a way, that was a
help; we could slide wood down over it, and some of the billets would
slide a couple of hundred yards downstream. But the cold was getting
to us. We only had a few men working at woodcutting--Cesario, and old
Piet Dumont, and Abe Clifford and I, because we were the smallest and
could wear bigger men's parkas and overpants over our own. But as long
as any of us could pile on enough clothing and waddle out of the hut,
we didn't dare stop. If the firewood ran out, we'd all freeze stiff in
no time at all.

Abe Clifford got the radio working, at last. It was a peculiar job as
ever was, but he thought it would have a range of about five hundred
miles. Somebody kept at it all the time, calling Mayday. I think it
was Bish Ware who told me that Mayday didn't have anything to do with
the day after the last of April; it was Old Terran French, _m'aidez_,
meaning "help me." I wondered how Bish was getting along, and I wasn't
too optimistic about him.

Cesario and Abe and I were up at the waterfall, picking up loads of
firewood--we weren't bothering, now, with anything but the hard and
slow-burning cores--and had just gotten two of them hooked onto the
lifters. I straightened for a moment and looked around. There wasn't a
cloud in the sky, and two of Fenris's three moons were making
everything as bright as day. The glisten of the snow and the frozen
waterfall in the double moonlight was beautiful.

I turned to Cesario. "See what all you'll miss, if you take your next
reincarnation off Fenris," I said. "This, and the long sunsets and
sunrises, and--"

Before I could list any more sights unique to our planet, the 7-mm
machine gun, down at the boat, began hammering; a short burst, and
then another, and another and another.

13

THE BEACON LIGHT

We all said, "Shooting!" and, "The machine gun!" as though we had to
tell each other what it was.

"Something's attacking them," Cesario guessed.

"Oh, there isn't anything to attack them now," Abe said. "All the
critters are dug in for the winter. I'll bet they're just using it to
chop wood with."

That could be; a few short bursts would knock off all the soft wood
from one of those big billets and expose the hard core. Only why
didn't they use the cutter? It was at the boat now.

"We better go see what it is," Cesario insisted. "It might be
trouble."

None of us was armed; we'd never thought we'd need weapons. There are
quite a few Fenrisian land an