saw the sun--and it was not due until the eighth morning!
"It will be years before we can stop fighting the enclosure of the
glacier but we have reached and passed the dead of Big Winter. We have
reached the bottom and the only direction we can go in the future is
up._
"And so," West said, closing the book, "we are here in the caves tonight
because of the stubbornness of Humbolt and Schroeder and all the others.
Had they thought only of their own welfare, had they conceded defeat and
gone into the migratory way of life, we would be sitting beside grass
campfires somewhere to the south tonight, our way of life containing no
plans or aspirations greater than to follow the game back and forth
through the years.
"Now, let's go outside to finish tonight's lesson."
Teacher West led the way into the starlit night just outside the caves,
Howard Lake and the other children following him. West pointed to the
sky where the star group they called the Athena Constellation blazed
like a huge arrowhead high in the east.
"There," he said, "beyond the top of the arrowhead, is where we were
going when the Gerns stopped us a hundred and twenty years ago and left
us to die on Ragnarok. It's so far that Athena's sun can't be seen from
here, so far that it will be another hundred and fifteen years before
our first signal gets there. Why is it, then, that you and all the other
groups of children have to learn such things as history, physics, the
Gern language, and the way to fire a Gern blaster?"
The hand of every child went up. West selected eight-year-old Clifton
Humbolt. "Tell us, Clifton," he said.
"Because," Clifton answered, "a Gern cruiser might pass by a few
light-years out at any time and pick up our signals. So we have to know
all we can about them and how to fight them because there aren't very
many of us yet."
"The Gerns will come to kill us," little Marie Chiara said, her dark
eyes large and earnest. "They'll come to kill us and to make slaves out
of the ones they don't kill, like they did with the others a long time
ago. They're awful mean and awful smart and we have to be smarter than
they are."
Howard looked again at the Athena constellation, thinking, _I hope they
come just as soon as I'm old enough to fight them, or even tonight...._
"Teacher," he asked, "how would a Gern cruiser look if it came tonight?
Would it come from the Athena arrowhead?"
"It probably would," West answered. "You would see its rocket blast,
like a bright trail of fire----"
A bright trail of fire burst suddenly into being, coming from the
constellation of Athena and lighting up the woods and hills and their
startled faces as it arced down toward them.
_"It's them!"_ a treble voice exclaimed and there was a quick flurry of
movement as Howard and the other older children shoved the younger
children behind them.
Then the light vanished, leaving a dimming glow where it had been.
"Only a meteor," West said. He looked at the line of older children who
were standing protectingly in front of the younger ones, rocks in their
hands with which to ward off the Gerns, and he smiled in the way he had
when he was pleased with them.
Howard watched the meteor trail fade swiftly into invisibility and felt
his heartbeats slow from the first wild thrill to gray disappointment.
Only a meteor....
But someday he might be leader and by then, surely, the Gerns would
come. If not, he would find some way to make them come.
* * * * *
Ten years later Howard Lake was leader. There were three hundred and
fifty of them then and Big Spring was on its way to becoming Big Summer.
The snow was gone from the southern end of the plateau and once again
game migrated up the valleys east of the caves.
There were many things to be done now that Big Winter was past and they
could have the chance to do them. They needed a larger pottery kiln, a
larger workshop with a wooden lathe, more diamonds to make cutting
wheels, more quartz crystals to make binoculars and microscopes. They
could again explore the field of inorganic chemistry, even though
results in the past had produced nothing of value, and they could,
within a few years, resume the metal prospecting up the plateau--the
most important project of all.
Their weapons seemed to be as perfect as was possible but when the
Gerns came they would need some quick and certain means of communication
between the various units that would fight the Gerns. A leader who could
not communicate with his forces and coordinate their actions would be
helpless. And they had on Ragnarok a form of communication, if trained,
that the Gerns could not detect or interfere with electronically: the
mockers.
The Craigs were still white and impassable with snow that summer but the
snow was receding higher each year. Five years later, in the summer of
one hundred and thirty-five, the Craigs were passable for a few weeks.
Lake led a party of eight over them and down into the chasm. They took
with them two small cages, constructed of wood and glass and made
airtight with the strong medusabush glue. Each cage was equipped with a
simple air pump and a pressure gauge.
They brought back two pairs of mockers as interested and trusting
captives, together with a supply of the orange corn and a large amount
of diamonds. The mockers, in their pressure-maintained cages, were not
even aware of the increase in elevation as they were carried over the
high summit of the Craigs.
To Lake and the men with him the climb back up the long, steep slope of
the mountain was a stiff climb to make in one day but no more than that.
It was hard to believe that it had taken Humbolt and Barber almost three
days to climb it and that Barber had died in the attempt. It reminded
him of the old crossbows that Humbolt and the others had used. They were
thin, with a light pull, such as the present generation boys used. It
must have required courage for the old ones to dare unicorn attacks with
bows so thin that only the small area behind the unicorn's jaws was
vulnerable to their arrows....
* * * * *
When the caves were reached, a very gradual reduction of pressure in the
mocker cages was started; one that would cover a period of weeks. One
pair of mockers survived and had two young ones that fall. The young
mockers, like the first generation of Ragnarok-born children of many
years before, were more adapted to their environment than their parents
were.
The orange corn was planted, using an adaptation method somewhat similar
to that used with the mockers. It might have worked had the orange corn
not required such a long period of time in which to reach maturity. When
winter came only a few grains had formed.
They were saved for next year's seeds, to continue the slow adaptation
process.
By the fifth year the youngest generation of mockers was well adapted to
the elevation of the caves but for a susceptibility to a quickly fatal
form of pneumonia which made it necessary to keep them from exposing
themselves to the cold or to any sudden changes of temperature.
Their intelligence was surprising and they seemed to be partially
receptive to human thoughts, as Bill Humbolt had written. By the end of
the fifteenth year their training had reached such a stage of perfection
that a mocker would transmit or not transmit with only the unspoken
thought of its master to tell it which it should be. In addition, they
would transmit the message to whichever mocker their master's thought
directed. Presumably all mockers received the message but only the
mocker to whom it was addressed would repeat it aloud.
They had their method of communication. They had their automatic
crossbows for quick, close fighting, and their long range longbows. They
were fully adapted to the 1.5 gravity and their reflexes were almost
like those of prowlers--Ragnarok had long ago separated the quick from
the dead.
There were eight hundred and nineteen of them that year, in the early
spring of one hundred and fifty, and they were ready and impatient for
the coming of the Gerns.
Then the transmitter, which had been in operation again for many years,
failed one day.
George Craig had finished checking it when Lake arrived. He looked up
from his instruments, remarkably similar in appearance to a sketch of
the old George Ord--a resemblance that had been passed down to him by
his mother--and said:
"The entire circuit is either gone or ready to go. It's already operated
for a lot longer than it should have."
"It doesn't matter," Lake said. "It's served its purpose. We won't
rebuild it."
George watched him questioningly.
"It's served its purpose," he said again. "It didn't let us forget that
the Gerns will come again. But that isn't enough, now. The first signal
won't reach Athena until the year two thirty-five. It will be the dead
of Big Winter again then. They'll have to fight the Gerns with bows and
arrows that the cold will make as brittle as glass. They won't have a
chance."
"No," George said. "They won't have a chance. But what can we do to
change it?"
"It's something I've been thinking about," he said. "We'll build a
hyperspace transmitter and bring the Gerns before Big Winter comes."
"We will?" George asked, lifting his dark eyebrows. "And what do we use
for the three hundred pounds of copper and five hundred pounds of iron
we would have to have to make the generator?"
"Surely we can find five hundred pounds of iron somewhere on Ragnarok.
The north end of the plateau might be the best bet. As for the copper--I
doubt that we'll ever find it. But there are seams of a bauxite-like
clay in the Western hills--they're certain to contain aluminum to at
least some extent. So we'll make the wires of aluminum."
"The ore would have to be refined to pure aluminum oxide before it could
be smelted," George said. "And you can't smelt aluminum ore in an
ordinary furnace--only in an electric furnace with a generator that can
supply a high amperage. And we would have to have cryolite ore to serve
as the solvent in the smelting process."
"There's a seam of cryolite in the Eastern Hills, according to the old
maps," said Lake. "We could make a larger generator by melting down
everything we have. It wouldn't be big enough to power the hyperspace
transmitter but it should be big enough to smelt aluminum ore."
George considered the idea. "I think we can do it."
"How long until we can send the signal?" he asked.
"Given the extra metal we need, the building of the generator is a
simple job. The transmitter is what will take years--maybe as long as
fifty."
_Fifty years...._
"Can't anything be done to make it sooner?" he asked.
"I know," George said. "You would like for the Gerns to come while
you're still here. So would every man on Ragnarok. But even on Earth the
building of a hyperspace transmitter was a long, slow job, with all the
materials they needed and all the special tools and equipment. Here
we'll have to do everything by hand and for materials we have only
broken and burned-out odds and ends. It will take about fifty years--it
can't be helped."
Fifty years ... but that would bring the Gerns before Big Winter came
again. And there was the rapidly increasing chance that a Gern cruiser
would at any day intercept the first signals. They were already more
than halfway to Athena.
"Melt down the generator," he said. "Start making a bigger one. Tomorrow
men will go out after bauxite and cryolite and four of us will go up the
plateau to look for iron."
* * * * *
Lake selected Gene Taylor, Tony Chiara and Steve Schroeder to go with
him. They were well on their way by daylight the next morning, on the
shoulder of each of them a mocker which observed the activity and new
scenes with bright, interested eyes.
They traveled light, since they would have fresh meat all the way, and
carried herbs and corn only for the mockers. Once, generations before,
it had been necessary for men to eat herbs to prevent deficiency
diseases but now the deficiency diseases, like Hell Fever, were unknown
to them.
They carried no compasses since the radiations of the two suns
constantly created magnetic storms that caused compass needles to swing
as much as twenty degrees within an hour. Each of them carried a pair
of powerful binoculars, however; binoculars that had been diamond-carved
from the ivory-like black unicorn horn and set with lenses and prisms of
diamond-cut quartz.
The foremost bands of woods goats followed the advance of spring up the
plateau and they followed the woods goats. They could not go ahead of
the goats--the goats were already pressing close behind the melting of
the snow. No hills or ridges were seen as the weeks went by and it
seemed to Lake that they would walk forever across the endless rolling
floor of the plain.
Early summer came and they walked across a land that was green and
pleasantly cool at a time when the vegetation around the caves would be
burned brown and lifeless. The woods goats grew less in number then as
some of them stopped for the rest of the summer in their chosen
latitudes.
They continued on and at last they saw, far to the north, what seemed to
be an almost infinitesimal bulge on the horizon. They reached it two
days later; a land of rolling green hills, scarred here and there with
ragged outcroppings of rock, and a land that climbed slowly and steadily
higher as it went into the north.
They camped that night in a little vale. The floor of it was white with
the bones of woods goats that had tarried too long the fall before and
got caught by an early blizzard. There was still flesh on the bones and
scavenger rodents scuttled among the carcasses, feasting.
"We'll split up now," he told the others the next morning.
He assigned each of them his position; Steve Schroeder to parallel his
course thirty miles to his right, Gene Taylor to go thirty miles to his
left, and Tony Chiara to go thirty miles to the left of Taylor.
"We'll try to hold those distances," he said. "We can't look over the
country in detail that way but it will give us a good general survey of
it. We don't have too much time left by now and we'll make as many miles
into the north as we can each day. The woods goats will tell us when
it's time for us to turn back."
They parted company with casual farewells but for Steve Schroeder, who
smiled sardonically at the bones of the woods goats in the vale and
asked:
"Who's supposed to tell the woods goats?"
* * * * *
Tip, the black, white-nosed mocker on Lake's shoulder, kept twisting his
neck to watch the departure of the others until he had crossed the next
hill and the others were hidden from view.
"All right, Tip," he said then. "You can unwind your neck now."
"Unwind--all right--all right," Tip said. Then, with a sudden burst of
energy which was characteristic of mockers, he began to jiggle up and
down and chant in time with his movements, "All right all right all
right all right----"
"Shut up!" he commanded. "If you want to talk nonsense I don't care--but
don't say 'all right' any more."
"All right," Tip agreed amiably, settling down. "Shut up if you want to
talk nonsense. I don't care."
"And don't slaughter the punctuation like that. You change the meaning
entirely."
"But don't say all right any more," Tip went on, ignoring him. "You
change the meaning entirely."
Then, with another surge of animation, Tip began to fish in his jacket
pocket with little hand-like paws. "Tip hungry--Tip hungry."
Lake unbuttoned the pocket and gave Tip a herb leaf. "I notice there's
no nonsensical chatter when you want to ask for something to eat."
Tip took the herb leaf but he spoke again before he began to eat;
slowly, as though trying seriously to express a thought:
"Tip hungry--no nonsensical."
"Sometimes," he said, turning his head to look at Tip, "you mockers give
me the peculiar feeling that you're right on the edge of becoming a new
and intelligent race and no fooling."
Tip wiggled his whiskers and bit into the herb leaf. "No fooling," he
agreed.
* * * * *
He stopped for the night in a steep-walled hollow and built a small
fire of dead moss and grass to ward off the chill that came with dark.
He called the others, thinking first of Schroeder so that Tip would
transmit to Schroeder's mocker:
"Steve?"
"Here," Tip answered, in a detectable imitation of Schroeder's voice.
"No luck."
He thought of Gene Taylor and called, "Gene?"
There was no answer and he called Chiara. "Tony--could you see any of
Gene's route today?"
"Part of it," Chiara answered. "I saw a herd of unicorns over that way.
Why--doesn't he answer?"
"No."
"Then," Chiara said, "they must have got him."
"Did you find anything today, Tony?" he asked.
"Nothing but pure andesite. Not even an iron stain."
It was the same kind of barren formation that he, himself, had been
walking over all day. But he had not expected success so soon....
He tried once again to call Gene Taylor:
"Gene ... Gene ... are you there, Gene?"
There was no answer. He knew there would never be.
* * * * *
The days became weeks with dismaying swiftness as they penetrated
farther into the north. The hills became more rugged and there were
intrusions of granite and other formations to promise a chance of
finding metal; a promise that urged them on faster as their time grew
shorter.
Twice he saw something white in the distance. Once it was the bones of
another band of woods goats that had huddled together and frozen to
death in some early blizzard of the past and once it was the bones of a
dozen unicorns.
The nights grew chillier and the suns moved faster and faster to the
south. The animals began to migrate, an almost imperceptible movement in
the beginning but one that increased each day. The first frost came and
the migration began in earnest. By the third day it was a hurrying tide.
Tip was strangely silent that day. He did not speak until the noon sun
had cleared the cold, heavy mists of morning. When he spoke it was to
give a message from Chiara:
"Howard ... last report ... Goldie is dying ... pneumonia...."
Goldie was Chiara's mocker, his only means of communication--and there
would be no way to tell him when they were turning back.
"Turn back today, Tony," he said. "Steve and I will go on for a few days
more."
There was no answer and he said quickly, "Turn back--turn back!
Acknowledge that, Tony."
"Turning back ..." the acknowledgment came. "... tried to save her...."
The message stopped and there was a silence that Chiara's mocker would
never break again. He walked on, with Tip sitting very small and quiet
on his shoulder. He had crossed another hill before Tip moved, to press
up close to him the way mockers did when they were lonely and to hold
tightly to him.
"What is it, Tip?" he asked.
"Goldie is dying," Tip said. And then again, like a soft, sad whisper,
"Goldie is dying...."
"She was your mate.... I'm sorry."
Tip made a little whimpering sound, and the man reached up to stroke his
silky side.
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I'm sorry as hell, little fellow."
* * * * *
For two days Tip sat lonely and silent on his shoulder, no longer
interested in the new scenes nor any longer relieving the monotony with
his chatter. He refused to eat until the morning of the third day.
By then the exodus of woods goats and unicorns had dwindled to almost
nothing; the sky a leaden gray through which the sun could not be seen.
That evening he saw what he was sure would be the last band of woods
goats and shot one of them.
When he went to it he was almost afraid to believe what he saw.
The hair above its feet was red, discolored with the stain of
iron-bearing clay.
He examined it more closely and saw that the goat had apparently watered
at a spring where the mud was material washed down from an iron-bearing
vein or formation. It had done so fairly recently--there were still tiny
particles of clay adhering to the hair.
The wind stirred, cold and damp with its warning of an approaching
storm. He looked to the north, where the evening had turned the gray
clouds black, and called Schroeder:
"Steve--any luck?"
"None," Schroeder answered.
"I just killed a goat," he said. "It has iron stains on its legs it got
at some spring farther north. I'm going on to try to find it. You can
turn back in the morning."
"No," Schroeder objected. "I can angle over and catch up with you in a
couple of days."
"You'll turn back in the morning," he said. "I'm going to try to find
this iron. But if I get caught by a blizzard it will be up to you to
tell them at the caves that I found iron and to tell them where it
is--you know the mockers can't transmit that far."
There was a short silence; then Schroeder said, "All right--I see. I'll
head south in the morning."
Lake took a route the next day that would most likely be the one the
woods goats had come down, stopping on each ridge top to study the
country ahead of him through his binoculars. It was cloudy all day but
at sunset the sun appeared very briefly, to send its last rays across
the hills and redden them in mockery of the iron he sought.
Far ahead of him, small even through the glasses and made visible only
because of the position of the sun, was a spot at the base of a hill
that was redder than the sunset had made the other hills.
He was confident it would be the red clay he was searching for and he
hurried on, not stopping until darkness made further progress
impossible.
Tip slept inside his jacket, curled up against his chest, while the wind
blew raw and cold all through the night. He was on his way again at the
first touch of daylight, the sky darker than ever and the wind spinning
random flakes of snow before him.
He stopped to look back to the south once, thinking, _If I turn back now
I might get out before the blizzard hits._
Then the other thought came: _These hills all look the same. It I don't
go to the iron while I'm this close and know where it is, it might be
years before I or anyone else could find it again._
He went on and did not look back again for the rest of the day.
By midafternoon the higher hills around him were hidden under the clouds
and the snow was coming harder and faster as the wind drove the flakes
against his face. It began to snow with a heaviness that brought a half
darkness when he came finally to the hill he had seen through the
glasses.
A spring was at the base of it, bubbling out of red clay. Above it the
red dirt led a hundred feet to a dike of granite and stopped. He hurried
up the hillside that was rapidly whitening with snow and saw the vein.
It set against the dike, short and narrow but red-black with the iron it
contained. He picked up a piece and felt the weight of it. It was
heavy--it was pure iron oxide.
He called Schroeder and asked, "Are you down out of the high hills,
Steve?"
"I'm in the lower ones," Schroeder answered, the words coming a little
muffled from where Tip lay inside his jacket. "It looks black as hell up
your way."
"I found the iron, Steve. Listen--these are the nearest to landmarks I
can give you...."
When he had finished he said, "That's the best I can do. You can't see
the red clay except when the sun is low in the southwest but I'm going
to build a monument on top of the hill to find it by."
"About you, Howard," Steve asked, "what are your chances?"
The wind was rising to a high moaning around the ledges of the granite
dike and the vein was already invisible under the snow.
"It doesn't look like they're very good," he answered. "You'll probably
be leader when you come back next spring--I told the council I wanted
that if anything happened to me. Keep things going the way I would have.
Now--I'll have to hurry to get the monument built in time."
"All right," Schroeder said. "So long, Howard ... good luck."
He climbed to the top of the hill and saw boulders there he could use to
build the monument. They were large--he might crush Tip against his
chest in picking them up--and he took off his jacket, to wrap it around
Tip and leave him lying on the ground.
He worked until he was panting for breath, the wind driving the snow
harder and harder against him until the cold seemed to have penetrated
to the bone. He worked until the monument was too high for his numb
hands to lift any more boulders to its top. By then it was tall enough
that it should serve its purpose.
He went back to look for Tip, the ground already four inches deep in
snow and the darkness almost complete.
"Tip," he called. "Tip--Tip----" He walked back and forth across the
hillside in the area where he thought he had left him, stumbling over
rocks buried in the snow and invisible in the darkness, calling against
the wind and thinking, _I can't leave him to die alone here._
Then, from a bulge he had not seen in the snow under him, there came a
frightened, lonely wail:
_"Tip cold--Tip cold----"_
He raked the snow off his jacket and unwrapped Tip, to put him inside
his shirt next to his bare skin. Tip's paws were like ice and he was
shivering violently, the first symptom of the pneumonia that killed
mockers so quickly.
Tip coughed, a wrenching, rattling little sound, and whimpered,
"Hurt--hurt----"
"I know," he said. "Your lungs hurt--damn it to hell, I wish I could
have let you go home with Steve."
He put on the cold jacket and went down the hill. There was nothing
with which he could make a fire--only the short half-green grass,
already buried under the snow. He turned south at the bottom of the
hill, determining the direction by the wind, and began the stubborn
march southward that could have but one ending.
He walked until his cold-numbed legs would carry him no farther. The
snow was warm when he fell for the last time; warm and soft as it
drifted over him, and his mind was clouded with a pleasant drowsiness.
_This isn't so bad_, he thought, and there was something like surprise
through the drowsiness. _I can't regret doing what I had to do--doing it
the best I could...._
Tip was no longer coughing and the thought of Tip was the only one that
was tinged with regret: _I hope he wasn't still hurting when he died._
He felt Tip still very feebly against his chest then, and he did not
know if it was his imagination or if in that last dreamlike state it was
Tip's thought that came to him; warm and close and reassuring him:
_No hurt no cold now--all right now--we sleep now...._
* * * * *