n they finally came the slow,
uneventful progression of decades and centuries might have brought a
false sense of security to the people of Ragnarok, might have turned the
stories of what the Gerns did to the Rejects into legends and then into
myths that no one any longer believed.

The Gerns would have to be brought to Ragnarok before that could happen.

* * * * *

He went to George Ord again and said:

"There's one kind of transmitter we could make a generator for--a plain
normal-space transmitter, dot-dash, without a receiver."

George laid down the diamond cutting wheel he had been working on.

"It would take two hundred years for the signal to get to Athena at the
speed of light," he said. "Then, forty days after it got there, a Gern
cruiser would come hell-bent to investigate."

"I want the ones of the future to know that the Gerns will be here no
later than two hundred years from now. And with always the chance that a
Gern cruiser in space might pick up the signal at any time before then."

"I see," George said. "The sword of Damocles hanging over their heads,
to make them remember."

"You know what would happen to them if they ever forgot. You're as old
as I am--you know what the Gerns did to us."

"I'm older than you are," George said. "I was nine when the Gerns left
us here. They kept my father and mother and my sister was only three. I
tried to keep her warm by holding her but the Hell Fever got her that
first night. She was too young to understand why I couldn't help her
more...."

Hatred burned in his eyes at the memory, like some fire that had been
banked but had never died. "Yes, I remember the Gerns and what they did.
I wouldn't want it to have to happen to others--the transmitter will be
made so that it won't."

* * * * *

The guns were melted down, together with other items of iron and steel,
to make the castings for the generator. Ceramic pipes were made to carry
water from the spring to a waterwheel. The long, slow job of converting
the miscellany of electronic devices, many of them broken, into the
components of a transmitter proceeded.

It was five years before the transmitter was ready for testing. It was
early fall of the year thirty-five then, and the water that gushed from
the pipe splashed in cold drops against Humbolt as the waterwheel was
set in motion.

The generator began to hum and George observed the output o