between forward motion and backward motion, those in the Lone Star's control compartment caught Kroner's face at a high magnification upon the screen.

"He'd been frightened mad," Hoag said. "We didn't need any doctor to tell us. We saw his face. And what he was shrieking all that time was, 'Ma—Ma—Ma—Ma—'"

He came at Lone Star like a meteor, his arms outstretched as though running to the safety of maternal arms, and he hit the space ship so hard that he started a seam in her outer skin. Whether he was killed by the impact or by the rupture of his suit was a rhetorical question. The man's body exploded outward in frozen streamers through the rents in the suit. The space worm plucked him up, examined him, casually tore the broken suit and the corpse into pieces....

And, in the control compartment, the Second Officer began to scream and to hide, forcing his way into an impossible recess behind a switchboard.

Inferiority complex. That, the helpless psychologists always said, was at the root of the madness when space travelers' primitive fears and emotions were lashed up by the whip of space. Lampell, long ago, seemed to have brought back a virus from some planet, an endemic disease that took control of all but the most hearty when confronted by new, terrible, intelligent life forms.

"It was the cold knowingness of those worms," Hoag said reflectively. "It was the feeling that you were licked before you started. I felt the complex, and I had a terrible desire to escape my death. The only refuge for my mind, from those merciless minds, was in death. If I hadn't been a captain, with responsibility such an instinct within me, maybe I would have picked up a gun ... but I didn't."

He forced himself to try to communicate. There was radio and radar and the first model of the beam. They ignored them all. And finally, with an effort of will against the fear which literally sickened him, he put on a suit and went out upon the shell of Lone Star with a paint-spray. The worms watched while he painted for them that ancient, universal mathematical proposition, The sum of the squares of the sides equals the square of the hypotenuse.

They looked, with their horrible eyes. And finally, all together, they turned away in unmistakable disgust.

They began to build a little solar system.

Of nothingness they fashioned the black spheres—flipped them 

 Prev. P 6/12 next