Lake put the parchment sheets back together in their proper order. “Sometimes,” he said, “a ship’s officer has to do things that are contrary to all his own wishes.”

Schroeder drew a deep breath, his face sombre with the memories he had kept to himself.

“It was two years ago when the Gerns were still talking friendship to the Earth government while they shoved the colonists around on Venus. This Gern⁠ ⁠… there was a girl there and he thought he could do what he wanted to her because he was a mighty Gern and she was nothing. He did. That’s why I killed him. I had to kill two Venusian police to get away⁠—that’s where I put the rope around my neck.”

“It’s not what we did but what we do that we’ll live or die by on Ragnarok,” Lake said. He handed Schroeder the sheets of parchment. “Tell Craig to make at least four copies of this. Someday our knowledge of Gern blasters may be something else we’ll live or die by.”

The school and writing were interrupted by the spring hunting. Craig made his journey to the Plateau’s snow-capped mountain but he was unable to keep his promise to prospect it. The plateau was perhaps ten thousand feet in elevation and the mountain rose another ten thousand feet above the plateau. No human could climb such a mountain in a 1.5 gravity.

“I tried,” he told Lake wearily when he came back. “Damn it, I never tried harder at anything in my life. It was just too much for me. Maybe some of the young ones will be better adapted and can do it when they grow up.”

Craig brought back several sheets of unusually transparent mica, each sheet a foot in diameter, and a dozen large water-clear quartz crystals.

“Float, from higher up on the mountain,” he said. “The mica and crystals are in place up there if we could only reach them. Other minerals, too⁠—I panned traces in the canyon bottoms. But no iron.”