Free The Survivors by Tom Godwin Page A

been obliterated by drifting snow but the rope still hung from the dead limb, the noose swinging and turning in the wind.
    *
    *
    *
    Anders had made a Ragnarok calendar that spring, from data given him by John Prentiss, and he had marked the corresponding Earth dates on it. By a coincidence, Christmas came near the middle of the winter. There would be the same rationing of food on Christmas day but little brown trees had been cut for the children and decorated with such ornaments as could be made from the materials at hand.
    There was another blizzard roaring down off the plateau Christmas morning; a white death that thundered and howled outside the caves at a temperature of more than eighty degrees below zero. But inside the caves it was warm by the fires and under the little brown trees were toys that had been patiently whittled from wood or sewn from scraps of cloth and animal skins while the children slept. They were crude and humble toys but the pale, thin faces of the children were bright with delight when they beheld them.
    There was the laughter of children at play, a sound that had not been heard for many months, and someone singing the old, old songs. For a few fleeting hours that day, for the first and last time on Ragnarok, there was the magic of an Earth Christmas. That night a child was born to Julia, on a pallet of dried grass and prowler skins. She asked for her baby before she died and they let her have it.
    “I wasn’t afraid, was I?” she asked. “But I wish it wasn’t so dark—I wish I could see my baby before I go.”
    They took the baby from her arms when she was gone and removed from it the blanket that had kept her from learning that her child was still-born.
    There were two hundred and fifty of them when the first violent storms of spring came. By then eighteen children had been born. Sixteen were still-born, eight of them deformed by the gravity, but two were like any normal babies on Earth. There was only one difference: the 1.5
    gravity did not seem to affect them as much as it had the Earth-born babies. Lake, himself, married that spring; a tall, gray-eyed girl who had fought alongside the men the night of the storm when the prowlers broke into John Prentiss’s camp. And Schroeder married, the last of them all to do so.
    That spring Lake sent out two classes of bowmen: those who would use the ordinary short bow and those who would use the longbows he had had made that winter. According to history the English longbowmen of medieval times had been without equal in the range and accuracy of their arrows and such extra-powerful weapons should eliminate close-range stalking of woods goats and afford better protection from unicorns.
    The longbows worked so well that by mid-spring he could detach Craig and three others from the hunting and send them on a prospecting expedition. Prentiss had said Ragnarok was devoid of metals but there was the hope of finding small veins the Dunbar Expedition’s instruments had not detected. They would have to find metal or else, in the end, they would go back into a flint axe stage.
    Craig and his men returned when the blue star was a sun again and the heat was more than men could walk and work in. They had traveled hundreds of miles in their circuit and found no metals.
    “I want to look to the south when fall comes,” Craig said. “Maybe it will be different down there.”
    They did not face famine that summer as they had the first summer. The diet of meat and dried herbs was rough and plain but there was enough of it.
    Full summer came and the land was again burned and lifeless. There was nothing to do but sit wearily in the shade and endure the heat, drawing what psychological comfort they could from the fact that summer solstice was past and the suns were creeping south again even though it would be many weeks before there was any lessening of the heat. It was then, and by accident, that Lake discovered there was something wrong about the southward movement