pose. We won't
rebuild it."

George watched him questioningly.

"It's served its purpose," he said again. "It didn't let us forget that
the Gerns will come again. But that isn't enough, now. The first signal
won't reach Athena until the year two thirty-five. It will be the dead
of Big Winter again then. They'll have to fight the Gerns with bows and
arrows that the cold will make as brittle as glass. They won't have a
chance."

"No," George said. "They won't have a chance. But what can we do to
change it?"

"It's something I've been thinking about," he said. "We'll build a
hyperspace transmitter and bring the Gerns before Big Winter comes."

"We will?" George asked, lifting his dark eyebrows. "And what do we use
for the three hundred pounds of copper and five hundred pounds of iron
we would have to have to make the generator?"

"Surely we can find five hundred pounds of iron somewhere on Ragnarok.
The north end of the plateau might be the best bet. As for the copper--I
doubt that we'll ever find it. But there are seams of a bauxite-like
clay in the Western hills--they're certain to contain aluminum to at
least some extent. So we'll make the wires of aluminum."

"The ore would have to be refined to pure aluminum oxide before it could
be smelted," George said. "And you can't smelt aluminum ore in an
ordinary furnace--only in an electric furnace with a generator that can
supply a high amperage. And we would have to have cryolite ore to serve
as the solvent in the smelting process."

"There's a seam of cryolite in the Eastern Hills, according to the old
maps," said Lake. "We could make a larger generator by melting down
everything we have. It wouldn't be big enough to power the hyperspace
transmitter but it should be big enough to smelt aluminum ore."

George considered the idea. "I think we can do it."

"How long until we can send the signal?" he asked.

"Given the extra metal we need, the building of the generator is a
simple job. The transmitter is what will take years--maybe as long as
fifty."

_Fifty years...._

"Can't anything be done to make it sooner?" he asked.

"I know," George said. "You would like for the Gerns to come while
you're still here. So would every man on Ragnarok. But even on Earth the
building of a hyperspace transmitter was a long, slow job, with all the
materials they needed and all the special tools and equipment. Here
we'll have to do everything by hand and for materials we have