“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 [p62] 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.