“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!”