The Worshippers | Page 8

spineless.
He wrote, "Take the aircar up farther, so that I can see this village from
above."
He signaled John to stop when they had reached a height of a few
hundred feet. From this elevation, he could see the village spread out
beneath him like an architect's model--the neat cross-hatching of
narrow streets separating the hollow curves of rooftops, dotted with the
myriad captive balloons launched in honor of his appearance.
The village lay in the gentle hollow of a wide valley, surrounded by the
equally gentle slopes of hills. To his right, it followed the bank of a
fair-sized river; in the other three directions the checkered pattern
ended in a careless, irregular outline and was replaced by the larger

pattern of cultivated fields.
It was a good site--the river for power, sanitation and transportation, the
hills for a sheltered climate. He saw suddenly, in complete, sharp detail,
how it would be.
"The trip is over," he wrote with sudden decision. "We will stay here,
and build a city."
III
The most difficult part was the number of things that he had to learn.
There was no trouble about anything he wanted done by others; he
simply commanded, and that was the end of it. But the mass of
knowledge about the Terranovans and their world before he came
appalled him not only by its sheer bulk but by its intricacy, the
unexplained gaps, the contradictions. For a long time after the founding
of New Washington--later New Jerusalem--he was still bothered a little
by doubt. He wanted to learn all that there was to learn about the
Terranovans, so that finally he would understand them completely and
the doubt would be gone.
Eventually he confessed to himself that the task was impossible. He
was forty-seven years old; he had perhaps thirty years ahead of him,
and it was not as if he were able to devote them solely to study. There
was the written history of the Terranovans, which covered minutely a
period of nine thousand years--though not completely; there were
periods and places which seemed to have left no adequate records of
themselves. The natives had no reasonable explanation of this
phenomenon; they simply said that the keeping of histories sometimes
went out of fashion.
Then there was the biology of the Terranovans and the countless other
organisms of the planet--simply to catalogue them and give them
English names, as he had set out to do, would have occupied him the
rest of his lifetime.
There was the complex and puzzling field of social relations--here

again everything seemed to be in unaccountable flux, even though the
over-all pattern remained the same and seemed as rigid as any primitive
people's. There was physics, which presented exasperating difficulties
of translation; there was engineering, there was medicine, there was
economics....
* * * * *
When he finally gave it up, it was not so much because of the simple
arithmetical impossibility of the job as because he realized that it didn't
matter. For a time he had been tempted away from the logical attitude
toward these savages of his--a foolish weakness of the sort that had
given him that ridiculous hour or two, when, he now dimly recalled, he
had been afraid of the Terranovans--afraid, of all things, that they were
fattening him for the sacrifice!
Whereas it was clear enough, certainly, that the former state of the
Terranovans, their incomprehensible society and language and customs,
simply had no practical importance. He was changing all that. When he
was through, they would be what he had made them, no more and no
less.
It was strange, looking back, to realize how little he had seen of his
destiny, there at the beginning. Timid little man, he thought half in
amusement, half contemptuously: nervous and fearful, seeing things
small. Build me a house, like the one I had in Schenectady!
They had built him a palace--no, a temple--and a city; and they were
building him a world. A planet that would be his to the last atom when
it was done; a corner of the universe that was Algernon James Weaver.
He recalled that in the beginning he had felt almost like these creatures'
servant--"public servant," he had thought, with self-righteous lukewarm,
pleasure. He had seen himself as one who built for others--the more
virtuous because those others were not even men.
But it was not he who built. They built, and for him.

It was strange, he thought again, that he should not have seen it from
the first. For it was perfectly clear and all of a pattern.
The marriage laws. Thou shalt not live in adultery.
The dietary laws. Thou shalt not eat that which is unclean.
And the logical concomitant, the law of worship. Thou shalt have no
gods