The Guardians

by Irving E. Cox

open.

  Mryna saw a circular room, brightly lighted with a glaring, blue light.The nature of her fear changed. This was the house of the Earth-god, butshe could not let him find her naked.

  She tried to run into the circular room. She found that the slightestexertion of her muscles sent her spinning through the air. She could notget her feet on the floor. There was no down and no up in that room. Shecollided painfully with the metal wall and she snatched at a lightbracket to keep herself from bouncing free in the empty air again.

  The god-car had landed against what was either the ceiling or the floorof the circular room. Mryna had no way of making a differentiation.Eight brightly lighted corridors opened into the side walls. Mryna heardfootsteps moving toward her down one of the corridors; she pulledherself blindly into another. As she went farther from the circularroom, a vague sense of gravity returned. At the end of the corridor shewas able to stand on her feet again, although she still had to walk verycarefully. Any sudden movement sent her soaring in a graceful leap thatbanged her head against the ceiling.

  Cautiously she opened a thick, metal door into another hall--and shestood transfixed, looking through a mica wall at the emptiness of spacepinpointed with its billions of stars. This was the reality of thecharts she had seen in the astronomy text: that knowledge alone savedher sanity. She had believed it when the proof lay hidden above the rainmist; she must believe it now.

  From where she stood, she was able to see the place where the god-carhad brought her--like a vast cartwheel spinning in the void. The god-carwas clamped against the hub, from which eight corridors radiated outwardlike wheel spokes toward the rim. Far below the gigantic wheel Mryna sawthe sphere of Rythar, invisible behind its shroud of glowing mist.

  She moved along the rim corridor, past the mica wall, until she came toa door that stood open. The room beyond was a sleeping compartment andit was empty. She searched it for clothing, and found nothing. She wentthrough four more dormitory rooms before she came upon anything shecould use--brief shorts, clearly made for a man, and a loose, whitetunic. It wasn't suitable; it wasn't the way she wanted to be dressedwhen she faced him. But it had to do.

  Mryna was pawing through a footlocker looking for boots when she heard ahesitant step behind her. She whirled and saw a small, stooped,white-haired man, naked except for trunks like the ones she was wearing.The wrinkled skin on his wasted chest was burned brown by the hot glareof the sun. Thick-lensed glasses hung from a chain around his neck.

  "My dear young lady," he said in a tired voice, "this is a men's ward!"

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know--"

  "You must be a new patient." He fumbled for his glasses. Instinctivelyshe knew she shouldn't let him see her clearly enough to identify her asa stranger. She shoved past him, knocking the glasses from his hand.

  "I'd better find my own--ward." Mryna didn't know the word, but shesupposed it meant some sort of sleeping chamber.

  The old man said chattily, "I hadn't heard they were bringing in any newpatients today."

  She was in the corridor by that time. He reached for her hand. "I'll seeyou in the sunroom?" It was a timid, hopeful question. "And you'll tellme all the news--everything they're doing back on Earth. I haven't beenhome for almost a year."

  She fled down the hall. When she heard voices ahead of her, she pulledback a door and slid into another room--a storeroom piled with cases ofmedicines. Behind the cartons she thought she would be safe.

  This wasn't what she had expected. Mryna thought there might be one manliving in a kind of prefab somehow suspended above the rain mist. Butthere were obviously others up here; she didn't know how many. And theold man frightened her--more than the dazzling sight of the heavensvisible through the mica wall. Mryna had never seen physical age before.No one on Rythar was older than she was herself--a sturdy, healthy,lusty twenty. The old man's infirmity disgusted her; for the first timein her life she was conscious of the slow decay of death.

  The door of the supply room slid open. Mryna crouched low behind thecartons, but she was able to see the man and the woman who had enteredthe room. A woman--here? Mryna hadn't considered that possibility.Perhaps the Earth-god already had a mate.

  The newcomers were dressed in crisp, white uniforms; the woman wore astarched, white hat. They carried a tray of small, glass cylinders fromwhich metal needles projected. While the woman held the tray, the mandrove the needles through the caps of small bottles and filled thecylinders with a bright-colored liquid.

  "When are you leaving, Dick?" the woman asked.

  "In about forty minutes. They're sending an auto-pickup."

  "Oh, no!"

  "Now don't start worrying. They have got the bugs out of it by thistime. The auto-pickups are entirely trustworthy."

  "Sure, that's what the army says."

  "In theory they should be even more reliable than--"

  "I wish you'd wait for the hospital shuttle."

  "And miss the chance to address Congress this year? We've worked toolong for this; I don't want to muff it now. We've all the statisticalproof we need, even to convince those pinchpenny halfwits. During thepast eight years we've handled more than a thousand cases up here. OnEarth they were pronounced incurable; we've sent better than eighty percent back in good health after an average stay of fourteen months."

  "No medical man has ever questioned the efficiency of cosmic radiationand a reduced atmospheric gravity, Dick."

  "It's just our so-called statesmen, always yapping about the budget. Butthis time we have the cost problem licked, too. For a year and a halfthe ore they send up from Rythar has paid for our entire operation."

  "I didn't know that."

  "We've kept it under wraps, so the politicians wouldn't cut ourappropriations."

  Their glass tubes were full, and they turned toward the door. "It isn'tright," the woman persisted, "for them not to send a piloted shuttleafter you, Dick. It isn't dignified. You're our assistant medicaldirector and--"

  Her words were cut off as the door slid shut behind them. Mryna tried tofit this new information into what she already knew--or thought sheknew--about the Earth-god. It didn't add up to a pretty picture. She hadonce asked for a definition of illness, and it was apparent to her thatthis place which they called the Guardian Wheel was an expensivehospital for Earthmen. It was paid for by the sacrificial ores mined onRythar. In a sense, Rythar was being enslaved and exploited by Earth.True, it was not difficult to dig out the ore, but Mryna resented thefact that the kids on Rythar had not been told the truth. She had longago lost her awe of the man called god; now she lost her respect aswell.

  Mryna was glad she had not seen him, glad no one knew she was aboard theGuardian Wheel. She would return to Rythar. After she told the otherswhat she knew, Rythar would send up no more sacrifice ores. Let theEarthmen come down and mine it for themselves!

  Very cautiously she pulled the door open. The rim corridor was empty.She moved toward one of the intersecting corridors. When she heardfootsteps, she hid in another dormitory room.

  This was different from the others. It showed more evidence of permanentoccupation. She guessed it was a dormitory for the people who took careof the sick. Pictures were fastened to the curved, metal walls. Personalarticles cluttered the shelves hung beside the bunks. On a writing deskshe saw a number of typed reports. Five freshly laundered uniforms,identical to the one she had lost in the antiseptic wash, hung on a rackbehind the door. Mryna stripped off the makeshift she was wearing andput on one of the uniforms; she found boots under the desk. When she wasdressed, she stood admiring herself in the polished surface of the metaldoor.

  She was a handsome woman, and she was very conscious of that. Her facewas tanned by the mist-filtered sunlight of Rythar; her lips were redand sensuous; her long, platinum-colored hair fell to her shoulders. Shecompared herself to the small, hard-faced female she had seen in thesupply room. Was that a typical Earthwoman? Mryna's lips curled in ascornful smile. Let the gods come down to Rythar, then, and discover
what a real female was like in the lush, green, Rytharian paradise.

  Mryna went to the desk and glanced at the typed reports. They had beenwritten by a man who signed himself "Commander in Charge, GuardianWheel," and they were addressed to the Congress of the world government.One typed document was a supply inventory; a second, still unfinished,was a budget report. (_You won't show a profit next time_, Mryna thoughtvindictively, _when we stop sending you the sacrifice ore_.) Anotherreport dealt with Rythar, and Mryna read it with more interest.

  One paragraph caught her attention,

  "We have asked for soil samples to be taken from an area covering tenthousand square miles. Our chemical analysis has been thorough, and wefind nothing that could be