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 suit