weeping out of the dark dawn.

They were things that might have been half wolf, half tiger; each of
them three hundred pounds of incredible ferocity with eyes blazing like
yellow fire in their white-fanged tiger-wolf faces. They came like the
wind, in a flowing black wave, and ripped through the outer guard line
as though it had not existed. The inner guards fired in a chattering
roll of gunshots, trying to turn them, and Prentiss's rifle licked out
pale tongues of flame as he added his own fire. The prowlers came on,
breaking through, but part of them went down and the others were swerved
by the fire so that they struck only the outer edge of the area where
the Rejects were grouped.

At that distance they blended into the dark ground so that he could not
find them in the sights of his rifle. He could only watch helplessly and
see a dark-haired woman caught in their path, trying to run with a child
in her arms and already knowing it was too late. A man was running
toward her, slow in the high gravity, an axe in his hands and his
cursing a raging, savage snarl. For a moment her white face was turned
in helpless appeal to him and the others; then the prowlers were upon
her and she fell, deliberately, going to the ground with her child
hugged in her arms beneath her so that her body would protect it.

The prowlers passed over her, pausing for an instant to slash the life
from her, and raced on again. They vanished back into the outer
darkness, the farther guards firing futilely, and there was a silence
but for the distant, hysterical sobbing of a woman.

It had happened within seconds; the fifth prowler attack that night and
the mildest.

* * * * *

Full dawn had come by the time he replaced the guards killed by the last
attack and made the rounds of the other guard lines. He came back by the
place where the prowlers had killed the woman, walking wearily against
the pull of gravity. She lay with her dark hair tumbled and stained with
blood, her white face turned up to the reddening sky, and he saw her
clearly for the first time.

It was Irene.

He stopped, gripping the cold steel of the rifle and not feeling the
rear sight as it cut into his hand.

Irene.... He had not known she was on Ragnarok. He had not seen her in
the darkness of the night and he had hoped she and Billy were safe among
the Acceptables with Dale.

There was the sound of footsteps and a bold-faced girl in a red