There were sixty of them in the fall of fifty, when all had been done that could be done to prepare for what might come.

“There aren’t many of the Earthborn left now,” Bob Craig said to him one night as they sat in the flickering light of a stove. “And there hasn’t been time for there to be many of the Ragnarok-born. The Gerns wouldn’t get many slaves if they should come now.”

“They could use however many they found,” he answered. “The younger ones, who are the best adapted to this gravity, would be exceptionally strong and quick on a one-gravity world. There are dangerous jobs where a strong, quick slave is a lot more efficient and expendable than complex, expensive machines.”

“And they would want some specimens for scientific study,” Jim Lake said. “They would want to cut into the young ones and see how they’re built that they’re adapted to this one and a half gravity world.”

He smiled with the cold mirthlessness that always reminded Humbolt of his father⁠—of the Lake who had been the Constellation ’s lieutenant commander. “According to the books the Gerns never did try to make it a secret that when a Gern doctor or biologist cuts into the muscles or organs of a non-Gern to see what makes them tick, he wants them to be still alive and ticking as he does so.”

Seventeen-year-old Don Chiara spoke, to say slowly, thoughtfully:

“Slavery and vivisection.⁠ ⁠… If the Gerns should come now when there are so few of us, and if we should fight the best we could and lose, it would be better for whoever was the last of us left to put a knife in the hearts of the women and children than to let the Gerns have them.”

No one made any answer. There was no answer to make, no alternative to suggest.