MIND WORMS

                            By Moses Schere

                 Glowing softly out there in the black
                nothingness--writhing evilly--what was
                their terrible power that could drive a
                ship's crew gibbering out the airlocks?

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories Spring 1948.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The ambassador, whose smile had grown fixed, whose thin, broad-domed
face was lined and tired, bowed before the screen saying, "Thank
you--thank you."

On Earth, 26,000,000 miles away, a billion saw his final bow and
cheered him. "Luck! Luck! Luck!" they roared.

His screen in his suite on the space ship _Ceres_ finally went blank
and the voice of the ship's operator cut in nervously, "I'll j-jibe
with the Center Room beam in a moment, sir." The operator, a capable
man, was frightened. The Ambassador had more reason to be frightened;
he took the moment in which he was unlinked from Earth to wipe one hand
nervously down across his face.

"On C-Center Room, Ambass--"

The operator at either end was cut off as the tight official beams met
in mid space. A different voice, older and deep bass, said, "Relax,
Phil." The Ambassador let his silvery cloak fall from its dramatic
sweep about his shoulders and stood naturally, tall, a little stooped,
heavy-shouldered, greying in the prime of his life at seventy-five.
His screen, which had been flashing to him a montage of the crowds in
Times Square, in Trafalgar Square, in the Champ de Mars, in Red Square,
filled with a view of Center Room, from which the Earth was governed.

The bass voice, backed by a large and friendly smile, belonged to the
President, who sat at the head of the great ivory table in the huge,
soft-lit room. They all were there, the men whom custom deprived of
a name when it gave them their titles--the Executive Secretary, the
Coordinator for Education, the Coordinator for Energy, the Terrestrial
and Astral Coordinators for Commerce and the half-dozen others who
possessed the ten-year term. If, privately, they called each other
George and Ahmed and Sven, it was for relaxation from the standard of
dignity expected of them.

At the foot of the table sat a small group of important guests, and
all the white, black, yellow and brown faces were turned to the image
of the Ambassador who waited for permission from the Venusians to step
upon Venus.

"Take it easy, Phil," the President said.

The Ambassador forced a smile. "Alec, when it's all over, I will."

"It can't fail. The very fact that after fifty years of trying they're
finally willing to receive an Earthman and will consider trade--"
The President made, a large, gathering gesture: _Everything's in the
force-field_. "For fifty years," he said with the reassurance the
Ambassador so greatly needed, "we've been dropping them capsules of
Earth goods and the means to learn our language. Drop, drop, drop, and
we've worn away the stone. Can't fail, Phil."

"I know," the Ambassador said. He thought: It isn't that. It was the
triple-distilled inferiority complex which gripped him and shook him.
The dread of the terrible brains below Venus' mist.

One by one around the table they gave him brief, friendly God-speed.
The distinguished guests were properly more formal with, "The Assembled
Physicists have asked me to convey to you all our best wishes,
Ambassador," and more on that style. He thanked them gravely.

       *       *       *       *       *

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.

The crew was still out there at the tubes when those worms came along,
and before they could crawl or jet their way to the airlock, one of the
worms plucked up a crew member. It was Able-bodied Spaceman Kroner, as
capable and steady and fearless a man who ever had boarded the _Lone
Star_. Kroner was seen at first to go rigid while the worm held him
with two tentacles and looked him over with that submerged, swimming
eye.

Suddenly Kroner blasted his oxygen-alcohol shoulder jets. The worm let
him go and recoiled.

[Illustration: _Suddenly Kroner blasted his shoulder jets._]

       *       *       *       *       *

Kroner slammed away into space, into nothingness. Suddenly, almost
at the half-limit of his short supply of fuel, he turned on his own
axis. He was expert, this Kroner, and had flipped his jet control so
perfectly that he had turned a hundred and eighty degrees and for a
couple of seconds he kept going directly backward on momentum against
the jets' renewed forward blast. While that happened he jerked his arms
and legs in a wild, running motion, running as though forward while
still going backward. It was a comic thing to see.

But at the instant of equilibrium 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 into
shape with complicated motions of their tentacles. Nine they made,
and set them in space with an approximation of the distances between
the planetary orbits. It was the same kind of approximation which is
necessary in any model of the solar system, for no model in which the
planets are of recognizable size can cope, in scale, with inter-orbital
distances.

Finally the worms grouped themselves in the center of all, merging
their body glow into a fair replica of the sun. And all the eyes
watched the space ship while they waited for the stupid little beings
within to understand.

"Couldn't reach our poor minds with their vibrations, so they gave
us something solid to look at. What did it mean? That they were the
architects of the solar system? Some of my crew were screaming we had
met God. All I knew was that we had to get out of there while a few
of us were sane. Finally I drove a work gang outside to the tubes
again, leading them myself, and we got to work on the liners, trying
not to look at the worms and their solar system but feeling their eyes
and feeling their awful, overpowering intelligence right through our
suits...."

A buzzer cut in, not upon the tight beam but upon the _Ceres'_
communicator.

"Excuse me, Captain Hoag," the Ambassador said acidly. "There is word
from Venus: It seems I have _business_ to attend to."

The old man, back on Earth, paused, and the President said, "We'll stay
on beam, Phil, till you go."

"Say, wait a minute," Hoag said anxiously. "I didn't get to the point
of the story."

But the Ambassador had walked out of the room.

He met the _Ceres'_ captain hurrying toward him, white-faced. Infected
by the man's haste and half-hysterical injunction to waste no time, he
almost ran to the special communications compartment.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here, in a screen whose outside viewer pointed downward, he saw the
smooth, liquid-seeming blanket of Venusian grey clouds, weirdly touched
with iridescence by a blinding sun. The clouds, believed to be over a
hundred miles thick, blanketed the entire planet. They might contain
water and oxygen somewhere below; here, where they touched space,
they were metallic vapor charged so heavily that no beam could ever
penetrate them. The Martians, who awesomely never lied, had told
Earthmen that Venusians existed; told them contemptuously. It would
not be wise to attempt a landing upon Venus without permission, the
Martians had said. Not wise for Earthmen, at any rate.

Because of the peculiar vapor there never had been electronic or
warp communication with Venus. So far, the only message from below
those clouds had come a month before to one of the patiently waiting,
patiently capsule-dropping ships--the permission to land one unarmed
ambassador. The Ambassador saw now that communication this time had
been by the same means. A rocket had come up through the clouds,
trailing a wire, and had been caught in the great cable net extended
behind the space ship.

"I had the wire plugged immediately," the sweating captain said.
"Expected to tell them to wait a minute and I'd put the Ambassador on.
But they're not listening to us, just telling us. And there's a time
limit. I would have had a line run to your suite if I'd known there was
a time limit, but I should have known there'd be a time limit, I should
have known how they act, all these races, because we're so feeble and
stupid compared--"

The man almost was gibbering. The Ambassador slapped his shoulder
heavily and stopped him. The Ambassador wanted a slap himself and his
hand missed the first time as he reached for the loud-speaker stud.

The voice came instantly, so mechanical and uninflected that it
occurred to him that a machine had spoken into a recording machine. The
Venusians must be so unearthly as to be unable to manage Earth sounds,
if they made sounds at all.

"... authority will advise him on the question of trade with Earth. He
will be freed one hour thereafter. Your ship must remain in the same
position meanwhile. The ambassador from Earth will leave your ship in
precisely eighteen minutes proceeding directly downward. He will be
picked up by our ship within the clouds. In this ship a representative
of fifth authority will advise him on the question of trade with Earth.
He will be freed one hour thereafter. Your ship must remain in the
same position meanwhile. The ambassador from Earth will leave your
ship in precisely eighteen minutes proceeding directly--"

The Ambassador snapped the stud, his teeth gritted hard against a
trembling. He was not even to land upon the alien planet, then. Not
even to talk to the head of government but with "a representative of
fifth authority." It was so condescending, so contemptuous--and so
deserved, of course, he thought, staring at the captain who stared
wild-eyed. You wanted to run. You wanted to hide. Already you felt
them inside your mind ruthlessly peering, destroying. _As crazy as an
ambassador._

Contemptuous time limit of eighteen minutes! They'd been told that it
took a minimum of sixteen minutes to get into a space suit.

"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.

"Yes sir, Ambassador, they weaved and they circled in and out of that
awful atom-blast. And I knew that the atom-blast will kill anything,
chop through any armor. But not those worms! _Now_ they showed us how
superior they were! _Now_ they made fun of our power!

"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!

"Don't you see, Ambassador," the old man said earnestly, "that only the
inferiority complex kept us from knowing right away that those worms
were no better than children? They hadn't been trying to send us any
message with radiations. No, it had been only the natural radiations of
their bodies, changing as they changed their formations around us--as
they _played_. One of them picked up poor Kroner. Why not? The thing
was curious. Took him apart, later, the way a child will take apart a
toy. My business with the square on the hypotenuse? Hell, how could
they understand when they'd never learned any mathematics?"

"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.

"Ambassador," the old man pleaded over thirty million miles, "you
don't _know_ what you're going to meet on Venus. You don't _know_
that they're particularly smart. And they don't know about you. Maybe
they're a little afraid of you. Maybe they're a _lot_ afraid of you. We
don't know one way. But we don't know the other.

"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."