The Dancers By WILTON HAZZARD _There was time now--plenty of time on this strange, dark planet--for those erudite exiles from frozen Earth to ponder the value of man's accumulated knowledge._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It was the hour before dawn. In the middle of the night the big ship had landed on the new planet, the satellite of the sun Proxima. Now they sat in the dark waiting, and they talked. "I wish we hadn't killed them," Rossiter said softly. His profile was faintly visible against the diffused light of the stars. "It's a bad sign, a bad start for a new life." "They attacked us," Bernard answered quickly. "Two spears, against forty blasters and stun guns?" Rossiter laughed. "An attack! We should have met them with stunners at low charge. But McNess ordered us to blast. The woman and the baby stick in my craw." "All our nerves were on edge," Bernard answered thoughtfully. "I know I was afraid when we first stepped out of the ship. There was something terrifying about air, and space, and the sky. But you're right, of course. We shouldn't have been ordered to blast." The two men were sitting a little apart, but there was a murmur of many low voices around them as the others from the _Elpis_ waited and talked. "I wonder why they attacked us?" Bernard went on. "Primitives usually run. We must have been an unbelievable sight to them, spiraling down out of the sky." "I don't know," Rossiter replied wearily. "And we can't ask them. They're dead, all five of them. That wind's cold." He was shivering. "You could go back inside the ship," Bernard said half-humorously. "I'm sick of the _Elpis_. We all are. Eight years of it--it's too much. We'll get used to the wind, I suppose. There's going to be lots of wind, with so much water and only this one land mass on our new world. It's not like Earth." Bernard made an involuntary movement. Then he relaxed. "I suppose the taboo is lifted now that we've landed," he said heavily. "We can talk about Earth again, and wonder, and speculate. I wonder what they're doing now on Earth." "Starving. Freezing. Burrowing into the ground for coal and warmth. They must be living a good many hundred feet down now, those that are left. And the seas are frozen. There's an ice sheet from pole to pole. "We astronomers paid you back finely, didn't we, Bernard, for all the appropriations you got us in committee meeting. You were always generous with us and the physicists. But when the catastrophe happened, the mystery, the debacle, we couldn't help. We didn't know the answer. We didn't know."