The Space Barbarians
Ragnarok 02
(1964)*
Tom Godwin
The victory fleet was two days from Earth when the phantom ship appeared again.
It came without warning, as it always did. John Humbolt was in the control room of the Ragnarok, glancing idly at the forward view screen. It showed nothing but the featureless blackness of hyperspace, then the bright white spot was suddenly glowing in the center of it.
"Norman—it's here again," he said. He pushed the Weapons Stations Alert button and spoke into the ship's intercom: "The Ghost ship is dead ahead—this may be the time it shows us what it's after." Norman Lake came over to the viewscreen, a blond, silently moving man with the face of a pale-eyed wolf.
"Not Gern," Norman said, watching the white spot on the screen. "After three bloody years the Gern Empire is no more—yet the Ghost still follows us."
"I wonder if the things on the Ghost will scare the mockers again?" John said. "They always—"
His answer came in the racing patter of tiny feet as two of the chipmunk-like telepathic mockers came running into the control room. They did not stop until they were on John's shoulders, their little paws clinging tightly to his collar.
"Scared!" Tip chattered. Freckles, his mate, repeated, "Scared!"
He used Tip to speak to Dale Ord, who had just gone to the drive room:
"Bring Tiny at once, Dale. Let's see what she can tell us."
He formed the mental image of Dale as he spoke and Tip sent the message telepathically to Tiny, Dale's mocker, who would then repeat it aloud to Dale.
There was a flash of black in the doorway and the huge tiger-wolf prowlers, Fenrir and Sigyn, came loping in. They stopped beside John with the fur half lifted on their shoulders and both wariness and question in their yellow eyes.
John looked at the white spot on the screen again. It was not really an image of the Ghost. Their own ships were in second-level-hyperspace—while the Ghost ship was always in third-level. The white spot on the viewscreen, they felt sure, was caused by secondary radiations from the Ghost's spy-ray as it probed into second-level.
Dale Ord came into the room; dark-eyed, dark-haired, a big man with an air of amiable good nature which was always in such contrast to the animal-like alertness and thinly veiled savagery of the pale-eyed Norman.
"Tiny is terrified," Dale said. "What kind of alien monsters could scare her like that?"
She was trembling violently and he was stroking her in an attempt to quiet her. She was a frail little mutant, hypersensitive telepathically, and this was their first opportunity to use her when the Ghost ship was near.
"What are you afraid of, Tiny?" John asked.
"Not know," Tiny quavered. "Scared to look."
"You have to, Tiny," he said. "Now, go ahead and look. All of us here, and Fenrir and Sigyn, too, will never let this thing hurt you." he little mocker's dark, frightened eyes looked from face to face, down at the big prowlers, then back to John. Reluctantly, still near the point of terror, she said, "I look."
Her eyes went vacant as she opened her mind to receive with all mental shields down. Then she shrieked, jerked convulsively, and was dead. John said quickly, "Tip, what did Tiny see?"
"Not know!" Tip's reply came as such a frightened chatter that it was almost unintelligible. "Tiny know—Tiny die!"
"Were you enough in Tiny's mind to tell where the bad thing is?" Tip lifted a shaking paw to point toward the stern of the ship.
"That way—long, long that way."
The three men looked at one another. "That way—" the mocker had said. The Ghost ship was in the opposite direction. There was a silence as they realized what the little mocker could not tell them.
A long, long way in that direction lay the suns of Orion and the black, unknown Great Nebula.
"Is the bad thing still there?" John asked.
"So it's not on the Ghost, after all," John said to the others. "Yet there has to be a connection—the mockers are scared only when the Ghost is near."
"Six hundred light-years is a long way to send a ship to spy on us," Dale said. "What kind of things sent it—and why?"
They knew only that the Ghost ship was not Gern. Ten days ago the surrender of the Gern Empire had taken place on the Ragnarok. The Ragnarok had been poised above the smoldering remains of the luxury city where once the Gern leaders had feasted on rare foods, drank rare wines, and gloried in their power as they made decisions that affected the fates of worlds and the lives of billions. The humble surrender had been broadcast to all worlds formerly held by the Gerns and the surrender terms given; terms that freed every world and every race from any vestige of Gern control and contained grim provisions for the punishment of any individual or groups which might try to hinder the change to freedom and independence.
Had the Ghost belonged to the Gerns, they .would surely have used it. Now, the war was over and the Terran and Ragnarokan ships not needed for occupation duty were on their way to Earth, following the Ragnarok. John could see the other ships in the rear viewscreens—an armada of battleships, cruisers, scout ships, observation ships …
And the Ghost was waiting ahead of them all, sending it's spy-ray probing into every ship of the fleet.
The whiteness on the screen enlarged faster and faster as they neared the Ghost. They watched it, until the entire screen was white. Then, as suddenly as switching off a light, the whiteness was gone from the forward screen and was filling the rear screen instead.
"Well," Norman said, "we went through the Ghost again. How do we fight something like that?"
The whiteness on the rear screen dwindled in size. Then, when the entire fleet had passed it by, the Ghost ship suddenly accelerated. It took a course at an angle to the course of the fleet and was a diminishing white dot on the screen when it suddenly vanished.
Its course was almost straight toward their own world—Ragnarok. John looked at Dale and Norman and in their eyes he saw the reflection of his own thoughts: a little over four thousand women, children, and men too old for any kind of war duty, were on Ragnarok. They represented the entire race of Ragnarok but for the fifteen hundred men on the ships. They had one medium-duty disintegrator for protection, mounted on a hill beside the little town, and nothing else. The speed of the Ghost ship was twenty-five times the speed of the Ragnarok—there was no way in the universe by which they could overtake it
"I'll call Ragnarok," John said, turning to the hyperspace communicator. "Athena must be warned, too, in case the Ghost veers over that way. One of you have Commander Hayden notified, so he can take care of that, himself."
He sent the message of warning to Ragnarok; specifically, to old Dan Destry, who had the prime responsibility for the welfare of all the others. He ended with the words: "If we had anywhere near the speed of the Ghost, we would be on our way to Ragnarok at once. We may decide to do that within the next two hours, anyway."
He turned back to face the other two men, glad that the communicator he had just used transmitted at a velocity of ten thousand light-years a day. The message would cross the two hundred and sixty light-years in approximately thirty-seven minutes. The hyperspace transmitters known to Terrans or Gerns two hundred years before had had a transmission velocity of only five light-years a day.
"I told Hayden," Dale said. "He sounded almost sober. He's having Athena, and Earth, and all ships warned of what happened."
"The Ghost might be bound for a world hundreds of light-years beyond Ragnarok," John answered. "After all, there's nothing on Ragnarok for strangers but barren rocks and Hell Fever. But we'll see—we may decide to drop our diplomatic mission and head straight for home, anyway."
"To me," Norman said, "this diplomatic business never made sense. Why should we go on to Earth for a psuedo-friendly reception by a race that hates us?"
"Not really hatred," John answered. "In a way, it's understandable. Two thousand of us did in three years what hundreds of millions of Earthmen hadn't been able to do in two centuries. We'll be on Earth for only a day or two, then we'll go on."
"Gesture of respect," Dale said, smiling a little at Norman. "We want to see Mother Earth again, home of our forefathers, before we go back to our own world. This is to remind them that we're still brothers under the skin, and all that."
"Brothers? Norman asked. His lip curled. "Muties—that's what they call us behind our backs. We're mutants—accidental freaks—especially to the Athenans. They can all go to hell so far as I'm concerned." John was alone twenty minutes later when Earth's Grand Commander Hayden came in. Hayden was a tall man, tanned and hard by Earth standards, with a military bearing that was increased by his gray mustache and steel-blue eyes. There would have been both strength and dignity to him if it had not been for the bitterness which had kept increasing all through the war.
"Pardon me for intruding in your sanctum sanctorum, sir," Hayden said with the mocking courtesy characteristic of him. "I came to see if I could be of any assistance."
"Sit down, John invited. "And thanks—but all any of us can do is wait and see."
Hayden took a chair, almost misjudging the distance, and John knew he had been drinking more than his appearance indicated.
"There are two cruisers only ten light-years out from Athena and I've ordered them to go to Athena at full acceleration. That will give Athena a total of four cruisers and ten land-based heavy-duty disintegrators for protection there. I regret that we have no ships near Ragnarok."
"Well—it can't be helped," he said.
"Actually," Hayden said, "I feel that Ragnarok is in no danger. With all due respect to your people there, the world, itself, is far too grim and barren to be of any interest to a race capable of building a third-level ship. In two hundred years you found only five hundred pounds of iron, I understand."
"That's right."
Hayden leaned back in the chair and said, "But the empire-changing qualities of that quarter-ton of iron! Most certainly one of the more fascinating chapters in the story of Ragnarok, sir. No ship with which to escape from your prison world, so you converted that iron into a transmitter and lured a Gern cruiser into your trap. Crossbows, unicorns, and tame prowlers against Gern disintegrators and blasters—and you captured their cruiser. With that cruiser, even before reaching Athena, you captured this battleship. Remarkable feats, sir—most remarkable."
"What is your true opinion of the Ragnarokans, Hayden?" he asked curiously.
"Do you refer to their superior physiques, sir? Or do you refer to such intangible but sterling qualities as their lion-like courage, their reckless daring, their indomitable determination, and so on?"
There it is again, he thought. A Ragnarokan can't even ask an Earthman or Athenan the time of day without running into that resentment.
He looked at Hayden, irritated by him yet feeling sorry for him. Hayden had devoted his life to working toward the day when he would lead the forces of Earth to victory over the Gerns and make Earth forever free. But the Ragnarokans, not Hayden, had made the victory possible and had given the Gerns the surrender terms. Through no fault of his own, Hayden's name would never glow in the books of history as the man who ended the Two Hundred Years War …
"I mean the Ragnarokans as a race," he said to Hayden. "From the day the Gerns left the Rejects on Ragnarok to die."
"We were certain that no human could survive on Ragnarok. Imagine our astonishment when two thousand bold barbarians came bursting out of there to rescue us. From the caves to destruction of the Gern Empire in three years—a success story without parallel."
"Not three years," he said. "Two centuries. It wasn't easy—not on Ragnarok."
The Dunbar Expedition of two hundred and ten years before had discovered the hell-world and given it its name from Teutonic mythology: Ragnarok; the last day for gods and men. It had been classified as "Absolutely uninhabitable." It was devoid of metals, with no known edible plants, its long, elliptic orbit and two suns giving it extremes of summer heat and winter cold such as no human had ever known, the vicious prowlers and unicorns its dominant life forms, scourged by the Hell Fever, and with a 1.5 gravity to drag like a leaden weight, day and night. It was near Ragnarok that two Gern cruisers had intercepted the unarmed Constellation, bound for the rich, uninhabited, Earth-discovered world of Athena with her eight thousand colonists.
The Gerns had destroyed the Constellation's drive and then divided the colonists into two groups, the Acceptables and the Rejects; a division that mercilessly split families. The Acceptables were those whose skills might be of value to Gerns in their development of Athena—which they now claimed as their own—and the cruisers would take them on to Athena. Those whose skills were of little value to the Gerns—and virtually all the small children—were classified as Rejects and left in a cold, barren little valley on Ragnarok. Three hundred and seventy died the first night …
"I'm intelligent enough to realize that the Rejects must have endured unimaginable hardships," Hayden said in a somewhat different tone.
"Also, no doubt, they could have survived only by developing an extremely strong code of mutual trust and duty. There could have been no place for the selfish."
John thought of the rotting stump which still stood in front of the caves. It had been a tree that first terrible summer when six hundred and three emaciated scarecrows watched the yellow sun burn the land by day and the blue one burn it by night. Children were dying of malnutrition each day. Bemmon, the fault-finder, the only one who still carried a trace of fat, complained incessantly of his discomfort, blaming Vincent Lake and the other leaders for their plight and seeming never to hear the whimpers of the dying children. Then his cache of stolen food was found; food which he had been secretly eating at night and which would have been enough to have saved the lives of many children.
To Lake and the others, Bemmon's action was far more than theft. It was treason and the murder of children. Fifteen minutes later Bemmon was hanging from the tree …
Norman came back into the room, as silently as a prowler, and lifted his pale eyebrows in sardonic amusement at sight of Hayden. Hayden looked back with impersonal regard.
"It's about time we heard from Ragnarok, Johnny," Norman said. John saw by the chronometer that it was a minute past the expected time. "Any second now," he said.
Hayden stood up, and said, "If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I'll go now to take care of some of my own humble duties."
Norman smiled after Hayden and said when he was gone, "He'll never forgive us for busting up his playhouse. Hell always—" The communicator gave the signal that would precede the call from Ragnarok and both men listened.
"Hello, Johnny—"
It was not the gruff voice of old Dan Destry but the soft voice of Lora Lake.
"Your message just came," Lora said. "I'm on communicator duty right now, and I've sent for Dan. I know what Dan will tell you—go on to Earth. But I...
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