The Survivors Read Free

them to Earth. Their abandonment there had been intended as a death sentence for all of them.
    And Dale was gone and she and Billy would die helpless and alone …
    “It will be dark—so soon.” Billy’s voice shook with the cold. “If Daddy can’t find us in the dark, what will we do?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s no one to help us and how can I know—what we should do—”
    She was from the city. How could she know what to do on an alien, hostile world where armed explorers had died? She had tried to be brave before the Gerns but now—now night was at hand and out of it would come terror and death for herself and Billy. They would never see Dale again, never see Athena or Earth or even the dawn on the world that had killed them
    …
    She tried not to cry, and failed. Billy’s cold little hand touched her own, trying to reassure her.
    “Don’t cry, Mama. I guess—I guess everybody else is scared, too.”
    Everyone else …
    She was not alone. How could she have thought she was alone? All around her were others, as helpless and uncertain as she. Her story was only one out of four thousand.
    “I guess they are, Billy,” she said. “I never thought of that, before.”
    She knelt to put her arms around him, thinking: Tears and fear are futile weapons; they can never bring us any tomorrows. We’ll have to fight whatever comes to kill us no matter how scared we are. For ourselves and for our children. Above all else, for our children …
    “I’m going back to find our clothes,” she said. “You wait here for me, in the shelter of that rock, and I won’t be gone long.”
    Then she told him what he would be too young to really understand.
    “I’m not going to cry any more and I know, now, what I must do. I’m going to make sure that there is a tomorrow for you, always, to the last breath of my life.”
    *
    *
    *
    The bright blue star dimmed and the others faded away. 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 prepared to face the new day and the sound of a child whimpering from the cold. There had been no time the evening before to gather wood for fires—
    “Prowlers!”
    The warning cry came from an outer guard and black shadows were suddenly sweeping out of the dark dawn.
    They were things that might have been half wolf, half tiger; each of them three hundred pounds of incredible ferocity with eyes blazing like yellow fire in their white-fanged tiger-wolf faces. They came like the wind, in a flowing black wave, and ripped through the outer guard line as though it had not existed. The inner guards fired in a chattering roll of gunshots, trying to turn them, and Prentiss’s rifle licked out pale tongues of flame as he added his own fire. The prowlers came on, breaking through, but part of them went down and the others were 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 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. A man was running toward her, slow in the high gravity, an axe in his hands and his cursing a raging, savage snarl. For a moment her white face was turned in helpless appeal to him and the others; then the prowlers were upon her and she fell, deliberately, going to the ground with her child hugged in her arms beneath her so that her body would protect it.
    The prowlers passed over her, pausing for an instant to slash the life from her, and raced on again. They vanished back into the outer darkness, the farther guards firing futilely, and there was a silence but for the distant, hysterical sobbing of a woman.
    It had happened