“Outside—hurry!” A woman said something in pleading question and there was the soft thud of a blow and the words: “Outside—do not ask questions!” A moment later she heard the woman going down the corridor, trying to hold back her crying.
Then the Gerns were at her own door.
She held Billy’s hand and waited for them with her heart hammering. She held her head high and composed herself with all the determination she could muster so that the arrogant Gerns would not see that she was afraid. Billy stood beside her as tall as his five years would permit, his teddy bear under his arm, and only the way his hand held to hers showed that he, too, was scared.
The door was flung open and two Gerns strode in.
They were big, dark men, with powerful, bulging muscles. They surveyed her and the room with a quick sweep of eyes that were like glittering obsidian, their mouths thin, cruel slashes in the flat, brutal planes of their faces.
“Your name?” snapped the one who carried a sheaf of occupation records.
“It’s”—she tried to swallow the quaver in her voice and make it cool and unfrightened—“Irene Lois Humbolt—Mrs. Dale Humbolt.”
The Gern glanced at the papers. “Where is your husband?”
“He was in the X-ray room at—”
“You are a Reject. Out—down the corridor with the others.”
“My husband—will he be a—”
“Outside!”
It was the tone of voice that had preceded the blow in the other compartment and the Gern took a quick step toward her. She seized the two bags in one hand, not wanting to release Billy, and swung back to hurry out into the corridor. The other Gern jerked one of the bags from her hand and flung it to the floor. “Only one bag per person,” he said, and gave her an impatient shove that sent her and Billy stumbling through the doorway.
She became part of the Rejects who were being herded like sheep down the corridors and into the port airlock. There were many children among them, the young ones frightened and crying, and often with only one parent or an older brother or sister to take care of them. And there were many young ones who had no one at all and were dependent upon strangers to take their hands and tell them what they must do.
When she was passing the corridor that led to the X-ray room she saw a group of Rejects being herded up it. Dale was not among them and she knew, then, that she and Billy would never see him again.
*
*
*
“
The commands of the Gern guards snapped like whips around them as she and the other Rejects crowded and stumbled down the boarding ramp and out onto the rocky ground. There was the pull of a terrible gravity such as she had never experienced and they were in a bleak, barren valley, a cold wind moaning down it and whipping the alkali dust in bitter clouds. Around the valley stood ragged hills, their white tops laying out streamers of wind-driven snow, and the sky was dark with sunset.
“Out from the ship—faster—”
It was hard to walk fast in the high gravity, carrying the bag in one hand and holding up all of Billy’s weight she could with the other.
“They lied to us!” a man beside her said to someone. “Let’s turn and fight. Let’s take—”
A Gern blaster cracked with a vivid blue flash and the man plunged lifelessly to the ground. She flinched instinctively and fell over an unseen rock, the bag of precious clothes flying from her hand. She scrambled up again, her left knee half numb, and turned to retrieve it. The Gern guard was already upon her, his blaster still in his hand. “Out from the ship—faster.”
The barrel of his blaster lashed across the side of her head. “Move on—move on!”
