The Survivors by Tom Godwin Page B

Rejects possessed.
    “Go back to your caves,” he said to the boys. “Go to bed and rest.”
    He looked at Bemmon. Bemmon’s eyes flinched away, refusing to meet his.
    “What few blankets we have are for babies and the very youngest children,” he said. His tone was coldly unemotional but he could not keep his fists from clenching at his sides. “You will return them at once and sleep on animal skins, as all the men and women do. And if you want grass for a mattress you will carry it yourself, as even the young children do.”
    Bemmon made no answer, his face a sullen red and hatred shining in the eyes that still refused to meet Lake’s.
    “Gather up the blankets and return them,” Lake said. “Then come on up to the central cave. We have a lot of work to do.”
    He could feel Bemmon’s gaze burning against his back as he turned away and he thought of what John Prentiss had once said:
    “I know he’s no good but he never has guts enough to go quite far enough to give me an excuse to whittle him down.”
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    Barber’s men arrived the next day, burdened with dried herbs. These were given to the seriously ill as a supplement to the ration of fruit and vegetable foods and were given, alone, to those not yet sick. Then came the period of waiting; of hoping that it was all not too late and too little.
    A noticeable change for the better began on the second day. A week went by and the sick were slowly, steadily, improving. The not-quite-sick were already back to normal health. There was no longer any doubt: the Ragnarok herbs would prevent a recurrence of the disease. It was, Lake thought, all so simple once you knew what to do. Hundreds had died, Chiara among them, because they did not have a common herb that grew at a slightly higher elevation. Not a single life would have been lost if he could have looked a week into the future and had the herbs found and taken to the caves that much sooner.
    But the disease had given no warning of its coming. Nothing, on Ragnarok, ever seemed to give warning before it killed.
    Another week went by and hunters began to trickle in, gaunt and exhausted, to report all the game going north up the plateau and not a single creature left below. They were the ones who had tried and failed to withstand the high elevation of the plateau. Only two out of three hunters returned among those who had challenged the plateau. They had tried, all of them, to the best of their ability and the limits of their endurance.
    The blue star was by then a small sun and the yellow sun blazed hotter each day. Grass began to brown and wither on the hillsides as the days went by and Lake knew summer was very near. The last hunting party, but for Craig’s and Schroeder’s, returned. They had very little meat but they brought with them a large quantity of something almost as important: salt. They had found a deposit of it in an almost inaccessible region of cliffs and canyons. “Not even the woods goats can get in there,” Stevens, the leader of that party, said. “If the salt was in an accessible place there would have been a salt lick there and goats in plenty.”
    “If woods goats care for salt the way Earth animals do,” Lake said. “When fall comes we’ll make a salt lick and find out.”
    Two more weeks went by and Craig and Schroeder returned with their surviving hunters. They had followed the game to the eastern end of the snow-capped mountain range but there the migration had drawn away from them, traveling farther each day than they could travel. They had almost waited too long before turning back: the grass at the southern end of the plateau was turning brown and the streams were dry. They got enough water, barely, by digging seep holes in the dry stream beds.
    Lake’s method of stalking unicorns under the concealment of a woods goat skin had worked well only a few times. After that the unicorns learned to swing downwind from any lone woods goats. If they smelled a man inside the goat