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Read Ebook: Mind Worms by Schere Moses McWilliams Al Illustrator
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Ebook has 75 lines and 7826 words, and 2 pages
"My suit! The dressers!" shouted the Ambassador. Remembering the Ten-year men who waited to reassure him, and badly needing one last contact--"Bring everything to the Earth screen!"
As he fled the room he saw, in the screen which showed Venus, a vast silvery ovoid lift momentarily to the surface of the vapor, then sink slightly and remain in a suggestion of menace neither in sight nor out of sight, waiting to engulf him.
When he faced the Earth screen two expert dressers flung themselves upon him with the pneumatic pads whose donning before the space suit took care and time. In Center Room, all the perfectly sane, shielded men attempted to convey by smiles their confidence in the shuddering creature being lapped in weirdness. The Ambassador strove with all his considerable mental power to hold the impression of those reassuring smiles.
And that doddering fool, Hoag, with his one arm waving unwanted friendliness, said, "Ahoy Ambassador! Now we can get to the point of that story."
A story about superior merciless beings, calculated to break the last weak thread of a man's confidence! "Shut up!" the Ambassador wanted to scream across space. And would have, had not the dressers jammed his mouth closed, at that moment, as they adjusted a throat pad.
On Earth, too, they tried to shut up Hoag but they couldn't. "I'm not the old fool you think I am," he said. "Listen! Ambassador--gentlemen, High Privilege!--Ambassador," he said urgently, "I told you I've been saving this story to tell an Ambassador at the last minute when he's in the spot you're in. I've been waiting fifty years. Listen!
"The vermiforms made this little solar system and we didn't understand, couldn't understand. We got our liners replaced finally and no more than half of us were capable of standing a watch when we blasted off. Ambassador, we blasted the hell out of there!
"The vermiforms stayed where they were for a few seconds. Then they began to follow. We were streaming a good train, of course, the old fission train, a couple of miles of very fancy destruction and waste. So the worms came along. They overtook us easy. And they began to dance in and out of our train.
"And I wanted to run and hide where my officer was hiding down among the mattresses we rigged for him among the girders along the keel. My mind was scarred by space and by everything that Earthmen were not born to--
"And then it happened."
Adjustments now had been made and the Ambassador could speak while the dressers almost threw him into the inner suit. His hand clawed his face and he said hoarsely, "For God's sake man, spare me!"
"And then it happened!" old Hoag shouted, thrusting away from those in the Center Room who were now trying physically to shut him up. "The worms died! They died in the atom-blast!"
The Ambassador stared, and around the ivory table they stared at the last of the pioneers.
"Died! The vermiforms' natural armor was proof against all the rays of space and it held out against the atom-blast for a quarter of minute. But then it went. One after the other they went limp and the blast spewed them backward and we could see the spreading holes in them. And then they were out of sight, dead, killed because they hadn't known any better, by George!
"And we went on to Phoebe and got along better than anyone else with the things that sit inside their crystals, thinking. Got the platinum nobody else could take. Because we knew that the universe can breed morons, incompetents! The crystal people are smarter than Earthmen, sure. But at least we knew we were smarter than somebody else!
"How could they?" the Ambassador echoed, and he was smiling.
"And that little trick of theirs, making a solar system. Well, don't you see that they had to show off? One of their natural functions is simply gathering and stacking together the scattered atoms of space. I'll bet they can't make anything but black balls of amorphous matter. It's possible they build themselves a little world here and there to lay their eggs on, or something. So, there they were feeling kind of abashed because they had no space ship or anything, so they just had to show us what they could do, and that they actually had gone and counted the planets of this system--on their tentacles, I'll bet, since they had more than nine tentacles. And wasn't it childish, getting together in the middle to show us a nice, glowing sun?"
They were locking the thorax section on the Ambassador. He stood straight and silent. Very straight.
"But you know now, the best way and the best minute I can tell you, that some pretty dumb creatures live beyond Earth. Now, the way my grandfather's grandfather used to say, you wouldn't start selling your horse to a stranger by telling him that your horse is no good?"
Silence, then, on the beam from Earth to Venus.
The dressers began to lower the helmet over the Ambassador's head. He stopped them. "Wait a minute."
Still that nakedness in his mind, and the fear ready to pounce again. But that was only an effect of space, not Venusians. Or was it simply Lampell's heritage. A conditioning?
And that contemptuous message, with its almost-impossible time limit and its pointed refusal to allow him to set foot upon Venus and its "representative of the fifth authority." He didn't know one way and he didn't know the other, but it could be a defense mechanism on the Venusians' part.
In Center Room an old, old man had slumped in his chair, exhausted, reduced to crippled flesh that bore one bright, brave Earthman's eye. The Ambassador waved. The old-timer waved back eagerly.
"Gentlemen," said the Ambassador formally, but he spoke to the one adventurer, "I thought I was in a hurry but I've decided I've plenty of time. I think it will be a very good idea to open these negotiations by keeping the other party waiting."
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