The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Worshippers, by Damon Francis Knight

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Title: The Worshippers

Author: Damon Francis Knight

Illustrator: Emsh

Release Date: September 10, 2007 [EBook #22560]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE
WORSHIPPERS

BY DAMON KNIGHT

ILLUSTRATED BY EMSH

Destiny reached out a hand to Algernon Weaver--but he
was a timid man, at first. But on the strange world of
Terranova, there was much to be learned--of destiny,
and other things....

It was a very different thing, Algernon Weaver decided, actually to
travel in space. When you read about it, or thought about it in terms of
what you read, it was more a business of going from one name to another.
Algol to Sirius. Aldebaran to Epsilon Ceti. You read the names, and the
descriptions that went with them, and the whole thing--although
breathtaking in concept, of course, when you really stopped to
_meditate_ on it--became rather ordinary and prosaic and somehow more
understandable.

Not that he had ever approved. No. He had that, at least, to look back
upon; he had seen the whole enterprise as pure presumption, and had said
so. Often. The heavens were the heavens, and Earth was Earth. It would
have been better--_much_ better for all concerned--if it had been left
that way.

He had held that opinion, he reminded himself gratefully, from the very
beginning, when it was easy to think otherwise. Afterward, of
course--when the first star ships came back with the news that space
was aswarm with creatures who did not even resemble Man, and had never
heard of him, and did not think much of him when they saw him.... Well,
who but an idiot could hold any other opinion?

If only the Creator had not seen fit to make so many human beings in His
image but without His common sense....

Well, if He hadn't then for one thing, Weaver would not have been where
he was now, staring out an octagonal porthole at an endless sea of
diamond-pierced bla