Mind Worms

One guest, however, distinctly annoyed him. It was Rupert Hoag, the last of the pioneers, that walking fossil from the first days of space travel. "Wide-open, Ambassador," he creaked with an antiquarian reference to atom-jets and a wave of his one hand that was not formal at all. Otherwise crippled from long-ago radiations was Hoag, but at a hundred and forty his one eye was bright. Probably he had not been invited to the gathering but just had barged in, being one of the half-dozen holders of High Privilege, that peculiar, all-inclusive reward for distinguished service. The trouble with Hoag was that he never would confine himself, like a decent old-timer, to remarking on the progress his years had seen.

This official farewell had a purpose. The men on Earth, secure and sane, were trying to give one last tenuous thread of security to the very sane, very well-adjusted (on Earth) Ambassador who in space was ready for a mental crack-up. No psychiatry or long-distance hypnosis had yet prevailed against the rampant inferiority, the primitive and infantile desire to crawl and hide which came often to Earthmen in the presence of alien, superior races. A foreigner who came to Earth they could respect and that was all; a foreigner met after a trip through space they met with their every fear and complex laid naked perhaps by artificial gravity, by unknown rays--by something.

Lampell, the first to make contact with the first unworldly race--Good Lord, Lampell actually had been a contemporary of leering old Hoag, there!--had met on Mars a cynical bunch of mental wizards who had had, and still had the most unholy good time with the bumbling Earthmen who would dare anything for trade. Of Lampell's crew, twelve out of forty returned sane, half-dead but sane, and the twelve did not include Lampell, first to set foot on Mars. That had been eighty years ago. Two other cultures were discovered in the next thirty years, those on Jupiter and upon Saturn's moon Phoebe. Always, the first few to expose their naked, terrified minds to a cosmic sophistication met the same fate. There was an old saying which the Ambassador now remembered a little too clearly:

Crazy as an ambassador....

The Ambassador jerked his hand away from his face. But all in Center Room had seen the desperate gesture, made as though one could wipe away fear.

"Say, Ambassador." That was old Hoag. "Say, Ambassador, I've been saving up something to tell you."

Annoyance ran around the ivory table. But High Privilege was High Privilege. All Hoag had to tell the public was that the Ten-year men hadn't been polite to him--

"Say, Ambassador, you know, I had a funny experience once, my first trip to Phoebe. Was the second trip made there, by the way. Mighty funny experience and it wasn't ever made public, because you know how things were." The old man chuckled rustily. "Nobody wanted to say anything against space travel until all the stock was sold. But I've been saving it up for a time just like this, to tell an Ambassador who's on a spot. Been saving up--" Hoag's mind seemed to skip, and he banged the table, laughing. "Yes sir, that was years before the Phoebean platinum scandal, and what Rupert Hoag ever had to do with that scandal, I'm not saying!"

The Ambassador said pointedly, "I understand that you were rather fortunate upon Phoebe, Captain Hoag." His voice was unsteady with anger. The President signalled across space, anxiously, that he should please be patient.

Hoag, still laughing and shaking his bald, scarred head reminiscently, settled back in his chair of little tension-bubbles. "Take a load off your feet, Ambassador, and listen. Wish I could give you a cigar."

The Ambassador took a load off his feet while the old man lit up in great comfort. As well, the Ambassador thought, to bore himself with Hoag while waiting for a Venusian signal as to pace about with jangling nerves. Soothing music, escapist motion pictures he could not listen to or look at, not in the grip of inferiority and fear.

Hoag blew a smoke ring. "Those days, a space ship didn't go much faster than that ring compared to nowadays. You know how we had to do when we headed for an outside planet? Took off in the direction of the Earth's revolution so our speed would be greater than Earth's and we'd tend to spiral away from the Sun, and we'd have to take a gravity-pull off a planet here and a gravity-pull off a planet there to detour us wherever we wanted to go. Many's the ship missed connections, or with the metal of those days she blew her tubes away and she's out there yet in an orbit, just a coffin. Or those that first tried for Venus but went into the Sun ... a lot of good friends of mine, Ambassador." The old man stared bleakly ahead of him for a moment.

"And of course there was just the radar that never could follow you much beyond five million miles. I was the first one to circle the Moon, y'know," he put in with senile pride. "Repaired a jet in mid-course. My hand came off a month later.

"But, as I was saying, this was on the way to Phoebe, and about a month out...."

The old man finally dug into his story and as he warmed up to it so did his listeners, although with a kind of self-apology for being interested in one of those gaudy old adventure yarns of the times when the long ships had to stand on their tails to blast off the Earth. They'd wobble up on polymerized liquid fuel, not daring to start the atom-blast till they were well beyond the atmosphere, then jerk away at the heads of their beautiful, wasteful fiery trains. Even the early atom-drive required conservation, so that it was necessary to take those long leap-frog curves from gravity-field to gravity-field, during which, as the ship coasted, its blast-eroded tube liners could be replaced.

The Lone Star, Hoag's ship--he was an unregenerate Texan--had to cut her drive on one of these occasions. A number of her crew, in shielded clumsy space suits, were at work at the stern upon those terrifically radio-active liners while they hoped for the best. Her primitive screens picked up some approaching objects and in a little while the great worms, almost as long as the 500-foot ship, faintly glowing, swam into plain view against the backdrop of illimitable stars.

"Worms," Hoag repeated, waving his cigar. "Space-worms."

They were perhaps ten times as long as they were thick, blunt-ended, with 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.