THE GUARDIANS
BY IRVING COX, JR.

[p54] Mryna Brill intended to ride thegod-car above the rain mist. For along time she had not believed inthe taboos or the Earth-god. She nolonger believed she lived on Earth.This paradise of green-floored forestsand running brooks was somethingcalled Rythar.

Six years ago, when Mryna wasfourteen, she first discovered thetruth. She asked a question and theEarth-god ignored it. A simple question,really: What is above the rainmist? God could have told her. Everyday he answered technical questionsthat were far more difficult. Instead,he repeated the familiar taboo aboutavoiding the Old Village because ofthe Sickness.

And consequently Mryna, beingfemale, went to the Old Village.There was nothing really unusualabout that. All the kids went throughthe ruins from time to time. Theyhad worked out a sort of charm thatmade it all right. They ran past theburned out shells of the old housesand they kept their eyes shaded toward off the Sickness.

But even at fourteen Mryna hadoutgrown charms and she didn’t believein the Sickness. She had onceasked the Earth-god what sicknessmeant, and the screen in the answerhouse had given her a very detailedanswer. Mryna knew that none of thehundred girls and thirty boys inhabitingRythar had ever been sick.That, like the taboo of the Old Village,she considered a childish superstition.

The Old Village wasn’t large—threeparallel roads, a mile long,lined with the charred ruins of prefabs,which were exactly like thecottages where the kids lived. It wasnothing to inspire either fear orlegend. The village had burned along time ago; the grass from theforest had grown a green mantle overthe skeletal walls.

For weeks Mryna poked throughthe ruins before she found anythingof significance—a few, scorchedpages of a printed pamphlet burieddeep in the black earth. The paperexcited her tremendously. It wasdifferent from the film books photographedin the answer house. Shehad never touched anything like it;and it seemed wonderful stuff.

She read the pamphlet eagerly. Itwas part of a promotional advertisementof a world called Rythar, “thejewel of the Sirian Solar System.”

The description made it obviousthat Rythar was the green paradisewhere Mryna lived—the place shehad been taught to call Earth. Andthe pamphlet had been addressed to“Earthmen everywhere.”

Mryna made her second find whenshe was fifteen, a textbook in astronomy.For the first time in her lifeshe read about the spinning dust ofthe universe lying beyond the eternalrain mist that hid her world.

The solid, stable Earth of herchildhood was solid and stable nolonger, but a sphere turning througha black void. Nor was it properlycalled Earth, but a planet namedRythar. The adjustment Mryna had[

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