The Worshippers, Damon Knight [good short books .txt] 📗

The planet itself, according to the experts who had been assigned the problem, was a little more than ten thousand miles in diameter. The land area, Weaver thought, probably amounted to more than fifty million square miles. It was a great deal to defend; but it must be done.

"Here is your next assignment," He told Luke. "Put a team to work on selecting and preparing sites for these guns, when they are built. There must be one in every thousand square miles...."

Luke bowed and took the plans away.

... For otherwise, Weaver thought somberly, another ship might land, some day. And how could I trust these children not to welcome it?

Sunlight gleamed brilliantly from the broad, white-marble plaza beyond the tall portico. Looking through the windows, He could see the enormous block of stone in the center of the plaza, and the tiny robot aircar hovering near it, and the tiny ant-shapes of the crowd on the opposite side. Beyond, the sky was a clear, faultless blue.

"Are you ready now, Master?" asked Luke.

Weaver tested His limbs. They were rigid and almost without sensation; He could not move them so much as the fraction of an inch. Even His lips were as stiff as that marble outside. Only the fingers of His right hand, clutching a pen, felt as if they belonged to Him.

A metal frame supported a note-pad where His hand could reach it. Then he wrote, "Yes. Proceed with the statue."

Luke was holding a tiny torpedo-shaped object that moved freely at the end of a long, jointed metal arm. He moved it tentatively toward Weaver's left shoulder. Outside, the hovering aircar duplicated the motion: the grinder at its tip bit with a screech into the side of the huge stone.

Weaver watched, feeling no discomfort; the drug Luke had injected was working perfectly. Luke moved the pantograph pointer, again and again, until it touched Weaver's robed body. With every motion, the aircar bored a tunnel into the stone to the exact depth required, and backed out again. Slowly a form was beginning to emerge.

The distant screech of the grinder was muffled and not unpleasant. Weaver felt a trifle sleepy.

The top of one extended arm was done. The aircar moved over and began the other, leaving the head still buried in stone.

After this, Weaver thought, He could rest. His cities were built, His church founded, His guns built and tested, His people trained. The Terranovans were as civilized as He could make them in one generation. They had literary societies, newsstands, stock markets, leisure and working classes, baseball leagues, armies.... They had had to give up their barbaric comfort, of course; so much the better. Life was real, life was earnest—Weaver had taught them that.

The mechanism of His government ran smoothly; it would continue to run, with only an occasional guiding touch. This was His last major task. The monument.

Something to remember Me by, He thought drowsily. Myself in stone, long after I am gone. That will keep them to My ways, even if they should be tempted. To them I will still be here, standing over them, gigantic, imperishable.

They will still have something to worship.

Stone dust was obscuring the figure now, glittering in the sunlight. Luke undercut a huge block of the stone and it fell, turning lazily, and crashed on the pavement. Robot tractors darted out to haul the pieces away.

Weaver was glad it was Luke whose hand was guiding the pantograph, not one of the bright, efficient younger generation. They had been together a long time, Luke and He. Almost ten years. He knew Luke as if he were a human being; understood him as if he were a person. And Luke knew Him better than any of the rest; knew His smiles and His frowns, all His moods.

It had been a good life. He had done all the things He set out to do, and He had done them in His own time and His own way. At this distance, it was almost impossible to believe that He had once been a little man among billions of others, conforming to their patterns, doing what was expected of Him.

His free hand was growing tired from holding the pen. When all the rest was done, Luke would freeze that hand also, and then it would be only a minute or so until he could inject the antidote. He scribbled idly, "Do you remember the old days, before I came, Luke?"

"Very well, Master," said the apostle. "But it seems a long time ago."

Yes, Weaver told Himself contentedly; just what I was thinking. We understand each other, Luke and I. He wrote, "Things are very different now, eh?"

"Very different, Master. You made many changes. The people are very grateful to You."

He could see the broad outlines of the colossal figure now: the arms, in their heavy ecclesiastical sleeves, outstretched in benediction, the legs firmly planted. But the bowed head was still a rough, featureless mass of stone, not yet shaped.

"Do you know," Weaver wrote, on impulse, "that when I first came, I thought for a time that you were savages who might want to eat Me?"

That would startle Luke, He thought. But Luke said, "We all wanted to, very much. But that would have been foolish, Master. Then we would not have had all the other things. And besides, there would not have been enough of You for all."

The aircar screeched, driving a tunnel along the edge of the parted vestments.

God felt a cold wind down the corridor of time. He had been that close, after all. It was only because the natives had been cold-bloodedly foresighted that He was still alive. The idea infuriated Him, and somehow He was still afraid.

He wrote, "You never told me this. You will all do a penance for it."

Luke was dabbing the pointer carefully at the bald top of Weaver's head. His horny, complicated face was unpleasantly close, the mandibles unpleasantly big even behind his mouth veil.

Luke said, "We will, very gladly ... except that perhaps the new ones will not like it."

Weaver felt bewildered. In one corner of His mind He felt a tiny darkness unfolding: the kernel of doubt, forgotten so long, but there all the time. Growing larger now, expanding to a ragged, terrifying shape.

He wrote, "What do you mean? Who are 'the new ones'?"

Luke said, "We did not tell You. We knew You would not like it. A spaceship landed in Asia two months ago. There are three people in it. One is sick, but we believe the other two will live. They are very funny people, Master."

The pantograph pointer moved down the side of God's nose and another wedge of stone fell in the plaza.

"They have three long legs, and a very little body, and a head with one eye in front and one behind. Also they have very funny ideas. They are horrified at the way we live, and they are going to change it all around."

Weaver's fingers jerked uncontrollably, and the words wavered across the page. "I don't understand. I don't understand."

"I hope You are not angry. Master," said Luke. "We are very grateful to You. When You came, we were desperately bored. There had been no new thing for more than seven thousand years, since the last ship came from space. You know that we have not much imagination. We tried to invent new things for ourselves, but we could never think of anything so amusing as the ones You gave us. We will always remember You with gratitude."

The pantograph was tracing Weaver's eyelids, and then the unfeeling eyes themselves.

"But all things must end," said Luke. "Now we have these others, who do not like what you have done, so we cannot worship you any more. And anyway, some of the people are growing tired. It has been ten years. A long time."

One thought pierced through the swirling fear in Weaver's mind. The guns, built with so much labor, the enormous guns that could throw a shell two hundred miles. The crews, manning them night and day to destroy the first ship that came in from space. And they had never meant to use them!

Anger fought with caution. He felt peculiarly helpless now, locked up in his own body like a prison. "What are you going to do?" he scrawled.

"Nothing that will hurt, Master," said Luke. "You remember, I told you long ago, we had no machines for killing before you came. We used other things, like this drug which paralyzes. You will feel no pain."

Algernon Weaver's hand, gripping the pen as a drowning man holds to a stave, was moving without his volition. It was scrawling in huge letters, over and over, "NO NO NO"....

"It is too bad we cannot wait," said Luke, "but it has to be done before the new ones get here. They would not like it, probably."

He let the pointer go, and it hung where he had left it. With two jointed claws he seized Weaver's hand and straightened it out to match the other, removing the pen. With a third claw he thrust a slender needle under the skin. Instantly the hand was as rigid as the rest of Weaver's body. Weaver felt as if the last door had been slammed, the telephone wires cut, the sod thrown on the coffin.

"This is the way we have decided," said Luke. "It is a shame, because perhaps these new ones will not be as funny as you, after all. But it is the way we have decided."

He took up the pantograph pointer again.

In the plaza, the aircar ground at the huge stone head, outlining the stern mouth, the resolute, bearded jaw. Helplessly, Weaver returned the stare of that remorseless, brooding face: the face of a conqueror.