by Various
The newcomers were dressed in crisp, white uniforms; the woman wore a starched, white hat. They carried a tray of small, glass cylinders from which metal needles projected. While the woman held the tray, the man drove the needles through the caps of small bottles and filled the cylinders 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 this time. 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 too long for this; I don't want to muff it now. We've all the statistical proof we need, even to convince those pinchpenny halfwits. During the past eight years we've handled more than a thousand cases up here. On Earth they were pronounced incurable; we've sent better than eighty per cent back in good health after an average stay of fourteen months."
"No medical man has ever questioned the efficiency of cosmic radiation and a reduced atmospheric gravity, Dick."
"It's just our so-called statesmen, always yapping about the budget. But this time we have the cost problem licked, too. For a year and a half the 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 our appropriations."
Their glass tubes were full, and they turned toward the door. "It isn't right," the woman persisted, "for them not to send a piloted shuttle after you, Dick. It isn't dignified. You're our assistant medical director and--"
Her words were cut off as the door slid shut behind them. Mryna tried to fit this new information into what she already knew--or thought she knew--about the Earth-god. It didn't add up to a pretty picture. She had once asked for a definition of illness, and it was apparent to her that this place which they called the Guardian Wheel was an expensive hospital for Earthmen. It was paid for by the sacrificial ores mined on Rythar. In a sense, Rythar was being enslaved and exploited by Earth. True, it was not difficult to dig out the ore, but Mryna resented the fact that the kids on Rythar had not been told the truth. She had long ago lost her awe of the man called god; now she lost her respect as well.
Mryna was glad she had not seen him, glad no one knew she was aboard the Guardian Wheel. She would return to Rythar. After she told the others what she knew, Rythar would send up no more sacrifice ores. Let the Earthmen 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 heard footsteps, she hid in another dormitory room.
This was different from the others. It showed more evidence of permanent occupation. She guessed it was a dormitory for the people who took care of the sick. Pictures were fastened to the curved, metal walls. Personal articles cluttered the shelves hung beside the bunks. On a writing desk she saw a number of typed reports. Five freshly laundered uniforms, identical to the one she had lost in the antiseptic wash, hung on a rack behind the door. Mryna stripped off the makeshift she was wearing and put on one of the uniforms; she found boots under the desk. When she was dressed, she stood admiring herself in the polished surface of the metal door.
She was a handsome woman, and she was very conscious of that. Her face was tanned by the mist-filtered sunlight of Rythar; her lips were red and sensuous; her long, platinum-colored hair fell to her shoulders. She compared herself to the small, hard-faced female she had seen in the supply room. Was that a typical Earthwoman? Mryna's lips curled in a scornful 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 been written by a man who signed himself "Commander in Charge, Guardian Wheel," 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 thought vindictively, when we stop sending you the sacrifice ore.) Another report 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 ten thousand square miles. Our chemical analysis has been thorough, and we find nothing that could be remotely harmful to human life. Atmospheric samples produce the same negative results. On the other hand, we have direct evidence that no animal life has ever evolved on Rythar; the life cycle is exclusively botanical."
The soil samples, Mryna realized, would be the vials of Earth which the Earth-god had requested so often. Were the Earthmen planning to move their hospital down to Rythar? That idea disturbed her. Mryna did not want her garden world cluttered up with a lot of sick, old men discarded by Earth.
She turned to the second page of the report. "The original colony survived for a year. The Sickness in the Old Village developed only after the first harvest of Rytharian-grown food. It is more and more evident that the botanical cycle of Rythar must be examined before we find the answer. To do that adequately, we shall have to send survey teams to the surface; that requires much larger appropriations for research than we have had in the past. The metal immunization suits, which must, of course, be destroyed after each expedition--"
"And what, may I ask, is the meaning of this?"
Mryna dropped the report and swung toward the door. She saw a woman standing there--another hard-faced Earthwoman, with a starched, white cap perched on her graying hair.
"I must have come to the wrong room," Mryna said in a small voice.
"Indeed! Everyone knows this is command headquarters. Who are you?" The woman put her hand on Mryna's arm, and the fingers bit through the uniform into Mryna's flesh.
Mryna pulled away, drawing her shoulders back proudly. Why should she feel afraid? She stood a head taller than this dried up stranger; she knew the Earthwoman's strength would be no match for hers.
"My name is Mryna Brill," she said quietly. "I came up in a god-car from Rythar."
"Rythar?" The woman's mouth fell open. She whispered the word as if it were profanity. Suddenly she turned and ran down the rim corridor, screaming in terror.
She's afraid of me! Mryna thought. And that made no sense at all.
Mryna knew she had to get back to the god-car quickly. Since the Earthmen had built up the taboos in order to get their sacrifice ores from Rythar, they would do everything they could to prevent her return. She ran toward an intersecting spoke corridor. An alarm bell began to clang, and the sound vibrated against the metal walls. An armed man sprang from a side room and fired his weapon at Mryna. The discharge burned a deep groove in the wall.
So they would even kill her--these men who pretended to be gods!
Before the man could fire again, Mryna swung down a side corridor, and at once the sensation of weightlessness overtook her. She could not move quickly. She saw the armed man at the mouth of the corridor. Frantically she pushed open the door of a room, which was crowded with consoles of transmission machines. Three men were seated in front of the speakers. They jumped and came toward her, clumsily fighting the weightlessness.
Mryna caught at the door jamb and swung herself toward the ceiling. At the same time the armed man fired. The discharge missed her and washed against the transmission machinery. Blue fire exploded from the room. The three men screamed in agony. Concussion threw Mryna helplessly toward the rim again.
And the Guardian Wheel was plunged into darkness. Mryna's head swam; her shoulder seethed with pain where she had banged into the wall. She tried to creep toward the circular room, but she had lost her sense of direction and she found herself back on the rim.
The clanging bell had stopp
ed when the lights went out, but Mryna heard the panic of frightened voices. Far away someone was screaming. Running feet clattered toward her. Mryna flattened herself against the outer wall. An indistinct body of men shot past her.
"From Rythar," one of them was saying. "A woman from Rythar!"
"And we've blasted the communication center. We've no way of sending the warning back to Earth--"
They were gone.
Mryna moved back into the spoke corridor. She felt her way silently toward the circular hub room and the god-car. Suddenly very close she heard voices which she recognized--the man and the woman who had been talking in the supply room.
"You're still all right, Dick," the woman said. "She hasn't been here long enough to--"
"We don't know that. We don't know how it spreads or how quickly. We can't take the chance."
"Then ... then we've no choice?" Her voice was a small whisper, choked with terror.
"None. These have been standing emergency orders for twenty years. We always faced the possibility that one of them would escape. If we'd been allowed to use a different policy of education--but the politicians wouldn't permit that. The Wheel has to be destroyed, and we must die with it."
"Couldn't we wait and make sure?"
"It works too fast. None of us would be able to do the job--afterward."
The voices moved away. Mryna floated toward the hub room. She found the air lock and pulled herself into the god-car. The metal lock hissed closed and light came on. Then she knew she had made a mistake. This ship was not the one she had used when she came up from Rythar. The tiny cabin was fitted with a sleeping lounge, a food cabinet and a file of reading films. Above the lounge a mica viewplate gave her a broad view of the sky.
Mryna remembered that the man in the supply room had said he was waiting for an auto-pickup; he was on his way back to Earth. Mryna had taken his ship instead of her own. In panic she tried to open the door again, but she found no way to do it. Machinery beneath her feet began to hum. She felt a slight lurch as the pickup left the hub of the Guardian Wheel.
It swung in a wide arc. Through the viewplate she saw the enormous Wheel growing small behind her, silhouetted against the mist of Rythar. Suddenly the wheel glowed red with a soundless explosion. Its flaming fragments died in the void.
Mryna dropped weakly on the lounge. Nausea spun through her mind. The man had said they would destroy themselves. Because Mryna had come aboard? But why were they afraid of her? What possible harm could she do them? Mryna had left Rythar to discover the truth, and the truth was insanity. Was truth always like this--a bitter disillusionment, an empty horror?
She had something else to say to the people of Rythar now: not that the gods were men, but that men were mad. Believe in the taboos; send up the sacrificial ores. It was a small price to pay to keep that madness away from Rythar.
And Mryna knew she could not go back. With the Wheel gone, she could never return to Rythar; the auto-pickup was carrying her inexorably toward Earth. The scream of the machinery slowly turned shrill, hammering against her eardrums. The stars visible in the viewplate blurred and winked out. Mryna felt a twist of vertigo as the shuttle shifted from conventional speed into a time warp. And then the sound was gone. The ship was floating in an impenetrable blackness.
Mryna had no idea how much time passed subjectively. When she became hungry, she took food from the cabinet. She slept when she was tired. To pass the time, she turned the reading films through the projector.
Most of the film stored in the shuttle covered material Mryna already knew. The Earthmen, clearly, had not denied any information to Rythar. Only one thing had been restricted--astronomy. And that would have made no difference, if Mryna had not found the text in the ruins of the Old Village. The people on Rythar never saw the stars; they had no way of knowing--or caring--what lay above the rain mist.
Mryna was more interested in the history of Earth, which she had never known before. She studied the pictures of the great industrial centers and the crowded countryside. She was awed by the mobs in the city streets and the towering buildings. Yet she liked her own world more--the forests and the clear-running brooks; the vast, uncrowded, open spaces.
It puzzled her that the people of Earth would give the Rytharian paradise to a handful of children, when their own world was so overcrowded. Was this another form of the madness that had driven the people in the Wheel to destroy themselves? That made a convenient explanation, yet Mryna's mind was too logical to accept it.
One film referred to the founding of the original colony on Rythar, a planet in the Sirian System which had been named for its discoverer. Rythar, according to the film, was one of a score of colonies established by Earth. It was unbelievably rich in deposits of uranium.
That, Mryna surmised, was the name of the sacrificial ore they sent up in the god-cars.
The atmosphere and gravity of Rythar duplicated that of Earth; Rythar should have become the largest colony in the system. The government of Earth had originally planned a migration of ten million persons.
"But after twelve months the survey colony was destroyed by an infection," Mryna read on the projection screen, "which has never been identified. It is called simply the Sickness. The origin of this plague is unknown. No adult in the survey colony survived; children born on Rythar are themselves immune, but are carriers of the Sickness. The first rescue team sent to save them died within eight hours. No human being, aside from these native-born children, has ever survived the Sickness."
Now Mryna had the whole truth. She knew the motivation for their madness of self-destruction. It was not insanity, but the sublime courage of a few human beings sacrificing themselves to save the rest of their civilization. They smashed the Guardian Wheel to keep the Sickness there. And Mryna had already escaped before that happened! She was being hurled through space toward Earth and she would destroy that, too.
If she killed herself, that would in no way alter the situation. The ship would still move in its appointed course. Her body would be aboard; perhaps the very furnishings in the cabin were now infected with the germ of the Sickness. When the ship touched Earth, the fatal poison would escape.
Dully Mryna turned up another frame on the film, and she read what the Earthmen had done to help Rythar. They built the Guardian Wheel to isolate the Sickness. Sealed in metal immunization suits, volunteers had descended to the plague world and reared the surviving children of the colonists until they were old enough to look out for themselves. The answer house had been set up as an instructional device.
"As nearly as possible, the scientists in charge attempted to create a normal social situation for the plague carriers. They could never be allowed to leave Rythar, but when they matured enough to know the truth, Rythar could be integrated into the colonial system. Rytharian uranium is already a significant trade factor in the colonial market. An incidental by-product of the Guardian Wheel is the hospital facility, where advanced cases of certain cancers and lung diseases have been cured in a reduced gravity or by exposure to cosmic radiation."
Mryna shut off the projection. The words made sense, but the results did not. And she knew precisely why Earth had failed. When they matured--in those three words she had her answer.
And now it didn't matter. There was nothing she could do. Her ship was a poisoned arrow aimed directly at the heart of man's civilization.
Mryna had slept twice when the auto-pickup lurched out of the time drive and she was able to see the stars again. Directly ahead of her she saw an emerald planet, bright in the sun. And she knew instinctively that it was Earth.
A speaker under the viewport throbbed with the sound of a human voice.
"Auto-shuttle SC 539, attention. You are assigned landing slot seven-three-one, Port Chicago. I repeat, seven-three-one. Dial that destination. Do you read me?"
Three times the message was repeated before Mryna concluded that it was meant for her. She found three small knobs close to the speaker and a plastic toggle l
abeled "voice reply." She snapped it shut and found that she could speak to the Chicago spaceport.
Her problem was easily solved, then. She could say she came from Rythar. Without hesitation, Earth ships would be sent to blast her ship out of the sky before she would be able to land. But she knew she had to accomplish more than that; the same mistake must not be repeated again.
"How much time do I have?" she asked.
"Thirty-four minutes."
"Can you keep this shuttle up here any longer than that?"
"Lady, the auto-pickups are on tape-pilot. Come hell or high water, they land exactly on schedule."
"What happens if I don't dial the slot destination?"
"We bring you in on emergency--and you fork over a thousand buck fine."
Mryna asked to be allowed to speak to someone in authority in the government. The Chicago port manager told her the request was absurd. For nine minutes Mryna argued, with a mounting sense of urgency, before he gave his grudging consent. Her trouble was that she had to skate close to the truth without admitting it directly. She could not--except as a last resort--let them kill her until they knew why the isolation of Rythar had failed.
It was thirteen minutes before landing when Mryna finally heard an older, more dignified voice on the speaker. By then the green globe of Earth filled the sky; Mryna could make out the shapes of the continents turning below her. The older man identified himself as a senator elected to the planetary Congress. She didn't know how much authority he represented, but she couldn't afford to wait any longer.
She told him frankly who she was. She knew she was pronouncing her own death sentence, yet she spoke quietly. She must show the same courage that the Earthmen had when they sacrificed themselves in the Guardian Wheel.
"Listen to me for two minutes more before you blast my ship," she asked. "I rode the god-car up from Rythar--I am coming now to spread the Sickness on Earth--because I wanted to know the truth about something that puzzled me. I had to know what was above the rain mist. In the answer house you would not tell us that. Now I understand why. We were children. You were waiting for us to mature. And that is the mistake you made; that blindness nearly destroyed your civilization.