The Worshippers | Page 3

effort, he raised his arm to begin the desperate race once more. His hand brushed against something--his kit, slung just above his waist. There were handkerchiefs in the kit, he recalled suddenly. And he remembered what the guide had said about Aurigean air.
He tugged the kit open, fumbled and found a handkerchief. He zipped open the closure of his helmet and tilted the helmet back. He brought up the handkerchief, and gave himself over to the spasm.
* * * * *
He was startled by a hoarse boom, as if someone had scraped the strings of an amplified bull fiddle. He looked around, blinking, and discovered that the sound was coming from the Aurigean. The monster, with its tentacles tightly curled around the tip of its body, was scuttling into the corridor. As Weaver watched in confusion, it vanished, and a sheet of metal slid across the doorway.
More boomings came shortly from a source Weaver finally identified as a grille over the control panels. He took a step that way, then changed his mind and turned back toward the airlock.
Just as he reached the nearer airlock door, the farther one swung open and 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 and pulled 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 his helmet, trying to swing it back over his head; but it stubbornly remained where it was. The blow when he struck the airlock wall, he thought dimly--it must have bent the helmet so that it would not fit into its grooves.
He forced himself across the room, toward the faint gleam of the Aurigean control board--shaped like a double horseshoe it was, around the two lattice-topped stools, and bristling with levers, knobs and sliding panels. One of these, he knew, controlled the airlock. He slapped blindly at them, pulling, pushing, turning as many as he could reach. 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 gratefully full of air. The Aurigean was nowhere to be seen; the door behind which he had disappeared was still closed.
Weaver got up, stripped off his spacesuit, and, by hammering with the sole of one of the boots, managed to straighten out the dent in the back of the helmet. He put the suit back on, then looked doubtfully at the control board. It wouldn't do to go on pulling things at random; he might cause some damage. Tentatively, he pushed a slide he remembered touching before. When nothing happened, he pushed it back. He tried a knob, then a lever.
The inner door of the airlock swung open.
Weaver marched into it, took one look through the viewport set in the outer door, and scrambled back out. He closed the airlock again, and thought a minute.
In the center of each horseshoe curve of the control board was a gray translucent 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 the others in turn.
They all showed him the same thing--the view he had seen from the viewport 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 to find the Aurigean and make him put things right. He tried all the remaining knobs and levers and buttons on the control board, reckless of consequences, until the door slid open again. Then he went down the corridor and found the Aurigean.
The creature was lying on the floor, with a turnip-shaped thing over its head, tubes trailing from it to an opened cabinet in the wall. It was dead--dead and decaying.
He searched the ship. He found storerooms, with cylinders and bales of stuff that looked as if it might possibly be food; he found the engine room, with great piles of outlandishly sculptured metal and winking lights and swinging meter needles. But he was the only living thing on board.
The view from all 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,