by Tom Godwin
“Prowlers!”
The warning cry came from an outer guard and black shadows were suddenly sweeping out of the dark dawn.
They were things that might have been half wolf, half tiger; each of them three hundred pounds of incredible ferocity with eyes blazing like yellow fire in their white-fanged tiger-wolf faces. They came like the wind, in a flowing black wave, and ripped through the outer guard line as though it had not existed. The inner guards fired in a chattering roll of gunshots, trying to turn them, and Prentiss’s rifle licked out pale tongues of flame as he added his own fire. The prowlers came on, breaking through, but part of them went down and the others were swerved by the fire so that they struck only the outer edge of the area where the Rejects were grouped.
At that distance they blended into the dark ground so that he could not find them in the sights of his rifle. He could only watch helplessly and see a dark-haired woman caught in their path, trying to run with a child in her arms and already knowing it was too late. A man was running toward her, slow in the high gravity, an axe in his hands and his cursing a raging, savage snarl. For a moment her white face was turned in helpless appeal to him and the others; then the prowlers were upon her and she fell, deliberately, going to the ground with her child hugged in her arms beneath her so that her body would protect it.
The prowlers passed over her, pausing for an instant to slash the life from her, and raced on again. They vanished back into the outer darkness, the farther guards firing futilely, and there was a silence but for the distant, hysterical sobbing of a woman.
It had happened within seconds; the fifth prowler attack that night and the mildest.
*
*
*
Full dawn had come by the time he replaced the guards killed by the last attack and made the rounds of the other guard lines. He came back by the place where the prowlers had killed the woman, walking wearily against the pull of gravity. She lay with her dark hair tumbled and stained with blood, her white face turned up to the reddening sky, and he saw her clearly for the first time.
It was Irene.
He stopped, gripping the cold steel of the rifle and not feeling the rear sight as it cut into his hand.
Irene … He had not known she was on Ragnarok. He had not seen her in the darkness of the night and he had hoped she and Billy were safe among the Acceptables with Dale. There was the sound of footsteps and a bold-faced girl in a red skirt stopped beside him, her glance going over him curiously.
“The little boy,” he asked, “do you know if he’s all right?”
“The prowlers cut up his face but he’ll be all right,” she said. “I came back after his clothes.”
“Are you going to look after him?”
“Someone has to and”—she shrugged her shoulders—“I guess I was soft enough to elect myself for the job. Why—was his mother a friend of yours?”
“She was my daughter,” he said.
“Oh.” For a moment the bold, brassy look was gone from her face, like a mask that had slipped. “I’m sorry. And I’ll take care of Billy.”
*
*
*
The first objection to his assumption of leadership occurred an hour later. The prowlers had withdrawn with the coming of full daylight and wood had been carried from the trees to build fires. Mary, one of the volunteer cooks, was asking two men to carry her some water when he approached. The smaller man picked up one of the clumsy containers, hastily improvised from canvas, and started toward the creek. The other, a big, thick-chested man, did not move.
“We’ll have to have water,” Mary said. “People are hungry and cold and sick.”
The man continued to squat by the fire, his hands extended to its warmth. “Name someone else,” he said.
“But—”
She looked at Prentiss in uncertainty. He went to the thick-chested man, knowing there would be violence and welcoming it as something to help drive away the vision of Irene’s pale, cold face under the red sky.
“She asked you to get her some water,” he said. “Get it.”
The man looked up at him, studying him with deliberate insolence, then he got to his feet, his heavy shoulders hunched challengingly.
“I’ll have to set you straight, old timer,” he said. “No one has appointed you the head cheese around here. Now, there’s the container you want filled and over there”—he made a small motion with one hand—“is the creek. Do you know what to do?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know what to do.”
He brought the butt of the rifle smashing up. It struck the man under the chin and there was a sharp cracking sound as his jawbone snapped. For a fraction of a second there was an expression of stupefied amazement on his face then his eyes glazed and he slumped to the ground with his broken jaw setting askew.
“All right,” he said to Mary. “Now you go ahead and name somebody else.”
*
*
*
He found that the prowlers had killed seventy during the night. One hundred more had died from the Hell Fever that often followed exposure and killed within an hour. He went the half mile to the group that had arrived on the second cruiser as soon as he had eaten a delayed breakfast. He saw, before he had quite reached the other group, that the Constellation‘s Lieutenant Commander, Vincent Lake, was in charge of it. Lake, a tall, hard-jawed man with pale blue eyes under pale brows, walked forth to meet him as soon as he recognized him.
“Glad to see you’re still alive,” Lake greeted him. “I thought that second Gern blast got you along with the others.”
“I was visiting midship and wasn’t home when it happened,” he said.
He looked at Lake’s group of Rejects, in their misery and uncertainty so much like his own, and asked, “How was it last night?”
“Bad—damned bad,” Lake said. “Prowlers and Hell Fever, and no wood for fires. Two hundred died last night.”
“I came down to see if anyone was in charge here and to tell them that we’ll have to move into the woods at once—today. We’ll have plenty of wood for the fires there, some protection from the wind, and by combining our defenses we can stand off the prowlers better.”
Lake agreed. When the brief discussion of plans was finished he asked, “How much do you know about Ragnarok?”
“Not much,” Prentiss answered. “We didn’t stay to study it very long. There are no heavy metals here, or resources of any value. We gave Ragnarok a quick survey and when the sixth man died we marked it on the chart as uninhabitable and went on our way.
“As you probably know, that bright blue star is Ragnarok’s other sun. Its position in the advance of the yellow sun shows the season to be early spring. When summer comes Ragnarok will swing between the two suns and the heat will be something no human has ever endured. Nor the cold, when winter comes.
“I know of no edible plants, although there might be some. There are a few species of rodent-like animals—they’re scavengers—and a herbivore we called the woods goat. The prowlers are the dominant form of life on Ragnarok and I suspect their intelligence is a good deal higher than we would like it to be. There will be a constant battle for survival with them.
“There’s another animal, not as intelligent as the prowlers but just as dangerous—the unicorn. The unicorns are big and fast and they travel in herds. I haven’t seen any here so far—I hope we don’t. At the lower elevations are the swamp crawlers. They’re unadulterated nightmares. I hope they don’t go to these higher elevations in the summer. The prowlers and the Hell Fever, the gravity and heat and cold and starvation, will be enough for us to have to fight.”
“I see,” Lake said. He smiled, a smile that was as bleak as moonlight on an arctic glacier.
“Earth-type—remember the promise the Gerns made the Rejects?” He looked out across the camp, at the snow whipping from the frosty hills, at the dead and the dying and a little girl trying vainly to awaken her brother.
“Th
ey were condemned, without reason, without a chance to live,” he said. “So many of them are so young … and when you’re young it’s too soon to have to die.”
*
*
*
Prentiss returned to his own group. The dead were buried in shallow graves and inventory was taken of the promised “ample supplies.” These were only the few personal possessions the Rejects had been permitted to take plus a small amount of food the Gerns had taken from the Constellation‘s stores. The Gerns had been forced to provide the Rejects with at least a little food—had they openly left them to starve, the Acceptables, whose families were among the Rejects, might have rebelled.
Inventory of the firearms and ammunition showed the total to be discouragingly small. They would have to learn how to make and use bows and arrows as soon as possible. With the first party of guards and workmen following him, Prentiss went to the tributary valley that emptied into the central valley a mile to the north. It was as good a camp site as could be hoped for; wide and thickly spotted with groves of trees, a creek running down its center.
The workmen began the construction of shelters and he climbed up the side of the nearer hill. He reached its top, his breath coming fast in the gravity that was the equivalent of a burden half his own weight, and saw what the surrounding terrain was like. To the south, beyond the barren valley, the land could be seen dropping in its long sweep to the southern lowlands where the unicorns and swamp crawlers lived. To the north the hills climbed gently for miles, then ended under the steeply sloping face of an immense plateau. The plateau reached from western to eastern horizon, still white with the snows of winter and looming so high above the world below that the clouds brushed it and half obscured it. He went back down the hill as Lake’s men appeared. They started work on what would be a continuation of his own camp and he told Lake what he had seen from the hill.
“We’re between the lowlands and the highlands,” he said. “This will be as near to a temperate altitude as Ragnarok has. We survive here—or else. There’s no other place for us to go.”
An overcast darkened the sky at noon and the wind died down to almost nothing. There was a feeling of waiting tension in the air and he went back to the Rejects, to speed their move into the woods. They were already going in scattered groups, accompanied by prowler guards, but there was no organization and it would be too long before the last of them were safely in the new camp.
He could not be two places at once—he needed a subleader to oversee the move of the Rejects and their possessions into the woods and their placement after they got there. He found the man he wanted already helping the Rejects get started: a thin, quiet man named Henry Anders who had fought well against the prowlers the night before, even though his determination had been greater than his marksmanship. He was the type people instinctively liked and trusted; a good choice for the subleader whose job it would be to handle the multitude of details in camp while he, Prentiss, and a second subleader he would select, handled the defense of the camp and the hunting.
“I don’t like this overcast,” he told Anders. “Something’s brewing. Get everyone moved and at work helping build shelters as soon as you can.”
“I can have most of them there within an hour or two,” Anders said. “Some of the older people, though, will have to take it slow. This gravity—it’s already getting the hearts of some of them.”
“How are the children taking the gravity?” he asked.
“The babies and the very young—it’s hard to tell about them yet. But the children from about four on up get tired quickly, go to sleep, and when they wake up they’ve sort of bounced back out of it.”
“Maybe they can adapt to some extent to this gravity.” He thought of what Lake had said that morning: So many of them are so young … and when you’re young it’s too soon to have to die.
“Maybe the Gerns made a mistake—maybe Terran children aren’t as easy to kill as they thought. It’s your job and mine and others to give the children the chance to prove the Gerns wrong.”
He went his way again to pass by the place where Julia, the girl who had become Billy’s foster-mother, was preparing to go to the new camp.
It was the second time for him to see Billy that morning. The first time Billy had still been stunned with grief, and at the sight of his grandfather he had been unable to keep from breaking.
“The Gern hit her,” he had sobbed, his torn face bleeding anew as it twisted in crying. “He hurt her, and Daddy was gone and then—and then the other things killed her—”
But now he had had a little time to accept what had happened and he was changed. He was someone much older, almost a man, trapped for a while in the body of a five-year-old boy.
“I guess this is all, Billy,” Julia was saying as she gathered up her scanty possessions and Irene’s bag. “Get your teddy bear and we’ll go.”
Billy went to his teddy bear and knelt down to pick it up. Then he stopped and said something that sounded like “No.” He laid the teddy bear back down, wiping a little dust from its face as in a last gesture of farewell, and stood up to face Julia empty-handed.
“I don’t think I’ll want to play with my teddy bear any more,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to play at all anymore.”
Then he went to walk beside her, leaving his teddy bear lying on the ground behind him and with it leaving forever the tears and laughter of childhood.
*
*
*
The overcast deepened, and at midafternoon dark storm clouds came driving in from the west. Efforts were intensified to complete the move before the storm broke, both in his section of the camp and in Lake’s. The shelters would be of critical importance and they were being built of the materials most quickly available; dead limbs, brush, and the limited amount of canvas and blankets the Rejects had. They would be inadequate protection but there was no time to build anything better.
It seemed only a few minutes until the black clouds were overhead, rolling and racing at an incredible velocity. With them came the deep roar of the high wind that drove them and the wind on the ground began to stir restlessly in response, like some monster awakening to the call of its kind.
Prentiss knew already who he wanted as his other subleader. He found him hard at work helping build shelters; Howard Craig, a powerfully muscled man with a face as hard and grim as a cliff of granite. It had been Craig who had tried to save Irene from the prowlers that morning with only an axe as a weapon.
Prentiss knew him slightly—and Craig still did not know Irene had been his daughter. Craig had been one of the field engineers for what would have been the Athena Geological Survey. He had had a wife, a frail, blonde girl who had been the first of all to die of Hell Fever the night before, and he still had their three small children.
“We’ll stop with the shelters we already have built,” he told Craig. “It will take all the time left to us to reinforce them against the wind. I need someone to help me, in addition to Anders. You’re the one I want.
“Send some young and fast-moving men back to last night’s camp to cut all the strips of prowler skins they can get. Everything about the shelters will have to be lashed down to something solid. See if you can find some experienced outdoorsmen to help you check the jobs.
“And tell Anders that women and children only will be placed in the shelters. There will be no room for anyone else and if any man, no matter what the excuse, crowds out a woman or child I’ll personally kill him.”
“You needn’t bother,” Craig said. He smiled with savage mirthlessness. “I’ll be glad to take care of any such incidents.”
Prentiss saw to it that the piles of wood for the guard fires were ready to be lighted when the time came. He ordered all guards to their stations, there to get what rest they could. They would have no rest at all after darkness came.
He met Lake at the north end of his own group’s camp, where it merged with Lake’s group and no guard line was ne
eded. Lake told him that his camp would be as well prepared as possible under the circumstances within another hour. By then the wind in the trees was growing swiftly stronger, slapping harder and harder at the shelters, and it seemed doubtful that the storm would hold off for an hour.
But Lake was given his hour, plus half of another. Then deep dusk came, although it was not quite sundown. Prentiss ordered all the guard fires lighted and all the women and children into the shelters. Fifteen minutes later the storm finally broke.
It came as a roaring downpour of cold rain. Complete darkness came with it and the wind rose to a velocity that made the trees lean. An hour went by and the wind increased, smashing at the shelters with a violence they had not been built to withstand. The prowler skin lashings held but the canvas and blankets were ripped into streamers that cracked like rifle shots in the wind before they were torn completely loose and flung into the night. One by one the guard fires went out and the rain continued, growing colder and driven in almost horizontal sheets by the wind. The women and children huddled in chilled misery in what meager protection the torn shelters still gave and there was nothing that could be done to help them.
The rain turned to snow at midnight, a howling blizzard through which Prentiss’s light could penetrate but a few feet as he made his rounds. He walked with slogging weariness, forcing himself on. He was no longer young—he was fifty—and he had had little rest. He had known, of course, that successful leadership would involve more sacrifice on his part than on the part of those he led. He could have shunned responsibility and his personal welfare would have benefited. He had lived on alien worlds almost half his life; with a rifle and a knife he could have lived, until Ragnarok finally killed him, with much less effort than that required of him as leader. But such an action had been repugnant to him, unthinkable. What he knew of survival on hostile worlds might help the others to survive. So he had assumed command, tolerating no objections and disregarding the fact that he would be shortening his already short time to live on Ragnarok. It was, he supposed, some old instinct that forbade the individual to stand aside and let the group die. The snow stopped an hour later and the wind died to a frigid moaning. The clouds thinned, broke apart, and the giant star looked down upon the land with its cold, blue light. The prowlers came then.