It was hard to walk fast in the high gravity, carrying the bag in one
hand and holding up all of Billy's weight she could with the other.

"They lied to us!" a man beside her said to someone. "Let's turn and
fight. Let's take----"

A Gern blaster cracked with a vivid blue flash and the man plunged
lifelessly to the ground. She flinched instinctively and fell over an
unseen rock, the bag of precious clothes flying from her hand. She
scrambled up again, her left knee half numb, and turned to retrieve it.

The Gern guard was already upon her, his blaster still in his hand. "Out
from the ship--faster."

The barrel of his blaster lashed across the side of her head. "Move
on--move on!"

She staggered in a blinding blaze of pain and then hurried on, holding
tight to Billy's hand, the wind cutting like knives of ice through her
thin clothes and blood running in a trickle down her cheek.

"He hit you," Billy said. "He hurt you." Then he called the Gern a name
that five-year-old boys were not supposed to know, with a savagery that
five-year-old boys were not supposed to possess.

When she stopped at the outer fringe of Rejects she saw that all of them
were out of the cruiser and the guards were going back into it. A half
mile down the valley the other cruiser stood, the Rejects out from it
and its boarding ramps already withdrawn.

When she had buttoned Billy's blouse tighter and wiped the blood from
her face the first blast of the drives came from the farther cruiser.
The nearer one blasted a moment later and they lifted together, their
roaring filling the valley. They climbed faster and faster, dwindling as
they went. Then they disappeared in the black sky, their roaring faded
away, and there was left only the moaning of the wind around her and
somewhere a child crying.

And somewhere a voice asking, "Where are we? In the name of God--what
have they done to us?"

She looked at the snow streaming from the ragged hills, felt the hard
pull of the gravity, and knew where they were. They were on Ragnarok,
the hell-world of 1.5 gravity and fierce beasts and raging fevers where
men could not survive. The name came from an old Teutonic myth and
meant: _The last day for gods and men_. The Dunbar Expedition had
discovered Ragnarok and her father had told her of it, of how it had
killed six of the eight men who had left the ship and would have killed
all of them if they had remained any longer.

She knew where they were and s