But what if the cruiser never came?

It was a thought too dark and hopeless to be held. They were not asking
a large favor of fate, after two hundred years of striving for it; only
the chance to challenge the Gern Empire with bows and knives....

Fenrir stiffened, the fur lifting on his shoulders and a muted growl
coming from him. Then Humbolt heard the first whisper of sound; a faint,
faraway roaring that was not the wind.

He watched and listened and the sound came swiftly nearer, rising in
pitch and swelling in volume. Then it broke through the clouds, tall and
black and beautifully deadly. It rode down on its rockets of flame,
filling the valley with its thunder, and his heart hammered with
exultation.

It had come--the cruiser had come!

He turned and dropped the ten feet to the ground inside the stockade.
The warning signal was being sounded from the center of town; a unicorn
horn that gave out the call they had used in the practice alarms.
Already the women and children would be hurrying along the tunnels that
led to the temporary safety of the woods beyond town. The Gerns might
use their turret blasters to destroy the town and all in it before the
night was over. There was no way of knowing what might happen before it
ended. But whatever it was, it would be the action they had all been
wanting.

He ran to where the others would be gathering, Fenrir and Sigyn loping
beside him and the horn ringing wild and savage and triumphant as it
announced the end of two centuries of waiting.

* * * * *

The cruiser settled to earth in the area where it had been expected to
land, towering high above the town with its turret blasters looking down
upon the houses.

Charley Craig and Norman Lake were waiting for him on the high steps of
his own house in the center of town where the elevation gave them a good
view of the ship yet where the fringes of the canopy would conceal them
from the ship's scanners. They were heavily armed, their prowlers beside
them and their mockers on their shoulders.

Elsewhere, under the connected rows of concealing canopies, armed men
were hurrying to their prearranged stations. Most of them were
accompanied by prowlers, bristling and snarling as they looked at the
alien ship. A few men were deliberately making themselves visible not
far away, going about unimportant tasks with only occasional and
carefully disinterested glances toward the ship. They were