There were sixty of them in the fall of fifty, when all had been done that could be done to prepare for what might come.
“There aren’t many of the Earthborn left now,” Bob Craig said to him one night as they sat in the flickering light of a stove. “And there hasn’t been time for there to be many of the Ragnarok-born. The Gerns wouldn’t get many slaves if they should come now.”
“They could use however many they found,” he answered. “The younger ones, who are the best adapted to this gravity, would be exceptionally strong and quick on a one-gravity world. There are dangerous jobs where a strong, quick slave is a lot more efficient and expendable than complex, expensive machines.”
“And they would want some specimens for scientific study,” Jim Lake said. “They would want to cut into the young ones and see how they’re built that they’re adapted to this one and a half gravity world.”
He smiled with the cold mirthlessness that always reminded Humbolt of his father—of the Lake who had been the Constellation’s lieutenant commander. “According to the books the Gerns never did try to make it a secret that when a Gern doctor or biologist cuts into the muscles or organs of a non-Gern to see what makes them tick, he wants them to be still alive and ticking as he does so.”
Seventeen-year-old Don Chiara spoke, to say slowly, thoughtfully:
“Slavery and vivisection. … If the Gerns should come now when there are so few of us, and if we should fight the best we could and lose, it would be better for whoever was the last of us left to put a knife in the hearts of the women and children than to let the Gerns have them.”
No one made any answer. There was no answer to make, no alternative to suggest.
“In the future there will be more of us and it will be different,” he said at last. “On Earth the Gerns were always stronger and faster than humans but when the Gerns come to Ragnarok they’re going to find a race that isn’t really human any more. They’re going to find a race before which they’ll be like woods goats before prowlers.”
“If only they don’t come too soon,” Craig said.
“That was the chance that had to be taken,” he replied.
He wondered again as he spoke, as he had wondered so often in the past years, if he had given them all their death sentence when he ordered the transmitter built. Yet, the future generations could not be permitted to forget … and steel could not be tempered without first thrusting it into the fire.
He was the last of the Young Ones when he awoke one night in the fall of fifty-six and found himself burning with the Hell Fever. He did not summon any of the others. They could do nothing for him and he had already done all he could for them.
He had done all he could for them … and now he would leave forty-nine men, women and children to face the unknown forces of Big Winter while over them hung the sword he had forged; the increasing danger of detection by the Gerns.
The question came again, sharp with the knowledge that it was far too late for him to change any of it. Did I arrange the execution of my people?
Then, through the red haze of the fever, Julia spoke to him out of the past; sitting again beside him in the summer twilight and saying:
Remember me, Billy, and this evening, and what I said to you … teach them to fight and be afraid of nothing … never let them forget how they came to be on Ragnarok. …
She seemed very near and real and the doubt faded and was gone. Teach them to fight … never let them forget. …
The men of Ragnarok were only fur-clad hunters who crouched in caves but they would grow in numbers as time went by. Each generation would be stronger than the generation before it and he had set forces in motion that would bring the last generation the trial of combat and the opportunity for freedom. How well they fought on that day would determine their destiny but he was certain, once again, what that destiny would be.
It would be to walk as conquerors before beaten and humbled Gerns.
It was winter of the year eighty-five and the temperature was one hundred and six degrees below zero. Walter Humbolt stood in front of the ice tunnel that led back through the glacier to the caves and looked up into the sky.
It was noon but there was no sun in the starlit sky. Many weeks before the sun had slipped below the southern horizon. For a little while a dim halo had marked its passage each day; then that, too, had faded away. But now it was time for the halo to appear again, to herald the sun’s returning.
Frost filled the sky, making the stars flicker as it swirled endlessly downward. He blinked against it, his eyelashes trying to freeze to his lower eyelids at the movement, and turned to look at the north.
There the northern lights were a gigantic curtain that filled a third of the sky, rippling and waving in folds that pulsated in red and green, rose and lavender and violet. Their reflection gleamed on the glacier that sloped down from the caves and glowed softly on the other glacier; the one that covered the transmitter station. The transmitter had long ago been taken into the caves but the generator and waterwheel were still there, frozen in a tomb of ice.
For three years the glacier had been growing before the caves and the plateau’s southern face had been buried under snow for ten years. Only a few woods goats ever came as far north as
