The Survivors by Tom Godwin Page B

we could only reach them. Other minerals, too—I panned traces in the canyon bottoms. But no iron.”
    Lake examined the sheets of mica. “We could make windows for the outer caves of these,”
    he said. “Have them double thickness with a wide air space between, for insulation. As for the quartz crystals … ”
    “Optical instruments,” Craig said. “Binoculars, microscopes—it would take us a long time to learn how to make glass as clear and flawless as those crystals. But we have no way of cutting and grinding them.”
    Craig went to the east that fall and to the west the next spring. He returned from the trip to the west with a twisted knee that would never let him go prospecting again.
    “It will take years to find the metals we need,” he said. “The indications are that we never will but I wanted to keep on trying. Now, my damned knee has me chained to these caves … ”
    He reconciled himself to his lameness and confinement as best he could and finished his textbook: GEOLOGY AND MINERAL IDENTIFICATION.
    He also taught a geology class during the winters. It was in the winter of the year four on Ragnarok that a nine-year-old boy entered his class; the silent, scar-faced Billy Humbolt. He was by far the youngest of Craig’s students, and the most attentive. Lake was present one day when Craig asked, curiously:
    “It’s not often a boy your age is so interested in mineralogy and geology, Billy. Is there something more than just interest?”
    “I have to learn all about minerals,” Billy said with matter-of-fact seriousness, “so that when I’m grown I can find the metals for us to make a ship.”
    “And then?” Craig asked.
    “And then we’d go to Athena, to kill the Gerns who caused my mother to die, and my grandfather, and Julia, and all the others. And to free my father and the other slaves if they’re still alive.”
    “I see,” Craig said.
    He did not smile. His face was shadowed and old as he looked at the boy and beyond him; seeing again, perhaps, the frail blonde girl and the two children that the first quick, violent months had taken from him.
    “I hope you succeed,” he said. “I wish I was young so I could dream of the same thing. But I’m not … so let’s get back to the identification of the ores that will be needed to make a ship to go to Athena and to make blasters to kill Gerns after you get there.”
    Lake had a corral built early the following spring, with camouflaged wings, to trap some of the woods goats when they came. It would be an immense forward step toward conquering their new environment if they could domesticate the goats and have goat herds near the caves all through the year. Gathering enough grass to last a herd of goats through the winter would be a problem—but first, before they worried about that, they would have to see if the goats could survive the summer and winter extremes of heat and cold.
    They trapped ten goats that spring. They built them brush sunshades—before summer was over the winds would have stripped the trees of most of their dry, brown leaves—and a stream of water was diverted through the corral.
    It was all work in vain. The goats died from the heat in early summer, together with the young that had been born.
    When fall came they trapped six more goats. They built them shelters that would be as warm as possible and carried them a large supply of the tall grass from along the creek banks; enough to last them through the winter. But the cold was too much for the goats and the second blizzard killed them all.
    The next spring and fall, and with much more difficulty, they tried the experiment with pairs of unicorns. The results were the same.
    Which meant they would remain a race of hunters. Ragnarok would not permit them to be herdsmen.
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    The years went by, each much like the one before it but for the rapid aging of the Old Ones, as Lake and the others called themselves, and the growing up of the Young Ones. No woman among the Old