“They were condemned, without reason, without a chance to live,” he said. “So many of them are so young … and when you’re young it’s too soon to have to die.”
*
*
*
Prentiss returned to his own group. The dead were buried in shallow graves and inventory was taken of the promised “ample supplies.” These were only the few personal possessions the Rejects had been permitted to take plus a small amount of food the Gerns had taken from the
Inventory of the firearms and ammunition showed the total to be discouragingly small. They would have to learn how to make and use bows and arrows as soon as possible. With the first party of guards and workmen following him, Prentiss went to the tributary valley that emptied into the central valley a mile to the north. It was as good a camp site as could be hoped for; wide and thickly spotted with groves of trees, a creek running down its center.
The workmen began the construction of shelters and he climbed up the side of the nearer hill. He reached its top, his breath coming fast in the gravity that was the equivalent of a burden half his own weight, and saw what the surrounding terrain was like. To the south, beyond the barren valley, the land could be seen dropping in its long sweep to the southern lowlands where the unicorns and swamp crawlers lived. To the north the hills climbed gently for miles, then ended under the steeply sloping face of an immense plateau. The plateau reached from western to eastern horizon, still white with the snows of winter and looming so high above the world below that the clouds brushed it and half obscured it. He went back down the hill as Lake’s men appeared. They started work on what would be a continuation of his own camp and he told Lake what he had seen from the hill.
“We’re between the lowlands and the highlands,” he said. “This will be as near to a temperate altitude as Ragnarok has. We survive here—or else. There’s no other place for us to go.”
An overcast darkened the sky at noon and the wind died down to almost nothing. There was a feeling of waiting tension in the air and he went back to the Rejects, to speed their move into the woods. They were already going in scattered groups, accompanied by prowler guards, but there was no organization and it would be too long before the last of them were safely in the new camp.
He could not be two places at once—he needed a subleader to oversee the move of the Rejects and their possessions into the woods and their placement after they got there. He found the man he wanted already helping the Rejects get started: a thin, quiet man named Henry Anders who had fought well against the prowlers the night before, even though his determination had been greater than his marksmanship. He was the type people instinctively liked and trusted; a good choice for the subleader whose job it would be to handle the multitude of details in camp while he, Prentiss, and a second subleader he would select, handled the defense of the camp and the hunting.
“I don’t like this overcast,” he told Anders. “Something’s brewing. Get everyone moved and at work helping build shelters as soon as you can.”
“I can have most of them there within an hour or two,” Anders said. “Some of the older people, though, will have to take it slow. This gravity—it’s already getting the hearts of some of them.”
“How are the children taking the gravity?” he asked.
“The babies and the very young—it’s hard to tell about them yet. But the children from about four on up get tired quickly, go to sleep, and when they wake up they’ve sort of bounced back out of it.”
“Maybe they can adapt to some extent to this gravity.” He thought of what Lake had said that morning:
“Maybe the Gerns made a mistake—maybe Terran children aren’t as easy to kill as they thought. It’s your job and mine and others to give the children the chance to prove the Gerns wrong.”
He went his way again to pass by the place where Julia, the girl who had become Billy’s foster-mother, was preparing to go to the new camp.
It was the second time for him to see Billy that morning. The first time Billy had still been stunned with grief, and at the sight of his grandfather he had been unable to keep from breaking.
“The Gern hit her,” he had sobbed, his torn face bleeding anew as it twisted in crying. “He hurt her, and Daddy was gone and then—and then the other things killed her—”
But now he had had a little time to accept what had happened and he was changed. He was someone much older, almost a man, trapped for a while in the body of a five-year-old boy.
“I guess this is all, Billy,” Julia was saying as she gathered up her scanty possessions and Irene’s bag.
