they were torn completely loose and flung
into the night.

One by one the guard fires went out and the rain continued, growing
colder and driven in almost horizontal sheets by the wind. The women and
children huddled in chilled misery in what meager protection the torn
shelters still gave and there was nothing that could be done to help
them.

The rain turned to snow at midnight, a howling blizzard through which
Prentiss's light could penetrate but a few feet as he made his rounds.
He walked with slogging weariness, forcing himself on. He was no longer
young--he was fifty--and he had had little rest.

He had known, of course, that successful leadership would involve more
sacrifice on his part than on the part of those he led. He could have
shunned responsibility and his personal welfare would have benefited. He
had lived on alien worlds almost half his life; with a rifle and a knife
he could have lived, until Ragnarok finally killed him, with much less
effort than that required of him as leader. But such an action had been
repugnant to him, unthinkable. What he knew of survival on hostile
worlds might help the others to survive.

So he had assumed command, tolerating no objections and disregarding the
fact that he would be shortening his already short time to live on
Ragnarok. It was, he supposed, some old instinct that forbade the
individual to stand aside and let the group die.

The snow stopped an hour later and the wind died to a frigid moaning.
The clouds thinned, broke apart, and the giant star looked down upon the
land with its cold, blue light.

The prowlers came then.

They feinted against the east and west guard lines, then hit the south
line in massed, ferocious attack. Twenty got through, past the
slaughtered south guards, and charged into the interior of the camp. As
they did so the call, prearranged by him in case of such an event, went
up the guard lines:

"Emergency guards, east and west--_close in!_"

In the camp, above the triumphant, demoniac yammering of the prowlers,
came the screams of women, the thinner cries of children, and the
shouting and cursing of men as they tried to fight the prowlers with
knives and clubs. Then the emergency guards--every third man from the
east and west lines--came plunging through the snow, firing as they
came.

The prowlers launched themselves away from their victims and toward the
guards, leaving a woman to stagger aimlessly with blood spurting from a
s