man frightened her—more than the dazzling sight of the heavens visible through the mica wall. Mryna had never seen physical age before. No one on Rythar was older than she was herself—a sturdy, healthy, lusty twenty. The old man’s infirmity disgusted her; for the first time in her life she was conscious of the slow decay of death.

The door of the supply room slid open. Mryna crouched low behind the cartons, but she was able to see the man and the woman who had entered the room. A woman—here? Mryna hadn’t considered that possibility. Perhaps the Earth-god already had a mate.

The newcomers were dressed in crisp, white uniforms; the woman wore a starched, white hat. They carried a tray of small, glass cylinders from which metal needles projected. While the woman held the tray, the man drove the needles through the caps of small bottles and filled the cylinders with a bright-colored liquid.

“When are you leaving, Dick?” the woman asked.

“In about forty minutes. They’re sending an auto-pickup.”

“Oh, no!”

“Now don’t start worrying. They have got the bugs out of it by this time. The auto-pickups are entirely trustworthy.”

“Sure, that’s what the army says.”

“In theory they should be even more reliable than—”

“I wish you’d wait for the hospital shuttle.”

“And miss the chance to address Congress this year? We’ve worked too long for this; I don’t want to muff it now. We’ve all the statistical proof we need, even to convince [p59]  those pinchpenny halfwits. During the past eight years we’ve handled more than a thousand cases up here. On Earth they were pronounced incurable; we’ve sent better than eighty per cent back in good health after an average stay of fourteen months.”

[p

59

]  

“No medical man has ever questioned the efficiency of cosmic radiation and a reduced atmospheric gravity, Dick.”

 Prev. P 7/17 next