"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 of the suns.
He was returning from the lookout that day and he realized it was
exactly a year since he and the others had walked back to the caves
while Bemmon swung on the limb behind them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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