Dark Star

7

TALBY STEPPED CAREFULLY down the ladder and headed purposefully toward the seldom-used corridor deep in the center of the Dark Star. The green glow of the lights set in the walls and ceiling marked the way to central computer.

He could have gone forward to the control room-bridge and used the annex there, but he wanted to check out something on the main computer itself. Besides, the central computer room was actually closer to the dome than the bridge. And he didn’t see the need to alarm the others. Besides, they were enjoying their dinners now. No point in disturbing them unless the problem turned out to require their help. He was uncomfortable down here. Odd how nervous he became these days, away from the friendly stars. There had been a time when he’d felt perfectly at home within the ship. A long time ago.

“Back, Talby,” the heavens whispered. “Come back.”

“It’s just for a couple of minutes, that’s all,” he murmured to himself, “Only a couple of minutes. But if there’s a possibility of a serious malfunction, then I have to check it out. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Come back, Talby…”

“I have to… because I don’t think Doolittle or the others will. They don’t care anymore.”

“Back, Talby,” a red giant whispered, a titantic voice roaring in his brain. “Back to us, Talby,” replied a mild sun not unlike old Sol.

A ghostly quartet moaned at him with a combined voice like rising wind over a lake—a remarkable quaternary system of four stars circling about one another.

He had to check out the indicated malfunction. A switch, and the double-shielded door slid aside.

“Hey,” said Pinback, pausing in the middle of a tube of dessert, “did I ever tell you guys how I got on this mission? Did I ever tell you?”

Doolittle indicated the tiny bottle on the table, and Boiler passed it to him. It consisted of auxiliary flavoring, and the meals computer changed its contents daily. He tried it in one tube. Vanilla today—interesting, even with the potatoes.

“Yes, you did, Pinback,” he replied.

But the sergeant was off, and nothing short of catastrophe could stop him.

“It’s very strange, you know, how it happened, but—”

Boiler groaned softly. “There he goes again.”

“Don’t get excited, Boiler,” Doolittle advised. “It won’t do any good and it won’t shut him up. He’s got to finish.”

Boiler turned away.

“I wasn’t an astronaut to begin with, see.”

Wait a minute—what was he saying? Of course he had been an astronaut! Then Pinback smiled inside. Might as well get the crazy story out. It was only a dream, of course. Just a weird dream that had been repeating itself over the years. It seemed very real, but naturally most dreams did.

Still, it was peculiar that he should find himself repeating so many times. At least it was amusing. And he seemed to be having it less and less now.

“See, to qualify for astronaut rating, you had to score at least seven hundred on the Officer’s Corps SARE’s,” he explained. “And I made fifty-eight… but I wanted to stay in the program. So they put me into liquid-fuel maintenance on the launch pad, working with the boosters for the starship.

“The boosters were liquid fueled, of course, since the Dark Star couldn’t use its overdrive field within the Earth’s gravitational influence. It was an important job and—”

Boiler glared back at him, but this time it failed to intimidate Pinback, just as Doolittle had indicated.

“Ah, naturally I was…” Pinback was aware of Boiler’s unpleasant scrutiny and strove not to look at him, “… ah, really disappointed. I wanted to be an astronaut in the worst way, and I don’t think those tests ever really measure your capability…”

“He told us this,” Boiler mused while Pinback rambled on, “four years ago last, didn’t he?”

“I mean, you know, I’d always had this urge to help push back the frontiers of space, get habitable systems ready for the colony ships. Anyway, I was on duty on the pad when they were getting ready to launch the ship… the Dark Star.”

Doolittle sipped at the last of his dinner. “No, I think it was four years ago.”

“… I was checking out the fuel lines on the big KG tanks at the time…”

“That’s what I said,” a puzzled Boiler commented. Doolittle looked over at him and frowned slightly.

“… And this astronaut came running out from behind the crew-isolation shed. He was stark naked, and he had his starsuit in one hand and, well, I evaluated the situation and immediately surmised that he was insane.

“He threw his starsuit on the ground. Then he saw me and gave me this really funny look, you know, and then I was sure he was insane, which really bothered me, because those guys are supposed to be about the stablest people there are. Then he opened the lid on the KG tank and jumped in.” Pinback’s tone turned earnest. “He was holding his nose, but I was sure that wouldn’t make much difference, guys, because as you probably know, liquid KG is kept at about minus two hundred and twenty degrees Centigrade and is pretty corrosive stuff besides.

“Well, I was pretty surprised, I can tell you. I didn’t know what to make of it. Like I said, astronauts are supposed to be super stable, and here this guy comes running along stark naked and jumps into my KG tank.”

“Can I have some of that?” Boiler pointed to an unopened packet still resting in Doolittle’s tray.

Doolittle nodded and handed the corporal the plastic container. He didn’t care much for liquid rolls and butter.

“Well, naturally,” Pinback continued relentlessly, “I was gonna try and save him… even though by that time, what with the super cold and corrosiveness and all, there probably wasn’t much left of him… but I mean, what’s a guy gonna do? I couldn’t just stand around and do nothing, could I?”

He shrugged off the nagging feeling that he shouldn’t be saying all this, that he’d gone through this insane dream too many times already. The feeling stayed with him, but he continued.

“So I put on his starsuit for protection, and I’m getting ready to go in after him… right, you guys? So what happened was that before I could leap into the vat…”

Doolittle gave him a sad look.

“…this other fella came running along. He took a fast look at the name on the starsuit and says, ‘Hey, Sergeant Pinback, you’ve gotta board immediately because we’re gonna launch in twenty minutes.’ ”

Doolittle’s patience was just about exhausted. “You told us this four years ago.”

“And I tried to tell him,” Pinback continued, ignoring the lieutenant’s comment, “that I wasn’t really astronaut Sergeant Pinback.”

What was that? Hold on there… you gone bananas or something, Pinback? Of course you’re Sergeant Pinback. Who else could you be but Sergeant Pinback?

“… but I couldn’t figure out how to make the helmet radio work…”

“It’s funny, you know,” Boiler said, trying hard to remember exactly and rubbing his chin, “but I’m sure it was four years ago.”

“Maybe,” Doolittle admitted. It was beginning to bother him now. At first he had shrugged off these trivial lapses of memory. After all, in twenty years it was hardly reasonable to expect that you’d be able to recall every tiny little thing that happened.

But the lapses seemed to be increasing. And he wasn’t alone in forgetting things. Boiler, too, was having trouble with the same memories—memories of things not directly connected with the operation of the ship. Pinback, poor Pinback, had problems of his own, as did Talby.

Doolittle could remember everything about his personal life before starting the mission, and everything necessary to the Dark Star’s operation—but anything in between gave him increasing trouble. It was beginning to be as if he had had no personal life at all in the past twenty years. As though nothing had happened not involving the mission.

As though his mind now as well as his body was be coming an extension of the ship. A voice screamed inside him.

One more bomb! One more drop, and they could start home.

But would they get there in time…?

Talby was seated before the computer keyboard. He blended neatly into the machinery. The main computer screen faced him, illuminated from within, framed by the green glow of the computer-chamber lighting.

At the moment the screen was flashing an ultrarapid series of mathematical symbols and words for Talby’s perusal. As usual, he had better luck following the symbols than the words.

It gave him some idea of where to look for the trouble. The computer’s own tracing circuits had apparently been damaged. That accounted for its failure to locate and announce the trouble. It needed help—Talby’s.

Repunching orders via the keyboard, he called up a chart of the Dark Star. More buttons pushed, more detailed graphs appeared.

He was clearly going to have to pinpoint the problem himself. More requests were fed into the ship’s electronic ganglion. The area of the ship under consideration was patiently reduced as one section after another checked out clean.

Finally an intermittent red flash appeared on the screen, accusing the rearmost section of the ship’s schematics.

He immediately punched out a request for that area, then saw it appear obediently on screen. The red flash was still there. He punched for an enlargement of the damaged area. It expanded tremendously. A final enlargement, and the bright red warning light turned into a winking arrow jabbing at a back section of the emergency airlock. And at last, words appeared underneath the diagram.

COMMUNICATIONS LASER NO. 17—EMERGENCY AIRLOCK

Talby’s thoughts moved one step ahead of the series of repair-and-realignment orders that followed. He thumbed the intercom switch to one side without even looking at it and spoke toward the mike.

“Lieutenant Doolittle, this is Talby. Please reply, Lieutenant, wherever you are.”

“I’m here, Talby,” came Doolittle’s voice. “What is it?”

The astronomer considered his words carefully. He had to impress the importance of the situation on Doolittle without necessarily alarming him. He didn’t want the lieutenant to send Boiler or Pinback back to help him—they made him nervous. He was pretty sure he could handle it alone, without having to look at another human being.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your evening meal, sir, but I’m in the computer room. I’ve located the malfunction.”

“Malfunction? What malfunction?”

“You remember, sir. The one that the computer couldn’t locate. You were in the dome with me when it came in.”

“Oh… sure,” Doolittle replied in a tone that hinted he was anything but.

“The scanner shows it to be a breakdown in the number seventeen communications laser, down in the emergency airlock. I can’t tell exactly what’s wrong with the laser, except that it has something to do with alignment. That could be dangerous, but since nothing disastrous has happened since the malfunction first occurred, I tend to think it’s okay… I’m going to put on a starsuit in a little while just in case, and go back and see if I can’t fix the trouble.”

“Sure, sounds good, Talby.”

“Just wanted to let you know, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah, fine. Doolittle out.” He slipped the mike back under the playback grid.

Now what had Talby been talking about? Some sort of malfunction? Well, it didn’t matter. If it were really important, he would see that Doolittle knew about it.

“Why doesn’t Talby ever eat down here with the rest of us?” Boiler asked.

Doolittle looked over at the corporal, surprised. It wasn’t like Boiler to show concern for anyone. He shrugged. “He just likes it up in the dome, that’s all. You know… astronomers.”

As if that were the final word on the subject, both he and Boiler became quiet. Doolittle finished off the last of the packet of ham and went to his final drops of mint tea. That was the best thing about the food computer, as far as he was concerned, and the best parts of their meals. With no effort, the computer could produce packets of any tea known to man—Darjeeling to Lipton. Sometimes the new flavors were all that kept Doolittle going.

If Doolittle had his teas, Boiler had his reconstituted cigars. Now he reached into a tunic pocket and extracted one of the long smokes. Pity their reconstructed food didn’t taste as good as the cigars smoked.

Lighting up, he took a couple of long, satisfied puffs. His brow wrinkled at a sudden thought.

“Hey, Talby—Talby who?” His confusion deepened, but he didn’t let it get to him. You couldn’t let anything get to you now or you were sure to go off the deep end. “What’s Talby’s first name?”

Doolittle looked up casually, started to say something, and suddenly appeared absorbed in an entirely different thought. A mild hint of worry crept into his voice.

“Hey, Boiler… what’s my first name?”

Boiler opened his mouth to reply, hesitated, closed it.

“So anyway,” Pinback went on as if they had been entranced by his reminiscences all along, “after they discovered the bits and pieces of this…”

Doolittle got up and dropped the remnants of plastic and metal into the proper disposal slot.

“I’m going to the music room.”

“So anyway,” Pinback began again, shifting to face Boiler.

Boiler didn’t even look at him, didn’t even say anything. He simply rose and tossed his used utensils into the same slot and left the eating area.

And Pinback—Pinback was mad. Here he’d just saved the whole damn ship and no one was the least bit interested in how he had come to be aboard to do it. But if that were the case, then he hadn’t been talking about saving the ship, had he? He’d been talking about saving someone else. An astronaut, yeah, like himself. Or was it? He wasn’t sure.

Getting up, he properly disposed of his own garbage and thoughtfully pressed the recycle button—something Doolittle and Boiler, typically, had neglected to do.

There was a hum from the disposal as he left the room, thinking hard. Saved. Astronaut. Himself, Pinback. Alien. Tranquilizer. Beachball.

He was definitely confused and worried, and at times when he was confused and worried there was only one way he could find solace.

Each of them had their own place. Boiler could do it anywhere, with occasional bursts of barely controlled violence. Doolittle did it in the music room. Talby did it… Boiler’s last words came back to him and he suddenly wondered what the hell Talby’s first name was, anyway.

As usual, the recording alcove in the library was unoccupied, but he took the precaution of checking the corridor before he closed the door and sat down. Privacy was essential here. It wouldn’t do for Boiler, or even Doolittle, to see what he was up to.

He removed the precious, unmarked tape from his shirt. The legend My Diary was scrawled across the otherwise blank label. Gently he slipped it into the machine and turned his attention to the screen in front of the compact console.

A muted hum indicated that the audio was activated, and then the words FOR OFFICIAL PURPOSES, THIS RECORDING INSTRUMENT AUTOMATICALLY DELETES ALL OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE AND/OR GESTURES appeared on the screen.

There was a last pop, indicating that the visual was focused and in synch with the sound, and then the words disappeared. They were replaced by a portrait of a young man, staring back at him. A stranger.

The stranger looked very much like himself. The differences were quite superficial. The stranger was neatly clad in a finely pressed uniform. His hair was closely trimmed on top and sides and the burgeoning beard carefully shaped. He wore a silly smile and a generally immature expression.

Beep. “This statement’s for posterity,” the stranger declaimed vigorously. Pinback sat perfectly motionless, watching him.

“I just wanna say that I am not Sergeant Pinback. My real name is Bill Frug. Frug. F-R-U-G. I’m a field maintenance technician. Specifically, I work with the KG liquid fuel tanks for the starship launch pad chemical boosters.

“I’ve been on this mission now for about fourteen years, Earth time. Or about…” he paused a moment to figure, “… two years shiptime.

“That’s a long time, two years shiptime, Fourteen years I’ve been on this mission and I just wanna tell you that Pinback’s uniforms do not fit me, and the underwear is too loose, and I’ve been trying to make up my own nametag to replace Sergeant Pinback’s, but I can’t seem to get his nametags off any of these jumpsuits without ripping the suit and besides, the sewing machine in the recreation room doesn’t work anymore, and I only know how to do hemstitching anyway.

“I do not belong on this mission, though so far I have been… an exemplary member of the crew and have tried to fulfill Sergeant Pinback’s duties to the best of my ability and… and… I want to go home.”

The picture changed. The stranger still looked like Pinback, only now his hair and beard were longer, much longer, and so was his expression.

“Ah, Commander Powell died today,” the stranger intoned solemnly. “We were coming out of hyperdrive after a successful bomb run and, well, he sits right next to me and, well, something went wrong with the force-field mechanism when we came out into normal space and it triggered a defective circuit in his seat and it blew up and—”

The figure on the screen gave a half-shrug, “—and he was dead, just like that. Doolittle said his brain was still functioning, sort of, so instead of giving him a burial in space we put him into the freezer in the hopes that when we get back to Earth, the bio boys can reconstruct a body for him.

“Personally, I think Doolittle is unduly optimistic, but then he always was kind of close to the commander and so I understand his actions.”

Yet again the video metamorphosis, and an even more disheveled Pinback-type stared forlornly out at Pinback.

“Doolittle says that he’s assuming formal command of the ship,” the figure said, “and I, I say…” The word DELETED momentarily replaced the figure on the screen, and the audio went silent.

“… that he’s exceeding his authority because I’m the only one with any objectivity left on this ship and therefore I should be the one to assume command. Doolittle says that I’m not really Sergeant Pinback, which shows how far gone he is, and so I couldn’t possibly assume command.

“Then he said that if I wanted to take over he would be perfectly happy to let me. And he asked what my first order was and that stupid ape Boiler just stood there and snickered at me and I didn’t think it was very funny. Or fair. I mean, I should have some time to prepare for something like taking command.

“Now, I’m filing an official report on this to Earth Base headquarters ’cause I think this is a lot of…” and the word DELETED appeared again—several times, in fact.

The view changed again. Now it was a smiling, happy Pinback-type who appeared, with slightly trimmed beard and hair. A Pinback who looked very much, if not exactly, like the Pinback sitting in the recorder chair, staring at his mirror image on the screen.

This time the audio came only in uneven bursts, with the now familiar slogan DELETED appearing almost constantly on the screen. Very few real sounds escaped the recorder’s inbuilt censors, and these were mostly snickers and nervous half-giggles instead of words.

“I went up to Doolittle in the hall today,” the image giggled, “and I DELETED Doolittle.” Snicker. “He said DELETED"… grin, chuckle, snort… “and he didn’t…” This time the words GESTURE DELETED appeared. “Then he,"… laugh, DELETED, chuckle… “and I said, well, and he still didn’t get it, and…”

The beep changed the screen yet again, to reveal now a nervous, irritated Pinback who in addition to looking very unhappy also revealed a slight twitch at the corner of the right eye.

“This mission has fallen apart since Commander Powell died. Doolittle treats me like an idiot. Talby, he thinks he’s so smart, up in his dome, and Boiler punches me in the arm when no one is looking.

“I’m tired of being treated like an old washrag. I’m tired of being treated like I’m an intruder and don’t belong. I’m tired of not being given due credit for the job I’m doing. I’m tired of… of not being treated like I should be treated.

“After all, I outrank both Talby and Boiler, and I’ve reported their disrespect back to headquarters. But for some reason headquarters hasn’t responded. I wonder what’s wrong with those people down there. Don’t they realize the importance of maintaining discipline up here? If rank means nothing anymore then we might as well give up on the whole mission. It’s enough to make someone resign his commission.

“I would relinquish my post and duties except that my sense of loyalty to the program runs too high. Besides, it would endanger everyone on the ship, myself included. If this is selfish self-preservation, then so be it.”

That was the last speech. The tape froze and the in formation AWAITING TAPING flashed on the screen.

Pinback let out a deep sigh. He adjusted his tunic slightly, smoothed back some free-flying hairs, and brushed a little congealed liquid ham out of his beard. Sitting up straight and clearing his throat, he flicked another switch on the console and spoke toward the machine, staring straight ahead. His tone was even, well modulated, controlled—maybe a touch overcontrolled.

“I do not like the men on this spaceship. They are uncouth and fail to appreciate my better qualities. I have something of value to contribute to this mission, if they would only take a little of their so-precious time to recognize it.

“Today, over lunch, I attempted to improve morale and build a sense of camaraderie among the men by holding a humorous round-robin discussion of the early days of the mission. My overtures were brutally rejected.

“These men do not want a happy ship. They are deeply sick and try to compensate for their own mental misfortunes by making me feel miserable.”

He was dimly aware that he was sniffling and that this was wrong. Also unmilitary. It should not be going on the tape. But he couldn’t stop himself, and besides, it felt good. The words continued to flow.

“Last week was my birthday. Not only didn’t I get any presents but nobody ever said ‘happy birthday’ to me. And there was no cake, either. When I asked about it Boiler suggested I go stick my head in the reactor core and blow myself out.”

He sniffled again.

“Someday this tape will be played, and then they’ll be sorry.”

That seemed to be everything. Anyhow, he was sniffling too hard to make much sense, and there was no point in clogging up the tape with too much emotion, however honest or heartfelt. It wasn’t dignified.

Reaching out, he flipped down the activate switch and the Pinback on the screen disappeared. Pinback carefully removed the tape from the recorder and slipped it back into his tunic. Then he got up and headed for the sleeping area.

There were a few hours left in overdrive before they reached the target planet. Sitting down on his bunk, he methodically turned off the intercom, warning controls, everything. He didn’t want to be disturbed. He still had some time to sulk, and he didn’t want Doolittle, or Boiler, breaking in on him,

So he didn’t hear it. And Doolittle, deep into his makeshift organ, didn’t hear it either, because he turned off everything when he was playing. Everything except the plink and bang and clonk of crude hammers striking water jars and old metal containers and the rank on rank of huge pipes blasting out the Franck Grande Pièce Symphonique.

And Boiler, deep, deep in his fading girlie magazine, didn’t hear it either, not with the earmuffs on. Didn’t hear the insistent voice of the computer…