Dark Star

3

HE SLID BACK to the door. The music room was a subdivided section of the common recreation chamber, walled off for his own use. Closing the door behind him, he turned and gazed reverently at the organ.

Using up almost all of their preformed wood scraps and everything he could generate out of the glass-making set, he’d made the instrument entirely by hand in the ship’s crafts-and-manual-hobby shop.

Out of what he could create from that, and from material cannibalized from several musical instruments (provided by the thoughtful psychometricians), he had produced something that resembled a cross between a weaver’s loom, an upright piano, and a spice vendor’s pushcart.

Dozens of bottles and bells and pieces of wood were suspended from a high wooden rack-and-shelf arrangement. All were connected by a mad spiderweb of strings and wires to a central keyboard.

Sitting gently in the chair, he took a mallet and tried several bottles for sound. The first few were fine, but eventually he struck one that gave back an inconsistent hollow bong. That same damned half-liter jug. It would never stay tuned.

A pitcher of water was standing to one side. Half of it had evaporated since he had last played here. Had it been that long? Ah well, nothing was lost. The water was recycled constantly by the ship, from normal breathing, excretion, and standing jugs.

Taking up the mallet, he tapped the half-liter again, poured some water into it, tapped it. More water, another tap, and a last dram of liquid should make it just right.

Someday he would finish the organ and get it properly tuned. Someday. Tuning an organ was, after all, a considerable job. But now it was as ready as he could get it. He raised his hands dramatically over the keyboard, brought them down,

Here, in the isolated corner of the Dark Star, was the one place where he could create; the one place where he desired to produce and not destroy; the one place that reminded him even a little of home. This was his temple, his equivalent of Talby’s dome, Boiler’s picture-wall, Pinback’s comic books.

Probably it was all the water. The blue rushing water—under him, over him, behind him. The friendly, familiar water lifting him up, up, and then sliding down the glassy green front. Always the blue-blue-green water.

His hands moved freely over the keys, loosening the final, flowing toccata from Widor’s “Sixth Organ Concerto"—a piece of music at once as light and powerful as the deepest ocean swells. It rose up around him, engulfed the tiny room in sound and then in slick sliding wetness.

He played harder, faster now, riding the fugal structure to its foaming coda—the music building to a crescendo, one trill piling atop another as he kept treading the bass pedals. His toes dug into and became one with the smooth, well-waxed pedals as he slid down the front of the taut, smooth, vinyl-suited tossed crescendo which died slowly behind him…

He blinked.

The music was done. The ride was over. He was reborn, refreshed, cleansed, and whole again. One with the universe.

He hesitated, struck one awkwardly placed key. Somewhere within the flimsy maze a mallet or screw driver moved to strike a jar partly filled with water. It made a dull, only vaguely musical sound.

He smiled to himself. Before the others he never smiled, but he could smile at himself here. It didn’t matter that the organ played notes other from those he heard. He’d played the right board all along—the carefully waxed, hand-rubbed, delicately manipulated board, and the sounds had been real to him. He stood, surveyed the organ with pleasure.

A little of the water had evaporated. That was all. Just a little of the water.

He left the room.

Why couldn’t the others understand? Pinback and Boiler, and even Powell. Even Powell had never understood what he saw in that “collection of splinters and junk” he persisted in calling an organ.

So the knowledge was Doolittle’s and Doolittle’s alone. That made him feel a little better, a little wiser than the others. But what about Talby? He frowned. No, Talby didn’t understand the lieutenant’s organ, either. His secret was safe.

Where was Talby’s head right now, in fact? Doolittle checked his watch. Probably up in the dome, as usual. Doolittle turned on his heel, heading abruptly toward the food-preparation room instead of returning to their converted living quarters.

Once there, he dialed a major breakfast. Not for himself. For Talby. He would take it up to the astronomer, up to Talby in his serene contemplation of the heavens, and try to share his organ-ideas with him. Of all the crew, the astronomer might be able to understand.

There was a short pause, then nothing. The meals computer seemed reluctant to discharge a single breakfast at this hour. Doolittle pushed the activate-request switch repeatedly, until the machine finally coughed up the meal he had ordered. Then he headed for the observation dome access corridor.

He hesitated on his way up. Talby might not like being disturbed. Doolittle thought about aborting this little expedition, but firmed himself. Talby might not like company, but even he had to eat.

Putting his head through the open hatch, be called softly, “Talby?”

There was a buzzing sound, and the chair spun around fast. Then Talby was staring down at him, his expression neutral.

“Here’s some breakfast.” He handed the slim metal package up to the astronomer. Talby took it, said nothing, but there was another buzz and the astronomer’s cocoonlike chair slid back, making room for Doolittle in the confined space of the dome. It was Talby’s way of welcoming him.

There was a little raised wedge on the far side of the hatch and Doolittle squeezed himself onto it, his feet framing either side of the opening. Like an upside-down well, light poured into the dome from the corridor below, lighting both faces from beneath. It gave Doolittle an uncharacteristically saturnine cast, while Talby, seated farther away, appeared wreathed in bloody shadows.

The lieutenant looked cautiously out through the dome. The universe wheeled around them. No, no, that was a phrase from a book. And it didn’t apply. The universe was motionless, still, with a solemnity far more impressive than any slow motion.

They were moving, but even at their supreme speed the galaxy was too vast for any movement to be seen by the naked eye. Hyperspace was different, a comforting blur. You couldn’t fear what you couldn’t delineate.

But up here, with everything laid out sharp and uncompromising… Doolittle did not like coming up into the dome for too long. For a little while it was impressive, but after too long it began to weigh a man down with his own insignificance. Pinback and Boiler couldn’t stand it for even a little while.

Even a little while was too long, and too long was—

Stop that, Doolittle. That’s not healthy.

It was different back on Earth. He could remember liking it then. The universe had seemed a friendly place those nights, a magnificient tapestry of suns and nebulae woven solely as a proper background for the blue-white jewel of Earth as seen from the moon.

But Earth wasn’t over his shoulder here. In their present position it was a distant pinprick of light which only the ship’s computer could identify.

Oh, and Talby, of course. He hid his smile. Just like he claimed to be able to identify suns by sight, the astronomer persisted in claiming he could pick Sol out of the sky. That was impossible, considering all the course changes they had made in the lost, gone years.

But if asked, Talby would unhesitatingly point to some point in the sky and say, “Sol? There it is. But why do you want to know? It’s not a very important star?” And he would return to his solemn study of the surrounding heavens.

Doolittle didn’t really know why being up in the dome for a while bothered him. It shouldn’t have. That was one thing he didn’t have to lie about—he had shown no symptoms of space fear. Fear of the great open spaces between the stars.

No, the vastnesses of the galaxy supposedly held no terrors for him. But then, the psychologists who had told him that hadn’t spent years floating away from sight of Earth in a tiny metal triangle, years without even a glimpse of their own sun. A journey like this brought home to a man something about space no psychometrician could ever approximate.

Not that it was complicated. No. Space was big, man was small, and you couldn’t dwell on that very long or the bigness would assume its proper proportions and come down on the mind and smash it. But Talby, he reflected, seemed to have licked that problem. He was going to turn some theories around when he got back home, if they could ever pry him out of his precious dome. Talby thrived on the emptiness.

Doolittle hated him for it.

Talby had removed his headset and was ripping the protective foil off his breakfast. Wadding up the thin metal into a ball, he tossed it with casual unconcern down the open hatchway. Doolittle followed its path until it had vanished from sight, then he turned his gaze back on the astronomer, who was starting to suck on a tube of concentrated eggs.

“You know, Talby, you really ought to come down and eat your meals with the rest of us. Or at least come down to sleep. You spend too much time up here.”

At least a thousand times now he had repeated similar statements of identical content to the astronomer. And for the thousandth time Talby, as unperturbed as ever, came back with the same answer—after swallowing a mouthful of food.

“Why? I like it up here. I don’t bother any of you, do I? You should be glad of the extra privacy.”

“We’ve got plenty of privacy, Talby. We’ve got a whole ship that’s almost empty now in which to hide from each other.” He paused, then went on in a different vein. “You used to come down and eat with the rest of us. Doesn’t it get lonely being up here so much? I mean, privacy is one thing, Talby, but…”

He trailed off as the astronomer finished his eggs. Finished them quickly, Doolittle thought. In a hurry to get the awkward refueling of his body out of the way. That wasn’t natural. Mealtime was one of their few remaining ties to Earthly habits. Talby opened a tube of bread substitute.

“I don’t like going below since Commander Powell died,” he said. “I feel too enclosed down there.”

“Yeah,” muttered Doolittle helplessly. What could he say to that? “You should spend more time below, though. You know, see more of the ship.”

“Me?” Talby answered, hearing him and yet not hearing him. “What do I want to look at the ship for? I know what the ship looks like. That’s not why I came on this mission, Doolittle.” He leaned back and stared outward with that peculiar, farsighted stare Doolittle now knew instantly.

“Up here, I can watch things, Doolittle. I love to watch things. Just stare at the sun systems and nomad meteors, gas clusters and distant galaxies. You know, I bet I’ve seen more stars than any human being alive, Doolittle. And you never know what may come tumbling by to say hello in overdrive or hyperdrive. Some of them would surprise you, Doolittle.”

“Yeah,” Doolittle mumbled again. Talby was making him increasingly nervous these days. “But you’ll have plenty of time for that later, though. I mean, think of it this way: we’ve been in space twenty years now and we’ve only aged three years physically, so there’ll be plenty of time later for staring around. Won’t there, Talby? Talby?”

“Are we really going into the Veil Nebula region?” the astronomer whispered.

“Of course we are,” Doolittle insisted. “I mean, I gave the order and supervised the course correction, didn’t I? It’s programmed, isn’t it?”

“You know, Doolittle,” Talby said quietly, “if we are going into the Veil region, we may actually find a strange and beautiful thing: the Phoenix Asteroids. They should be passing through there about now, if the predictions are really correct.”

“Oh. Phoenix Asteroids.” Doolittle’s brow furrowed. It seemed to him that that was a name he should know, a name he’d heard before. It wasn’t that he’d cheated his way through the astronomy courses, too. It was just that he hadn’t paid much attention to anything but the basics for navigation and plotting. Sightseeing highlights he had kind of glossed over.

“Phoenix Asteroids?” he confessed finally. “I don’t think I ever heard of them.”

Talby gave him a look Doolittle couldn’t quite interpret. Anger. Contempt. Pity.

“They’re a body of asteroids—at least, that’s what the best guesses think they are—that are running on a definite orbit, but one so vast that for years nobody could calculate it.

“They were detected right after the development of the first big lunar telescopes. They don’t travel in a straight line like most asteroid groupings. Nor do they belong to any one sun system. But they have a true orbit.

“Once every twelve point three trillion years they circle our universe. They pass through our galaxy in the region of Sol just once, and they’ll return in slightly less than twelve point three trillion years from now. But the Earth won’t be here to meet them. The Earth may not be anyplace by then. The universe may not be anyplace. But the Phoenix will.”

“Crazy… how can anybody calculate an orbit like that?” muttered Doolittle, and then he felt stupid for asking it because, obviously, somebody had calculated it.

“I don’t know, Doolittle. I’m no computer, but it’s been done. As for the Phoenix itself, we don’t know much about it. Its composition is just a guess. An asteroidal grouping seems as logical as anything for something that defies as many laws as this does.” He leaned back in his chair and looked outward, outward. The Phoenix Asteroids…

“They’re something different, Doolittle. Something so different we can’t even begin to assign an explanation for them. For example, for the scopes on the moon to pick them up visually means they must have their own internal source of light, Doolittle, and an incredibly intense one at that. They glow. Their spectrum changes constantly, the colors on the charts flow like wine. Nobody knows how, or why. By rights, an astronomical object that small should be invisible to us at such distances. You shouldn’t be able to detect them from Earth at all, let alone distinguish something like color. But you can, Doolittle, you can.”

Doolittle just stared at Talby, thinking. It seemed to him that he would remember something as spectacular as the Phoenix Asteroids, despite his often lackadaisical approach to some courses. Were they real… or another figment of Talby’s all-too-active imagination, the product of too much stimulation from an unrelenting universe viewed too long?

“They just glow,” Talby was whispering as he stared out the dome, “just glow as they drift in a great grand circle around the whole universe. The Phoenix Asteroids.”

Doolittle considered what Talby had said for a long time, while neither man said anything. The only sounds were occasional ship groans and mechanical belches rumbling up through the open hatch.

Doolittle finally looked up, hands folded in front of him, and spoke to Talby. “You know what I think about, Talby? You’re always talking about yourself, and Boiler and Pinback let themselves go any old time—but I’m not like that. Yet up here…” and he gazed at the heavens above, “it’s easier to talk, I think. You know what I think about?”

The astronomer didn’t respond, but looked expectantly down at him. Thus encouraged, Doolittle talked on, his hands twisting and turning on themselves.

“It’s funny… I kinda sit around a lot on the ship, alone, trying to get a lotta time to myself. I can’t talk to the others, really. I’ve never been too good at talking to anybody in the program. I don’t know why. It bothers me, Talby. I didn’t have any trouble talking to people back home. I was positively gregarious, back home.”

“We’ve all gone through a change, Doolittle,” Talby said in a sepulchral voice.

“Yeah, I guess… Anyway, with time to myself, I can think about back… back home in Malibu. Do you know where Malibu is, Talby?”

The astronomer shook his head. Mere Terran geography held little interest for him. His cartographic concerns were cosmic in scope.

“It’s a little town north of Los Angeles Megalopolis. A beach town. I lived there before I got into the program. And I used to surf all the time, Talby. I used to be a great surfer.” He paused, glanced up at the silent astronomer. “What time do you think it is back home, Talby, back in the States?”

Talby stared out the dome. “In Los Angeles; it would be about eight-oh-five in the morning.”

“Yes, sure.” Doolittle tried to hide his smile. “But what time of year?”

Talby shook his head.

“I’ll bet it’s spring,” Doolittle mused, his smile spreading. “The waves at Malibu and Zuma—that’s a beach north of Malibu, Talby—are so fantastic in the spring. I can remember running down the beach in those early spring mornings in my wet suit, my board under my arm and the fog pricking my face…” He stopped. Talby wasn’t really listening. He was watching the stars again. But it was good to talk to someone else about it.

“The waves would really be peaking, you know… high and glassy.” He might have been describing a woman now—and in a sense, he was. “You’d hit that water, just smash into it, and before you could wake up you’re coming right off one of those walls and you just ride all the way in, perfect.”

“Perfect.” Talby echoed, looking back down at him suddenly. Maybe a part of him had been listening after all.

“You know,” the lieutenant continued sadly, “I guess I miss the waves and my board more than anything.”

Talby smiled. “Tell me more about it, Doolittle.”

“You really want to hear?”

Talby nodded, and Doolittle told him about the waves…