The Worshippers | Page 3

door of the lock
swung open.
"Well, I should think so!" said Weaver. He stepped forward again--But
his eyes were beginning to water. There was an intolerable tickling far
back in his nostrils. He was going to--he was--
Eyes squeezed shut, his whole body contorted with 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