 Psypod Books presents Space Prison by Tom Godwin, read by Mark Douglas Nelson. EPISODE IV Lake made the trip back to the caves in a fraction of the length of time it had taken him to reach the plateau, walking until he was ready to drop and then pausing only for an hour or two of rest. He spotted Barber's camp when coming down off the plateau and he swung to one side, to tell Barber to have a supply of the herbs sent to the caves at once. He reached the caves to find half the camp in bed and the other half dragging about listlessly at the tasks given them by Bemen. Anders was in grave condition too weak to rise and Dr. Chiara was dying. He squatted down beside Chiara's pallet and knew there could be no hope for him. On Chiara's pale face and in his eyes was the shadow of his own foreknowledge. I finally saw what it was. Chiara's words were very low, hard to hear. And I told Bemen what to do. It's a deficiency disease, complicated by the gravity into some form not known on earth. He stopped to rest and Lake waited. Barry, Barry, Palagra, we had deficiency diseases on earth, but none so fatal, so quickly. I told Bemen, ration out fruits and vegetables to everybody. Hurry, or it will be too late. Again he stopped to rest, the last vestige of color gone from his face. And you, Lake asked, already knowing the answer. For me, too late. I kept thinking of viruses. Should have seen the obvious sooner. Just like... His lips turned up a little at the corners and the Chiara of the dead past smiled for the last time at Lake. Just like a damned fool intern. That was all then and the chamber was suddenly very quiet. Lake stood up to leave and to speak the words that Chiara could never hear. We're going to need you and miss you, doctor. He found Bemen in the food storage cavern, supervising the work of two teenage boys with critical officiousness, although he was making no move to help them. At sight of Lake he hurried forward, the ingratiating smile sliding across his face. I'm glad you're back, he said. I had to take charge when Anders got sick and he had everything in such a mess. I've been working day and night to undo his mistakes and get the work done properly under way again. Lake looked at the two thin-faced boys who had taken advantage of the opportunity to rest. They leaned wearily against the heavy pole table Bemen had had them moving, their eyes already dulled with the incipient sickness and watching him in mute appeal. Have you obeyed Chiara's order, he asked? Ah, no, Bemen said. I felt it best to ignore it. Why? Lake asked. It would be a senseless waste of our small supply of fruit and vegetable foods to give them to people already dying. I'm afraid—the ingratiating smile came again. We've been letting him exercise an authority he isn't entitled to. He's really hardly more than a medical student and his diagnoses are only guesses. He's dead, Lake said flatly. His last order will be carried out. He looked from the two tired boys to Bemen, contrasting their thinness and weariness with the way Bemen's punch still bulged outward and his jowls still sagged with their load of fat. I'll send West down to take over in here, he said to Bemen. You come with me. You and I seem to be the only two in good health here, and there's plenty of work for us to do. The fawning expression vanished from Bemen's face. I see, he said. Now that I've turned Anders' muddle into organization, you'll hand my authority over to another of your favorites and to moat me back to common labor? Setting up work quotas for sick and dying people isn't organization, Lake said. He spoke to the two boys. Both of you go lie down. West will find someone else. Then to Bemen. Come with me. We're both going to work at common labor. They passed by the cave where Bemen slept. Two boys were just going into it, carrying armloads of dried grass to make a mattress under Bemen's pallet. They moved slowly, heavily. Like the two boys in the food storage cave, they were dull-eyed with the beginning of the sickness. Lake stopped to look more closely into the cave and verify something else he thought he had seen. Bemen had discarded the prouder skins on his bed and in their place were soft wool blankets, perhaps the only unpatched blankets the rejects possessed. Go back to your caves, he said to the boys. Go to bed and rest. He looked at Bemen. Bemen's eyes flickered away, refusing to meet his. What few blankets we have are for babies and the very youngest children, he said. His tone was coldly unemotional, but he could not keep his fists from clenching at his sides. You will return them at once and sleep on animal skins as all the men and women do, and if you want grass for a mattress you will carry it yourself, as even the young children do. Bemen made no answer. His face a sullen red and hatred shining in the eyes that still refuse to meet lakes. Gather up the blankets and return them, like said. Then come on up to the central cave. We have a lot of work to do. He could feel Bemen's gaze burning against his back as he turned away, and he thought of what John Prentice had once said. I know he's no good, but he never has guts enough to go quite far enough to give me an excuse to whittle him down. Barber's men arrived the next day, burdened with dried herbs. These were given to the seriously ill as a supplement to the ration of fruit and vegetable foods, and were given alone to those not yet sick. Then came the period of waiting, of hoping that it was all not too late and too little. A noticeable change for the better began on the second day. A week went by, and the sick were slowly, steadily improving. The not quite sick were already back to normal health. There was no longer any doubt. The Ragnarok herbs would prevent a recurrence of the disease. It was, Lake thought, all so simple once you knew what to do. Prentice had died, Chiar among them, because they did not have a common herb that grew at a slightly higher elevation. Not a single life would have been lost if he could have looked a week into the future and had the herbs found and taken to the caves that much sooner. But the disease had given no warning of its coming. Nothing on Ragnarok ever seemed to give warning before it killed. Another week went by, and hunters began to trickle in, gaunt and exhausted, to report all the game going north up the plateau, and not a single creature left below. They were the ones who had tried and failed to withstand the high elevation of the plateau. Only two out of three hunters returned among those who had challenged the plateau. They had all tried, all of them, to the best of their ability and the limits of their endurance. The blue star was by then a small sun, and the yellow sun blazed hotter each day. Grass began to brown and wither on the hillsides as the days went by and Lake knew summer was very near. The last hunting party, but for crags and schroters, returned. They had very little meat, but they brought with them a large quantity of something almost as important. Salt. They had found a deposit of it in an almost inaccessible region of cliffs and canyons. Not even the woods goats can get in there, Stevens, the leader of that party, said. If the salt was in an accessible place, there would have been a salt lick there and goats in plenty. If woods goats care for salt the way earth animals do, Lake said, when fall comes, we'll make a salt lick and find out. Two more weeks went by and Craig and Schroeder returned with their surviving hunters. They had followed the game to the eastern end of the snow-capped mountain range, but there the migration had drawn away from them, traveling farther each day than they could travel. They had almost waited too long before returning back. The grass at the southern end of the plateau was turning brown and the streams were dry. They got enough water, barely, by digging seapholes in the dry stream beds. Lake's method of stalking unicorns under the concealment of a woods goat skin had worked well only a few times. After that the unicorns learned to swing downwind from any lone woods goats. If they smelled a man inside the goat skin they charged him and killed him. With the return of the last hunters everything was done that could be done in preparation for summer. Inventory was taken of the total food supply and it was even smaller than Lake had feared. It would be far from enough to last until fall brought the game back from the north and he instituted rationing much stricter than before. The heat increased as the yellow sun blazed hotter and the blue sun grew larger. Each day the vegetation was browner and a morning came when Lake could see no green wherever he looked. They numbered eleven hundred and ten that morning out of what had so recently been four thousand. Eleven hundred and ten thin, hungry scarecrows who already could do nothing more than sit listlessly in the shade and wait for the hell that was coming. He thought of the food supply, so pitifully small and of the months it would have to last. He saw the grim, inescapable future for his charges. Famine! There was nothing he could do to prevent it. He could only try to forestall complete starvation for all by cutting rations to the bare existence level. And that would be bare existence for the stronger of them. The weaker were already doomed. He had them all gathered in front of the caves that evening when the terrace was in the shadow of the ridge. He stood before them and spoke to them. All of you know we have only a fraction of the amount of food we need to see us through the summer. Tomorrow the present ration will be cut in half. That will be enough to live on just barely. If that cut isn't made the food supply will be gone long before fall and all of us will die. If anyone has any food of any kind it must be turned in to be added to the total supply. Some of you may have thought of your children and kept a little hidden for them. I can understand why you should do that. But you must turn it in. There may possibly be some who hid food for themselves personally. If so, I give them the first and last warning. Turn it in to-night. If any hidden cash of food is found in the future the one who hid it will be regarded as a traitor and murderer. All of you, but for the children, will go into the chamber next to the one where the food is stored. Each of you, and there will be no exceptions regardless of how innocent you are, will carry a bulkily folded cloth or garment. Each of you will go into the chamber alone. There will be no one in there. You will leave the food you have folded in the cloth, if any, and go out the other exit and back to your caves. No one will ever know whether the cloth you carried contained food or not. No one will ever ask. Our survival on this world, if we are to survive at all, can be only by working and sacrificing together. There can be no selfishness. What any of you may have done in the past is of no consequence. Tonight we start anew. From now on we trust one another without reserve. There will be one punishment for any who betray that trust. Death. Anders set the example by being the first to carry a folded cloth into the cave. Of them all, Lake Hurd later, only Behrman voiced any real indignation, warning all those in his section of the line that the order was the first step toward outright dictatorship and a police and spy system in which Lake and the other leaders would deprive them all of freedom and dignity. Behrman insisted upon exhibiting the emptiness of the cloth he carried, an action that, had he succeeded in persuading the others to follow his example, would have mercilessly exposed those who did have food they were returning. But no one followed Behrman's example and no harm was done. As for Lake, he had worries on his mind of much greater importance than Behrman's enmity. The weeks dragged by, each longer and more terrible to endure than the one before it, as the heat steadily increased. Summer solstice arrived and there was no escape from the heat, even in the deepest caves. There was no night, the blue sun rose in the east as the yellow sun set in the west. There was no life of any kind to be seen, not even an insect. Nothing moved across the burned land but the swirling dust devils and shimmering distorted mirages. The death rate increased with appalling swiftness. The small supply of canned and dehydrated milk, fruit and vegetables was reserved exclusively for the children, but it was far insufficient in quantity. The Ragnarok herbs prevented any recurrence of the fatal deficiency disease, but they provided virtually no nourishment to help fight the heat and gravity. The stronger of the children lay wasted and listless on their palates, while the ones not so strong died each day. Each day, thin and hollow-eyed mothers would come to plead with them to save their children. It would take so little to save his life, please, before it's too late. But there was so little food left, and the time was yet so long until fall would bring relief from the famine that he could only answer each of them with a grim and final no. And watched the last hope flicker and die in their eyes, and watched them turn away to go and sit for the last hours beside their children. Bemen became increasingly irritable and complaining as the rationing and heat made existence a misery, insisting that Lake and the others were to blame for the food shortage, that their hunting efforts had been bungling and faint-hearted. And he implied, without actually saying so, that Lake and the others had forbidden him to go near the food chamber because they did not want a competent, honest man to check up on what they were doing. There were six hundred and three of them in the blazing afternoon when the girl, Julia, could stand his constant, vindictive, fault finding no longer. Lake heard about it shortly afterward, the way she had turned on Bemen in a flare of temper she could control no longer, and said, "'Whenever your mouth is still, you can hear the children who are dying today. But you don't care. All you think of is yourself. You claim Lake and the others were cowards. But you didn't dare hunt with them. You keep insinuating that they're cheating us and eating more than we are. But your belly is the only one that has any fat left on it.'" She never completed the sentence. Bemen's face turned livid in sudden, wild fury, and he struck her, knocking her against the rock wall so hard that she slumped unconscious to the ground. "'She's a liar,' he panted, glaring at the others. "'She's a rotten liar, and anybody who repeats what she said will get what she got.'" When Lake learned of what had happened, he did not send for Bemen at once. He wondered why Bemen's reaction had been so quick and violent, and there seemed to be only one answer. Bemen's belly was still a little fat. There could be but one way he could have kept it so. He summoned Craig, Schroeder, Barber, and Anders. They went to the chamber where Bemen slept, and there, almost at once, they found his cash. He had it buried under his pallets and hidden in the cavities along the walls. Dried meat, dried fruits and milk, canned vegetables. It was an amount amazingly large, and many of the items had presumably been exhausted during the deficiency disease attack. "'It looks,' Schroeder said, like he didn't waste any time feathering his nest when he made himself a leader. The others said nothing but stood with grim, frozen faces, waiting for Lake's next action. "'Bring Bemen,' Lake said to Craig. Craig returned with him two minutes later. Bemen stiffened at the sight of his unearthed cash and color drained away from his face. "'Well,' Lake asked. "'I didn't,' Bemen swallowed. "'I didn't know it was there. Then quickly. You can't prove I put it there. You can't prove you didn't just now bring it in yourselves to frame me!' Lake stared at Bemen, waiting. The others watched Bemen as Lake was doing and no one spoke. The silence deepened and Bemen began to sweat as he tried to avoid their eyes. He looked again at the damning evidence and his defiance broke. "'It—if I hadn't taken it, it would have been wasted on people who were dying,' he said. He wiped at his sweating face. "'I won't ever do it again. I swear I won't.'" Lake spoke to Craig. "'You and Barber take him to the lookout point.' "'What?' Bemen's protest was cut off as Craig and Barber took him by the arms and walked him swiftly away. Lake turned to Anders. "'Get a rope,' he ordered. Anders paled a little. "'A rope?' What else does he deserve?' Nothing, Anders said. Not—not after what he did. On the way out they passed a place where Julia lay. Bemen had knocked her against the wall with such force that a sharp projection of rock had cut a deep gash in her forehead. A woman was wiping the blood from her face and she lay limply, still unconscious. A frail shadow of the bold girl she had once been, with the new life she would try to give them an almost unnoticeable little bulge in her starved thinness. The lookout point was an outjudding spur of the ridge, six hundred feet from the caves and in full view of them. A lone tree stood there. Its dead limbs thrust like wide arms through the brown foliage of the limbs that still lived. Craig and Barber waited under the tree, Bemen between them. The lowering sun shone hot and bright on Bemen's face as he squinted back toward the caves at the approach of Lake and the other two. He twisted to look at Barber. "'What is it? Why do you bring me here?' There was a tremor of fear in his voice. "'What are you going to do to me?' Barber did not answer and Bemen turned back toward Lake. He saw the rope in Ander's hand and his face went white with comprehension. "'No!' he threw himself back with a violence that almost tore him loose. "'No! No!' Schroeder stepped forward to help hold him and Lake took the rope from Ander's. He fashioned a noose in it while Bemen struggled and made panting animal sounds, his eyes fixed in horrified fascination on the rope. When the noose was finished he threw the free end of the rope over the white limb above Bemen. He released the noose and Barber caught it to draw its snug around Bemen's neck. Bemen stopped struggling then and sagged weakly. For a moment it appeared that he would faint. Then he worked his mouth soundlessly until words came. "'You won't! You can't really hang me!' Lake spoke to him. "'We're going to hang you. What you stole would have saved the lives of ten children. You've watched the children cry because they were so hungry, and you've watched them become too weak to cry or care any more. You've watched them die each day, and each night you've secretly eaten the food that was supposed to be theirs. We're going to hang you, for the murder of children and the betrayal of our trust in you. If you have anything to say, say it now.' "'You can't! I had a right to live! To eat would have been wasted on dying people!' Bemen twisted to appeal to the ones who held him, his words quick and ragged with hysteria. "'You can't hang me! I don't want to die!' Craig answered him with a smile that was like the thin snarl of a wolf. "'Neither did two of my children.' Craig nodded to Craig and Schroeder, not waiting any longer. They stepped back to seize the free end of the rope, and Bemen screamed at what was coming, tearing loose from the grip of Barber. Then his scream was abruptly cut off as he was jerked into the air. There was a cracking sound, and he kicked spasmodically, his head setting grotesquely to one side. Craig and Schroeder and Barber watched him with hard, emotionless faces, but Anders turned quickly away to be suddenly and violently sick. He was the first to betray us, Lake said, snub the rope and leave him to swing there. If there are any others like him they'll know what to expect. The blue sun rose as they went back to the caves. Behind them Bemen swung and twirled aimlessly on the end of the rope. Two long pale shadows swung and twirled with him, a yellow one to the west and a blue one to the east. Bemen was buried the next day. Someone cursed his name and someone spat on his grave, and then he was part of the dead past as they faced the suffering ahead of them. Julia recovered, although she would always wear a ragged scar on her forehead. Anders, who had worked closely with Chiara and was trying to take his place, quieted her fears by assuring her that the baby she carried was still too small for there to be much danger of the fall causing her to lose it. Three times during the next month the wind came roaring down out of the northwest, bringing a grey dust that filled the sky and enveloped the land in a hot, smothering gloom through which the suns could not be seen. This black clouds gathered in the distance to pour out a cloud burst. The 1.5 gravity gave the wall of water that swept down the canyon a far greater force and velocity than it would have had on earth and boulders the size of small houses were tossed into the air and shattered into fragments. But all the rain fell upon one small area and not a drop fell at the caves. One single factor was in their favour and but for it they could not have survived such intense, continual heat. There was no humidity. Water evaporated quickly in the hot, dry air and sweat glands operated at the highest possible degree of efficiency. As a result they drank enormous quantities of water. The average adult needed five gallons a day. All canvass have been converted into water bags and the same principle of cooling by evaporation gave them water that was only warm instead of sickeningly hot as it would have otherwise have been. But despite the lack of humidity the heat was still far more intense than any on earth. It never ceased, day or night, never let them have a moment's relief. There was a limit to how long human flesh could bear up under it, no matter how valiant the will. Each day the toll of those who had reached that limit was greater like a swiftly rising tide. There were three hundred and forty of them when the first rain came, the rain that meant the end of summer. The yellow sun moved southward and the blue sun shrank steadily. Grass grew again and the woods-goats returned, with them the young that had been born in the north already half the size of their mothers. For a while there was meat and green herbs. Then the prowlers came to make hunting dangerous. Females with pups were seen but always at a great distance as though the prowlers, like humans, took no chances with the lives of their children. The unicorns came close behind the first prowlers, their young amazingly large and already weaned. Hunting became doubly dangerous then, but the bowmen, through necessity, were learning how to use their bows with increasing skill and deadliness. A salt lick for the woods-goats was hopefully tried, although Lake felt dubious about it. They learned that salt was something the woods-goats could either take or leave alone. And when hunters were in the vicinity they left it alone. The game was followed for many miles to the south. The hunters returned the day the first blizzard came, roaring and screaming down over the edge of the plateau. The blizzard that marked the beginning of the long frigid winter. By then they were prepared as best they could be. Wood had been carried in great quantities and the caves fitted with crude doors and a ventilation system. And they had meat, not as much as they would need but enough to prevent starvation. Lake took inventory of the food supply when the last hunters returned, and held check-up inventories at irregular and unannounced intervals. He found no shortages. He had expected none. Bemmon's grave had long since been obliterated by drifting snow, but the rope still hung from the dead limb, the noose swinging and turning in the wind. Anders had made a Ragnarok calendar that spring, from data given him by John Prentice, and he had marked the corresponding earth dates on it. By a coincidence Christmas came near the middle of the winter. There would be the same rationing of food on Christmas Day, but little brown trees had been cut for the children and decorated with such ornaments as could be made from the materials at hand. There was another blizzard roaring down off the plateau Christmas morning, a white death that thundered and howled outside the caves at a temperature of more than eighty degrees below zero. But inside the caves it was warm by the fires, and under the little brown trees were toys that had been patiently whittled from wood or sewn from scraps of cloth and animal skins while the children slept. They were crude and humble toys, but the pale, thin faces of the children were bright with delight when they beheld them. There was the laughter of children at play, a sound that had not been heard for many months, and someone singing the old, old songs. For a few fleeting hours that day, for the first and last time on Ragnarok, there was the magic of an earth Christmas. That night a child was born to Julia, on a pallet of dried grass and prouder skins. She asked for her baby before she died, and they let her have it. I wasn't afraid, was I? she asked. But I wish it wasn't so dark. I wish I could see my baby before I go. They took the baby from her arms when she was gone and removed from it the blanket that had kept her from learning that her child was stillborn. There were two hundred and fifty of them when the first violent storms of spring came. By then, eighteen children had been born, sixteen were stillborn, eight of them deformed by the gravity, but two were like any normal babies on earth. There was only one difference. The one-point-five gravity did not seem to affect them as much as it had the earth-born babies. Lake himself married that spring, a tall grey-eyed girl who had fought alongside the men the night of the storm when the prowlers broke into John Prentice's camp. And Schroeder married the last of them all to do so. CHAPTER VI That spring Lake set out two classes of bowmen, those who would use the ordinary short bow and those who would use the long bows he had had made that winter. According to history the English longbowmen of medieval times had been without equal in the range and accuracy of their arrows, and such extra-powerful weapons should eliminate close-range stocking of woods-goats and afford better protection from unicorns. The longbows worked so well that by mid-spring he could detach Craig and three others from the hunting and send them on a prospecting expedition. Prentice had said Ragnarok was devoid of metals, but there was the hope of finding small veins the Dunbar expedition's instruments had not detected. They would have to find metal, or else in the end they would go back into a flint-axe stage. Craig and his men returned when the blue star was a sun again and the heat was more than men could walk and work in. They had travelled hundreds of miles in their circuit and found no metals. I went to look to the south when the fall comes, Craig said. Maybe it will be different down there. They did not face famine that summer as they had the first summer. The diet of meat and dried herbs was rough and plain, but there was enough of it. Full summer came and the land was again burned and lifeless. There was nothing to do but sit wearily in the shade and endure the heat, drawing what psychological comfort they could from the fact that summer solstice was past and the suns were creeping south again even though it would be many weeks before there was any lessening of the heat. It was then, and by accident, that Lake discovered there was something wrong about the southward movement of the suns. He was returning from the lookout that day and he realized it was exactly a year since he and the others had walked back to the caves while Bemen swung on the limb behind them. It was even the same time of day. The blue sun rising in the east behind him and the yellow sun brightened his face as it touched the western horizon before him. He remembered how the yellow sun had been like the front site of a rifle set in the deepest v-notch of the western hills. But now, exactly a year later, it was not in the v-notch. It was on the north side of the notch. He looked to the east at the blue sun. It seemed to him that it too was farther north than it had been, although with it he had no landmark to check by. But there was no doubt about the yellow sun. It was going south, as it should at that time of year, but it was lagging behind schedule. The only explanation Leigh could think of was one that would mean still another threat to their survival, perhaps greater than all the others combined. The yellow sun dropped completely behind the north slope of the v-notch and he went on to the caves. He found Craig and Anders, the only two who might know anything about Ragnarok's axial tilts, and told them what he had seen. I made the calendar from the data John gave me, Anders said. The Dunbar men made observations and computed the length of Ragnarok's year. I don't think they would have made any mistakes. If they didn't, Leigh said, we're in for something. Craig was watching him closely, thoughtfully. Like the Ice Ages of Earth, he asked. Leigh nodded and Anders said, I don't understand. Each year the North Pole tilts toward the sun to give a summer and away from it to give us winter, Leigh said, which, of course, you know, but there can be still another kind of axial tilt. On Earth it occurs at intervals of thousands of years. The tilting that produces the summers and winters goes on as usual, but as the centuries go by the summer tilt toward the sun grows less, the winter tilt away from it greater. The North Pole leans farther and farther from the sun and ice sheets come down out of the North, an Ice Age. Then the North Pole's progression away from the sun stops and the ice sheets recede as it tilts back toward the sun. I see, Anders said, and if the same thing is happening here we're going away from an Ice Age but at a rate thousands of times faster than on Earth. I don't know whether it's Ragnarok's tilt alone, or if the orbits of the suns around each other add effects of their own over a period of years, Leigh said. The Dunbar expedition wasn't here long enough to check up on anything like that. It seemed to me it was hotter this summer than last, Craig said. Maybe only my imagination, but it won't be imagination in a few years if the tilt toward the sun continues. The time would come when we'd have to leave here, Leigh said. We'd have to go north, up the plateau, each spring. There's no timber there, nothing but grass and wind and thin air. We'd have to migrate south each fall. Yes, migrate. Anders's face was old and weary in the harsh reflected light of the blue sun and his hair had turned almost white in the past year. Only the young ones could ever adapt enough to go up the plateau to its north portion, the rest of us, but we haven't many years anyway. Ragnarok is for the young, and if they have to migrate back and forth like animals just to stay alive, they will never have time to accomplish anything or be more than stone-aged nomads. I wish we could know how long the big summer will be that we're going into, Craig said, and how long and cold the big winter when Ragnarok tilts away from the sun. It wouldn't change anything, but I'd like to know. We'll start making and recording daily observations, Leigh said. Maybe the tilt will start back the other way before it's too late. Fall seemed to come a little later that year. Craig went to the south as soon as the weather permitted, but there were no minerals there, only the metal barren hills dwindling in size until they became a prairie that sloped down and down toward the southern lowlands, where all the creatures of Ragnarok spent the winter. I'll try again to the north when the spring comes, Craig said. Maybe that mountain on the plateau will have something. Winter came and Elaine died in giving him a son. The loss of Elaine was an unexpected blow, hurting more than he would ever have thought possible. But he had a son, and it was his responsibility to do whatever he could to ensure the survival of his son and the sons and daughters of all the others. His outlook altered and he began to think of the future, not in terms of years to come, but in terms of generations to come. Someday one of the young ones would succeed him as leader, but the young ones would have only childhood memories of earth. He was the last leader who had known earth and the civilization of earth as a grown man. What he did while he was leader would incline the destiny of a new race. He would have to do whatever was possible for him to do, and he would have to begin at once. The years left to him could not be many. He was not alone. Others in the caves had the same thoughts he had regarding the future, even though none of them had any plan for accomplishing what they spoke of. West, who had held degrees in philosophy on earth, said to Lake one night as they sat together by the fire. Have you noticed the way the children listen when the talk turns to what used to be on earth, what might have been on Athena, and what would be if only we could find a way to escape from Ragnarok? I've noticed, he said. These stories already contain the goal for future generations, West went on. Someday, somehow, they will go to Athena to kill the Guerns there and free the Terran slaves and reclaim Athena as their own. He listened to them talk of the interstellar flight to Athena as they sat by their fires and worked at making bows and arrows. It was only a dream, they held, yet without that dream there would be nothing before them but the vision of generation after generation living and dying on a world that could never give them more than existence. The dream was needed, but it alone was not enough. How long on earth had it been from the Neolithic age to advanced civilization? How long from the time men were ready to leave their caves until they were ready to go to the stars? Twelve thousand years. There were men and women among the rejects who had been specialists in various fields. There were a few books that had survived the trampling of the Terrans, and others could be written, with ink made from the black lance tree bark, upon parchment made from the thin inner skin of unicorn hides. The knowledge contained in the books and the learning of the rejects still living should be preserved for the future generations. With the help of that learning, perhaps they really could, someday, somehow, escape from their prison and make Athena their own. He told West of what he had been thinking. You'll have to start a school, he said. This winter, to-morrow. West nodded in agreement. And the writing should be commenced as soon as possible. Some of the textbooks will require more time to write than Ragnarok will give the authors. A school for the children was started the next day, and the writing of the books began. The parchment books would serve two purposes. One would be to teach the future generations things that could not only help them survive, but would help them create a culture of their own, as advanced as the harsh environment and scanty resources of Ragnarok permitted. The other would be to warn them of the danger of a return of the guerns, and to teach them all that was known about guerns and their weapons. Lake's main contribution would be a lengthy book, Terrans Spaceships, Types, and Operation. He postponed its writing, however, to first produce a much smaller book, but one that might well be more important, interior features of a guern cruiser. Terran Intelligence knew a little about guern cruisers, and as second in command of the constellation he had seen and studied a copy of that report. He had an excellent memory for such things, almost photographic, and he wrote the text and drew a multitude of sketches. He shook his head ruefully at the result. The text was good, but for clarity the accompanying illustration should be accurate and in perspective, and he was definitely not an artist. He discovered that Craig could take a pen in his scarred, powerful hand and draw with the neat precision of a professional artist. He turned the sketches over to him together with the mass of specifications. Since it might someday be of such vital importance he would make four copies of it. The text was given to a teenage girl who would make three more copies of it. Four days later Schroeder handed Lake a text with some rough sketches. The title was Operation of Guern Blasters. Not even intelligence had ever been able to examine a Guern hand blaster, but a man named Schroeder, on Venus, had killed a Guern with his own blaster, and then disappeared with both infuriated Guerns and Guern-intimidated Venetian police in pursuit. There had been a high reward for his capture. He looked it over and said, I was counting on you giving us this. Only the barest trace of surprise showed on Schroeder's face, but his eyes were intently watching Lake. So you knew all the time who I was? I knew. Did anyone else on the Constellation know? You were recognized by one of the ship's officers. You would have been tried in two more days. I see, Schroeder said, and since I was guilty and couldn't be returned to Earth or Venus I'd have been executed on the Constellation. He smiled sardonically. And you, as second in command, would have been my execution's master of ceremonies. Lake put the parchment sheets back together in their proper order. Sometimes, he said, a ship's officer has to do things that are contrary to all his own wishes. Schroeder drew a deep breath, his face somber with the memories he had kept to himself. It was two years ago, when the Guernes were still talking friendship to the Earth Government, while they shoved the colonists around on Venus. This Guern. There was a girl there, and he thought he could do what he wanted to her because he was a mighty Guern, and she was nothing. He did. That's why I killed him. I had to kill two Venetian police to get away. That's where I put the rope around my neck. That's not what we did, but what we do that will 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 Guern Blasters may be something else will live or die by. The school and writing were interrupted by the spring hunting. Craig made his journey to the plateau's snow-capped mountain, but he was unable to keep his promise to prospect it. The plateau was perhaps 10,000 feet in elevation, and the mountain rose another 10,000 feet above the plateau. No human could climb such a mountain in a 1.5 gravity. I tried, he told Lake Weerly 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 pan traces in the canyon bottoms. But no iron. Craig examined the sheets of mica. We could make windows for the outer caves of these, he said. Have them double thickness with a wide airspace 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 Humboldt. He was by far the youngest of Craig's students and the most attentive. Craig 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 a 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 Guerns 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 oars that will be needed to make a ship to go to Athena and to make blasters to kill Guerns after you get there.� Lake had a corral built early the following spring, with camouflaged wings to trap some of the wood-goats when they came. It would be an immense forward step toward conquering their new environment if they could domesticate the goats and have goat herds near the caves all through the year. Gathering enough grass to last a herd of goats through the winter would be a problem, but first, before they worried about that, they would have to see if the goats could survive the summer and winter extremes of heat and cold. They trapped ten goats that spring. They built them brush sunshades. Before summer was over the winds would have stripped the trees of most of their dry brown leaves, and a stream of water was diverted through the corral. It was all work in vain. The goats died from the heat in early summer, together with the young that had been born. When fall came they trapped six more goats. They built them shelters that would be as warm as possible and carried them a large supply of the tall grass from along the creek banks, enough to last them through the winter, but the cold was too much for the goats and the second blizzard killed them all. The next spring and fall, and with much more difficulty, they tried the experiment with pairs of unicorns. The results were the same. Which meant they would remain a race of hunters. Ragnarok would not permit them to be herdsmen. The years went by, each much like the one before it, but for the rapid aging of the old ones, as Lake and the others called themselves, and the growing up of the young ones. No woman among the old ones could any longer have children, but six more normal, healthy children had been born. Like the first two they were not affected by the gravity as earth-born babies had. Among the young ones Lake saw was a distinguishable difference. Those who had been very young the day the guerns left them to die had adapted better than those who had been a few years older. The environment of Ragnarok had struck at the very young with merciless savagery. It had subjected them to a test of survival that was without precedent on earth. It had killed them by the hundreds, but among them had been those whose young flesh and blood and organs had resisted death by adapting to the greatest extent possible. The day of the old ones was almost done, and the future would soon be in the hands of the young ones. They were the ninety unconquerables out of what had been four thousand rejects, the first generation of what would be a new race. It seemed to Lake that the years came and went ever faster as the old ones dwindled in numbers at an accelerating rate. Anders had died in the sixth year, his heart failing him one night as he worked patiently in his crude little laboratory at carrying on the work started by Chiara to find a cure for the hell fever. Barber, trying to develop a strain of herbs that would grow in the lower elevations of the caves, was killed by a unicorn as he worked in his test-plot below the caves. Craig went limping out one spring day on the eighth year to look at a new mineral a hunter had found a mile from the caves. A sudden cold rain blew up, chilling him before he could return, and he died of hell fever the same day. Schroeder was killed by prowlers the same year, dying with his back to a tree and a bloody knife in his hand. It was the way he would have wanted to go, once he had said to Lake, When my time comes I would rather it be against the prowlers. They fight hard and kill quick, and then they're through with you. They don't tear you up after you're dead and slobber and gloat over the pieces the way the unicorns do. The springs came a little earlier each year, the falls a little later and the observations showed the sun's progressing steadily northward. But the winters, though shorter, were seemingly as cold as ever. The long summers reached such a degree of heat on the ninth year that Lake knew they could endure no more than two or three years more of the increasing heat. Then in the summer of the tenth year, the tilting of Ragnarok, the apparent northward progress of the suns, stopped. They were in the middle of what Craig called the big summer and they could endure it just barely. They would not have to leave the caves. The sun started their drift southward. The observations were continued and carefully recorded. Big fall was coming and behind it would be big winter. Big winter. The threat of it worried Lake. How far to the south would the suns go? How long would they stay? Would the time come when the plateau would be buried under hundreds of feet of snow and the caves enclosed in glacial ice? There was no way he could ever know or even guess. Only those of the future would ever know. On the twelfth year only Lake and West were left of the old ones. By then there were eighty-three left of the young ones, eight Ragnarok born children of the old ones, and four Ragnarok born children of the young ones. Not counting himself and West there were ninety-five of them. It was not many to the beginnings of a race that would face an ice age of unknown proportions and have over them, always, the threat of a chance return of the guerns. The winter of the fifteenth year came and he was truly alone, the last of the old ones. Right haired and aged far beyond his years he was still leader. But that winter he could do little other than sit by his fire and feel the gravity dragging at his heart. He knew, long before spring, that it was time he chose his successor. He had hoped to live to see his son take his place, but Jim was only thirteen. Among the others he was one he had been watching since the day he told Craig he would find metals to build a ship and kill the guerns. Bill Humboldt. Bill Humboldt was not the oldest among those who would make leaders, but he was the most versatile of them all, the most thoughtful and stubbornly determined. He reminded Lake of the fierce old man who had been his grandfather, and had it not been for the scars that twisted his face into grim ugliness he would have looked much like him. A violent storm was roaring outside the caves the night he told the others that he wanted Bill Humboldt to be a successor. There were no objections, and, without ceremony and with few words, he terminated his fifteen years of leadership. He left the others, his son among them, and went back to the cave where he slept. His fire was low, down to dying embers, but he was too tired to build it up again. He lay down on his pallet and saw, with neither surprise nor fear, that his time was much nearer than he had thought. It was already at hand. He lay back and let the lassitude enclose him, not fighting it. He had done the best he could for the others, and now the weary journey was over. His thoughts dissolved into the memory of the day fifteen years before. The roaring of the storm became the thunder of the Gern cruisers as they disappeared into the gray sky. Four thousand rejects stood in the cold wind and watched them go, the children not yet understanding that they had been condemned to die. Somehow his own son was among them. He tried feebly to rise. There was work to do, a lot of work to do. END OF EPISODE V SPACE PRISON EPISODE VI PART II It was early morning as Bill Humboldt sat by the fire in his cave and studied the map Craig had made of the Plateau's mountain. Craig had left the mountain nameless and he dipped his pen in ink to write Craig Mountains. Bill, Delmont Anders entered very quietly, what he had to tell already evident on his face. He died last night, Bill. It was something he had been expecting to come at any time, but the lack of surprise did not diminish the sense of loss. Lake had been the last of the old ones, the last of those who had worked and fought and shortened the years of their lives that the young ones might have a chance to live. Now he was gone, now a brief era was ended, a valiant, bloody chapter written and finished. And he was the new leader who would decree how the next chapter would be written, only four years older than the boy who was looking at him with an unconscious appeal for reassurance on his face. You'd better tell Jim, he said. Then a little later I want to talk to everyone about the things we'll start doing as soon as spring comes. You mean the hunting, Delmont asked? No, more than just the hunting. He sat for a while after Delmont left, looking back down the years that had preceded that day, back to that first morning on Ragnarok. He had set a goal for himself that morning when he left his toy bear in the dust behind him and walked beside Julia into the new and perilous way of life. He had promised himself that some day he would watch the Guerns die and beg for mercy as they died and he would give them the same mercy they had given his mother. As he grew older he realized that his hatred alone was a futile thing. There would have to be a way of leaving Ragnarok and there would have to be weapons with which to fight the Guerns. These would be things impossible and beyond his reach, unless he had the help of all the others in united, coordinated effort. To make certain of that united effort he would have to be their leader. So for eleven years he had studied and trained until there was no one who could use a bow or spear quite as well as he could, no one who could travel as far in a day or spot a unicorn ambush as quickly. And there was no one, with the exception of George Ord, who had studied as many textbooks as he had. He had reached his first goal, he was leader. For all of them there existed the second goal, the hope of some day leaving Ragnarok and taking Athena from the Guerns. For many of them perhaps it was only wishful dreaming, but for him it was the prime driving force of his life. There was so much for them to do and their lives were so short in which to do it. For so long as he was leader they would not waste a day in idle wishing. When the others were gathered to hear what he had to say he spoke to them. We're going to continue where the old ones had to leave off. We're better adapted than they were and we're going to find medals to make a ship if there are any to be found. Somewhere on Ragnarok, on the northwest side of a range similar to the Craig Mountains on the Plateau, is a deep valley that the Dunbar expedition called the Chasm. They didn't investigate it closely since their instruments showed no medals there, but they saw strata in one place that was red, an iron discoloration. Maybe we can find a vein there that was too small for them to have paid any attention to, so we'll go over the Craigs as soon as the snow melts from them. That will be an early summer, George Ord said, his black eyes thoughtful. Whoever goes will have to time their return for either just before the prowlers and unicorns come back from the north or wait until they've all migrated down off the Plateau. It was something Humboldt had been thinking about and wishing they could remedy. Men could elude unicorn attacks wherever there were trees large enough to offer safety, and even prouder attacks could be warded off wherever there were trees for refuge, spears holding back the prowlers who would climb the trees while arrows picked off the ones on the ground. But there were no trees on the Plateau, and to be caught by a band of prowlers or unicorns there was certain death for any small party of two or three. For that reason no small parties had ever gone up on the Plateau except when the unicorns and prowlers were gone, or nearly so. It was an inconvenience, and it would continue for as long as their weapons were the slow-to-reload bows. You're supposed to be our combination inventor craftsman, he said to George. No one else can compare with you in that respect. Besides, you're not exactly enthusiastic about such hard work as mountain climbing. So from now on you'll do the kind of work you're best suited for. Your first job is to make us a better bow. Make it a crossbow, with a sliding action to draw and cock the string, and with a magazine of arrows mounted on top of it." George studied the idea thoughtfully. The general principle is simple, he said. I'll see what I can do. How many of us will go over the Craig Mountains, Bill? Dan Barber asked. You and I, Humboldt answered. A three-man party under Bob Craig will go into the Western Hills, and another party under Johnny Stevens will go into the Eastern Hills. He looked toward the adjoining cave where the guns had been stored for so long, coated with unicorn tallow to protect them from rust. We could make gunpowder if we could find a deposit of Salt Peter. We already know where there's a little sulfur. The guns would have to be converted to flintlocks, though, since we don't have what we need for cartridge-priming material. Worse, we'd have to use ceramic bullets. They would be inefficient, too light, and destructive to the bores. But we would need powder for mining if we ever found any iron. And if we can't have metal bullets to shoot the gurns, we can have bombs to blast them with. Suppose, Johnny Stevens said, that we never do find the metals to make a ship. How will we ever leave Ragnarok if that happens? There's another way, a possible way, of leaving here without a ship of our own, if there are no metals we'll have to try it. Why wait, Bob Craig demanded. Why not try it now? Because the odds would be about 10,000 to one in favor of the gurns. But we'll try it if everything else fails. George made, altered, and rejected four different types of crossbows before he perfected a reloading bow that met his critical approval. He brought it to where Humboldt stood outside the cave's early one spring day when the grass was sending up the first green shoots on the southern hillsides and the long winter was finally dying. Here it is, he said, handing Humboldt the bow. Try it. He took it, noting the fine balance of it. Projecting down from the center of the bow at right angles to it was a stock shaped to fit the grip of the left hand. Under the crossbar was a sliding stock for the right hand, shaped like the butt of a pistol and fitted with a trigger. Mounted slightly above and to one side of the crossbar was a magazine containing ten short arrows. The pistol grip was in position near the forestock. He pulled it back the length of the crossbar and it brought the string with it, stretching it taut. There was a click as the trigger mechanism locked the bow string in place and at the same time a concealed spring arrangement shoved an arrow into place against the string. He took quick aim at a distant tree and pressed the trigger. There was a twang as the arrow was ejected. He jerked the sliding pistol grip forward and back to reload, pressing the trigger an instant later. Another arrow went its way. By the time he had fired the tenth arrow in the magazine he was shooting at the rate of one arrow per second. On the trunk of the distant tree, like a bristle of stiff whiskers, the ten arrows were driven deep into the wood in an area no larger than the chest of a prowler or ahead of a unicorn. This is better than I hoped for, he said to George. One man with one of these could equal six men with ordinary bows. I'm going to add another feature, George said. Bundles of arrows tend to the bundle in special holders to carry in the quivers. To reload the magazine you just slap down a new bundle of arrows in no more time than it would take to put one arrow in an ordinary bow. I figured that with practice a man should be able to get off forty arrows in not much more than twenty seconds. George took the bow and went back in the cave to add his new feature. Humboldt stared after him, thinking, if he can make something like that out of wood and unicorn gut, what would he be able to give us if he could have metal? Perhaps George would never have the opportunity to show what he could do with metal, but Humboldt already felt sure that George's genius wood, if it ever became necessary, make possible the alternate plan for leaving Ragnarok. The weeks dragged into months and at last enough snow was gone from the craigs that Humboldt and Dan Barber could start. They met no opposition. The prowlers had long since disappeared into the north and the unicorns were very scarce. They had no occasion to test the effectiveness of the new automatic crossbows in combat, a lack of opportunity that irked Barber. Any other time, if we had ordinary bows, he complained, the unicorns would be popping up to charges from all directions. Don't fret, Humboldt consoled him. This fall, when we come back, they will be. They reached the mountain and stopped near its foot where a creek came down, its water high and muddy with melting snows. There they hunted until they had obtained all the meat they could carry. They would see no more game when they went up the mountain's canyons. A poisonous weed replaced most of the grass in all the canyons and the animals of Ragnarok had learned long before to shun the mountain. They found the canyon that Craig and his men had tried to explore and started up it. It was there that Craig had discovered the quartz and mica, and so far as he had been able to tell, the head of that canyon would be the lowest of all the passes over the mountain. The canyon went up the mountain diagonally so that the climb was not steep, although it was constant. They began to see mica and quartz crystals in the creek bed, and at noon on the second day they passed the last stunted tree. Nothing grew higher than that point, but the thorny poison weeds and they were scarce. The air was noticeably thinner there, and their burdens heavier. A short distance beyond they came to a small rock monument, Craig's turnback point. The next day they found the quartz crystals in place. A mile farther was the vein the mica had come from. Of the other minerals Craig had hoped to find however there were only traces. The fourth day was an eternity of struggling up the now steeper canyon under loads that seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds, forcing their protesting legs to carry them fifty steps at a time, at the end of which they would stop to rest while their lungs labored to suck in the thin air in quick panting breaths. It would have been much easier to have gone around the mountain, but the chasm was supposed to be like a huge cavity scooped out of the plateau beyond the mountain, rimmed with sheer cliffs a mile high. Only on the side next to the mountain was there a slope leading down into it. They stopped for the night where the creek ended in a small spring. There the snow still clung to the canyon's walls, and there the canyon curved, offering them the promise of the summit just around the bend as it had been doing all day. The sun was hot and bright the next morning as they made their slow way on again. The canyon straightened, the steep walls of it flattening out to make a pair of ragged shoulders with a saddle between them. They climbed to the summit of the saddle, and there, suddenly before them, was the other side of the world, and the chasm. Far below them was a plateau, stretching endlessly like the one they had left behind them. But the chasm dominated all else. It was a gigantic, sheer walled valley, a hundred miles long by forty miles wide, sunk deep in the plateau with the tops of its mile-high walls level with the floor of the plateau. The mountain under them dropped swiftly away, sloping down and down to the level of the plateau, and then on, down and down again, to the bottom of the chasm, that was so deep its floor was half hidden by the morning shadows. "'My God!' Barber said. "'It must be over three miles under us to the bottom, on the vertical. Ten miles of thirty-three percent grade. If we go down, we'll never get out again.' "'You can turn back here if you want to,' Humboldt said. "'Turn back!' Barber's red whiskers seemed to bristle. Who in the hell said anything about turning back?' "'Nobody,' Humboldt said, smiling a little at Barber's quick flash of anger. He studied the chasm, wishing that they could have some way of cutting the quartz crystals and making binoculars. It was a long way to look with the naked eye. Here and there the chasm thrust out arms into the plateau. All the arms were short, however, and even at their heads the cliffs were vertical. The morning shadows prevented a clear view of much of the chasm, and he could see no sign of the red-stained strata that they were searching for. In the southwest corner of the chasm, far away and almost imperceptible, he saw a faint cloud rising up from the chasm's floor. It was impossible to tell what it was, and it faded away as he watched. Barber saw it too, and said, "'It looked like smoke. Do you suppose there could be people, or some kind of intelligent things, living down there?' It might have been the vapor from hot springs condensed by the cool morning air," he said. "'Whatever it was, we'll look into it when we get there.'" The climb down the steep slope into the chasm was swifter than that up the canyon, but no more pleasant. Carrying a heavy pack down such a grade exerted a tortuous strain upon the backs of the legs. The heat increased steadily as they descended. They reached the floor of the valley the next day, and the noonday heat was so great that Humboldt wondered if they might not have trapped themselves into what the summer would soon transform into a monstrous oven where no life at all could exist. There could never be any choice, of course. The mountains were passable only when the weather was hot. The floor of the valley was silt, sand, and gravel. They would find nothing there. They set out on a circuit of the chasm's walls, following along close to the base. In many places the mile-high walls were without a single ledge to break their vertical faces. When they came to the first such place they saw that the ground near the base was riddled with queer little pits, like tiny craters of the moon. As they looked there was a crack like a cannon shot, and the ground beside them erupted into an explosion of sand and gravel. When the dust had cleared away there was a new crater where none had been before. Humboldt wiped the blood from his face where a flying fragment had cut it and said, "'The heat of the sun loosens rocks up on the rim. When one falls a mile in 1.5 gravity it's traveling like a meteor.' They went on through the danger zone. As with the peril of the chasm's heat there was no choice. Only by observing the material that littered the base of the cliffs could they know what minerals, if any, might be above them. On the fifteenth day they saw the red-stained stratum. Humboldt quickened his pace, hurrying forward in advance of barber. The stratum was too high up on the wall to be reached, but it was not necessary to examine it in place. The base of the cliff was piled thick with fragments from it. He felt the first touch of discouragement as he looked at them. They were a sandstone, light in weight. The iron present was only what the Dunbar expedition had thought it to be, a mere discoloration. They made their way slowly along the foot of the cliff, examining piece after piece in the hope of finding something more than iron stains. There was no variation, however, and a mile farther on they came to the end of the red stratum. Beyond that point the rocks were gray without a vestige of iron. So that, barber said, looking back the way they had come, is what we were going to build a ship out of, iron stains. Humboldt did not answer. For him it was more than a disappointment. It was the death of a dream he had held since the year he was nine and had heard that the Dunbar expedition had seen iron-stained rock in a deep chasm, the only iron-stained rock on the face of Ragnarok. Surely he had thought there would be enough iron there to build a small ship. For eleven years he had worked toward the day when he would find it. Now he had found it, and it was nothing. The ship was as far away as ever. But discouragement was as useless as iron-stained sandstone. He shook it off and turned to barber. Let's go, he said. Maybe we'll find something by the time we circle the chasm. For seven days they risked the danger of death from downward plunging rocks and found nothing. On the eighth day they found the treasure that was not treasure. They stopped for the evening just within the mouth of one of the chasm's tributaries. Humboldt went out to get a drink where a trickle of water ran through the sand, and as he knelt down he saw the flash of something red under him, almost buried in the sand. He lifted it out. It was a stone half the size of his hand, darkly translucent and glowing in the light of the setting sun like blood. It was a ruby. He looked and saw another gleam a little farther up the stream. It was another ruby, almost as large as the first one. Near it was a flawless blue sapphire. Scattered here and there were smaller rubies and sapphires, down to the size of grains of sand. He went farther upstream and saw specimens of still another stone. They were colorless but burning with internal fires. He rubbed one of them hard across the ruby he still carried, and there was a gritting sound as it cut a deep scratch in the ruby. "'I'll be damned,' he said aloud. There was only one stone hard enough to cut a ruby. The diamond.' It was almost dark when he returned to where Barber was resting beside their packs. "'What did you find to keep you out so late?' Barber asked curiously. He dropped a double handful of rubies, sapphires, and diamonds at Barber's feet. "'Take a look,' he said. "'On a civilized world, what you see there would bias a ship without our having to lift a finger. Here they're just pretty rocks.' "'Except the diamonds,' he added. "'At least we now have something to cut those quartz crystals with.' They took only a few of the rubies and sapphires the next morning, but they gathered more of the diamonds, looking in particular for the gray black and ugly but very hard and tough carbonato variety. Then they resumed their circling of the chasm's walls. The heat continued its steady increase as the days went by. Only at night was there any relief from it, and the nights were growing swiftly shorter as the blue sun rose earlier each morning. When the yellow sun rose the chasm became a blazing furnace or on the edge of which they crept like ants in some gigantic oven. There was no life in any form to be seen. No animal or bush or blade of grass. There was only the barren floor of the chasm, made a harsh green shade by the two suns and writhing and undulating with heat waves like a nightmare sea, while above them the towering cliffs shimmered too, and sometimes seemed to be leaning far out over their heads and already falling down upon them. They found no more minerals of any kind, and they came at last to the place where they had seen the smoke or vapor. There the walls of the chasm drew back to form a little valley a mile long by half-mile wide. The walls did not drop vertically to the floor there, but sloped out at the base into a fantastic formation of natural roofs and arches that reached almost to the center of the valley from each side. Green things grew in the shade under the arches, and sparkling waterfalls cascaded down over many of them. A small creek carried the water out of the valley, going out into the chasm a little way before the hot sands absorbed it. They stood and watched for some time, but there was no movement in the valley other than the waving of the green plants as a breeze stirred them. Once the breeze shifted to bring them the fresh, sweet scent of growing things and urged them to come closer. "'A place like that doesn't belong here,' Barber said in a low voice. "'But it's there. I wonder what else is there?' "'Shade and cool water,' Humboldt said, and maybe things that don't like strangers. Let's go find out.' They watched warily as they walked their crossbows in their hands. At the closer range they saw that the roofs and arches were the outer remains of a system of natural caves that went back into the valley's walls. The green vegetation grew wherever the roofs gave part-time shade, consisting mainly of a holly-leafed bush with purple flowers and a tall plant resembling corn. Under some of the roofs the corn was mature, the orange-colored grains visible. Under others it was no more than half grown. He saw the reason and said to Barber, "'There are both warm and cold springs here. The plants watered by the warm springs would grow almost the year round, the ones watered by the cold springs only in the summer. And what we saw from the mountaintop would have been vapor rising from the warm springs.' They passed under arch after arch without seeing any life. When they came to the valley's upper end and still had seen nothing it seemed evident that there was little danger of an encounter with any intelligent and hostile creatures. Apparently nothing at all lived in the little valley. Humboldt stopped under a broad arch where the breeze was made cool and moist by the spray of water it had come through. Barber went on to look under the adjoining arch. Caves led into the wall from both arches and as he stood there Humboldt saw something lying in the mouth of the nearest cave. It was a little mound of orange corn, lying in a neat pile as though whatever had left it there had intended to come back after it. He looked toward the other arch but Barber was somewhere out of sight. He doubted that whatever had left the corn could be much of a menace. Dangerous animals were more apt to eat flesh than corn, but he went to the cave with his crossbow ready. He stopped at the mouth of the cave to let his eyes become accustomed to the darkness inside it. As he did so the things inside came out to meet him. They emerged into full view. Six little animals the size of squirrels, each of them a different color. They walked on short hind legs like miniature bears, and the dark eyes and the bare chipmunk faces were fixed on him with intense interest. They stopped five feet in front of him, there to stand in a neat row and continue the fascinated staring up at him. The yellow one in the center scratched absently at its stomach with a furry paw, and he lowered the bow, feeling a little foolish at having bothered to raise it against animals so small and harmless. Then he half brought it up again as the yellow one opened its mouth and said in a tone that held distinct anticipation, I think we'll eat you for supper. He darted glances to right and left, but there was nothing near him except the six little animals. The yellow one, having spoken, was staring silently at him with only curiosity on its furry face. He wondered if some miasma or some scent from the vegetation in the valley had warped his mind into a sudden insanity and asked, You think you'll do what? It opened its mouth again to stutter, I, I, then with a note of alarm, Hey! It said no more and the next sound was that of Barber hurrying toward him and calling, Hey, Bill, where are you? Here, he answered, and he was already sure that he knew why the little animal had spoken to him. Barber came up and saw the six chipmunk bears. Six of them, he exclaimed, there's one in the next cave, the damn thing spoke to me. I thought so, he replied. You told it we'd have it for supper, and then it said, You think you'll do what, didn't it? Barber's face showed surprise. How did you know that? There telepathic, between one another, he said. The yellow one there repeated what the one you spoke to heard you say, and it repeated what the yellow one heard me say. It has to be telepathy between them. Telepathy! Barber stared at the six little animals, who stared back with their fascinated curiosity undiminished. But why should they want to repeat aloud what they received telepathically? I don't know. Maybe at some stage in their revolution only part of them were telepaths, and the telepaths broadcasted danger warnings to the others that way. So far as that goes, why does a parrot repeat what it hears? There was a scurry of movement behind Barber and another of the little animals, a white one hurried past them. It went to the yellow one and they stood close together as they stared up. Apparently they were mates. That's the other one. Those are the two that mocked us, Barber said, and thereby gave them the name by which they would be known. Mockers. End of Episode 6. Episode 7 of Space Prison by Tom Godwin. Read by Mark Nelson. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Space Prison, Episode 7. The mockers were fresh meat, but they accepted the humans with such friendliness and trust that Barber lost all his desire to have one for supper or for any other time. They had a limited supply of dried meat and there would be plenty of orange corn. They would not go hungry. They discovered that the mockers had living quarters in both the cool caves and the ones warmed by the hot springs. There was evidence that they hibernated during the winters in the warm caves. There were no minerals in the mockers' valley and they set out to continue their circuit of the chasm. They did not get far until the heat had become so great that the chasm's tributaries began going dry. They turned back then to wade in the little valley until the fall rains came. When the long summer was ended by the first rain, they resumed their journey. They took a supply of the orange corn and two of the mockers, the yellow one and its mate. The other mockers watched them leave, standing silent and solemn in front of their caves as though they feared they might never see their two fellows or the humans again. The two mockers were pleasant company, riding on their shoulders and shattering any nonsense that came to mind, and sometimes saying things that were not at all nonsense, making humboldt wonder if mockers could partly read human minds and dimly understand the meaning of some of the things they said. They found a place where Salt Peter was very thinly and erratically distributed. They scraped off all the films of it that were visible and procured a small amount. They completed their circuit and reached the foot of the long, steep slope of the craigs without finding anything more. It was an awesome climb that lay before them, up a grade so steep and barred with so many low ledges that when their legs refused to carry them farther they crawled. The heat was still very serious, and there would be no water until they came to the spring beyond the mountain summit. A burning wind, born on the blazing floor of the chasm, followed them up the mountain all day. Their leather canteens were almost dry when night came, and they were no more than a third of the way up to the top. The mockers had become silent as the elevation increased, and when they stopped for the night, humboldt saw that they would never live to cross the mountain. They were breathing fast, their hearts racing, as they tried to extract enough oxygen from the thin air. They drank a few drops of water, but they would not touch the corn he offered them. The white mockered died at mid-morning the next day, as they stopped for a rest. The yellow one crawled feebly to her side, and died a few minutes later. So, that's that, humboldt said, looking down at them. The only things on Ragnarok that ever trusted us and wanted to be our friends, and we killed them. They drank the last of their water and went on. They made dry camp that night, and dreams of cold streams of water tormented their exhausted sleep. The next day was a hellish eternity in which they walked and fell and crawled, and walked and fell again. Barber weakened steadily, his breathing growing to a rattling panting. He spoke once that afternoon to try to smile with dry, swollen lips and say between his panting gasps, It would be hell to have to die so thirsty like this. After that he fell with increasing frequency, each time slower and weaker in getting up again. Half a mile short of the summit he fell for the last time. He tried to get up, failed, and tried to crawl. He failed at that too, and collapsed face down in the rocky soil. Humboldt went to him, and said between his own labored intakes of breath, Wait, Dan, I'll go on, bring you back water. Barber raised himself with a great effort and looked up. No use, he said. My heart, too much. He fell forward again, and that time he was very still, his desperate panting no more. It seemed to Humboldt that it was half a lifetime later that he finally reached the spring and the cold, clear water. He drank the most ecstatic pleasure he had ever experienced in his life. Then the pleasure drained away, as he seemed to see Dan Barber trying to smile, and seemed to hear him say, It would be hell to have to die so thirsty like this. He rested for two days before he was in condition to continue on his way. He reached the plateau and saw that the woods-goats had been migrating south for some time. On the second morning he climbed up a gentle roll in the plain and met three unicorns face to face. They charged at once, squealing with anticipation. Had he been equipped with an ordinary bow he would have been killed within seconds, but the automatic crossbow poured a rain of arrows into the faces of the unicorns that caused them to swing aside in pain and enraged astonishment. The moment they had swung enough to expose the area just behind their heads the arrows became fatal. One unicorn escaped, three arrows bristling in its face. It watched him from a distance for a little while, squealing and shaking its head in baffled fury. Then it turned and disappeared over a swell in the plain, running like a deer. He resumed his southward march, hurrying faster than before. The unicorn had headed north, and that could be for but one purpose, to bring enough reinforcements to finish the job. He reached the caves at night. No one was up but George Ord, working late in his combination workshop laboratory. George looked up at the sound of his entrance and saw that he was alone. So, Dan didn't make it, he asked. The chasm got him, he answered. And then, wearily, the chasm we found the damn thing. The red stratum? It was only iron stains. I made a little pilot smelter while you were gone, George said. I was hoping the red stratum would be ore. The other prospecting parties, none of them found anything. We'll try again next spring, he said. We'll find it somewhere, no matter how long it takes. Our time may not be so long. The observation showed the sun to be farther south than ever. Then we'll make double use of the time we do have. We'll cut the hunting parties to the limit, and send out more prospecting parties. We're going to have a ship to meet the Guerns again. Sometimes, George said, his black eyes studying him thoughtfully. I think that's all you live for, Bill. The day when you can kill Guerns. George said it as a statement of fact, without censure, but Humboldt could not keep an edge of harshness out of his voice as he answered. For as long as I'm leader, that's all we're going to live for. He followed the game south that fall, taking with him Bob Craig and young Anders. Hundreds of miles south of the caves they came to the Lowlands, a land of much water and vegetation and vast herds of unicorns and woods-goats. It was an exceedingly dangerous country, due to the concentration of unicorns and prowlers, and only the automatic crossbows combined with never-ceasing vigilance enabled them to survive. There they saw the crawlers, hideous things that crawled on multiple legs like three-ton centipedes, their mouths set with six mandibles and dripping a stinking saliva. The bite of a crawler was poisonous, instantly paralyzing even to a unicorn, though not instantly killing them. The crawlers ate their victims at once, however, ripping the helpless and still living flesh from its bones. Although the unicorns feared the crawlers, the prowlers hated them with a fanatical intensity, and made the use of their superior quickness to kill every crawler they found, ripping at the crawler until the crawler, in an insanity of rage, bit itself and died of its own poison. They had taken one of the powerful longbows with them, in addition to their crossbows, and they killed a crawler with it one day. As they did so, a band of twenty prowlers came suddenly upon them. Twenty prowlers, with the advantage of surprise at short range, could have slaughtered them. Instead, the prowlers continued on their way without as much as a challenging snarl. Now, why, Bob Craig wondered, did they do that? They saw we had just killed a crawler, Humboldt said. The crawlers are their enemies, and I guess letting us live was their way of showing appreciation. Their further explorations of the lowlands revealed no minerals, nothing but a luvial material of unknown depth, and there was no reason to stay longer, except that return to the caves was impossible until spring came. They built attack-proof shelters in the trees, and settled down to wade out the winter. They started north with the first wave of woods-goats, nothing but lack of success to show for their months of time and effort. When they were almost to the caves, they came to the barren valley where the guerns had herded the rejects out of the cruisers, and to the place where the stockade had been. It was a lonely place, the stockade walls fallen and scattered, and the graves of Humboldt's mother and all the others long since obliterated by the hooves of the unicorn legions. Their memories were reawakened, tinged by the years with nostalgia, and the stockade was far behind them before the dark mood left them. The orange corn was planted that spring and the number of prospecting parties was doubled. The corn sprouted, grew feebly, and died before maturity. The prospecting parties returned one by one, each to report no success. He decided, that fall, that time was too precious to waste. They would have to use the alternate plan he had spoken of. He went to George Ord and asked him if it would be possible to build a hyperspace transmitter with the materials they had. It's the one way we could have a chance to leave here without a ship of our own, he said, by luring a guern cruiser here and then taking it away from them. George shook his head. A hyperspace transmitter might be built, given enough years of time, but it would be useless without power. It would take a generator of such size that we'd have to melt down every gun, knife, axe, every piece of steel and iron we have, and then we'd be five hundred pounds short. On top of that, we'd have to have at least three hundred pounds more of copper for additional wire. I didn't realize it would take such a large generator, he said after a silence. I was sure we could have a transmitter. Get me the metal, and we can, George said. He sighed restlessly, and there was almost hatred in his eyes as he looked at the enclosing walls of the cave. You're not the only one who would like to leave our prison. Get me eight hundred pounds of copper and iron, and I'll make the transmitter some way. Eight hundred pounds of metal. On Ragnarok, that was like asking for the sun. The years went by, and each year there was the same determined effort, the same lack of success, and each year the suns were farther south, marking the coming of the end of any efforts other than the one to survive. In the year thirty, when Fall came earlier than ever before, he was forced to admit to himself the bleak and bitter fact. He and the others were not of the generation that would escape from Ragnarok. They were earth-born, they were not adapted to Ragnarok, and could not scour a world of one point five gravity for metals that might not exist. And vengeance was a luxury he could not have. A question grew in his mind where there had been only his hatred for the guerns before. What would become of the future generations on Ragnarok? With a question a scene from his childhood kept coming back to him, a late summer evening in the first year on Ragnarok, and Julia sitting beside him in the warm starlight. You're my son, Billy, she had said, the first I ever had. Now, before so very long, maybe I'll have another one. Hezitantly, 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 let them forget how they came to be on Ragnarok. Someday, even if it's a hundred years from now, the Guerns 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 Guerns 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 Guern Empire, free only so long as they remained unnoticed. It was inconceivable that the Guerns 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 Guerns did to the Rejects into legends, and then into myths that no one any longer believed. The Guerns 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 200 years for the signal to get to Athena at the speed of light, he said. Then, 40 days after it got there, a Guern cruiser would come hell bent to investigate. I want the ones of the future to know that the Guerns will be here no later than 200 years from now, and with always the chance that a Guern cruiser in space might pick up the signal at any time before then. I see, George said, the sort 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 Guerns did to us. I'm older than you are, George said. I was nine when the Guerns 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 Guerns 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 the 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 water wheel. 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 35 then, and the water that gushed from the pipe splashed in cold drops against Humboldt as the water wheel 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 Guern 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 hear this morning is going to cause a lot of Guerns, or Ragnarok people, to die. It will be the Guerns 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 water wheel that powered the generator. The sending of the signals was resumed when the 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 45, he saw that he would have to make his final decision. By then, they had dwindled until they numbered only 68, 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 mid-summer. Stoves were made of fire clay and mica, which would give both heat and light and would be more efficient than the open fireplaces. The innermost caves were prepared for occupation with multiple doors to hold out the cold and with laboriously excavated ventilation ducts and smoke outlets. There were 60 of them in the fall of 50 when all had been done that could be done to prepare for what might come. There aren't many of the earth-born left now, Bob Crade 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 were 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 Humboldt 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. 17-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 anymore. They're going to find a race before which they'll be like wood 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 56 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 49 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 guerns. 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, Julius 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 guerns. End of episode seven.