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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 stopped 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.