Too Soon To Die
Ragnarok 00
(1957)*
Venture Science Fiction Magazine, March 1957
Tom Godwin
The Constellation, bound for Athena with eight thousand colonists aboard, had not expected attack from the Gerns. There had been no indication when it left Earth that the cold war with the Gern Empire would suddenly flare into violence, and the world of Athena was a Terran discovery, four hundred light-years from the outer boundary of the Gern Empire.
The two Gern cruisers appeared without warning, and attacked with silent, vicious efficiency, demolishing the Constellation's stern and rendering her driveless and powerless. Her single obsolete blaster fired once in futile defense and was instantly destroyed, together with the forward control room.
Within seconds the Constellation was helpless and leaderless, her air regenerators lifeless. Gerns boarded her and a Gern officer delivered the ultimatum in quick, brittle words:
"A state of war now exists between the Gern Empire and Earth. The section of space, together with the planet Athena, is claimed as part of the Gern Empire.
"This ship has invaded Gern territory and fired upon a Gern cruiser, but we are willing to extend a leniency not required under the circumstances. Terran technicians and skilled workers in certain specific fields can be of use to us in the factories we shall build on Athena. The others will not be needed and there is not room on the cruisers to take them.
"You will be divided into two groups, the Acceptables and the Rejects. The Rejects will be taken by the cruisers to an Earth-type planet near here and left, together with ample supplies. The cruisers will then take the Acceptables on to Athena.
"This division will split families but there will be no resistance to it. At the first instance of rebellion the offer will be withdrawn and the cruisers will go on their way again."
There was no choice for the colonists. The air was already growing stale and within twenty hours they would start smothering to death. The division was made.
Six hours later the Rejects, four thousand of them, stood in a bleak, rocky valley, a 1.5 gravity dragging at them like a heavy burden, and watched the cruiser roar away into the gray sky. A moaning wind sent the alkali dust swirling in gray sky. A moaning wind sent the alkali dust swirling in cold, bitter clouds, and things like gigantic black wolves would already be seen gathering in the distance.
They realized fully, then, what had happened. They were on Ragnarok, the hell-world, and their abandonment there was intended to be a death sentence for all of them.
The bright blue star dimmed and 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 in his group prepared to face the new day. A child whimpered from the cold. There had not been time the evening before to gather enough firewood—
"Prowlers!"
The warning cry came from an outer guard as the enormous wolflike black shadows materialized out of the dark dawn, their white fangs gleaming in their devil's faces as they ripped through the outer guard line. Prentiss's rifle licked out thing tongues of flame as he added his fire to that of the inner guards. The prowlers came on, breaking through, but four of them went down and the others 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 in the dawn's dim light 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. For a moment her white face was turned in hopeless appeal to the others. Then she fell, deliberately, going to the ground with her child beneath her so that her body would protect it from the prowlers. A man was running toward her, slow in the high gravity, an axe in his hands and he cursing a raging, impotent snarl.
The prowlers passed over her, pausing for an instant as they slashed the life from her, and raced on again. They vanished into the outer darkness, the farther guards firing futilely. Then there was silence but for the distant, hysterical sobbing of a woman.
It had happened within seconds; the fifth prowler attack that night and by far the mildest...
Full dawn had come by the time John Prentiss replaced the two guards killed by the last attack and made the rounds of the other guards. 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.
It was Irene.
He stopped, gripping the rifle hard, not feeling the rear sight as it cut into his hand.
Irene ... He had not known she was on Ragnarok. His one consolation had been the thought that she and Billy were safe among the Acceptables ...
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 had to." 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. "I didn't know she was on Ragnarok till just now."
"Oh." The bold, brassy look was gone from her face for a moment, 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 renew the fires. Mary, one of the volunteer cooks, was asking two men to carry water when he approached. The smaller man picked up one of the clumsy containers, hastily improvised from canvas, and started for the creek, but the thick-chested man did not move.
"People are hungry and cold and sick," Mary said. "Aren't you going to help?"
The man continued to squat by the fire, his hands extended to its warmth. "Name somebody else," he said.
"But—"
Mary looked at Prentiss in uncertainty and 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 got quickly to his feet and swung to face him challengingly, his heavy shoulders hunched.
"You overlook one little point," he said. "No one has appointed you head cheese around here. Now, there's the container you want filled, old timer, and there—" he made a small motion with one hand "—is the creek. Do you know what to do?"
"Yes," Prentiss 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. He slumped to the ground, his eyes glazing and his broken jaw askew.
"Now, go ahead and name someone else," Prentiss said to Mary ...
He found that the prowlers had killed seventy of his group during the night. One hundred more had died from the Hell Fever that seemed to follow quickly behind exposure on Ragnarok and killed within an hour.
He went to the group that had arrived on the second cruiser to urge them to combine with his own group in their forthcoming move into the woods, where there would be ample fuel for the fires and some protection from the wind.
He found a leader in the second group, as he had known he would. It was a characteristic of human nature that leaders should appear in times of emergency.
His name was Lake, a man with cold blue eyes under pale brows and a smile as bleak as moonlight on an arctic glacier, and he agreed that they should move into the woods at once. "We'll have to combine," he said. "The prowlers raised hell here last night and I don't want that to happen again."
When the brief discussion of plans was finished and Prentiss was ready to go, Lake said, "It might be of help if we knew more about Ragnarok, besides its name." He quoted dryly, " 'the last days of gods and men.' "
"I was with the Dunbar Expedition that discovered Ragnarok," Prentiss said. "We didn't stay to study it very long—there wasn't any reason to. Six men died and we marked it on the chart as uninhabitable. The Gerns knew it—when they left us here they were giving us death."
"Yes." Lake looked out across the camp at the dead and the dying and the snow whipping from the frosty hills. "But it's too soon to die," he said.
The dead were buried in shallow graves and men set to work building crude shelters among the trees. Inventory was taken of the promised "ample supplies," which were no more than the few personal possessions that each Reject had been permitted to bring along. There was very little food, and its inventory of firearms and ammunition showed the total there to be discouragingly small.
There were a few species of herbivores on Ragnarok, the woods-goats in particular, but they would have to learn how to make and use bows and arrows as soon as possible.
An overcast darkened the sky and at noon black storm clouds came driving in from the west. Efforts were intensified to complete the move before the storm broke. Lake's group established itself beside his and by late afternoon they were ready.
The rain came at dark, a roaring downpour. The wind rose to a velocity that made the trees lean, and hammered and ripped at the hastily built shelters. Many of them were destroyed. The rain continued, growing colder and driven in almost horizontal sheets by the wind. One by one, the fires went out.
The rain turned to snow at midnight. Prentiss walked through it wearily, 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 effort and sacrifice on his part than on the part of those he led. He had thought that what little he knew of Ragnarok might help the others to survive. So he had taken charge, tolerating no dispute in his claim as leader. It was, he supposed, some old instinct that forbids the individual to stand calmly 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, in sudden, ferocious attack.
Twenty got through, past the slaughtered south guards, and charged in to the interior of the camp. As they did so, the call went up the guard lines: "Emergency guards—close in!"
Above the triumphant, demoniac yammering of the prowlers came the screams of women, the thinner cries of children, and the shouting and cursing of men as they tried to fight the prowlers with knives and clubs. Then the emergency guards—every third man from the east and west guard lines—came plunging through the snow, firing as they came.
The prowlers launched themselves away from their victims and toward the guards, leaving a woman to stagger aimlessly, blood spurting from a severed artery and splashing dark in the starlight on the white snow.
The air was filled with the cracking of gunfire and the deep, savage snarling of the prowlers. Ten of them got through, leaving four dead guards behind them. The other ten lay where they had fallen and the emergency guards turned to hurry back to their stations, reloading as they went.
The wounded woman was lying in the snow and a first-aid man knelt over her. He straightened, shaking his head, and joined the others as they searched for the injured among the prowlers' victims.
They found no injured, only the dead. The prowlers killed with grim efficiency.
"John—"
Chiara, in charge of the shelters in that section of the camp, hurried toward him, his dark eyes worried under ice-coated brows.
"The wood is soaked," he said. "It's going to take some time to get the fires going again. There are babies and small children who lost their mothers when the prowlers attacked. They're already cold and wet—they'll freeze to death before we can get the fires going."
Prentiss looked at the ten prowlers lying in the show and motioned toward them. "They're warm. Take out their guts."
"What—" Then Chiara's eyes lighted with comprehension and he hurried away without further questions.
He went on, to make the rounds of the guard stations. When he returned he saw that his order had been obeyed.
The prowlers lay in the snow as before, their fangs bared and their devils' faces twisted in their dying snarl. But snug and warm inside them, children slept.
There were three hundred dead when the wan sun lifted to shine down on the white, frozen land; two hundred from Hell Fever and one hundred from prowler attacks.
Lake reported approximately the same number of dead and said, "Our guards are too far apart."
"We'll have to move everyone in closer together," Prentiss agreed. "And we're going to have to have a stockade wall around the camp."
All were moved to the center of the camp area that day and work was started on building a log wall around the camp. When the prowlers came that night, they found a ring of guards and fires which kept most of them out.
Men moved heavily at their jobs as the days went by. Of all the forces on Ragnarok, the gravity was the worst. Even at night there was no surcease from it. Men fell into an exhausted sleep in which there was no real rest and from which they awoke tired and aching.
Each morning there would be some who did not awake at all, though their hearts had been sound enough for living on Earth or Athena.
But overworked muscles strengthened and men moved with a little less laborious effort. The stockade wall was completed on the twentieth day and the camp was prowler-proof. The prowlers changed their tactics then and began lying in wait for the daytime hunting parties.
The days became weeks, and the giant blue star that was the other component of Ragnarok's binary grew swiftly in size as it preceded the yellow sun earlier each morning. The season was spring; when summer came the blue star would be a sun as hot as the yellow sun and Ragnarok would be between them. The yellow sun would burn the land by day and the blue one would sear it by the night that would not be night. Then would come the brief fall, followed by the long, frozen winter when the yellow sun would shine pale and cold, far to the south, and the blue sun would be a star again, two hundred and fifty million miles away and invisible behind the cold yellow sun.
The cemetery was thirty graves long by thirty wide and more were added each day. To all the fact became grimly obvious; they were swiftly dying out and they had yet to face Ragnarok at its worst.
...
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