The Survivors (20 page)

“You will please come to the council hall to lead the discussion regarding the last preparations for the meeting with the Gerns. The transmitter is complete.”

*

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*

The lathe was torn down the next day and the smelter began to roar with its forced draft. Excitement and anticipation ran through the town like a fever. It would take perhaps twenty days to build the generator, working day and night so that not an hour of time would be lost, forty days for the signal to reach Athena, and forty days for the Gern cruiser to reach Ragnarok—

In one hundred days the Gerns would be there!

The men who would engage in the fight for the cruiser quit trimming their beards. Later, when it was time for the Gerns to appear, they would discard their woolen garments for ones of goat skin. The Gerns would regard them as primitive inferiors at best and it might be of advantage to heighten the impression. It would make the awakening of the Gerns a little more shocking.

An underground passage, leading from the town to the concealment of the woods in the distance, had long ago been dug. Through it the women and children would go when the Gerns arrived.

There was a level area of ground, just beyond the south wall of town, where the cruiser would be almost certain to land. The town had been built with that thought in mind. Woods were not far from both sides of the landing site and unicorn corrals were hidden in them. From the corrals would come the rear flanking attack against the Gerns.

The prowlers, of course, would be scattered among all the forces.

*

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*

The generator was completed and installed on the nineteenth night. Charley Craig, a giant of a man whose red beard gave him a genially murderous appearance, opened the valve of the water pipe. The new wooden turbine stirred and belts and pulleys began to spin. The generator hummed, the needles of the dials climbed, flickered, and steadied.

Norman Lake looked from them to Humbolt, his pale gray eyes coldly satisfied. “Full output,” he said. “We have the power we need this time.”

Jim Chiara was at the transmitter and they waited while he threw switches and studied dials. Every component of the transmitter had been tested but they had not had the power to test the complete assembly.

“That’s it,” he said at last, looking up at them. “She’s ready, after almost two hundred years of wanting her.”

Humbolt wondered what the signal should be and saw no reason why it should not be the same one that had been sent out with such hope a hundred and sixty-five years ago.

“All right, Jim,” he said. “Let the Gerns know we’re waiting for them—make it ‘Ragnarok calling’ again.”

The transmitter key rattled and the all-wave signal that the Gerns could not fail to receive went out at a velocity of five light-years a day:

Ragnarok calling—Ragnarok calling—Ragnarok calling—

It was the longest summer Humbolt had ever experienced. He was not alone in his impatience—among all of them the restlessness flamed higher as the slow days dragged by, making it almost impossible to go about their routine duties. The gentle mockers sensed the anticipation of their masters for the coming battle and they became nervous and apprehensive. The prowlers sensed it and they paced about the town in the dark of night; watching, listening, on ceaseless guard against the mysterious enemy their masters waited for. Even the unicorns seemed to sense what was coming and they rumbled and squealed in their corrals at night, red-eyed with the lust for blood and sometimes attacking the log walls with blows that shook the ground.

The interminable days went their slow succession and summer gave way to fall. The hundredth day dawned, cold and gray with the approach of winter; the day of the Gerns. But no cruiser came that day, nor the next.

He stood again on the stockade wall in the evening of the third day, Fenrir and Sigyn beside him. He listened for the first dim, distant sound of the Gern cruiser and heard only the moaning of the wind around him.

Winter was coming. Always, on Ragnarok, winter was coming or the brown death of summer. Ragnarok was a harsh and barren prison, and no amount of desire could ever make it otherwise. Only the coming of a Gern cruiser could ever offer them the bloody, violent opportunity to regain their freedom.

But what if the cruiser never came?

It was a thought too dark and hopeless to be held. They were not asking a large favor of fate, after two hundred years of striving for it; only the chance to challenge the Gern Empire with bows and knives …

Fenrir stiffened, the fur lifting on his shoulders and a muted growl coming from him. Then Humbolt heard the first whisper of sound; a faint, faraway roaring that was not the wind. He watched and listened and the sound came swiftly nearer, rising in pitch and swelling in volume. Then it broke through the clouds, tall and black and beautifully deadly. It rode down on its rockets of flame, filling the valley with its thunder, and his heart hammered with exultation.

It had come—the cruiser had come!

He turned and dropped the ten feet to the ground inside the stockade. The warning signal was being sounded from the center of town; a unicorn horn that gave out the call they had used in the practice alarms. Already the women and children would be hurrying along the tunnels that led to the temporary safety of the woods beyond town. The Gerns might use their turret blasters to destroy the town and all in it before the night was over. There was no way of knowing what might happen before it ended. But whatever it was, it would be the action they had all been wanting.

He ran to where the others would be gathering, Fenrir and Sigyn loping beside him and the horn ringing wild and savage and triumphant as it announced the end of two centuries of waiting.

*

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*

The cruiser settled to earth in the area where it had been expected to land, towering high above the town with its turret blasters looking down upon the houses. Charley Craig and Norman Lake were waiting for him on the high steps of his own house in the center of town where the elevation gave them a good view of the ship yet where the fringes of the canopy would conceal them from the ship’s scanners. They were heavily armed, their prowlers beside them and their mockers on their shoulders.

Elsewhere, under the connected rows of concealing canopies, armed men were hurrying to their prearranged stations. Most of them were accompanied by prowlers, bristling and snarling as they looked at the alien ship. A few men were deliberately making themselves visible not far away, going about unimportant tasks with only occasional and carefully disinterested glances toward the ship. They were the bait, to lure the first detachment into the center of town …

“Well?” Normal Lake asked, his pale eyes restless with his hunger for violence. “There’s our ship—when do we take her?”

“Just as soon as we get them outside it,” he said. “We’ll use the plan we first had—wait until they send a full force to rescue the first detachment and then hit them with everything we have.”

His black, white-nosed mocker was standing in the open doorway and watching the hurrying men and prowlers with worried interest: Tip, the great-great-great-great grandson of the mocker that had died with Howard Lake north of the plateau. He reached down to pick him up and set him on his shoulder, and said:

“Jim?”

“The longbows are ready,” Tip’s treble imitation of Jim Chiara’s voice answered. “We’ll black out their searchlights when the time comes.”

“Andy?” he asked.

“The last of us for this section are coming in now,” Andy Taylor answered. He made his check of all the subleaders, then looked up to the roof to ask, “All set, Jimmy?”

Jimmy Stevens’ grinning face appeared over the edge. “Ten crossbows are cocked and waiting up here. Bring us our targets.”

They waited, while the evening deepened into near-dusk. Then the airlock of the cruiser slid open and thirteen Gerns emerged, the one leading them wearing the resplendent uniform of a subcommander.

“There they come,” he said to Lake and Craig. “It looks like we’ll be able to trap them in here and force the commander to send out a full-sized force. We’ll all attack at the sound of the horn and if you can hit their rear flanks hard enough with the unicorns to give us a chance to split them from this end some of us should make it to the ship before they realize up in the control room that they should close the airlocks.

“Now”—he looked at the Gerns who were coming straight toward the stockade wall, ignoring the gate to their right—“you’d better be on your way. We’ll meet again before long in the ship.”

Fenrir and Sigyn looked from the advancing Gerns to him with question in their eyes after Lake and Craig were gone, Fenrir growling restlessly.

“Pretty soon,” he said to them. “Right now it would be better if they didn’t see you. Wait inside, both of you.”

They went reluctantly inside, to merge with the darkness of the interior. Only an occasional yellow gleam of their eyes showed that they were crouched to spring just inside the doorway. He called to the nearest unarmed man, not loud enough to be heard by the Gerns:

“Cliff—you and Sam Anders come here. Tell the rest to fade out of sight and get armed.”

Cliff Schroeder passed the command along and he and Sam Anders approached. He looked back at the Gerns and saw they were within a hundred feet of the—for them—unscalable wall of the stockade. They were coming without hesitation—

A pale blue beam lashed down from one of the cruiser’s turrets and a fifty-foot section of the wall erupted into dust with a sound like thunder. The wind swept the dust aside in a gigantic cloud and the Gerns came through the gap, looking neither to right nor left.

“That, I suppose,” Sam Anders said from beside him, “was Lesson Number One for degenerate savages like us: Gerns, like gods, are not to be hindered by man-made barriers.”

The Gerns walked with a peculiar gait that puzzled him until he saw what it was. They were trying to come with the arrogant military stride affected by the Gerns and in the 1.5 gravity they were succeeding in achieving only a heavy clumping.

They advanced steadily and as they drew closer he saw that in the right hand of each Gern soldier was a blaster while in the left hand of each could be seen the metallic glitter of chains. Schroeder smiled thinly. “It looks like they want to subject about a dozen of us to some painful questioning.”

No one else was any longer in sight and the Gerns came straight toward the three on the steps. They stopped forty feet away at a word of command from the officer and Gerns and Ragnarok men exchanged silent stares; the faces of the Ragnarok men bearded and expressionless, the faces of the Gerns hairless and reflecting a contemptuous curiosity.

“Narth!” The communicator on the Gern officer’s belt spoke with metallic authority. “What do they look like? Did we come two hundred light-years to view some animated vegetables?”

“No, Commander,” Narth answered. “I think the discard of the Rejects two hundred years ago has produced for us an unexpected reward. There are three natives under the canopy before me and their physical perfection and complete adaptation to this hellish gravity is astonishing.”

“They could be used to replace expensive machines on some of the outer world mines,” the commander said, “providing their intelligence isn’t too abysmally low. What about that?”

“They can surely be taught to perform simple manual labor,” Narth answered.

“Get on with your job,” the commander said. “Try to pick some of the most intelligent looking ones for questioning—I can’t believe these cattle sent that message and they’re going to tell us who did. And pick some young, strong ones for the medical staff to examine—ones that won’t curl up and die after the first few cuts of the knife.”

“We’ll chain these three first,” Narth said. He lifted his hand in an imperious gesture to Humbolt and the other two and ordered in accented Terran: “Come here!”

No one moved and he said again, sharply, “
Come here
!”

Again no one moved and the minor officer beside Narth said, “Apparently they can’t even understand Terran now.”

“Then we’ll give them some action they can understand,” Narth snapped, his face flushing with irritation. “We’ll drag them out by their heels!”

The Gerns advanced purposefully, three of them holstering their blasters to make their chains ready. When they had passed under the canopy and could not be seen from the ship Humbolt spoke:

“All right, Jimmy.”

The Gerns froze in midstride, suspicion flashing across their faces.

“Look up on the roof,” he said in Gern.

They looked, and the suspicion became gaping dismay.

“You can be our prisoners or you can be corpses,” he said. “We don’t care which.”

The urgent hiss of Narth’s command broke their indecision:

“Kill them!”

Six of them tried to obey, bringing up their blasters in movements that seemed curiously heavy and slow, as though the gravity of Ragnarok had turned their arms to wood. Three of them almost lifted their blasters high enough to fire at the steps in front of them before arrows went through their throats. The other three did not get that far.