Schroeder drew a deep breath, his face somber with the memories he had kept to himself.
“It was two years ago when the Gerns were still talking friendship to the Earth government while they shoved the colonists around on Venus. This Gern … there was a girl there and he thought he could do what he wanted to her because he was a mighty Gern and she was nothing. He did. That’s why I killed him. I had to kill two Venusian police to get away—that’s where I put the rope around my neck.”
“It’s not what we did but what we do that we’ll live or die by on Ragnarok,” Lake said. He handed Schroeder the sheets of parchment. “Tell Craig to make at least four copies of this. Someday our knowledge of Gern blasters may be something else we’ll live or die by.”
*
*
*
The school and writing were interrupted by the spring hunting. Craig made his journey to the Plateau’s snowcapped mountain but he was unable to keep his promise to prospect it. The plateau was perhaps ten thousand feet in elevation and the mountain rose another ten thousand feet above the plateau. No human could climb such a mountain in a 1.5 gravity.
“I tried,” he told Lake wearily when he came back. “Damn it, I never tried harder at anything in my life. It was just too much for me. Maybe some of the young ones will be better adapted and can do it when they grow up.”
Craig brought back several sheets of unusually transparent mica, each sheet a foot in diameter, and a dozen large water-clear quartz crystals.
“Float, from higher up on the mountain,” he said. “The mica and crystals are in place up there if we could only reach them. Other minerals, too—I panned traces in the canyon bottoms. But no iron.”
Lake examined the sheets of mica. “We could make windows for the outer caves of these,”
he said. “Have them double thickness with a wide air space between, for insulation. As for the quartz crystals … ”
“Optical instruments,” Craig said. “Binoculars, microscopes—it would take us a long time to learn how to make glass as clear and flawless as those crystals. But we have no way of cutting and grinding them.”
Craig went to the east that fall and to the west the next spring. He returned from the trip to the west with a twisted knee that would never let him go prospecting again.
“It will take years to find the metals we need,” he said. “The indications are that we never will but I wanted to keep on trying. Now, my damned knee has me chained to these caves … ”
He reconciled himself to his lameness and confinement as best he could and finished his textbook: GEOLOGY AND MINERAL IDENTIFICATION.
He also taught a geology class during the winters. It was in the winter of the year four on Ragnarok that a nine-year-old boy entered his class; the silent, scar-faced Billy Humbolt. He was by far the youngest of Craig’s students, and the most attentive. Lake was present one day when Craig asked, curiously:
“It’s not often a boy your age is so interested in mineralogy and geology, Billy. Is there something more than just interest?”
“I have to learn all about minerals,” Billy said with matter-of-fact seriousness, “so that when I’m grown I can find the metals for us to make a ship.”
“And then?” Craig asked.
“And then we’d go to Athena, to kill the Gerns who caused my mother to die, and my grandfather, and Julia, and all the others. And to free my father and the other slaves if they’re still alive.”
“I see,” Craig said.
He did not smile. His face was shadowed and old as he looked at the boy and beyond him; seeing again, perhaps, the frail blonde girl and the two children that the first quick, violent months had taken from him.
“I hope you succeed,” he said. “I wish I was young so I could dream of the same thing. But I’m not … so let’s get back to the identification of the ores that will be needed to make a ship to go to Athena and to make blasters to kill Gerns after you get there.”
