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."