United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The god-car was clamped against the hub, from which eight corridors radiated outward like wheel spokes toward the rim. Far below the gigantic wheel Mryna saw the sphere of Rythar, invisible behind its shroud of glowing mist. She moved along the rim corridor, past the mica wall, until she came to a door that stood open. The room beyond was a sleeping compartment and it was empty.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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 time in her life she was conscious of the slow decay of death. The door of the supply room slid open. Mryna crouched low behind the cartons, but she was able to see the man and the woman who had entered the room.
She had once asked the Earth-god what sickness meant, and the screen in the answer house had given her a very detailed answer. Mryna knew that none of the hundred girls and thirty boys inhabiting Rythar had ever been sick. That, like the taboo of the Old Village, she considered a childish superstition.
Unless the equipment was unusually heavy, the attendant stationed in the house was expected to unload the god-car and pile aboard the sacrifice ores mined on Rythar. God asked two things from the settlement: the pieces of unusually heavy metal which they dug from the hills, and tiny vials of soil.
Word Of The Day