"No," George said. "They won’t have a chance. But what can we do to change it?"
"It’s something I’ve been thinking about," he said. "We’ll build a hyperspace transmitter and bring the Gerns before Big Winter comes."
"We will?" George asked, lifting his dark eyebrows. "And what do we use for the three hundred pounds of copper and five hundred pounds of iron we would have to have to make the generator?"
"Surely we can find five hundred pounds of iron somewhere on Ragnarok. The north end of the plateau might be the best bet. As for the copper—I doubt that we’ll ever find it. But there are seams of a bauxite-like clay in the Western hills—they’re certain to contain aluminum to at least some extent. So we’ll make the wires of aluminum."
"The ore would have to be refined to pure aluminum oxide before it could be smelted," George said. "And you can’t smelt aluminum ore in an ordinary furnace—only in an electric furnace with a generator that can supply a high amperage. And we would have to have cryolite ore to serve as the solvent in the smelting process."
"There’s a seam of cryolite in the Eastern Hills, according to the old maps," said Lake. "We could make a larger generator by melting down everything we have. It wouldn’t be big enough to power the hyperspace transmitter but it should be big enough to smelt aluminum ore."
George considered the idea. "I think we can do it."
"How long until we can send the signal?" he asked.
"Given the extra metal we need, the building of the generator is a simple job. The transmitter is what will take years—maybe as long as fifty."
Fifty years….
"Can’t anything be done to make it sooner?" he asked.
"I know," George said. "You would like for the Gerns to come while you’re still here. So would every man on Ragnarok. But even on Earth the building of a hyperspace transmitter was a long, slow job, with all the materials they needed and all the special tools and equipment. Here we’ll have to do everything by hand and for materials we have only broken and burned-out odds and ends. It will take about fifty years—it can’t be helped."
Fifty years … but that would bring the Gerns before Big Winter came again. And there was the rapidly increasing chance that a Gern cruiser would at any day intercept the first signals. They were already more than halfway to Athena.
"Melt down the generator," he said. "Start making a bigger one. Tomorrow men will go out after bauxite and cryolite and four of us will go up the plateau to look for iron."
Lake selected Gene Taylor, Tony Chiara and Steve Schroeder to go with him. They were well on their way by daylight the next morning, on the shoulder of each of them a mocker which observed the activity and new scenes with bright, interested eyes.
They traveled light, since they would have fresh meat all the way, and carried herbs and corn only for the mockers. Once, generations before, it had been necessary for men to eat herbs to prevent deficiency diseases but now the deficiency diseases, like Hell Fever, were unknown to them.
They carried no compasses since the radiations of the two suns constantly created magnetic storms that caused compass needles to swing as much as twenty degrees within an hour. Each of them carried a pair of powerful binoculars, however; binoculars that had been diamond-carved from the ivory-like black unicorn horn and set with lenses and prisms of diamond-cut quartz.
The foremost bands of woods goats followed the advance of spring up the plateau and they followed the woods goats. They could not go ahead of the goats—the goats were already pressing close behind the melting of the snow. No hills or ridges were seen as the weeks went by and it seemed to Lake that they would walk forever across the endless rolling floor of the plain.
Early summer came and they walked across a land that was green and pleasantly cool at a time when the vegetation around the caves would be burned brown and lifeless. The woods goats grew less in number then as some of them stopped for the rest of the summer in their chosen latitudes.
They continued on and at last they saw, far to the north, what seemed to be an almost infinitesimal bulge on the horizon. They reached it two days later; a land of rolling green hills, scarred here and there with ragged outcroppings of rock, and a land that climbed slowly and steadily higher as it went into the north.
They camped that night in a little vale. The floor of it was white with the bones of woods goats that had tarried too long the fall before and got caught by an early blizzard. There was still flesh on the bones and scavenger rodents scuttled among the carcasses, feasting.
"We’ll split up now," he told the others the next morning.
He assigned each of them his position; Steve Schroeder to parallel his course thirty miles to his right, Gene Taylor to go thirty miles to his left, and Tony Chiara to go thirty miles to the left of Taylor.
"We’ll try to hold those distances," he said. "We can’t look over the country in detail that way but it will give us a good general survey of it. We don’t have too much time left by now and we’ll make as many miles into the north as we can each day. The woods goats will tell us when it’s time for us to turn back."
They parted company with casual farewells but for Steve Schroeder, who smiled sardonically at the bones of the woods goats in the vale and asked:
"Who’s supposed to tell the woods goats?"
Tip, the black, white-nosed mocker on Lake’s shoulder, kept twisting his neck to watch the departure of the others until he had crossed the next hill and the others were hidden from view.
"All right, Tip," he said then. "You can unwind your neck now."
"Unwind—all right—all right," Tip said. Then, with a sudden burst of energy which was characteristic of mockers, he began to jiggle up and down and chant in time with his movements, "All right all right all right all right——"
"Shut up!" he commanded. "If you want to talk nonsense I don’t care—but don’t say all right any more."
"All right," Tip agreed amiably, settling down. "Shut up if you want to talk nonsense. I don’t care."
"And don’t slaughter the punctuation like that. You change the meaning entirely."
"But don’t say all right any more," Tip went on, ignoring him. "You change the meaning entirely."
Then, with another surge of animation, Tip began to fish in his jacket pocket with little hand-like paws. "Tip hungry—Tip hungry."
Lake unbuttoned the pocket and gave Tip a herb leaf. "I notice there’s no nonsensical chatter when you want to ask for something to eat."
Tip took the herb leaf but he spoke again before he began to eat; slowly, as though trying seriously to express a thought:
"Tip hungry—no nonsensical."
"Sometimes," he said, turning his head to look at Tip, "you mockers give me the peculiar feeling that you’re right on the edge of becoming a new and intelligent race and no fooling."
Tip wiggled his whiskers and bit into the herb leaf. "No fooling," he agreed.
He stopped for the night in a steep-walled hollow and built a small fire of dead moss and grass to ward off the chill that came with dark. He called the others, thinking first of Schroeder so that Tip would transmit to Schroeder’s mocker:
"Steve?"
"Here," Tip answered, in a detectable imitation of Schroeder’s voice. "No luck."
He thought of Gene Taylor and called, "Gene?"
There was no answer and he called Chiara. "Tony—could you see any of Gene’s route today?"