Alan Foster: Dark Star

Nine, ten… begin again.

Sergeant Steel held on to his guts in he stared at the approaching Goering Panzer. The ring of the grenade was clamped bitterly in his sweating teeth. He had one chance for the platoon. Get up and ram that egg down the Panzer’s open hatch before her 88mm. and twin machine guns could spit death among his trapped men. He steeled himself for the leap—

The communicator buzzed for attention. Pinback reluctantly put down the tattered issue of Real War Stories—Action Comics and stared at the switch set in the wall. For a moment he thought the buzzing had stopped. He returned to the busy Sergeant Steel, but the nasty instrument interrupted again.

He was forced to acknowledge.

Doolittle’s voice was mildly peeved. “Pinback, if you can tear yourself away from improving your mind, we could use you forward. We’re getting close.”

“Aw, I’m just getting to the good part, Doolittle.”

“You’ve read every one of those comics at least thirty times, Pinback,” responded the lieutenant tiredly. “Get your ass forward.”

“Oh, all right!” Pinback snapped off the intercom and lovingly marked his place in the magazine.

Darn Doolittle anyhow, he muttered to himself as he ambled forward. So they had another sun to blow, so what? It wouldn’t have hurt to let him finish the book. Sometimes Doolittle really got on his nerves.

As usual, no one said anything to him when he walked into the narrow bridge-control room. Slipping mutely into his seat between Doolittle and Boiler, he made a casual check of the readouts, nodded to himself.

Uh-huh, sure enough. They had lots of time before coming in drop range of the target luminary. Doolittle just wanted to irritate him by bringing him forward early. Well, he wasn’t going to let it show.

Then he noticed the tell-tale flashing idly at the base of his communications grid. It was the deep-space receive. He looked right at Boiler, then left at Doolittle. Their tell-tales were flashing too, yet neither man seemed to notice, or care. No telling how long they’d been flashing.

He activated the grid and the computer voice promptly announced, “Attention, attention. Incoming communication from Earth Base, Mission Control, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. To Scout Ship Dark Star .”

Dazed, Pinback stole another glance at his companions. Still, no one seemed the least bit interested. Well, they weren’t going to get a rise out of him. So he ignored the computer also, while the message continued to repeat.

One man was a crowd on the narrow bridge. With the three of them it was intolerably close, and highly efficient.

But there were other reasons why the bridge was so small. One was that many sections of the ship, now empty, had once been packed with compressed acres of food, spare parts, and living material—most of which was now gone.

And there had to be lots of room for the bombs. It bothered Pinback that Doolittle and Boiler persisted in calling them bombs. He always tried to get them to refer to them by their proper names—thermostellar triggering devices.

But Doolittle persisted in calling them bombs. The term seemed inadequate to Pinback for such a godlike and overwhelming concatenation of modern technology. Once in a while Boiler would call them something else, usually unmentionable, because the bombs were the main reason they were on this unmentionable mission.

Talby didn’t call them bombs, but then Talby didn’t refer to them at all, Of course, Talby was crazy anyway, so it didn’t much matter. But that bothered Pinback too, beause Talby didn’t look crazy, or sound crazy. The alternative was that Talby was sane and the rest of them were crazy. Pinback found this line of thought unpleasant, and he dropped it.

Now Commander Powell, he’d always called them thermostellar triggering devices, but Commander Powell was—

“Attention, attention. Incoming communication from Earth Base, Mission Control, McMurd—”

The tension was too much for Pinback. Phooey on Boiler.

“Hey, guys,” he said finally, his voice the usual combination of half pleading, half whine. “It’s a message from Earth. All the way from Earth. Isn’t anybody going to acknowledge it?”

Boiler’s reaction was predictable. He just lay back in his chair, punching alternating buttons. The buttons didn’t do anything. Nobody could remember what the buttons used to do. But punching them didn’t affect the ship, so Boiler kept doing it. One on, one off. One on, one off.

Boiler was always punching things lately, not always inanimate things, either. Pinback liked Boiler even though the big sandy-haired gentleman hated the sergeant’s guts. Pinback liked everybody. It was the best thing about him, really.

So he kept trying to make friends with Boiler. When Boiler made it particularly hard on him, Pinback rationalized that it was his contribution to maintenance of the ship’s morale. The task was necessary, then, for the good of the ship as well as for the good of Pinback. Secretly, deep down, what he really wanted to do was see Boiler reduced to his component atoms. And he kept it deep down, because he was afraid of Boiler. He had no question in his mind, no question at all, that Boiler could beat him to a pulp anytime he felt like it.

Pinback returned his attention to Doolittle, tried to put a mite more grit into his voice, and failed miserably. “Lieutenant Doolittle, sir, aren’t we going to accept the message? Sir?”

Doolittle looked back at him with that faintly contemptuous air he seemed to reserve for Pinback alone. “Message? Why bother? They wouldn’t have anything important to say. And they never have anything nice to say. So why bother?

“Besides, we’ve got an unstable world coming up, Pinback. Or have you forgotten already? You could have, you know. You’re particularly good at forgetting things, Pinback.”

There! Now why did he have to go and say a thing like that? Pinback tried to ignore it.

“I know that, sir. I know we’ve got another unstable world to blow. And I’m ready for it, sir, ready as always—but a message from Earth! We haven’t had a message from Earth in, well, in days, sir.”

“Months,” mumbled Boiler.

“Years,” corrected Doolittle.

Pinback was discouraged. He badly wanted to hear that message. But should he acknowledge it by himself? Wasn’t that kind of a bold step?

Why should it be? He outranked everyone on the ship now except Doolittle. That is, he would have outranked everybody on the ship except Doolittle if he were Sergeant Elmer Pinback, Deep Space Exploration Forces. But he wasn’t Sergeant Elmer Pinback—or was he?

If he wasn’t Sergeant Elmer Pinback, then, who was he? What was it Doolittle had said about forgetting? No, no!

He looked down at his uniform and sighed with relief. The name sewn into his jersey definitely said Pinback . And that was the only name he could think of for himself, though there was a tiny door opening in his mind, just a crack, that—

He slammed it shut. He was Sergeant Elmer Pinback, Deep Space Exploration Forces, and that was about enough nonsense!

As it developed, he was spared the need to make a decision, which pleased him greatly. He didn’t like making decisions. He wasn’t very good at it and he never would be very good at it.

Doolittle didn’t like making decisions either, but it seemed to come naturally to him. Oh, the lieutenant didn’t have any flair for it, and he didn’t do it with much conviction—not like Commander Powell, say. But Pinback didn’t care so long as he didn’t have to do it.

Doolittle reached out a hand and lazily flipped the Receive switch.

The main screen over their heads started to clear. Pinback looked up at it anxiously, hopefully. Maybe, maybe it was even a recall order. He chided himself. That was a damn silly thought. There would be no recall order until they had finished their mission.