or some reason the
man who played at being god wanted the kids to believe Rythar was Earth,
the totality of the universe enveloped in a cloud of mist. She knew that
because she once asked god what a planet was. The face on the screen in
the answer house became frigid with anger--or was it fear?--and the
Earth-god said:

"The word means nothing."

But late that night a very large god-car brought six metal men down
through the rain mist. They were huge, jointed things that clanked when
they walked. Four of them used weapons to herd the kids together in
their small settlement. The two others went to the Old Village and
blasted the ruins with high explosives.

Vaguely Mryna remembered that the metal men had been there before, when
the kids were still very small. They had built the new settlement and
they had brought food. They lived with the children for a long time, she
thought--but the memory was hazy.

As the years passed, Mryna's fear retreated and only one thing became
important: she knew the Earth-god was a man. On the fertile soil of
Rythar there were one hundred women and thirty men. All the boys had
taken mates before they reached seventeen. Seventy girls were left
unmarried, with no prospect of ever having husbands. A score or more
became second wives in polygamous homes, but plural marriage had no
appeal for Mryna. She was firmly determined to possess a man of her own.
And why shouldn't it be the Earth-god?

As her first step toward escape, Mryna volunteered for duty in the
answer house. For as long as she could remember, the answer house had
stood on a knoll some distance beyond the new settlement. It was a
square, one-room building, housing a speaking box, a glass screen and a
console of transmission machinery. Anyone in the settlement could
contact god and request information or special equipment.

God went out of his way to deluge them with information. The simplest
question produced voluminous data, transmitted over the screen and
photographed on reels of film. Someone had to be in the answer house to
handle the photography. The work was not hard, but it was monotonous.
Most of the kids preferred to farm the fields or dig the sacrificial
ore.

A request for equipment was granted just as promptly. Tools, machines,
seeds, fertilizers, packaged buildings, games, clothing--everything came
in a god-car. It was a large cylinder which hissed down from the rain
mist on a pillar of fire. The landing site was