“Remember me, Billy, and this evening, and what I said to you, if you should ever be leader. Remember that it’s only through the children that we can ever survive and whip this world. Protect them while they’re small and helpless and teach them to fight and be afraid of nothing when they’re a little older. Never, never let them forget how they came to be on Ragnarok. Someday, even if it’s a hundred years from now, the Gerns will come again and they must be ready to fight, for their freedom and for their lives.”

He had been too young then to understand how truly she had spoken and when he was old enough his hatred for the Gerns had blinded him to everything but his own desires. Now, he could see.⁠ ⁠…

The children of each generation would be better adapted to Ragnarok and full adaptation would eventually come. But all the generations of the future would be potential slaves of the Gern Empire, free only so long as they remained unnoticed.

It was inconceivable that the Gerns should never pass by Ragnarok through all time to come. And when they finally came the slow, uneventful progression of decades and centuries might have brought a false sense of security to the people of Ragnarok, might have turned the stories of what the Gerns did to the Rejects into legends and then into myths that no one any longer believed.

The Gerns would have to be brought to Ragnarok before that could happen.

He went to George Ord again and said:

“There’s one kind of transmitter we could make a generator for⁠—a plain normal-space transmitter, dot-dash, without a receiver.”

George laid down the diamond cutting wheel he had been working on.

“It would take two hundred years for the signal to get to Athena at the speed of light,” he said. “Then, forty days after it got there, a Gern cruiser would come hell-bent to investigate.”