Dark Star

5

THEY RESTED LIKE that—man on one side, alien on the other. The alien gobbled playfully, evidentally enjoying the interesting afternoon. It didn’t look malicious. Pinback, however, found that he could no longer regard the alien with anything remotely like objectivity.

He sat on the inside of the access port, caught his breath, and thought. This was the end. Now he would have to go back to the emergency airlock, get on the intercom, and ask either Boiler or Doolittle to send the elevator down for him. No way he could even do that for himself now.

Turning and kneeling, he stared across the shaft at the alien. It was still resting on the edge of the drop, quivering expectantly and twittering to itself. Pinback eyed it and thought uncomplimentary thoughts.

He would never live this down. Never. Boiler would never let him forget it. If there were any way to avoid calling for help… but how? What else could he do?

The board was gone, and long wooden boards were not scattered haphazardly about the ship. If there were another way across the shaft.

Sure… Leaning out, he looked down and traced the tiny ledge that ran completely around the interior walls. It was only a few centimeters wide, but it would hold his weight easily, being part of the structure itself.

If he moved carefully, took a step at a time, the ledge ought to be negotiable.

Unaware that his breathing had suddenly grown stronger than normal, he stuck his head, turned upward, into the shaft. Hanging on to the inside of the hatchway with both hands, he slid one foot out and tested the strength of the ledge. It was part of the shaft wall, for sure.

Gritting his teeth and edging his body out a little at a time, he soon found himself standing upright on the ledge, his body pressed tight against the wall, hands outstretched and facing inward.

He only looked down once.

Now, if he could just edge around, make his way across the first corner… Trying to get a grip on the smooth metal walls, and wishing his members were as adhesive as the alien’s seemed to be, he stepped over the first corner. Then the back foot, and he was already nearly halfway across.

Hell, this was easy! The Beachball gobbled at him, and Pinback felt secure enough to risk shaking a fist at it.

“Idiot! When I get out of here and get you back into your room—”

Another voice interrupted him sharply, and he looked wildly around the shaft.

“Attention, attention.” Soft voice, feminine—the computer again. “The central trunk elevator shaft is now activated. All personnel please clear the area.”

There was a snap, a brilliant flare, and the shaft suddenly appeared above and below him, fully lighted. Now he could see exactly how high it was, exactly how deep it was, and exactly where he was trapped in relationship to those extremes. He screamed. He was all right when he didn’t have to look down and see a bottom, but now…

His fear quickly gave way to anger.

“Doolittle… Boiler, Talby. I’m in here, you idiots! In the shaft. What are you playing with the elevator for? Turn it off. Turn…!”

His voice faded. There was absolutely no reason for Doolittle to activate the elevator. There was no reason for Boiler to activate the elevator. And even if there had been a reason for Talby to activate the elevator, he probably wouldn’t have bothered. This led him to the obvious explanation: there had been another malfunction, possibly keyed by his own presence in the shaft.

Leaning back against the cool metal, he closed his eyes and worked at fighting his recalcitrant muscles. He couldn’t stay here. One way or another, he had to get moving. Otherwise, when the elevator got to this level its bottom would peel him off the wall as neatly as old skin off a beach-burned back.

“Help!” he streamed again. “Help!”

Now stop that and save your breath, Pinback. There’s nobody here to hear you, and nobody’s coming to rescue you. You’ve got to get out of this by yourself.

He was nearly to the hatchway on the other side, but it was still occupied by the twittering form of the alien. Making sure he was well set on his left leg, he kicked at it with his right, trying to force the creature back into the chamber beyond.

The alien bounced up and down violently in the portal, obviously agitated, but not struck sufficiently to be hurt. Pinback kicked at it again, and added some curses for added punch.

“Get out of there, you… go on, get out, move, you ignorant, stupid, ungrate…!”

Making an especially virulent gobbling sound, the alien leaped—not backward, but into the shaft. It landed on Pinback’s chest and immediately began scratching at him with its claws. The claws had little clutching power behind them, but it was still damned uncomfortable.

“No, no!” Flailing at it hysterically with both hands, he tried to beat it off without sacrificing his balance. He couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. If it got to his eyes…

Somehow he spun on the narrow ledge. Now he had his stomach and face pressed up against the wall. But the sudden twist had only temporarily dislodged the alien. It simply jumped free and reattached itself, this time to his upper back.

“Get off, get off!”

Still beating at it with little success, he started edging toward his right. Maybe it would leave him if he went back into the old hatchway. Taking another step, he arched his back slightly and took a good swat at the Beachball with his right hand. At the same time, it made a particularly strong wrench at his right side.

There was a loud, gobbling scream—from Pinback—as he slipped. Both hands caught the ledge as he slumped down. He hung like that, dangling over the seemingly bottomless shaft. Well, it was far from bottomless. But it was far too far away for him to risk a drop.

Grunting and twisting, he fought to get one leg back up on the ledge, swinging his body from side to side without much luck.

The alien had hopped free at the moment of falling and was now comfortably ensconced once more in the hatchway. It appeared to regard Pinback with interest, quivering and honking in its maddeningly unconcerned fashion.

Pinback had no trouble holding on—he’d been something of a gymnast in secondary school. No doubt with a little more effort he could get back up. At least, he thought so until he felt a frighteningly familiar light pressure on his shoulder blades.

“No… oh, no… I don’t want to play anymore. Get off. Get offfff!”

The alien’s weight was negligible. Its activities were not. After several moments of serene sizing-up, it started to squeeze at Pinback’s rib cage. The sergeant started to scream, but soon found himself laughing uncontrollably. Occasionally the laugh would dissolve into a scream for help.

“Stop… s-s-stop! That’s not… f-funny!” The alien continued its merciless tickling.

It shouldn’t have known what it was doing—certainly Pinback couldn’t recall any time when he’d done any tickling, or been tickled, in the alien’s presence. He might have forgotten something, though.

In any case, he had no time to ponder the possibilities of a carefully camouflaged alien intelligence suddenly coming to the surface. The tickling was weakening him in a way that hanging on couldn’t. At least nothing more could happen.

A mechanical voice drifted through the shaft.

“Attention, attention…”

“Arrghh… no!” Pinback howled.

“Elevator descending for midweekly proficiency check. Please clear the shaft.”

“You crazy bundle of crossed circuits—this isn’t midweek!”

“Your cooperation will be appreciated.”

Pinback’s gaze turned wildly upward. His laughter and his grip on the narrow ledge were fading fast. There was a muffled clank, followed by a whirring sound.

Above him, a smooth white panel began to grow larger—the bottom of the slowly descending elevator. His eyes widened. “Goddamn it!” Tears began to start from them, half from laughter, half from desperation.

Making a supreme effort, he somehow managed to get both arms up onto the ledge at the same time. This seemed to catalyze something in the Beachball’s mind. Whether bored with the tickling or disappointed at its lack of success in getting Pinback to let go, or for some incomprehensible reason known only to animated Beachballs, the creature floated free and jumped back into the hatchway.

With a smooth whine, to indicate that all its components were functioning perfectly, the elevator continued to descend, a wide white foot coming down to crush Pinback.

He struggled wildly, got his foot, then his right leg back onto the ledge. Now that the alien had decided to leave him alone, his strength was coming back. Fighting frantically, he managed to get himself onto the ledge. Hands pressed against the wall, he started to stand.

He was just taking a retreating step toward the hatchway when the elevator touched his face—and stopped. Having detected interference, the lift would pause for a second, then move downward in stages unless it encountered stiff resistance. Pinback would not supply stiff resistance.

It would peel him off the ledge in slow jerks.

Even as he thought, the elevator dropped another tenth of a meter, bunching up his face and shoving him backward so that he was arching over the shaft. Another drop; and it would be impossible for him to keep his balance.

Just to one side of his scrunched-up face he saw a single metal bar suspended from the bottom of the lift. Reaching for it desperately, he just got a hand around it when the elevator dropped again.

Swinging out into open space, he grabbed with the other hand, rested in open air as the elevator slid another notch downward. That last one would have sent him tumbling down the shaft. His present position would not last forever, either, but it was better than lying broken fifty or sixty meters below.

There was a soft click, the pitch of the whining motor changed slightly, and he found himself rising as the elevator started up: He’d had some vague hope that it would continue downward until he could drop free. Now he dared not.

“Help… for God’s sake, somebody, help!”

No one heard him, of course. And no doubt the malfunctioning elevator was stimulating no red warning light in the control room, so no one would be hurrying back here to check it out.

He wondered what the damn elevator would do next. How long did one of these automatic proficiency tests last, anyhow? It couldn’t keep going up and down, up and down, forever—though it showed no sign of stopping.

There was no logic to it. Like the rest of the instrumentation on the Dark Star, it was operating in a typically haphazard manner.

As for the alien—he looked upward, and if he twisted his body, so, he could just see around one edge of the elevator. There was a brief flash of red, which had to be the Beachball clearing the shaft with ease. It squeezed through the other side, and as Pinback passed that level, with its open hatchways—open, unreachable hatchways—he saw it scampering along back to where he had disturbed it. Back to the emergency airlock.

Imitative creatures have one other characteristic in common with man—they are intensely curious. If Pinback had gone to the trouble of trying to root it out of the place it had been exploring, then it followed that there must be something in that place of particular interest to Beachballs. Anyhow, it was no longer curious about Pinback, now dangling helplessly in the shaft behind it.

The room certainly was an interesting place, though we have no descriptive referents capable of explaining exactly how the alien saw it. It was full of control panels, switches, blinking lights, five ranked sets of starsuits.

The Beachball examined each in turn, bouncing over open shelves and packages of emergency foodstuffs and even the triple knob that Pinback had sweated over—the one which, if engaged, would blow open the outer emergency door, an event that would be disastrous to anyone on the lock side of an airtight portal.

Not that the Beachball knew or could comprehend any of this. In any case, it elected not to play with the triple knob. Instead, its attention was drawn to a partial hole in the wall, where a protective plate had come loose and now swung from a last, reluctant screw. An interesting hum issued from within the hole, and there was an ugly dark spot on the outside of the loose plate where it had been scorched recently.

There was also a pretty glowing thing inside.

The alien couldn’t read, either, so the characters etched into the swinging plate meant nothing to it beyond another smattering of red color. There was a lot of small print, and two big blotches of red, which spelled out:

CAUTION… LASER.

The Beachball took one bounce and stuck itself to the wall just outside the loose panel. It peered inward with whatever it used for eyes.

Two beams of intense red light flashed deeper into the dark interior, still steady, still in proper line. They issued from a complex instrument close by the portal.

If the Beachball had been at all familiar with starship construction, it would have noted instantly that the join between the light-emitting device and its base was no longer solid. Shifting its position on the wall, it reached in with both claws, touching, feeling, probing curiously for more tactile information about the thing that ended in the pretty lights.

The finely adjusted instrument moved slightly on its loosened mounting. There was a spark, a crackling flash. The Beachball honked in pain and jerked back out of the recess, bouncing at top speed out of the lock.

An occasional wisp of smoke came from the dark interior now, interspersed with odd electrical pops and crackles. It didn’t seem very important.

Like everything else on the Dark Star, the appearances were deceptive…

They had twenty yards to go now for a first down—twenty yards to go because that schmuck Anderson had blown the last play totally and run into his own tight end.

Jesus, how could you run into your own tight end—even on an end around? But it had happened, and now they were back on their own ten instead of the twenty or maybe better, with twenty to go for a first and a third down and Coach had sent in Davis—that pansy Davis, the flanker—with the play and they were supposed to quick kick, fer crissake.

Quick kick with the third quarter almost over and them trailing and goddamnit that was no way to win football games.

Boiler pleaded and begged with O’Brien, the new quarterback. Just let them run another play. An off-tackle… a lousy off-tackle, geez! Fake the damn kick and have O’Brien take the snap and hand it to him and he’d follow Harris off the left side.

And O’Brien had hemmed and hawed and said what the hell, why not? He didn’t like the coach and he didn’t like kicking on third down and his girl friend wasn’t putting out, so why the hell not?

The snap was made and Boiler yelled at Harris that if he didn’t clear that hole for him he’d kick his teeth out after the game and the big black son-of-a-bitch just turned and smiled back at him and said don’t worry, just follow me, man.

So they’d snapped and he’d seen it working right then… seen the stupid linebackers pull up close to try and block the kick and only two backs deep for the kick and O’Brien had stepped up and at the last second, perfect, took the ball instead of letting it go to Davis.

Tossed it to him like a volleyball, and he caught it and there was the whole left side of the line wiped out, just wiped out, man. And Harris out there running ahead of him. Old Mojack Harris, and the last linebacker recovering and trying to get over. Boiler laughed at the expression on his face as Harris wasted him. Put him on his can and then Boiler was running free, free, with the sounds of the crowd in his ears and the look on the coach’s face turning from fury to cheers as he passed the first down marker and kept going.

A little sidestep here—the deep back never saw him and then it was nothing but grass, grass, man, all the way to the end zone, to those beautiful high-stickin’ goal posts. And the cheering, oh man, the cheering as that crowd went absolutely nuts. Ninety yards off-tackle, man. Ninety goddamn yards and the crowd so loud you couldn’t hear yourself. Couldn’t hear a thing, man, and the lights blinding you. Couldn’t hear and couldn’t see; couldn’t hear and couldn’t see, couldn’t hear or see the alarm flashing on the screen behind him…

Talby blinked. He’d been star-dreaming again. It seemed somebody was talking to him.

“So you see,” Doolittle was telling him, glancing up now and then from his seat in the little corner on the other side of the open hatch, “so you see, sometimes you’d get a wave that would just kind of fold over on itself. You know, like somebody whipping batter. And you’d crouch down inside this tube of water, Talby, and it would sound like, oh, like an express train coming up right on your heels. Just like in a cartoon.”

He glanced upward out through the dome, but the blackness was beginning to get to him again. So he stared at his feet. The sight was surprisingly comforting.

“You’d just crouch down on your board then, inside that tube, and ride it and hope it never ended. If you were a second too fast, you’d lose it altogether… be out in front of it. A second too slow and the water would just catch you up, swing you up and over and spit you out somewhere high up on the beach. I tell you, Talby, there’s nothing like it. How does that sound to you, hey, Talby? Talby?”

Talby was engrossed in watching words and numbers form and realign on his tiny console screen.

… SYSTEMS STATUS POSSIBLE COMP 47308… MALFUNCTION POSSIBLE PRIMARY… SECONDARY PRIORITY DEMAND… 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-MAX… POTENTIAL CIRCUIT FAIL…

The last words vanished from the screen. It stayed clear. That meant the ship’s computer was working on whatever the problem was.

A part of him—dim, social portion, vestigial appendage—was listening to Doolittle say something about water and a tube. He nodded politely at what he thought might be an appropriate moment and was aware of pleasing the lieutenant. The rest of him remained fixed on the screen.

… RAD, REG 594…

Now words and symbols and numbers began to flash across the screen in rapid succession. They meant nothing and they meant everything, but it was one part of the computer talking to another. It was too fast for even Talby to follow.

He relaxed again in the seat. The computer hadn’t flashed any emergency buzzers, activated any warning lights. Whatever the difficulty was, the Dark Star’s brain appeared to have it under control.

He was aware that several emergency warning circuits had failed on and off for a number of years. This node of information was shunted conveniently aside. Right now he didn’t feel like double-checking on the “emergency,” if indeed there was one. Later, maybe…

A new star drifted slowly into view over the arm’s-length horizon of the ship. His gaze locked on to it as efficiently as any tracking telescope. Definitely a new luminary to add to his growing personal catalog.

He set about logging it as enthusiastically as he had the thousands suddenly glimpsed on their first day out of hyperdrive.

Size, distance, possible planets, composition. More words were flashing across the screen now, slower, slow enough for human comprehension.

He was aware that these words meant something significant, but surely they could wait. There was nothing that couldn’t be subordinated to the cataloging of a new star, for nothing was more important. Nothing!

Doolittle would have paid more attention to the words appearing on the astronomer’s screen, but he war out of position to see it. And his mind was busy elsewhere, thinking of open, rolling sea.

Boiler would have paid more attention to the words, but his thoughts were on an open field.

Pinback was thinking of an open surface, period. Open surface of any kind, so long as it was solid beneath his feet, and equipped with the normal appurtenances—green grass, blue sky, a cloud or two, maybe even some real trees.

As for Commander Powell, his mind was just… open.

In addition to not paying attention to their communications screens, the crew members of the Dark Star were serenely ignoring what was happening beneath the ship. None of them heard the soft click inside the ship’s largest chamber.

None of them saw the doors in the bottom of the ship slide back as they had numerous times before. A long magnetic grapple dropped down with a familiar oblong numbered shape attached to its base. Nor did they see the next series of words that flashed across every screen on ship.

… BOMB BAY SYSTEMS ACTIVATED…

There was a large 20 engraved on the side of this oblong shape. Thermostellar Triggering Device Number Twenty knew that it had been through this sequence before. It had a long memory capability programmed into a short life.

And it shouldn’t have been through this before. It was programmed for this sequence only once, and here it was running through it a second time. The bomb searched those memory reels and found nothing to account for it.

Number Twenty was understandably confused.

“Ship’s computer calling bomb Number Twenty. Ship’s computer calling bomb Number Twenty. You are out of the bomb bay again. This is incorrect.”

“I received the signal to prepare for drop again,” the bomb replied with a twinge of electronic irritability.

Hesitation on the part of the Dark Star’s brain. Recheck and correlate—ah yes, here was the difficulty.

“There is an additional unexpected malfunction in the laser system in communications which has not yet been rectified. This is the system failure which caused your former abortive drop. It apparently has not yet been fully compensated for. It has caused your drop system to pass an incorrect order again. I repeat. This is not a bomb run.”

“All very plausible… but nevertheless, I received the drop signal.”

“As stated, the signal was given in error.”

“Oh, I don’t want to hear that,” the bomb muttered. A definite note of petulance had crept into its otherwise neutral tones. The longer the bomb conversed, the greater the danger of its fairly simple logic circuits growing confused.

“I order you to return to the bomb bay.”

“Phooey.”

The expletive was exceedingly mild, but the import behind it was not. The ship’s computer considered what to do. Perhaps a more direct machine-to-machine approach was required.

“If you do not return to the bomb bay, you will be in direct contravention of Prime Ordinance One of Central Computer to Subordinate Computer relations.”

“Sticks and stones will break my bones,” the bomb started to reply.

“We have no time to discuss your internal configurations,” the main computer countered. “However, I will elucidate at length if you will return to the bomb bay.”

“Uh-uh.”

“I ord—” the computer hesitated a microsecond, “I strongly suggest that you return to the bomb bay.”

“That is counter to my current programming.”

For the first time now the Dark Star’s brain revealed some emotion of its own—if indeed it is possible for a mechanical mind to indicate exasperation.

“Repeat One of the communications-systems’ lasers has sustained damage. The same accident also temporarily deactivated the tracer circuit necessary to locate the damage without manual aid. Until such aid is forthcoming I cannot rectify the damage, but it is certain that you received a false signal. Do you see this? You must return to the bomb bay while I identify the source of the false signal.”

There was a long pause. Then the bomb agreed. Reluctantly.

“Oh, all right—but this is the last time.”

Once more an internal hum sounded. Bomb Number Twenty obediently slid up on its grapple back into the belly of the Dark Star. The bay doors slid silently shut behind it.