e Gerns
wouldn't get many slaves if they should come now."

"They could use however many they found," he answered. "The younger
ones, who are the best adapted to this gravity, would be exceptionally
strong and quick on a one-gravity world. There are dangerous jobs where
a strong, quick slave is a lot more efficient and expendable than
complex, expensive machines."

"And they would want some specimens for scientific study," Jim Lake
said. "They would want to cut into the young ones and see how they're
built that they're adapted to this one and a half gravity world."

He smiled with the cold mirthlessness that always reminded Humbolt of
his father--of the Lake who had been the _Constellation_'s lieutenant
commander. "According to the books the Gerns never did try to make it a
secret that when a Gern doctor or biologist cuts into the muscles or
organs of a non-Gern to see what makes them tick, he wants them to be
still alive and ticking as he does so."

Seventeen-year-old Don Chiara spoke, to say slowly, thoughtfully:

"Slavery and vivisection.... If the Gerns should come now when there are
so few of us, and if we should fight the best we could and lose, it
would be better for whoever was the last of us left to put a knife in
the hearts of the women and children than to let the Gerns have them."

No one made any answer. There was no answer to make, no alternative to
suggest.

"In the future there will be more of us and it will be different," he
said at last. "On Earth the Gerns were always stronger and faster than
humans but when the Gerns come to Ragnarok they're going to find a race
that isn't really human any more. They're going to find a race before
which they'll be like woods goats before prowlers."

"If only they don't come too soon," Craig said.

"That was the chance that had to be taken," he replied.

He wondered again as he spoke, as he had wondered so often in the past
years, if he had given them all their death sentence when he ordered the
transmitter built. Yet, the future generations could not be permitted to
forget ... and steel could not be tempered without first thrusting it
into the fire.

* * * * *

He was the last of the Young Ones when he awoke one night in the fall of
fifty-six and found himself burning with the Hell Fever. He did not
summon any of the others. They could do nothing for him and he had
already done all he could for them.

He had done all he