"I came, landed just now, from Earth."
"The Heaven of the Gods?" she murmured. "Oh, yes. Tell me. Surely I came from there, too. And you can remember it."
"I sure can. Ah-li, listen. What you've got to understand now—" Abruptly he checked himself. It wouldn't be easy to tell her. And then he had a queer thought. Was it right for him to destroy her faith in her own power to do good among the people of this world? Certainly he'd better find out what was here, first. And she probably would not believe him anyway.
"Tell me," he amended. "The Marlans—your people here."
Under his questions she told him with simple directness. The planetoid here was known as Marla. The Marlans were its only race. Not many of them now of recent generations—a few thousands, he gathered, most of whom lived in a settlement here in the forest only a short distance away.
"There were many, once," she was saying. "But always the rising of the terrible Genes killed them off. We have learned now to subdue the genes with the glow of the Drall-stone light."
The radiance of the Xarite. Her gesture indicated it. From here, on the forest top, the patch of its light-radiance showed plainly an Earth-mile or so away. Weird thing. So far as he could understand now, these genes seemed to be microscopic things of horror. At intervals, caused by the weather, or in rhythmic cycles of some mysterious process of nature, the genes abruptly grew from microscopic spores into ghastly monsters. But the radiance of the Xarite held them in check. So that of recent years the human Marlans had learned to use the Xarite against these monsters of the half-world. A barrage of the Xarite radiance was set up here to protect the Marlan settlement.
"I think I understand," Atwood said at last. "Queerly enough, I came here to get some of that Xarite, as we call it on Earth. It is needed there."
"In the God-realm they need—"
"Yes," he hastily agreed. "Anyway—Oh, well, never mind that."