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THE SURVIVORS
Tom Godwin
Editor’s note: This is my personal favorite of all of Godwin’s writings. Some of my fondness for this short novel, I’ll admit, is perhaps simply nostalgia. The first two science fiction novels I ever read were Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy and … this one. Between them, the two stories instilled a love of science fiction in a thirteen-year- old boy which has now lasted for more than four decades. But leaving that aside, I think this story more than any other captures those themes which recur constantly in Godwin’s fiction: the value of courage and loyalty. Godwin had a grim side to him, which is reflected in The Survivors as it is in most of his stories, but—also as in most—it is ultimately a story of triumph. More so, in some ways, than in any other science fiction novel I’ve ever read.
Eric Flint
Table of Contents
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 1
^ »
For seven weeks the Constellation had been plunging through hyperspace with her eight thousand colonists; fleeing like a hunted thing with her communicators silenced and her drives moaning and thundering. Up in the control room, Irene had been told, the needles of the dials danced against the red danger lines day and night.
She lay in bed and listened to the muffled, ceaseless roar of the drives and felt the singing vibration of the hull. We should be almost safe by now, she thought. Athena is only forty days away .
Thinking of the new life awaiting them all made her too restless to lie still any longer. She got up, to sit on the edge of the bed and switch on the light. Dale was gone—he had been summoned to adjust one of the machines in the ship’s X-ray room—and Billy was asleep, nothing showing of him above the covers but a crop of brown hair and the furry nose of his ragged teddy bear.
She reached out to straighten the covers, gently, so as not to awaken him. It happened then, the thing they had all feared.
From the stern of the ship came a jarring, deafening explosion. The ship lurched violently, girders screamed, and the light flicked out.
