a cluster of tentacles at each end and another cluster belting them in the middle, all the tentacles gently moving and apparently propelling them. They were covered, including the tentacles, with a crystalline shell that had no visible opening, but there was an eye that swam under this shell anywhere along the body. What metabolic process they sustained in space could not be said. It probably was similar to that of the solar nautilus which floats in great colonies, paper shelled, on the pressure of light inside the orbit of Mercury, each colony like one vast resentful brain.

There were six of these worms. They gyrated in peculiar patterns, at one time joining their bodies to form a gigantic hoop around the ship. Different radiation patterns were made evident upon the ship's dials, and it was obvious that these vermiform beings were trying to communicate. Neither Hoag nor his two interpreters could make anything of the radiation patterns, and one of the interpreters, after trying hard, sat blindly in a corner and shivered.

Inferiority complex. Or that for a beginning while alien minds strove impatiently to penetrate the naked and shivering Earth minds. This was space, and worse it was space in the old times before warp-vibrant communication, before rattled Earthmen could scream to a home base for moral support.

The crew was still out there at the tubes when those worms came along, and before they could crawl or jet their way to the airlock, one of the worms plucked up a crew member. It was Able-bodied Spaceman Kroner, as capable and steady and fearless a man who ever had boarded the Lone Star. Kroner was seen at first to go rigid while the worm held him with two tentacles and looked him over with that submerged, swimming eye.

Suddenly Kroner blasted his oxygen-alcohol shoulder jets. The worm let him go and recoiled.

Suddenly Kroner blasted his shoulder jets.

Kroner slammed away into space, into nothingness. Suddenly, almost at the half-limit of his short supply of fuel, he turned on his own axis. He was expert, this Kroner, and had flipped his jet control so perfectly that he had turned a hundred and eighty degrees and for a couple of seconds he kept going directly backward on momentum against the jets' renewed forward blast. While that happened he jerked his arms and legs in a wild, running motion, running as though forward while still going backward. It was a comic thing to see.

But at the instant of equilibrium 

 Prev. P 5/12 next