looking for boots when she heard a hesitant step behind her. She whirled and saw a small, stooped, white-haired man, naked except for trunks like the ones she was wearing. The wrinkled skin on his wasted chest was burned brown by the hot glare of the sun. Thick-lensed glasses hung from a chain around his neck.

[p58] “My dear young lady,” he said in a tired voice, “this is a men’s ward!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”

“You must be a new patient.” He fumbled for his glasses. Instinctively she knew she shouldn’t let him see her clearly enough to identify her as a stranger. She shoved past him, knocking the glasses from his hand.

“I’d better find my own—ward.” Mryna didn’t know the word, but she supposed it meant some sort of sleeping chamber.

The old man said chattily, “I hadn’t heard they were bringing in any new patients today.”

She was in the corridor by that time. He reached for her hand. “I’ll see you in the sunroom?” It was a timid, hopeful question. “And you’ll tell me all the news—everything they’re doing back on Earth. I haven’t been home for almost a year.”

She fled down the hall. When she heard voices ahead of her, she pulled back a door and slid into another room—a storeroom piled with cases of medicines. Behind the cartons she thought she would be safe.

This wasn’t what she had expected. Mryna thought there might be one man living in a kind of prefab somehow suspended above the rain mist. But there were obviously others up here; she didn’t know how many. And the old 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.”

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

“It’s just our so-called statesmen, always yapping about the budget. But this time we have the cost problem licked, too. For a year and a half the ore they send up from Rythar has paid for our entire operation.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“We’ve kept it under wraps, so the