“You’re my son, Billy,” she had said. “The first I ever had. Now, before so very long, maybe I’ll have another one.”
Hesitantly, not wanting to believe, he had asked, “What some of them said about how you might die then—it won’t really happen, will it, Julia?”
“It … might.” Then her arm had gone around him and she had said, “If I do I’ll leave in my place a life that’s more important than mine ever was.
“Remember me, Billy, and this evening, and what I said to you, if you should ever be leader. Remember that it’s only through the children that we can ever survive and whip this world. Protect them while they’re small and helpless and teach them to fight and be afraid of nothing when they’re a little older. Never, never let them forget how they came to be on Ragnarok. Someday, even if it’s a hundred years from now, the Gerns will come again and they must be ready to fight, for their freedom and for their lives.”
He had been too young then to understand how truly she had spoken and when he was old enough his hatred for the Gerns had blinded him to everything but his own desires. Now, he could see. …
The children of each generation would be better adapted to Ragnarok and full adaptation would eventually come. But all the generations of the future would be potential slaves of the Gern Empire, free only so long as they remained unnoticed.
It was inconceivable that the Gerns should never pass by Ragnarok through all time to come. And when they finally came the slow, uneventful progression of decades and centuries might have brought a false sense of security to the people of Ragnarok, might have turned the stories of what the Gerns did to the Rejects into legends and then into myths that no one any longer believed.
The Gerns would have to be brought to Ragnarok before that could happen.
He went to George Ord again and said:
“There’s one kind of transmitter we could make a generator for—a plain normal-space transmitter, dot-dash, without a receiver.”
George laid down the diamond cutting wheel he had been working on.
“It would take two hundred years for the signal to get to Athena at the speed of light,” he said. “Then, forty days after it got there, a Gern cruiser would come hell-bent to investigate.”
“I want the ones of the future to know that the Gerns will be here no later than two hundred years from now. And with always the chance that a Gern cruiser in space might pick up the signal at any time before then.”
“I see,” George said. “The sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, to make them remember.”
“You know what would happen to them if they ever forgot. You’re as old as I am—you know what the Gerns did to us.”
“I’m older than you are,” George said. “I was nine when the Gerns left us here. They kept my father and mother and my sister was only three. I tried to keep her warm by holding her but the Hell Fever got her that first night. She was too young to understand why I couldn’t help her more. …”
Hatred burned in his eyes at the memory, like some fire that had been banked but had never died. “Yes, I remember the Gerns and what they did. I wouldn’t want it to have to happen to others—the transmitter will be made so that it won’t.”
The guns were melted down, together with other items of iron and steel, to make the castings for the generator. Ceramic pipes were made to carry water from the spring to a waterwheel. The long, slow job of converting the miscellany of electronic devices, many of them broken, into the components of a transmitter proceeded.
It was five years before the transmitter was ready for testing. It was early fall of the year thirty-five then, and the water that gushed from the pipe splashed in cold drops against Humbolt as the waterwheel was set in motion.
The generator began to hum and George observed the output of it and the transmitter as registered by the various meters he had made.
“Weak, but it will reach the Gern monitor station on Athena,” he said, “It’s ready to send—what do you want to say?”
“Make it something short,” he said. “Make it, ‘Ragnarok calling.’ ”
George poised his finger over the transmitting key. “This will set forces in motion that can never be recalled. What we do here this morning is going to cause a lot of Gerns—or Ragnarok people—to die.”
“It will be the Gerns who die,” he said. “Send the signal.”
“Like you, I believe the same thing,” George said. “I have to believe it because that’s the way I want it to be. I hope we’re right. It’s something we’ll never know.”
He began depressing the key.
A boy was given the job of operating the key and the signal went out daily until the freezing of winter stopped the waterwheel that powered the generator.
The sending of the signals was resumed when spring came and the prospecting parties continued their vain search for metals.
The suns continued moving south and each year the springs came later, the falls earlier. In the spring of forty-five he saw that he would have to make his final decision.
By then they had dwindled until they numbered only sixty-eight; the Young Ones gray and rapidly growing old. There was no longer any use to continue the prospecting—if any metals were to be found they were at the north end of the plateau where the snow no longer melted during the summer. They were too few to do more than prepare for what the Old Ones had feared they might have to face—Big Winter. That would require the work of all of them.
Sheets of mica were brought down from the Craigs, the summits of which were deeply buried under snow even in midsummer. Stoves were made of fireclay and mica, which would give both heat and light and
