The Survivors Read Online Free PDF Page B

his voice a little thick, “do you think I’ll tolerate this absurd situation?”
    “What situation?” Prentiss asked.
    “This stupid insistence upon confining me to manual labor. I’m the single member on Ragnarok of the Athena Planning Board and surely you can see that the bumbling confusion of these people”—Bemmon indicated the hurrying, laboring men, women and children around them—“can be transformed into efficient, organized effort only through proper supervision. Yet my abilities along such lines are ignored and I’ve been forced to work as a common laborer—a wood chopper!”
    He flung the hatchet down viciously, into the rocks at his feet, breathing heavily with resentment and challenge. “I demand the respect to which I’m entitled.”
    “Look,” Prentiss said.
    He pointed to the group just then going past them. A sixteen-year-old girl was bent almost double under the weight of the pole she was carrying, her once pretty face flushed and sweating. Behind her two twelve-year-old boys were dragging a still larger pole. Behind them came several small children, each of them carrying as many of the pointed stakes as he or she could walk under, no matter if it was only one. All of them were trying to hurry, to accomplish as much as possible, and no one was complaining even though they were already staggering with weariness.
    “So you think you’re entitled to more respect?” Prentiss asked. “Those kids would work harder if you were giving them orders from under the shade of a tree—is that what you want?”
    Bemmon’s lips thinned and hatred was like a sheen on his face. Prentiss looked from the single stake Bemmon had cut that morning to Bemmon’s white, unblistered hands. He looked at the hatchet that Bemmon had thrown down in the rocks and at the V notch broken in its keen-edged blade. It had been the best of the very few hatchets they had …
    “The next time you even nick that hatchet I’m going to split your skull with it,” he said.
    “Pick it up and get back to work. I mean work . You’ll have broken blisters on every finger tonight or you’ll go on the log-carrying force tomorrow. Now, move!”
    What Bemmon had thought to be his wrath deserted him before Prentiss’s fury. He stooped to obey the order but the hatred remained on his face and when the hatchet was in his hands he made a last attempt to bluster:
    “The day may come when we’ll refuse to tolerate any longer your sadistic displays of authority.”
    “Good,” Prentiss said. “Anyone who doesn’t like my style is welcome to try to change it—or to try to replace me. With knives or clubs, rifles or broken hatchets, Bemmon—any way you want it and any time you want it.”
    “I—” Bemmon’s eyes went from the hatchet in his half raised hand to the long knife in Prentiss’s belt. He swallowed with a convulsive jerk of his Adam’s apple and his hatchet-bearing arm suddenly wilted. “I don’t want to fight—to replace you—”
    He swallowed again and his face forced itself into a sickly attempt at an ingratiating smile.
    “I didn’t mean to imply any disrespect for you or the good job you’re doing. I’m very sorry.”
    Then he hurried away, like a man glad to escape, and began to chop stakes with amazing speed.
    But the sullen hatred had not been concealed by the ingratiating smile; and Prentiss knew Bemmon was a man who would always be his enemy.
    *
    *
    *
    The days dragged by in the weary routine, but overworked muscles slowly strengthened and people moved with a little less laborious effort. On the twentieth day the wall was finally completed and the camp was prowler proof.
    But the spring weather was a mad succession of heat and cold and storm that caused the Hell Fever to take its toll each day and there was no relaxation from the grueling labor. Weatherproof shelters had to be built as rapidly as possible.
    So the work of constructing them began; wearily, sometimes almost hopelessly, but without