Space Prison | Page 5

us no matter how scared we are. For
ourselves and for our children. Above all else, for our children....
"I'm going back to find our clothes," she said. "You wait here for me, in
the shelter of that rock, and I won't be gone long."
Then she told him what he would be too young to really understand.
"I'm not going to cry any more and I know, now, what I must do. I'm

going to make sure that there is a tomorrow for you, always, to the last
breath of my life."
* * * * *
The bright blue star dimmed and the others faded away. Dawn touched
the sky, bringing with it a coldness that frosted the steel of the rifle in
John Prentiss's hands and formed beads of ice on his gray mustache.
There was a stirring in the area behind him as the weary Rejects
prepared to face the new day and the sound of a child whimpering from
the cold. There had been no time the evening before to gather wood for
fires----
"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