Space Prison | Page 4

guards snapped like whips around them as
she and the other Rejects crowded and stumbled down the boarding
ramp and out onto the rocky ground. There was the pull of a terrible
gravity such as she had never experienced and they were in a bleak,
barren valley, a cold wind moaning down it and whipping the alkali
dust in bitter clouds. Around the valley stood ragged hills, their white
tops laying out streamers of wind-driven snow, and the sky was dark
with sunset.
"Out from the ship--faster----"
It was hard to walk fast in the high gravity, carrying the bag in one
hand and holding up all of Billy's weight she could with the other.
"They lied to us!" a man beside her said to someone. "Let's turn and
fight. Let's take----"
A Gern blaster cracked with a vivid blue flash and the man plunged
lifelessly to the ground. She flinched instinctively and fell over an
unseen rock, the bag of precious clothes flying from her hand. She
scrambled up again, her left knee half numb, and turned to retrieve it.
The Gern guard was already upon her, his blaster still in his hand. "Out
from the ship--faster."
The barrel of his blaster lashed across the side of her head. "Move

on--move on!"
She staggered in a blinding blaze of pain and then hurried on, holding
tight to Billy's hand, the wind cutting like knives of ice through her thin
clothes and blood running in a trickle down her cheek.
"He hit you," Billy said. "He hurt you." Then he called the Gern a name
that five-year-old boys were not supposed to know, with a savagery
that five-year-old boys were not supposed to possess.
When she stopped at the outer fringe of Rejects she saw that all of them
were out of the cruiser and the guards were going back into it. A half
mile down the valley the other cruiser stood, the Rejects out from it and
its boarding ramps already withdrawn.
When she had buttoned Billy's blouse tighter and wiped the blood from
her face the first blast of the drives came from the farther cruiser. The
nearer one blasted a moment later and they lifted together, their roaring
filling the valley. They climbed faster and faster, dwindling as they
went. Then they disappeared in the black sky, their roaring faded away,
and there was left only the moaning of the wind around her and
somewhere a child crying.
And somewhere a voice asking, "Where are we? In the name of
God--what have they done to us?"
She looked at the snow streaming from the ragged hills, felt the hard
pull of the gravity, and knew where they were. They were on Ragnarok,
the hell-world of 1.5 gravity and fierce beasts and raging fevers where
men could not survive. The name came from an old Teutonic myth and
meant: The last day for gods and men. The Dunbar Expedition had
discovered Ragnarok and her father had told her of it, of how it had
killed six of the eight men who had left the ship and would have killed
all of them if they had remained any longer.
She knew where they were and she knew the Gerns had lied to them
and would never send a ship to take them to Earth. Their abandonment
there had been intended as a death sentence for all of them.

And Dale was gone and she and Billy would die helpless and alone....
"It will be dark--so soon." Billy's voice shook with the cold. "If Daddy
can't find us in the dark, what will we do?"
"I don't know," she said. "There's no one to help us and how can I
know--what we should do----"
She was from the city. How could she know what to do on an alien,
hostile world where armed explorers had died? She had tried to be
brave before the Gerns but now--now night was at hand and out of it
would come terror and death for herself and Billy. They would never
see Dale again, never see Athena or Earth or even the dawn on the
world that had killed them....
She tried not to cry, and failed. Billy's cold little hand touched her own,
trying to reassure her.
"Don't cry, Mama. I guess--I guess everybody else is scared, too."
Everyone else....
She was not alone. How could she have thought she was alone? All
around her were others, as helpless and uncertain as she. Her story was
only one out of four thousand.
"I guess they are, Billy," she said. "I never thought of that, before."
She knelt to put her arms around him, thinking: Tears and fear are
futile weapons; they can never bring us any tomorrows. We'll have to
fight whatever comes to kill