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 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. Mryna remembered that the man in the supply room had said he was waiting for an auto-pickup; he was on his way back to Earth. Mryna had taken his ship instead of her own. In panic she tried to open the door again, but she found no way to do it. Machinery beneath her feet began to hum. She felt a slight lurch as the pickup left the hub of the Guardian Wheel. It swung in a wide arc. Through the viewplate she saw the enormous Wheel growing small behind her, silhouetted against the mist of Rythar. Suddenly the wheel glowed red with a soundless explosion. Its flaming fragments died in the void. Mryna dropped weakly on the lounge. Nausea spun through her mind. The man had said they would destroy themselves. Because Mryna had come aboard? But why were they afraid of her? What possible harm could she do them? Mryna had left Rythar to discover the truth, and the truth was insanity. Was truth always like this--a bitter disillusionment, an empty horror? She had something else to say to the people of Rythar now: not that the gods were men, but that men were mad. Believe in the taboos; send up the sacrificial ores. It was a small price to pay to keep that madness away from Rythar.