The Worshippers Read online

kit, slung just above his waist. There were handkerchiefsin the kit, he recalled suddenly. And he remembered what the guide hadsaid about Aurigean air.

  He tugged the kit open, fumbled and found a handkerchief. He zipped openthe closure of his helmet and tilted the helmet back. He brought up thehandkerchief, and gave himself over to the spasm.

  * * * * *

  He was startled by a hoarse boom, as if someone had scraped the stringsof an amplified bull fiddle. He looked around, blinking, and discoveredthat the sound was coming from the Aurigean. The monster, with itstentacles tightly curled around the tip of its body, was scuttling intothe corridor. As Weaver watched in confusion, it vanished, and a sheetof metal slid across the doorway.

  More boomings came shortly from a source Weaver finally identified as agrille over the control panels. He took a step that way, then changedhis mind and turned back toward the airlock.

  Just as he reached the nearer airlock door, the farther one swung openand an instant torrent of wind thrust him outward.

  Strangling, Weaver grabbed desperately at the door-frame as it went by.He swung with a sickening thud into the inner wall, but he hung on andpulled himself back inside.

  The force of the wind was dropping rapidly; so was the air pressure.Ragged black blotches swam before Weaver's eyes. He fumbled with hishelmet, trying to swing it back over his head; but it stubbornlyremained where it was. The blow when he struck the airlock wall, hethought dimly--it must have bent the helmet so that it would not fitinto its grooves.

  He forced himself across the room, toward the faint gleam of theAurigean control board--shaped like a double horseshoe it was, aroundthe two lattice-topped stools, and bristling with levers, knobs andsliding panels. One of these, he knew, controlled the airlock. Heslapped blindly at them, pulling, pushing, turning as many as he couldreach. Then the floor reeled under him, and, as he fell toward it,changed into a soft gray endless mist....

  * * * * *

  When he awoke, the airlock door was closed. His lungs were gratefullyfull of air. The Aurigean was nowhere to be seen; the door behind whichhe had disappeared was still closed.

  Weaver got up, stripped off his spacesuit, and, by hammering with thesole of one of the boots, managed to straighten out the dent in the backof the helmet. He put the suit back on, then looked doubtfully at thecontrol board. It wouldn't do to go on pulling things at random; hemight cause some damage. Tentatively, he pushed a slide he rememberedtouching before. When nothing happened, he pushed it back. He tried aknob, then a lever.

  The inner door of the airlock swung open.

  Weaver marched into it, took one look through the viewport set in theouter door, and scrambled back out. He closed the airlock again, andthought a minute.

  In the center of each horseshoe curve of the control board was a graytranslucent disk, with six buttons under it. They might, Weaver thought,be television screens. He pressed the first button under one of them,and the screen lighted up. He pressed the second button, then all theothers in turn.

  They all showed him the same thing--the view he had seen from theviewport in the airlock: stars, and nothing but stars.

  The Moon, incredibly, had disappeared. He was in space.

  * * * * *

  His first thought, when he was able to think connectedly again, was tofind the Aurigean and make him put things right. He tried all theremaining knobs and levers and buttons on the control board, reckless ofconsequences, until the door slid open again. Then he went down thecorridor and found the Aurigean.

  The creature was lying on the floor, with a turnip-shaped thing over itshead, tubes trailing from it to an opened cabinet in the wall. It wasdead--dead and decaying.

  He searched the ship. He found storerooms, with cylinders and bales ofstuff that looked as if it might possibly be food; he found the engineroom, with great piles of outlandishly sculptured metal and winkinglights and swinging meter needles. But he was the only living thing onboard.

  The view from all six directions--in the control room telescreens, andin the ship's direct-view ports alike--was exactly the same. The stars,like dandruff on Weaver's blue serge suit. No one of them, apparently,any nearer than the others. No way to tell which, if any of them, washis own.

  The smell of the dead creature was all through the ship. Weaver closedhis helmet against it; then, remembering that the air in his suit tankwould not last forever, he lugged the corpse out to the airlock, closedthe inner door on it, and opened the outer one.

  It was hard for him to accept the obvious explanation of the Aurigean'sdeath, but he finally came to it. He recalled something the guide hadsaid about the Aurigeans' susceptibility to Earthly infections. Thatmust have been it. That had been why the creature had bellowed and runto seal itself off from him. It was all his fault.

  If he had not sneezed with his helmet open, the Aurigean would not bedead. He would not be marooned in space. And the other Aurigeans, downon Earth, would not be marooned there. Though they, he decidedwistfully, would probably get home sooner or later. They knew where homewas.

  * * * * *

  As far as he could, he made himself master of the ship and its contents.He discovered, by arduous trial and error, which of the supposed foodsin the storerooms he could eat safely, which would make him sick, andwhich were not foods at all. He found out which of the control board'sknobs and levers controlled the engines, and he shut them off. Hestudied the universe around him, hoping to see some change.

  After nearly a month, it happened. One star grew from a brilliantpinpoint to a tiny disk, and each time he awoke it was larger.

  Weaver took counsel with himself, and pasted a small piece oftransparent red tape over the place on the telescreen where the starappeared. He scratched a mark to show where the star was on each ofthree succeeding "days." The trail crawled diagonally down toward thebottom of the screen.

  He knew nothing about astrogation; but he knew that if he were headingdirectly toward the star, it ought to stay in the same place on hisscreen. He turned on the engines and swung the steering arm downward.The star crawled toward the center of the screen, then went past. Weaverpainstakingly brought it back; and so, in parsec-long zigzags, he heldhis course.

  The star was now increasing alarmingly in brightness. It occurred toWeaver that he must be traveling with enormous speed, although he had nosensation of movement at all. There was a position on the scale aroundthe steering arm that he thought would put the engines into reverse. Hetried it, and now he scratched the apparent size of the star into thered tape. First it grew by leaps and bounds, then more slowly, thenhardly at all. Weaver shut off the engines again, and waited.

  The star had planets. He noted their passage in the telescreen, markedtheir apparent courses, and blithely set himself to land on the one thatseemed to be nearest. He was totally ignorant of orbits; he simplycentered his planet on the screen as he had done with the star, foundthat it was receding from him, and began to run it down.

  He came in too fast the first time--tore through the atmosphere like alost soul and frantically out again, sweating in the control room'ssudden heat. He turned, out in space, and carefully adjusted his speedso that ship and planet drifted softly together. Gently, as if he hadbeen doing this all his life. Weaver took the ship down upon a continentof rolling greens and browns, landed it without a jar--saw the landscapebegin to tilt as he stepped into the airlock, and barely got outsidebefore the ship rolled ten thousand feet down a gorge he had not noticedand smashed itself into a powdering of fragments.

  Two days later, he began turning into a god.

  II

  They had put him into a kind of enclosed seat at the end of a longrotating arm, counter-weighted at the opposite side of the aircarproper, and the whole affair swung gently in an eccentric path, aroundand around, and up and down as the aircar moved very slowly forwardthrough the village.

  All the houses were
faced with broad wooden balconies stained blood-redand turquoise, umber and yellow, gold and pale green; and all of thesewere crowded to bursting with the blue and white horny chests and thebig-eyed faces of the bug things. Weaver swung in his revolving seatpast first one level and another, and the twittering voices burst aroundhim like the stars of a Fourth-of-July rocket.

  This was the fifth village they had visited since the bug things hadfound him wandering in the mountains. At the first one, he had beenprobed, examined and twittered over interminably; then the aircar hadarrived, they had strapped him into this ridiculous seat and begun whatlooked very much like a triumphal tour. Other aircars, without therevolving arm, preceded and followed him. The slowly floating cars andtheir riders were gay with varicolored streamers. Every now and then oneof the bug things in the cars would raise a pistol-like object to fire apinkish streak that spread out, high in the air, and became a gentlydescending, diffusing cloud of rosy dust. And always the twittering roseand fell, rose and fell as Weaver revolved at the end of the swingingarm.

  One had to remember, he reminded himself, that Earthly parallels did notnecessarily apply. It was undignified, certainly, to be revolving like achild on a merry-go-round, while these crowds glared with bright alieneyes; but the important thing was that they had not once offered him anyviolence. They had not even put him into the absurd revolving seat byforce; they had led him to it gently, with a great deal of gesturing andtwittered explanation. And if their faces were almost nauseatinglyunpleasant--with the constantly-moving complexity of parts that he hadseen in live lobsters--well, that proved nothing except that they werenot human. Later, perhaps, he could persuade them to wear masks....

  * * * * *

  It was a holiday; a great occasion--everything testified to that. Thecolored streamers, the clouds of rosy dust like sky-rockets, the crowdsof people lined up to await him. And why not? Clearly, they had neverbefore seen a man. He was unique, a personage to be honored: a visitordescended from the heavens, clothed in fire and glory. Like theSpaniards among the Aztecs, he thought.

  Weaver began to feel gratified, his ego expanding. Experimentally, hewaved to the massed ranks of bug things as he passed them. A newexplosion of twittering broke out, and a forest of twiglike arms wavedback at him. They seemed to regard him with happy awe.

  "Thank you," said Weaver graciously. "Thank you...."

  In the morning, there were crowds massed outside the building where hehad slept; but they did not put him into the aircar with the revolvingarm again. Instead, four new ones came into his room after he had eatenthe strange red and orange fruits that were all of the bug diet he couldstomach, and began to twitter very seriously at him, while pointing tovarious objects, parts of their bodies, the walls around them, andWeaver himself.

  * * * * *

  After awhile, Weaver grasped the idea that he was being instructed. Hewas willing to co-operate, but he did not suppose for a moment that hecould master the bird-like sounds they made. Instead, he took an oldenvelope and a stub of pencil from his pocket and wrote the English wordfor each thing they pointed out. "ORANGE," he wrote--it was not anorange, but the color was the same, at any rate--"THORAX. WALL. MAN.MANDIBLES."

  In the afternoon, they brought a machine with staring lenses and brightlights. Weaver guessed that he was being televised; he put a hand on thenearest bug thing's shoulder, and smiled for his audience.

  Later, after he had eaten again, they went on with the language lesson.Now it was Weaver who taught, and they who learned. This, Weaver felt,was as it should be. These creatures were not men, he told himself; hewould give himself no illusions on that score; but they might still becapable of learning many things that he had to teach. He could do agreat deal of good, even if it turned out that he could never return toEarth.

  He rather suspected that they had no spaceships. There was somethingabout their life--the small villages, the slowly drifting aircars, theabsence of noise and smell and dirt, that somehow did not fit with theidea of space travel. As soon as he was able, he asked them about it. Nothey had never traveled beyond their own planet. It was a great marvel;perhaps he could teach them how, sometime.

  As their command of written English improved, he catechized them aboutthemselves and their planet. The world, as he knew already, was muchlike Earth as to atmosphere, gravity and mean temperature. It occurredto him briefly that he had been lucky to hit upon such a world, but thethought did not stick; he had no way of knowing just how improbable hisluck had been.

  They themselves were, as he had thought, simple beings. They had awritten history of some twelve thousand of their years, which heestimated to be about nine thousand of his. Their technicalaccomplishments, he had to grant, equalled Earth's and in some casessurpassed them. Their social organization was either so complex that itescaped him altogether, or unbelievably simple. They did not, so far ashe could discover, have any political divisions. They did not make war.

  They were egg-layers, and they controlled their population simply bymeans of hatching only as many eggs as were needed to replace theirnatural losses.

  * * * * *

  Just when it first struck Weaver that he was their appointed ruler itwould be hard to say. It began, perhaps, that afternoon in the aircar;or a few days later when he made his first timid request--for a house ofhis own. The request was eagerly granted, and he was asked how he wouldlike the house constructed. Half timidly, he drew sketches of his ownsuburban home in Schenectady; and they built it, swarms of them workingtogether, down to the hardwood floors and the pneumatic furniture andthe picture mouldings and the lampshades.

  Or perhaps the idea crystallized when he asked to see some of theirnative dances, and within an hour the dancers assembled on hislawn--five hundred of them--and performed until sundown.

  At, any rate, nothing could have been more clearly correct once he hadgrasped the idea. He was a Man, alone in a world of outlandishcreatures. It was natural that he should lead; indeed, it was his duty.They were poor things, but they were malleable in his hands. It was agreat adventure. Who knew how far he might not bring them?

  Weaver embarked on a tour of the planet, taking with him two of the bugthings as guides and a third as pilot and personal servant. Their namesin their own tongue he had not bothered to ask; he had christened themMark, Luke and John. All three now wrote and read English with fairproficiency; thus Weaver was well served.

  The trip was entirely enjoyable. He was met everywhere by the samethrongs, the same delight and enthusiasm as before; and betweenvillages--there seemed to be nothing on the planet that could be calleda city--the rolling green countryside, dotted with bosquets of yellow-and orange-flowered trees, was most soothing to the eye. Weaver notedthe varieties of strangely shaped and colored plants, and the swarms ofbright flying things, and began an abortive collection. He had to giveit up, for the present: there were too many things to study. He lookedforward to a few books to be compiled later, when he had time, for theguidance of Earthmen at some future date: _The Flora of Terranova_, _TheFauna of Terranova_....

  All that was for the distant future. Now he was chiefly concerned withthe Terranovans themselves--how they lived, what they thought, what sortof primitive religion they had, and so on. He asked endless questions ofhis guides, and through them, of the villagers they met; and the more helearned, the more agitated he became.

  * * * * *

  "But this is monstrous," he wrote indignantly to Mark and Luke. They hadjust visited a house inhabited by seventeen males and twelvefemales--Weaver was now beginning to be able to distinguish thesexes--and he had inquired what their relations were. Mark had informedhim calmly that they were husbands and wives; and when Weaver pointedout that the balance was uneven, had written, "No, not one to one. Allto all. All husband and wife of each other."

  Mark held Weaver's indignant message up to his eyes with onemany-jointed claw, while his o
ther three forelimbs gestured uncertainly.Finally he seized the note-pad and wrote, "Do not understand monstrous,please forgive. They do for more change, so not to make each other havetiredness."

  Weaver frowned and wrote, "Does not your religion forbid this?"

  Mark consulted in his own piping tongue with the other two. Finally hesurrendered the note-pad to Luke, who wrote: "Do not understand religionto forbid, please excuse. With us many religion, some say spirits inflower, some say in wind and sun, some say in ground. Not say to dothis, not to do that. With us all people the same, no one tell otherwhat to do."

  Weaver added another mental note to his already lengthy list: "Buildchurches."

  He wrote: "Tell them this must stop."

  Mark turned without hesitation to the silently attentive group, andtranslated. He turned back to Weaver and wrote, "They ask please, whatto do now instead of the way they do?"

  Weaver told him, "They must mate only one to one, and for life."

  To his surprise, the translation of this was greeted by unmistakabletwitterings of gladness. The members of the adulterous group turned toeach other with excited gestures, and Weaver saw a pairing-off processbegin, with much discussion.

  He asked Mark about it later, as they were leaving the village. "How isit that they did this thing before--for more variety, as you say--andyet seem so glad to stop?"

  Mark's answer was: "They very glad to do whatever thing you say. Youbring them new thing, they very happy."

  Weaver mused on this, contentedly on the whole, but with a smallundigested kernel of uneasiness, until they reached the next village.Here he found a crowd of Terranovans of both sexes and all ages at afeast of something with a fearful stench. He asked what it was; Mark'sanswer had better not be revealed. Feeling genuinely sick withrevulsion, Weaver demanded, "Why do they do such an awful thing? This isten times worse than the other."

  This time Mark answered without hesitation. "They do