The Worshippers | Page 4

six directions--in the control room telescreens, and in
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, was his
own.
The smell of the dead creature was all through the ship. Weaver closed
his helmet against it; then, remembering that the air in his suit tank
would not last forever, he lugged the corpse out to the airlock, closed
the inner door on it, and opened the outer one.
It was hard for him to accept the obvious explanation of the Aurigean's
death, but he finally came to it. He recalled something the guide had
said about the Aurigeans' susceptibility to Earthly infections. That must
have been it. That had been why the creature had bellowed and run to
seal itself off from him. It was all his fault.
If he had not sneezed with his helmet open, the Aurigean would not be
dead. He would not be marooned in space. And the other Aurigeans,
down on Earth, would not be marooned there. Though they, he decided
wistfully, would probably get home sooner or later. They knew where
home was.
* * * * *
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 foods
in the storerooms he could eat safely, which would make him sick, and
which were not foods at all. He found out which of the control board's

knobs and levers controlled the engines, and he shut them off. He
studied the universe around him, hoping to see some change.
After nearly a month, it happened. One star grew from a brilliant
pinpoint to a tiny disk, and each time he awoke it was larger.
Weaver took counsel with himself, and pasted a small piece of
transparent red tape over the place on the telescreen where the star
appeared. He scratched a mark to show where the star was on each of
three succeeding "days." The trail crawled diagonally down toward the
bottom of the screen.
He knew nothing about astrogation; but he knew that if he were
heading directly toward the star, it ought to stay in the same place on
his screen. He turned on the engines and swung the steering arm
downward. The star crawled toward the center of the screen, then went
past. Weaver painstakingly brought it back; and so, in parsec-long
zigzags, he held his course.
The star was now increasing alarmingly in brightness. It occurred to
Weaver that he must be traveling with enormous speed, although he
had no sensation of movement at all. There was a position on the scale
around the steering arm that he thought would put the engines into
reverse. He tried it, and now he scratched the apparent size of the star
into the red tape. First it grew by leaps and bounds, then more slowly,
then hardly at all. Weaver shut off the engines again, and waited.
The star had planets. He noted their passage in the telescreen, marked
their apparent courses, and blithely set himself to land on the one that
seemed to be nearest. He was totally ignorant of orbits; he simply
centered his planet on the screen as he had done with the star, found
that it was receding from him, and began to run it down.
He came in too fast the first time--tore through the atmosphere like a
lost soul and frantically out again, sweating in the control room's
sudden heat. He turned, out in space, and carefully adjusted his speed
so that ship and planet drifted softly together. Gently, as if he had been
doing this all his life. Weaver took the ship down upon a continent of

rolling greens and browns, landed it without a jar--saw the landscape
begin to tilt as he stepped into the airlock, and barely got outside before
the ship rolled ten thousand feet down a gorge he had not noticed and
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 long
rotating arm, counter-weighted at the opposite side of the aircar proper,
and the whole affair swung gently in an eccentric path, around and
around, and up and down as the aircar moved very slowly forward
through the village.
All the houses were faced with broad wooden balconies stained
blood-red and turquoise, umber and yellow, gold and pale green; and
all of these were crowded to bursting with the blue and white horny
chests and the big-eyed faces of the bug things. Weaver swung in his
revolving