al skins while the children slept. They were crude and humble toys
but the pale, thin faces of the children were bright with delight when
they beheld them.

There was the laughter of children at play, a sound that had not been
heard for many months, and someone singing the old, old songs. For a few
fleeting hours that day, for the first and last time on Ragnarok, there
was the magic of an Earth Christmas.

That night a child was born to Julia, on a pallet of dried grass and
prowler skins. She asked for her baby before she died and they let her
have it.

"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. "Ma