he knew the Gerns had lied to them and
would never send a ship to take 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
s