ith you."

"How did you get through the barrier?" Nea asked.

Val lifted the umbrella-frame. "We have had the barrier for years. There
are strange beasts out there on the plain. This instrument allows us to go
through the barrier when we please."

"Then we can go to the city?" Gunnar exclaimed with a joyful war-whoop.
"To kill, and kill, and kill--"

"You are right," Ato admitted. "Delay will only increase Grim Hagen's
advantage. To the city--as fast as we can--"

CHAPTER 15

Val and his men had brought along enough of the umbrella-shaped defenses
to get them through the barrier.

They held a short council of war. It was agreed that every able-bodied man
would go into the city. Nea and a few of the older men were detailed to
stay by The Nebula and take care of the women and children.

Nea had screamed and protested against that. She had only agreed to stay
upon one condition: That she be left one of the umbrella-skeletons.

The nights, Odin learned, were about sixteen hours long on this dying
planet. It was toward midnight when they started out from the ship toward
the violet dome. The strange half-light still hovered over the ground. In
the sky, splinters of mauve tore at curtains of purplish flame. Something
like northern lights, they glinted and gleamed, wrestled and writhed. There
was no peace up there in that abandoned sky. But there was enough of that
unearthly light glimmering below for him to watch his footsteps.

They had brought every kind of weapon that they could lug with them.
Atomic machine-guns. Needle-nosed things that spat blobs of flame.
Anti-gravitational bombs. Bombs that swirled slowly toward the enemy
and cut him down with scythe-blades.

Gunnar had laughed at that. "Hang on to your sword and knife, Nors-King.
We will need them yet."

With the umbrella frames held over them, as though protecting them from a
flood, they went through the barrier. Beyond it, thousands of men rose up
from the scarred plain to join them. Val had a much larger following than
Odin had ever guessed. These men were swathed in long coats and capes.
Similar items of apparel were hastily furnished the crew of The Nebula--for
when they were through the barrier the temperature dropped to about thirty.
Once they passed through a thin swirl of snow.

Then something screamed at them out there in the night and came at them
like a juggernaut. It must have stood nearly fifty feet high, and came
rushing at them o