* * * * *
John Humbolt, leader, stood on the wide stockade wall and watched the
lowering sun touch the western horizon--far south of where it had set
when he was a child. Big Summer was over and now, in the year two
hundred, they were already three years into Big Fall. The Craigs had
been impassable with snow for five years and the country at the north
end of the plateau, where the iron had been found, had been buried under
never-melting snow and growing glaciers for twenty years.
There came the soft tinkling of ceramic bells as the herd of milk goats
came down off the hills. Two children were following and six prowlers
walked with them, to protect them from wild unicorns.
There were not many of the goats. Each year the winters were longer,
requiring the stocking of a larger supply of hay. The time would come
when the summers would be so short and the winters so long that they
could not keep goats at all. And by then, when Big Winter had closed in
on them, the summer seasons would be too short for the growing of the
orange corn. They would have nothing left but the hunting.
They had, he knew, reached and passed the zenith of the development of
their environment. From a low of forty-nine men, women and children in
dark caves they had risen to a town of six thousand. For a few years
they had had a way of life that was almost a civilization but the
inevitable decline was already under way. The years of frozen sterility
of Big Winter were coming and no amount of determination or ingenuity
could alter them. Six thousand would have to live by hunting--and one
hundred, in the first Big Winter, had found barely enough game.
They would have to migrate in one of two different ways: they could go
to the south as nomad hunters--or they could go to other, fairer, worlds
in ships they took from the Gerns.
The choice was very easy to make and they were almost ready.
In the workshop at the farther edge of town the hyperspace transmitter
was nearing completion. The little smelter was waiting to receive the
lathe and other iron and steel and turn them into the castings for the
generator. Their weapons were ready, the mockers were trained, the
prowlers were waiting. And in the massive corral beyond town forty
half-tame unicorns trampled the ground and hated the world, wanting to
kill something. They had learned to be afraid of Ragnarok men but they
would not be afraid to kill Gerns....
The children with the goats reached the stockade and two of the
prowlers, Fenrir and Sigyn, turned to see him standing on the wall. He
made a little motion with his hand and they came running, to leap up
beside him on the ten-foot-high wall.
"So you've been checking up on how well the young ones guard the
children?" he asked.
Sigyn lolled out her tongue and her white teeth grinned at him in
answer. Fenrir, always the grimmer of the two, made a sound in his
throat in reply.
Prowlers developed something like a telepathic rapport with their
masters and could sense their thoughts and understand relatively complex
instructions. Their intelligence was greater, and of a far more mature
order, than that of the little mockers but their vocal cords were not
capable of making the sounds necessary for speech.
He rested his hands on their shoulders, where their ebony fur was
frosted with gray. Age had not yet affected their quick, flowing
movement but they were getting old--they were only a few weeks short of
his own age. He could not remember when they had not been with him....
Sometimes it seemed to him he could remember those hungry days when he
and Fenrir and Sigyn shared together in his mother's lap--but it was
probably only his imagination from having heard the story told so often.
But he could remember for certain when he was learning to walk and
Fenrir and Sigyn, full grown then, walked tall and black beside him. He
could remember playing with Sigyn's pups and he could remember Sigyn
watching over them all, sometimes giving her pups a bath and his face a
washing with equal disregard for their and his protests. Above all he
could remember the times when he was almost grown; the wild, free days
when he and Fenrir and Sigyn had roamed the mountains together. With a
bow and a knife and two prowlers beside him he had felt that there was
nothing on Ragnarok that they could not conquer; that there was nothing
in the universe they could not defy together....
* * * * *
There was a flicker of black movement and a young messenger prowler came
running from the direction of the council hall, a speckle-faced mocker
clinging to its back. It leaped up on the wall beside him and the
mocker, one that had been trained to remember and repeat messages
verbatim, took a breath so deep that its cheeks bulged out. It spoke, in
a quick rush like a child that is afraid it might forget some of the
words:
"You will please come to the council hall to lead the discussion
regarding the last preparations for the meeting with the Gerns. The
transmitter is completed."
* * * * *
The lathe was torn down the next day and the smelter began to roar with
its forced draft. Excitement and anticipation ran through the town like
a fever. It would take perhaps twenty days to build the generator,
working day and night so that not an hour of time would be lost, forty
days for the signal to reach Athena, and forty days for the Gern cruiser
to reach Ragnarok----
In one hundred days the Gerns would be there!
The men who would engage in the fight for the cruiser quit trimming
their beards. Later, when it was time for the Gerns to appear, they
would discard their woolen garments for ones of goat skin. The Gerns
would regard them as primitive inferiors at best and it might be of
advantage to heighten the impression. It would make the awakening of the
Gerns a little more shocking.
An underground passage, leading from the town to the concealment of the
woods in the distance, had long ago been dug. Through it the women and
children would go when the Gerns arrived.
There was a level area of ground, just beyond the south wall of town,
where the cruiser would be almost certain to land. The town had been
built with that thought in mind. Woods were not far from both sides of
the landing site and unicorn corrals were hidden in them. From the
corrals would come the rear flanking attack against the Gerns.
The prowlers, of course, would be scattered among all the forces.
* * * * *
The generator was completed and installed on the nineteenth night.
Charley Craig, a giant of a man whose red beard gave him a genially
murderous appearance, opened the valve of the water pipe. The new wooden
turbine stirred and belts and pulleys began to spin. The generator
hummed, the needles of the dials climbed, flickered, and steadied.
Norman Lake looked from them to Humbolt, his pale gray eyes coldly
satisfied. "Full output," he said. "We have the power we need this
time."
Jim Chiara was at the transmitter and they waited while he threw
switches and studied dials. Every component of the transmitter had been
tested but they had not had the power to test the complete assembly.
"That's it," he said at last, looking up at them. "She's ready, after
almost two hundred years of wanting her."
Humbolt wondered what the signal should be and saw no reason why it
should not be the same one that had been sent out with such hope a
hundred and sixty-five years ago.
"All right, Jim," he said. "Let the Gerns know we're waiting for
them--make it 'Ragnarok calling' again."
The transmitter key rattled and the all-wave signal that the Gerns
could not fail to receive went out at a velocity of five light-years a
day:
_Ragnarok calling--Ragnarok calling--Ragnarok calling--_
It was the longest summer Humbolt had ever experienced. He was not alone
in his impatience--among all of them the restlessness flamed higher as
the slow days dragged by, making it almost impossible to go about their
routine duties. The gentle mockers sensed the anticipation of their
masters for the coming battle and they became nervous and apprehensive.
The prowlers sensed it and they paced about the town in the dark of
night; watching, listening, on ceaseless guard against the mysterious
enemy their masters waited for. Even the unicorns seemed to sense what
was coming and they rumbled and squealed in their corrals at night,
red-eyed with the lust for blood and sometimes attacking the log walls
with blows that shook the ground.
The interminable days went their slow succession and summer gave way to
fall. The hundredth day dawned, cold and gray with the approach of
winter; the day of the Gerns.
But no cruiser came that day, nor the next. He stood again on the
stockade wall in the evening of the third day, Fenrir and Sigyn beside
him. He listened for the first dim, distant sound of the Gern cruiser
and heard only the moaning of the wind around him.
Winter was coming. Always, on Ragnarok, winter was coming or the brown
death of summer. Ragnarok was a harsh and barren prison, and no amount
of desire could ever make it otherwise. Only the coming of a Gern
cruiser could ever offer them the bloody, violent opportunity to regain
their freedom.
But what if the cruiser never came?
It was a thought too dark and hopeless to be held. They were not asking
a large favor of fate, after two hundred years of striving for it; only
the chance to challenge the Gern Empire with bows and knives....
Fenrir stiffened, the fur lifting on his shoulders and a muted growl
coming from him. Then Humbolt heard the first whisper of sound; a faint,
faraway roaring that was not the wind.
He watched and listened and the sound came swiftly nearer, rising in
pitch and swelling in volume. Then it broke through the clouds, tall and
black and beautifully deadly. It rode down on its rockets of flame,
filling the valley with its thunder, and his heart hammered with
exultation.
It had come--the cruiser had come!
He turned and dropped the ten feet to the ground inside the stockade.
The warning signal was being sounded from the center of town; a unicorn
horn that gave out the call they had used in the practice alarms.
Already the women and children would be hurrying along the tunnels that
led to the temporary safety of the woods beyond town. The Gerns might
use their turret blasters to destroy the town and all in it before the
night was over. There was no way of knowing what might happen before it
ended. But whatever it was, it would be the action they had all been
wanting.
He ran to where the others would be gathering, Fenrir and Sigyn loping
beside him and the horn ringing wild and savage and triumphant as it
announced the end of two centuries of waiting.
* * * * *
The cruiser settled to earth in the area where it had been expected to
land, towering high above the town with its turret blasters looking down
upon the houses.
Charley Craig and Norman Lake were waiting for him on the high steps of
his own house in the center of town where the elevation gave them a good
view of the ship yet where the fringes of the canopy would conceal them
from the ship's scanners. They were heavily armed, their prowlers beside
them and their mockers on their shoulders.
Elsewhere, under the connected rows of concealing canopies, armed men
were hurrying to their prearranged stations. Most of them were
accompanied by prowlers, bristling and snarling as they looked at the
alien ship. A few men were deliberately making themselves visible not
far away, going about unimportant tasks with only occasional and
carefully disinterested glances toward the ship. They were the bait, to
lure the first detachment into the center of town....
"Well?" Norman Lake asked, his pale eyes restless with his hunger for
violence. "There's our ship--when do we take her?"
"Just as soon as we get them outside it," he said. "We'll use the plan
we first had--wait until they send a full force to rescue the first
detachment and then hit them with everything we have."
His black, white-nosed mocker was standing in the open doorway and
watching the hurrying men and prowlers with worried interest: Tip, the
great-great-great-great grandson of the mocker that had died with Howard
Lake north of the plateau. He reached down to pick him up and set him on
his shoulder, and said:
"Jim?"
"The longbows are ready," Tip's treble imitation of Jim Chiara's voice
answered. "We'll black out their searchlights when the time comes."
"Andy?" he asked.
"The last of us for this section are coming in now," Andy Taylor
answered.
He made his check of all the subleaders, then looked up to the roof to
ask, "All set, Jimmy?"
Jimmy Stevens' grinning face appeared over the edge. "Ten crossbows are
cocked and waiting up here. Bring us our targets."
They waited, while the evening deepened into near-dusk. Then the airlock
of the cruiser slid open and thirteen Gerns emerged, the one leading
them wearing the resplendent uniform of a subcommander.
"There they come," he said to Lake and Craig. "It looks like we'll be
able to trap them in here and force the commander to send out a
full-sized force. We'll all attack at the sound of the horn and if you
can hit their rear flanks hard enough with the unicorns to give us a
chance to split them from this end some of us should make it to the ship
before they realize up in the control room that they should close the
airlocks.
"Now"--he looked at the Gerns who were coming straight toward the
stockade wall, ignoring the gate to their right--"you'd better be on
your way. We'll meet again before long in the ship."
Fenrir and Sigyn looked from the advancing Gerns to him with question in
their eyes after Lake and Craig were gone, Fenrir growling restlessly.
"Pretty soon," he said to them. "Right now it would be better if they
didn't see you. Wait inside, both of you." They went reluctantly inside,
to merge with the darkness of the interior. Only an occasional yellow
gleam of their eyes showed that they were crouched to spring just inside
the doorway.
He called to the nearest unarmed man, not loud enough to be heard by the
Gerns:
"Cliff--you and Sam Anders come here. Tell the rest to fade out of sight
and get armed."
Cliff Schroeder passed the command along and he and Sam Anders
approached. He looked back at the Gerns and saw they were within a
hundred feet of the--for them--unscalable wall of the stockade. They
were coming without hesitation----
A pale blue beam lashed down from one of the cruiser's turrets and a
fifty foot section of the wall erupted into dust with a sound like
thunder. The wind swept the dust aside in a gigantic cloud and the Gerns
came through the gap, looking neither to right nor left.
"That, I suppose," Sam Anders said from beside him, "was Lesson Number
One for degenerate savages like us: Gerns, like gods, are not to be
hindered by man-made barriers."
The Gerns walked with a peculiar gait that puzzled him until he saw what
it was. They were trying to come with the arrogant military stride
affected by the Gerns and in the 1.5 gravity they were succeeding in
achieving only a heavy clumping.
They advanced steadily and as they drew closer he saw that in the right
hand of each Gern soldier was a blaster while in the left hand of each
could be seen the metallic glitter of chains.
Schroeder smiled thinly. "It looks like they want to subject about a
dozen of us to some painful questioning."
No one else was any longer in sight and the Gerns came straight toward
the three on the steps. They stopped forty feet away at a word of
command from the officer and Gerns and Ragnarok men exchanged silent
stares; the faces of the Ragnarok men bearded and expressionless, the
faces of the Gerns hairless and reflecting a contemptuous curiosity.
"Narth!" The communicator on the Gern officer's belt spoke with metallic
authority. "What do they look like? Did we come two hundred light-years
to view some animated vegetables?"
"No, Commander," Narth answered. "I think the discard of the Rejects two
hundred years ago has produced for us an unexpected reward. There are
three natives under the canopy before me and their physical perfection
and complete adaptation to this hellish gravity is astonishing."
"They could be used to replace expensive machines on some of the outer
world mines," the commander said, "providing their intelligence isn't
too abysmally low. What about that?"
"They can surely be taught to perform simple manual labor," Narth
answered.
"Get on with your job," the commander said. "Try to pick some of the
most intelligent looking ones for questioning--I can't believe these
cattle sent that message and they're going to tell us who did. And pick
some young, strong ones for the medical staff to examine--ones that
won't curl up and die after the first few cuts of the knife."
"We'll chain these three first," Narth said. He lifted his hand in an
imperious gesture to Humbolt and the other two and ordered in accented
Terran: "Come here!"
No one moved and he said again, sharply, _"Come here!"_
Again no one moved and the minor officer beside Narth said, "Apparently
they can't even understand Terran now."
"Then we'll give them some action they can understand," Narth snapped,
his face flushing with irritation. "We'll drag them out by their heels!"
The Gerns advanced purposefully, three of them holstering their blasters
to make their chains ready. When they had passed under the canopy and
could not be seen from the ship Humbolt spoke:
"All right, Jimmy."
The Gerns froze in midstride, suspicion flashing across their faces.
"Look up on the roof," he said in Gern.
They looked, and the suspicion became gaping dismay.
"You can be our prisoners or you can be corpses," he said. "We don't
care which."
The urgent hiss of Narth's command broke their indecision:
_"Kill them!"_
Six of them tried to obey, bringing up their blasters in movements that
seemed curiously heavy and slow, as though the gravity of Ragnarok had
turned their arms to wood. Three of them almost lifted their blasters
high enough to fire at the steps in front of them before arrows went
through their throats. The other three did not get that far.
Narth and the remaining six went rigidly motionless and he said to them:
"Drop your blasters--quick!"
Their blasters thumped to the ground and Jimmy Stevens and his bowmen
slid off the roof. Within a minute the Gerns were bound with their own
chains, but for the officer, and the blasters were in the hands of the
Ragnarok men.
Jimmy looked down the row of Gerns and shook his head. "So these are
Gerns?" he said. "It was like trapping a band of woods goats."
"Young ones," Schroeder amended. "And almost as dangerous."
Narth's face flushed at the words and his eyes went to the ship. The
sight of it seemed to restore his courage and his lips drew back in a
snarl.
"You fools--you stupid, megalomaniac dung-heaps--do you think you can
kill Gerns and live to boast about it?"
"Keep quiet," Humbolt ordered, studying him with curiosity. Narth, like
all the Gerns, was different from what they had expected. It was true
the Gerns had strode into their town with an attempt at arrogance but
they were harmless in appearance, soft of face and belly, and the
snarling of the red-faced Narth was like the bluster of a cornered
scavenger-rodent.
"I promise you this," Narth was saying viciously, "if you don't release
us and return our weapons this instant I'll personally oversee the
extermination of you and every savage in this village with the most
painful death science can contrive and I'll----"
Humbolt reached out his hand and flicked Narth under the chin. Narth's
teeth cracked loudly together and his face twisted with the pain of a
bitten tongue.
"Tie him up, Jess," he said to a man near him. "If he opens his mouth
again, shove your foot in it."
He spoke to Schroeder. "We'll keep three of the blasters and send two to
each of the other front groups. Have that done."
Dusk was deepening into darkness and he called Chiara again. "They'll
turn on their searchlights any minute and make the town as light as
day," he said. "If you can keep them blacked out until some of us have
reached the ship, I think we'll have won."
"They'll be kept blacked out," Chiara said. "With some flint-headed
arrows left over for the Gerns."
He called Lake and Craig, to be told they were ready and waiting.
"But we're having hell keeping the unicorns quiet," Craig said. "They
want to get to killing something."
He pressed the switch of the communicator but it was dead. They had, of
course, transferred to some other wave length so he could not hear the
commands. It was something he had already anticipated....
Fenrir and Sigyn were still obediently inside the doorway, almost
frantic with desire to rejoin him. He spoke to them and they bounded
out, snarling at three Gerns in passing and causing them to blanch to a
dead-white color.
He set Tip on Sigyn's shoulders and said, "Sigyn, there's a job for you
and Tip to do. A dangerous job. Listen--both of you...."
The yellow eyes of Sigyn and the dark eyes of the little mocker looked
into his as he spoke to them and accompanied his words with the
strongest, clearest mental images he could project:
"Sigyn, take Tip to the not-men thing. Leave him hidden in the grass to
one side of the big hole in it. Tip, you wait there. When the not-men
come out you listen, and tell what they say.
"Now, do you both understand?"
Sigyn made a sound that meant she did but Tip clutched at his wrist with
little paws suddenly gone cold and wailed, "_No!_ Scared--scared----"
"You have to go, Tip," he said, gently disengaging his wrist. "And Sigyn
will hide near to you and watch over you." He spoke to Sigyn. "When the
horn calls you run back with him."
Again she made the sound signifying understanding and he touched them
both in what he hoped would not be the last farewell.
"All right, Sigyn--go now."
She vanished into the gloom of coming night, Tip hanging tightly to her.
Fenrir stood with the fur lifted on his shoulders and a half snarl on
his face as he watched her go and watched the place where the not-men
would appear.
"Where's Freckles?" he asked Jimmy.
"Here," someone said, and came forward with Tip's mate.
He set Freckles on his shoulder and the first searchlight came on,
shining down from high up on the cruiser. It lighted up the area around
them in harsh white brilliance, its reflection revealing the black
shadow that was Sigyn just vanishing behind the ship.
Two more searchlights came on, to illuminate the town. Then the Gerns
came.
They poured out through the airlock and down the ramp, there to form in
columns that marched forward as still more Gerns hurried down the ramp
behind them. The searchlights gleamed on their battle helmets and on the
blades of the bayonets affixed to their rifle-like long range blasters.
Hand blasters and grenades hung from their belts, together with stubby
flame guns.
They were a solid mass reaching halfway to the stockade before the last
of them, the commanding officers, appeared. One of them stopped at the
foot of the ramp to watch the advance of the punitive force and give the
frightened but faithful Tip the first words to transmit to Freckles:
"The full force is on its way, Commander."
A reply came, in Freckles' simulation of the metallic tones of a
communicator:
"The key numbers of the confiscated blasters have been checked and the
disturbance rays of the master integrator set. You'll probably have few
natives left alive to take as prisoners after those thirteen charges
explode but continue with a mopping up job that the survivors will never
forget."
_So the Gerns could, by remote control, set the total charges of stolen
blasters to explode upon touching the firing stud?_ It was something new
since the days of the Old Ones....
He called Chiara and the other groups, quickly, to tell them what he had
learned. "We'll get more blasters--ones they can't know the numbers
of--when we attack," he finished.
He took the blaster from his belt and laid it on the ground. The front
ranks of the Gerns were almost to the wall by then, a column wider than
the gap that had been blasted through it, coming with silent
purposefulness.
Two blaster beams lanced down from the turrets, to smash at the wall.
Dust billowed and thunder rumbled as they swept along. A full three
hundred feet of the wall had been destroyed when they stopped and the
dust hid the ship and made dim glows of the searchlights.
It had no doubt been intended to impress them with the might of the
Gerns but in doing so it hid the Ragnarok forces from the advancing
Gerns for a few seconds.
"Jim--black out their lights before the dust clears," he called.
"Joe--the horn! We attack now!"
The first longbow arrow struck a searchlight and its glow grew dimmer as
the arrow's burden--a thin tube of thick lance tree ink--splattered
against it. Another followed----
Then the horn rang out, harsh and commanding, and in the distance a
unicorn screamed in answer. The savage cry of a prowler came, like a
sound to match, and the attack was on.
He ran with Fenrir beside him and to his left and right ran the others
with their prowlers. The lead groups converged as they went through the
wide gap in the wall. They ran on, into the dust cloud, and the shadowy
forms of the Gerns were suddenly before them.
A blaster beam cut into them and a Gern shouted, _"The natives!"_ Other
beams sprang into life, winking like pale blue eyes through the dust and
killing all they touched. The beams dropped as the first volley of
arrows tore through the massed front ranks, to be replaced by others.
They charged on, into the blue winking of the blasters and the red
lances of the flame guns with the crossbows rattling and strumming in
answer. The prowlers lunged and fought beside them and ahead of them;
black hell-creatures that struck the Gerns too swiftly for blasters to
find before throats were torn out; the sound of battle turned into a
confusion of raging snarls, frantic shouts and dying screams.
A prowler shot past him to join Fenrir--Sigyn--and he felt Tip dart up
to his shoulder. She made a sound of greeting in passing, a sound that
was gone as her jaws closed on a Gern.
The dust cloud cleared a little and the searchlights looked down on the
scene; no longer brilliantly white but shining through the red-black
lance tree ink as a blood red glow. A searchlight turret slid shut and
opened a moment later, the light wiped clean. The longbows immediately
transformed it into a red glow.
The beam of one of the turret blasters stabbed down, to blaze a trail of
death through the battle. It ceased as its own light revealed to the
Gern commander that the Ragnarok forces were so intermixed with the Gern
forces that he was killing more Gerns than Ragnarok men.
By then the fighting was so hand to hand that knives were better than
crossbows. The Gerns fell like harvested corn; too slow and awkward to
use their bayonets against the faster Ragnarok men and killing as many
of one another as men when they tried to use their blasters and flame
guns. From the rear there came the command of a Gern officer, shouted
high and thin above the sound of battle:
"Back to the ship--leave the natives for the ship's blasters to kill!"
The unicorns arrived then, to cut off their retreat.
They came twenty from the east and twenty from the west in a thunder of
hooves, squealing and screaming in their blood lust, with prowlers a
black wave going before them. They struck the Gerns; the prowlers
slashing lanes through them while the unicorns charged behind, trampling
them, ripping into them with their horns and smashing them down with
their hooves as they vented the pent up rage of their years of
confinement. On the back of each was a rider whose long spear flicked
and stabbed into the throats and bellies of Gerns.
The retreat was halted and transformed into milling confusion. He led
his own groups in the final charge, the prearranged wedge attack, and
they split the Gern force in two.
The ship was suddenly just beyond them.
He gave the last command to Lake and Craig: "_Now_--into the ship!"
He scooped up a blaster from beside a fallen Gern and ran toward it. A
Gern officer was already in the airlock, his face pale and strained as
he looked back and his hand on the closing switch. He shot him and ran
up the ramp as the officer's body rolled down it.
Unicorn hooves pounded behind him and twenty of them swept past, their
riders leaping from their backs to the ramp. Twenty men and fifteen
prowlers charged up the ramp as a warning siren shrieked somewhere
inside the ship. At the same time the airlocks, operated from the
control room, began to slide swiftly shut.
He was through first, with Fenrir and Sigyn. Lake and Craig, together
with six men and four prowlers, squeezed through barely in time. Then
the airlocks were closed and they were sealed in the ship.
Alarm bells added their sound to the shrieking of the siren and from the
multiple-compartments shafts came the whir of elevators dropping with
Gern forces to kill the humans trapped inside the ship.
They ran past the elevator shafts without pausing, light and swift in
the artificial gravity that was only two-thirds that of Ragnarok. They
split forces as long ago planned; three men and four prowlers going with
Charley Craig in the attempt to take the drive room, Lake and the other
three men going with him in the attempt to take the control room.
They found the manway ladder and began to climb, Fenrir and Sigyn
impatiently crowding their heels.
There was nothing on the control room level and they ran down the short
corridor that their maps had showed. They turned left, into the corridor
that had the control room at its end, and into the concentrated fire of
nine waiting Gerns.
Fenrir and Sigyn went into the Gerns, under their fire before they could
drop the muzzles of their blasters, with an attack so vicious and
unexpected that what would have been a certain and lethal trap for the
humans was suddenly a fighting chance.
The corridor became an inferno of blaster beams that cracked and hissed
as they met and crossed, throwing little chips of metal from the walls
with snapping sounds and going through flesh with sounds like soft
tappings. It was over within seconds, the last Gern down and one man
still standing beside him, the blond and nerveless Lake.
Thomsen and Barber were dead and Billy West was bracing himself against
the wall with a blaster hole through his stomach, trying to say
something and sliding to the floor before it was ever spoken.
And Sigyn was down, blood welling and bubbling from a wound in her
chest, while Fenrir stood over her with his snarling a raging scream as
he swung his head in search of a still-living Gern.
Humbolt and Lake ran on, Fenrir raging beside them, and into the control
room.
Six officers, one wearing the uniform of a commander, were gaping in
astonishment and bringing up their blasters in the way that seemed so
curiously slow to Humbolt. Fenrir, in his fury, killed two of them as
Lake's blaster and his own killed three more.
The commander was suddenly alone, his blaster half lifted. Fenrir leaped
at his throat and Humbolt shouted the quick command: _"Disarm!"_
It was something the prowlers had been taught in their training and
Fenrir's teeth clicked short of the commander's throat while his paw
sent the blaster spinning across the room.
The commander stared at them with his swarthy face a dark gray and his
mouth still gaping.
"How--how did you do it?" he asked in heavily accented Terran. "Only two
of you----"
"Don't talk until you're asked a question," Lake said.
"Only two of you...." The thought seemed to restore his courage, as
sight of the ship had restored Narth's that night, and his tone became
threatening. "There are only two of you and more guards will be here to
kill you within a minute. Surrender to me and I'll let you go free----"
Lake slapped him across the mouth with a backhanded blow that snapped
his head back on his shoulders and split his lip.
"Don't talk," he ordered again. "And never lie to us."
The commander spit out a tooth and held his hand to his bleeding mouth.
He did not speak again.
Tip and Freckles were holding tightly to his shoulder and each other,
the racing of their hearts like a vibration, and he touched them
reassuringly.
"All right now--all safe now," he said.
He called Charley Craig. "Charley--did you make it?"
"We made it to the drive room--two of us and one prowler," Charley
answered. "What about you?"
"Norman and I have the control room. Cut their drives, to play safe.
I'll let you know as soon as the entire ship is ours."
He went to the viewscreen and saw that the battle was over. Chiara was
letting the searchlight burn again and prowlers were being used to drive
back the unicorns from the surrendering Gerns.
"I guess we won," he said to Lake.
But there was no feeling of victory, none of the elation he had thought
he would have. Sigyn was dying alone in the alien corridor outside.
Sigyn, who had nursed beside him and fought beside him and laid down her
life for him....
"I want to look at her," he said to Lake.
Fenrir went with him. She was still alive, waiting for them to come back
to her. She lifted her head and touched his hand with her tongue as he
examined the wound.
It was not fatal--it need not be fatal. He worked swiftly, gently, to
stop the bleeding that had been draining her life away. She would have
to lie quietly for weeks but she would recover.
When he was done he pressed her head back to the floor and said, "Lie
still, Sigyn girl, until we can come to move you. Wait for us and Fenrir
will stay here with you."
She obeyed and he left them, the feeling of victory and elation coming
to him in full then.
Lake looked at him questioningly as he entered the control room and he
said, "She'll live."
He turned to the Gern commander. "First, I want to know how the war is
going?"
"I----" The commander looked uncertainly at Lake.
"Just tell the truth," Lake said. "Whether you think we'll like it or
not."
"We have all the planets but Earth, itself," the commander said. "We'll
have it, soon."
"And the Terrans on Athena?"
"They're still--working for us there."
"Now," he said, "you will order every Gern in this ship to go to his
sleeping quarters. They will leave their weapons in the corridors
outside and they will not resist the men who will come to take charge of
the ship."
The commander made an effort toward defiance:
_"And if I refuse?"_
Lake answered, smiling at him with the smile of his that was no more
than a quick showing of teeth and with the savage eagerness in his eyes.
"If you refuse I'll start with your fingers and break every bone to
your shoulders. If that isn't enough I'll start with your toes and go to
your hips. And then I'll break your back."
The commander hesitated, sweat filming his face as he looked at them.
Then he reached out to switch on the all-stations communicator and say
into it:
"Attention, all personnel: You will return to your quarters at once,
leaving your weapons in the corridors. You are ordered to make no
resistance when the natives come...."
There was a silence when he had finished and Humbolt and Lake looked at
each other, bearded and clad in animal skins but standing at last in the
control room of a ship that was theirs: in a ship that could take them
to Athena, to Earth, to the ends of the galaxy.
The commander watched them, on his face the blankness of unwillingness
to believe.
"The airlocks--" he said. "We didn't close them in time. We never
thought you would dare try to take the ship--not savages in animal
skins."
"I know," Humbolt answered. "We were counting on you to think that way."
"No one expected any of you to survive here." The commander wiped at his
swollen lips, wincing, and an almost child-like petulance came into his
tone. "You weren't supposed to survive."
"I know," he said again. "We've made it a point to remember that."
"The gravity, the heat and cold and fever, the animals--why didn't they
kill you?"
"They tried," he said. "But we fought back. And we had a goal--to meet
you Gerns again. You left us on a world that had no resources. Only
enemies who would kill us--the gravity, the prowlers, the unicorns. So
we made them our resources. We adapted to the gravity that was supposed
to kill us and became stronger and quicker than Gerns. We made allies of
the prowlers and unicorns who were supposed to be our executioners and
used them tonight to help us kill Gerns. So now we have your ship."
"Yes ... you have our ship." Through the unwillingness to believe on the
commander's face and the petulance there came the triumph of vindictive
anticipation. "The savages of Ragnarok have a Gern cruiser--but what can
they do with it?"
"What can we do with it?" he asked, almost kindly. "We've planned for
two hundred years what we can do with it. We have the cruiser and sixty
days from now we'll have Athena. That will be only the beginning and you
Gerns are going to help us do it."
* * * * *
For six days the ship was a scene of ceaseless activity. Men crowded it,
asking questions of the Gern officers and crew and calmly breaking the
bones of those who refused to answer or who gave answers that were not
true. Prowlers stalked the corridors, their cold yellow eyes watching
every move the Gerns made. The little mockers began roaming the ship at
will, unable any longer to restrain their curiosity and confident that
the men and prowlers would not let the Gerns harm them.
One mocker was killed then; the speckle-faced mocker that could repeat
messages verbatim. It wandered into a storage cubicle where a Gern was
working alone and gave him the opportunity to safely vent his hatred of
everything associated with the men of Ragnarok. He broke its back with a
steel bar and threw it, screaming, into the disposal chute that led to
the matter converter. A prowler heard the scream and an instant later
the Gern screamed; a sound that died in its making as the prowler tore
his throat out. No more mockers were harmed.
One Ragnarok boy was killed. Three fanatical Gern officers stole knives
from the galley and held the boy as hostage for their freedom. When
their demands were refused they cut his heart out. Lake cornered them a
few minutes later and, without touching his blaster, disemboweled them
with their own knives. He smiled down upon them as they writhed and
moaned on the floor and their moans were heard for a long time by the
other Gerns in the ship before they died. No more humans were harmed.
They discovered that operation of the cruiser was relatively simple,
basically similar to the operation of Terran ships as described in the
text book the original Lake had written. Most of the operations were
performed by robot mechanisms and the manual operations, geared to the
slower reflexes of the Gerns, were easily mastered.
They could spend the forty-day voyage to Athena in further learning and
practice so on the sixth day they prepared to depart. The unicorns had
been given the freedom they had fought so well for and reconnaissance
vehicles were loaned from the cruiser to take their place. Later there
would be machinery and supplies of all kinds brought in by freighter
ships from Athena.
Time was precious and there was a long, long job ahead of them. They
blasted up from Ragnarok on the morning of the seventh day and went into
the black sea of hyperspace.
By then the Gern commander was no longer of any value to them. His
unwillingness to believe that savages had wrested his ship from him had
increased until his compartment became his control room to him and he
spent the hours laughing and giggling before an imaginary viewscreen
whereon the cruiser's blasters were destroying, over and over, the
Ragnarok town and all the humans in it.
But Narth, who had wanted to have them tortured to death for daring to
resist capture, became very cooperative. In the control room his
cooperation was especially eager. On the twentieth day of the voyage
they let him have what he had been trying to gain by subterfuge: access
to the transmitter when no men were within hearing distance.
After that his manner abruptly changed. Each day his hatred for them and
his secret anticipation became more evident.
The thirty-fifth day came, with Athena five days ahead of them--the day
of the execution they had let him arrange for them.
* * * * *
Stars filled the transdimensional viewscreen, the sun of Athena in the
center. Humbolt watched the space to the lower left and the flicker came
again; a tiny red dot that was gone again within a microsecond, so
quickly that Narth in the seat beside him did not see it.
It was the quick peek of another ship; a ship that was running invisible
with its detector screens up but which had had to drop them for an
instant to look out at the cruiser. Not even the Gerns had ever been
able to devise a polarized detector screen.
He changed the course and speed of the cruiser, creating an increase in
gravity which seemed very slight to him but which caused Narth to slew
heavily in his seat. Narth straightened and he said to him:
"Within a few minutes we'll engage the ship you sent for."
Narth's jaw dropped, then came back up. "So you spied on me?"
"One of our Ragnarok allies did--the little animal that was sitting near
the transmitter. They're our means of communication. We learned that you
had arranged for a ship, en route to Athena, to intercept us and capture
us."
"So you know?" Narth asked. He smiled, an unpleasant twisting of his
mouth. "Do you think that knowing will help you any?"
"We expect it to," he answered.
"It's a battleship," Narth said. "It's three times the size of this
cruiser, the newest and most powerful battleship in the Gern fleet. How
does that sound to you?"
"It sounds good," he said. "We'll make it our flagship."
"Your flagship--your _'flagship'_!" The last trace of pretense left
Narth and he let his full and rankling hatred come through. "You got
this cruiser by trickery and learned how to operate it after a fashion
because of an animal-like reflex abnormality. For forty-two days you
accidental mutants have given orders to your superiors and thought you
were our equals. Now, your fool's paradise is going to end."
The red dot came again, closer, and he once more altered the ship's
course. He had turned on the course analyzer and it clicked as the
battleship's position was correlated with that of its previous
appearance. A short yellow line appeared on the screen to forecast its
course for the immediate future.
"And then?" he asked curiously, turning back to Narth.
"And then we'll take all of you left alive back to your village. The
scenes of what we do to you and your village will be televised to all
Gern-held worlds. It will be a valuable reminder for any who have
forgotten the penalty for resisting Gerns."
The red dot came again. He punched the BATTLE STATIONS button and the
board responded with a row of READY lights.
"All the other Gerns are by now in their acceleration couches," he said.
"Strap yourself in for high acceleration maneuvers--we'll make contact
with the battleship within two minutes."
Narth did so, taking his time as though it was something of little
importance. "There will be no maneuvers. They'll blast the stern and
destroy your drive immediately upon attack."
He fastened the last strap and smiled, taunting assurance in the twisted
unpleasantness of it. "The appearance of this battleship has very much
disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the slaves on
Athena, hasn't it?"
"Not exactly," Humbolt replied. "Our plans are a little broader in scope
than that. There are two new cruisers on Athena, ready to leave the
shops ten days from now. We'll turn control of Athena over to the humans
there, of course, then we'll take the three cruisers and the battleship
back by way of Ragnarok. There we'll pick up all the Ragnarok men who
are neither too old nor too young and go on to Earth. They will be given
training en route in the handling of ships. We expect to find no
difficulty in breaking through the Gern lines around Earth and then,
with the addition of the Earth ships, we can easily capture all the Gern
ships in the solar system."
"'Easily'!" Narth made a contemptuous sneer of the word. "Were you
actually so stupid as to think that you biological freaks could equal
Gern officers who have made a career of space warfare?"
"We'll far exceed them," he said. "A space battle is one of trying to
keep your blaster beams long enough on one area of the enemy ship to
break through its blaster shields at that point. And at the same time
try to move and dodge fast enough to keep the enemy from doing the same
thing to you. The ships are capable of accelerations up to fifty
gravities or more but the acceleration limitator is the safeguard that
prevents the ship from going into such a high degree of acceleration or
into such a sudden change of direction that it would kill the crew.
"We from Ragnarok are accustomed to a one point five gravity and can
withstand much higher degrees of acceleration than Gerns or any other
race from a one gravity world. To enable us to take advantage of that
fact we have had the acceleration limitator on this cruiser
disconnected."
_"Disconnected?"_ Narth's contemptuous regard vanished in frantic
consternation. "You fool--you don't know what that means--_you'll move
the acceleration lever too far and kill us all!_"
The red dot flicked on the viewscreen, trembled, and was suddenly a
gigantic battleship in full view. He touched the acceleration control
and Narth's next words were cut off as his diaphragm sagged. He swung
the cruiser in a curve and Narth was slammed sideways, the straps
cutting into him and the flesh of his face pulled lopsided by the
gravity. His eyes, bulging, went blank with unconsciousness.
The powerful blasters of the battleship blossomed like a row of pale
blue flowers, concentrating on the stern of the cruiser. A warning siren
screeched as they started breaking through the cruiser's shields. He
dropped the detector screen that would shield the cruiser from sight,
but not from the blaster beams, and tightened the curve until the
gravity dragged heavily at his own body.
The warning siren stopped as the blaster beams of the battleship went
harmlessly into space, continuing to follow the probability course
plotted from the cruiser's last visible position and course by the
battleship's robot target tracers.
He lifted the detector screen, to find the battleship almost exactly
where the cruiser's course analyzers had predicted it would be. The
blasters of the battleship were blazing their full concentration of
firepower into an area behind and to one side of the cruiser.
They blinked out at sight of the cruiser in its new position and blazed
again a moment later, boring into the stern. He dropped the detector
screen and swung the cruiser in another curve, spiraling in the opposite
direction. As before, the screech of the alarm siren died as the
battleship's blasters followed the course given them by course analyzers
and target tracers that were built to presume that all enemy ships were
acceleration-limitator equipped.
The cruiser could have destroyed the battleship at any time--but they
wanted to capture their flagship unharmed. The maneuvering continued,
the cruiser drawing closer to the battleship. The battleship, in
desperation, began using the same hide-and-jump tactics the cruiser used
but it was of little avail--the battleship moved at known acceleration
limits and the cruiser's course analyzers predicted each new position
with sufficient accuracy.
The cruiser made its final dash in a tightening spiral, its detector
screen flickering on and off. It struck the battleship at a matched
speed, with a thump and ringing of metal as the magnetic grapples
fastened the cruiser like a leech to the battleship's side.
In that position neither the forward nor stern blasters of the
battleship could touch it. There remained only to convince the commander
of the battleship that further resistance was futile.
This he did with a simple ultimatum to the commander:
"This cruiser is firmly attached to your ship, its acceleration
limitator disconnected. Its drives are of sufficient power to thrust
both ships forward at a much higher degree of acceleration than persons
from one-gravity worlds can endure. You will surrender at once or we
shall be forced to put these two ships into a curve of such short radius
and at an acceleration so great that all of you will be killed."
Then he added, "If you surrender we'll do somewhat better by you than
you did with the humans two hundred years ago--we'll take all of you on
to Athena."
The commander, already sick from an acceleration that would have been
negligible to Ragnarok men, had no choice.
His reply came, choked with acceleration sickness and the greater
sickness of defeat:
"We will surrender."
* * * * *
Narth regained consciousness. He saw Humbolt sitting beside him as
before, with no Gern rescuers crowding into the control room with
shouted commands and drawn blasters.
"Where are they?" he asked. "Where is the battleship?"
"We captured it," he said.
"You captured--a Gern battleship?"
"It wasn't hard," he said. "It would have been easier if only Ragnarok
men had been on the cruiser. We didn't want to accelerate to any higher
gravities than absolutely necessary because of the Gerns on it."
"You did it--you captured the battleship," Narth said, his tone like one
dazed.
He wet his lips, staring, as he contemplated the unpleasant implications
of it.
"You're freak mutants who can capture a battleship. Maybe you will take
Athena and Earth from us. But"--the animation of hatred returned to his
face--"What good will it do you? Did you ever think about that?"
"Yes," he said. "We've thought about it."
"Have you?" Narth leaned forward, his face shining with the malice of
his gloating. "You can never escape the consequences of what you have
done. The Gern Empire has the resources of dozens of worlds. The Empire
will build a fleet of special ships, a force against which your own will
be nothing, and send them to Earth and Athena and Ragnarok. The Empire
will smash you for what you have done and if there are any survivors of
your race left they will cringe before Gerns for a hundred generations
to come.
"Remember that while you're posturing in your little hour of glory on
Athena and Earth."
"You insist in thinking we'll do as Gerns would do," he said. "We won't
delay to do any posturing. We'll have a large fleet when we leave Earth
and we'll go at once to engage the Gern home fleet. I thought you knew
we were going to do that. We're going to cripple and capture your fleet
and then we're going to destroy your empire."
"Destroy the Empire--_now_?" Narth stared again, all the gloating gone
as he saw, at last, the quick and inexorable end. "Now--before we can
stop you--before we can have a chance?"
"When a race has been condemned to die by another race and it fights and
struggles and manages somehow to survive, it learns a lesson. It learns
it must never again let the other race be in position to destroy it. So
this is the harvest you reap from the seeds you sowed on Ragnarok two
hundred years ago.
"You understand, don't you?" he asked, almost gently. "For two hundred
years the Gern Empire has been a menace to our survival as a race. Now,
the time has come when we shall remove it."
* * * * *
He stood in the control room of the battleship and watched Athena's sun
in the viewscreen, blazing like a white flame. Sigyn, fully recovered,
was stretched out on the floor near him; twitching and snarling a little
in her sleep as she fought again the battle with the Gerns. Fenrir was
pacing the floor, swinging his black, massive head restlessly, while Tip
and Freckles were examining with fascinated curiosity the collection of
bright medals that had been cleaned out of the Gern commander's desk.
Lake and Craig left their stations, as impatient as Fenrir, and came
over to watch the viewscreen with him.
"One day more," Craig said. "We're two hundred years late but we're
coming in to the world that was to have been our home."
"It can never be, now," he said. "Have any of us ever thought of
that--that we're different to humans and there's no human world we could
ever call home?"
"I've thought of it," Lake said. "Ragnarok made us different physically
and different in the way we think. We could live on human worlds--but
we would always be a race apart and never really belong there."
"I suppose we've all thought about it," Craig said. "And wondered what
we'll do when we're finished with the Gerns. Not settle down on Athena
or Earth, in a little cottage with a fenced-in lawn where it would be
adventure to watch the Three-D shows after each day at some safe,
routine job."
"Not back to Ragnarok," Lake said. "With metals and supplies from other
worlds they'll be able to do a lot there but the battle is already won.
There will be left only the peaceful development--building a town at the
equator for Big Winter, leveling land, planting crops. We could never be
satisfied with that kind of a life."
"No," he said, and felt his own restlessness stir in protest at the
thought of settling down in some safe and secure environment. "Not
Athena or Earth or Ragnarok--not any world we know."
"How long until we're finished with the Gerns?" Lake asked. "Ten years?
We'll still be young then. Where will we go--all of us who fought the
Gerns and all of the ones in the future who won't want to live out their
lives on Ragnarok? Where is there a place for us--a world of our own?"
"Where do we find a world of our own?" he asked, and watched the star
clouds creep toward them in the viewscreen; tumbled and blazing and
immense beyond conception.
"There's a galaxy for us to explore," he said. "There are millions of
suns and thousands of worlds waiting for us. Maybe there are races out
there like the Gerns--and maybe there are races such as we were a
hundred years ago who need our help. And maybe there are worlds out
there with things on them such as no man ever imagined.
"We'll go, to see what's there. Our women will go with us and there will
be some worlds on which some of us will want to stay. And, always, there
will be more restless ones coming from Ragnarok. Out there are the
worlds and the homes for all of us."
"Of course," Lake said. "Beyond the space frontier ... where else would
we ever belong?"
It was all settled, then, and there was a silence as the battleship
plunged through hyperspace, the cruiser running beside her and their
drives moaning and thundering as had the drives of the _Constellation_
two hundred years before.
A voyage had been interrupted then, and a new race had been born. Now
they were going on again, to Athena, to Earth, to the farthest reaches
of the Gern Empire. And on, to the wild, unknown regions of space
beyond.
There awaited their worlds and there awaited their destiny; to be a race
scattered across a hundred thousand light-years of suns, to be an empire
such as the galaxy had never known.
They, the restless ones, the unwanted and forgotten, the survivors.
THE END
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Crushing gravity--thin air--winters of unimaginable cold--searing
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Transcriber's Note:
The following typographical errors in the original text have been
corrected in this eBook:
Verso, p. 4: "arangement" changed to "arrangement"
Part 1, p. 22: comma changed to a period
Part 1, p. 22: "benefitted" changed to "benefited"
Part 1, p. 53: "say it it now" changed to "say it now"
Part 2, p. 105: "acknowledgement" changed to "acknowledgment"
Part 4, p. 134: "lightyears" changed to "light-years"