s; he simply
centered his planet on the screen as he had done with the star, found
that it was receding from him, and began to run it down.

He came in too fast the first time--tore through the atmosphere like a
lost soul and frantically out again, sweating in the control room's
sudden heat. He turned, out in space, and carefully adjusted his speed
so that ship and planet drifted softly together. Gently, as if he had
been doing this all his life. Weaver took the ship down upon a continent
of rolling greens and browns, landed it without a jar--saw the landscape
begin to tilt as he stepped into the airlock, and barely got outside
before the ship rolled ten thousand feet down a gorge he had not noticed
and smashed itself into a powdering of fragments.

Two days later, he began turning into a god.

II

They had put him into a kind of enclosed seat at the end of a long
rotating arm, counter-weighted at the opposite side of the aircar
proper, and the whole affair swung gently in an eccentric path, around
and around, and up and down as the aircar moved very slowly forward
through the village.

All the houses were faced with broad wooden balconies stained blood-red
and turquoise, umber and yellow, gold and pale green; and all of these
were crowded to bursting with the blue and white horny chests and the
big-eyed faces of the bug things. Weaver swung in his revolving seat
past first one level and another, and the twittering voices burst around
him like the stars of a Fourth-of-July rocket.

This was the fifth village they had visited since the bug things had
found him wandering in the mountains. At the first one, he had been
probed, examined and twittered over interminably; then the aircar had
arrived, they had strapped him into this ridiculous seat and begun what
looked very much like a triumphal tour. Other aircars, without the
revolving arm, preceded and followed him. The slowly floating cars and
their riders were gay with varicolored streamers. Every now and then one
of the bug things in the cars would raise a pistol-like object to fire a
pinkish streak that spread out, high in the air, and became a gently
descending, diffusing cloud of rosy dust. And always the twittering rose
and fell, rose and fell as Weaver revolved at the end of the swinging
arm.

One had to remember, he reminded himself, that Earthly parallels did not
necessarily apply. It was undignified, certainly, to be revolving like a
child on a merry-g