Alan Foster - Dark Star

There had never been as much trouble between the two when Commander Powell was alive. But that was all in the past. So much was all in the past, had been lost in Powell’s death. You remove one corner of the pentagram, and the mystic symbol seemed to lose all of its power.

“Let’s have some music in here, Boiler,” he said carefully.

“Sure thing.” Boiler, showing no signs of recent aggravation, reached for an upper panel. Strains of the song “Benson, Arizona” immediatly floated through the control room.

Doolittle relaxed. He loved this particular tune almost as much as he hated it. Loved it for the memories it brought back to him, and hated it for reminding him of what he no longer had.

Pinback spoke up a moment later—his usual obnoxious and cheerful self again. It didn’t take Pinback long to break out of one of his pouts. He was incapable, it seemed to Doolittle, of getting really angry at anything.

“Hey, don’t you think it’s time to make an entry in the log, Lieutenant? You know, bring the records up to date, record officially the new star, tell about our little amusing troubles, and all that.”

Doolittle turned over three cards, found himself stuck with the last jack buried on the bottom. He switched the jack with the top card, then put it up on the queen and played out the last two cards and the rest of the game. That made 342 straight games he’d played out—an impressive string he had no intention of breaking.

“What, Pinback?”

“I said, don’t you think it’s time for a log entry?” When Doolittle didn’t exactly leap to his feet to race to the recorder, Pinback continued pleading. “Aw, come on, Lieutenant. You haven’t made a log entry in a long time. One of these days that log’ll be history. Little kids will study, it and gasp, and their great-grandparents will say, ‘I remember when the Dark Star first did this or that.’ The folks back home will—”

“The folks back home,” Doolittle started to say angrily, “won’t give a flying…!”

He stopped. It was impossible to get mad at Pinback. The sergeant was a terrible audience. He wouldn’t do the decent thing and howl back at you. No, Pinback would either retreat into a heady pout or else try to make a joke out of your most heartfelt furies.

He could lay it on Boiler, but Boiler would just sit there and ignore him completely. At least Pinback reacted. And Talby, he could talk and yell and complain to Talby, but something in him always rejected the thought of disturbing the astronomer’s period of endless contemplation.

He could always talk to Commander Powell. Even though Powell was technically deceased, his occasionally functioning mind was still capable of random conversation. Sometimes Doolittle found himself closer in feeling to Powell than anyone else. Both men’s minds existed in a kind of suspended animation.

Well, might as well make Pinback happy. And it was part of his duty. And he’d promised himself, once upon a time, that he’d carry out the duties of acting commander to the best of his ability, etc., etc., blah-blah.

Besides, if he didn’t do it, Pinback might, and that would be disastrous if they ever did get back in one piece.

He reached up and activated the overhead screen. When the READY sign had cleared, he spoke toward the directional microphone. “Ship’s Log, entry number one thousand nine hundred and forty-three. Lieutenant Doolittle, acting commander of Dark Star , informing.

“Ship is presently cruising through sector Theta nine ninety at light-speed multiple enroute to area Veil Nebula for destruction of unstable planet. Our ETA is seventeen hours. Our ability to locate unstable worlds in systems with habitable planets seems to have increased markedly with practice. It almost seems as if they are presenting themselves to us on request. I can only assume that our increased proficiency is due to greater vigilance and familiarity with the necessary instrumentation. In any case it appears that we shall be returning home sooner than expected, ah, and we…”

He hesitated. There was something else, he thought, but he couldn’t think of what… oh yes. “Ship’s internal systems continue to deteriorate. We are compensating, but as the number of malfunctions multiplies, we find it increasingly difficult to improvise from our rapidly decreasing ship’s stores.”

Pinback leaned over and whispered to him.

He nodded, spoke to the screen. “Oh yeah… the short circuit in the rear seat panel which killed Commander Powell is still faulty. After much deliberation and thorough analysis of the situation, I have given explicit instructions that no one is to sit in that seat or he will be severely reprimanded.”

Pinback leaned over and whispered again, a mite more urgently this time.

“The storage… what is it now, Pinback?”

He paused, listened to the whisper. “Oh. And because he is sitting next to Commander Powell’s seat, Pinback is continually bothered by the faulty circuit. He is possessed of this unreasonable fear that his rear seat panel will be the next to short circuit.

I’ve pointed out to Sergeant Pinback that this attitude is both irrational and asinine, and he—”

“Is not,” muttered Pinback from off-screen.

“—he persists in reminding me of it.” Then the thought he had first been hunting for finally came to him. “Oh, yeah. Storage Area Nine, Subsection B self destructed last week following a circuit malfunction, thus destroying the ship’s entire supply of toilet paper. I would request of the folks down at McMurdo that we be immediately resupplied with this important commodity. But am afraid, logistics being what they seem to be at Earth Base these days, that they would ship us the toilet paper in lieu of our desperately needed radiation shielding.

“As the two materials are not interchangeable in function, I am therefore delaying the request that we be resupplied with the former commodity, although,” and he looked over at Pinback, “there are those among the crew who feel that in the long run, the toilet paper is the more vitally needed of the two.”

He stared back up into the screen. “And if anyone ever reading this log finds the present situation amusing, I can only hope that they someday find themselves in a situation where they have to opt for radiation shielding over toilet paper. I think that’s all.”

He reached up and switched off the screen recorder, feeling pleased with himself. It was a good log entry, a substantial log entry. It would never get him promoted, of course, but it was sobering to think that someday what he had just recorded might be broadcast to reverent billions all over Earth.

The music was beginning to grate in its familiarity, both of sound and conjured-up image. He swiveled around to glance at the silent corporal. “Put something else on, Boiler. Something less descriptive. Something more… abstract.”

Boiler mumbled something unintelligible, nudged the dial a fraction. Immediately, responsive electric guitars, drums, trumpets, and theremin filled the tiny control cabin, swamped it in an orgy of amplified rhythm.

Pinback and Boiler began to move in their seats, drawn together by their single, common point of interest—jumping, rocking, snapping their fingers, shaking in time to the music.

Doolittle tried to join them, to complete the triumvirate. He tried to force himself, but for all his will to subsume himself in the music, all that moved was his head, slightly. Inside, he wondered that he could respond to the music at all.

Something made him different from even Boiler and Pinback. Yet again, he wondered what it was that he was missing.

The music reached Talby over the open intercom. He frowned slightly until he identified the source of the interruption and turned it down. It would be unprofessional as well as potentially dangerous to switch the intercom off entirely. He hardly heard the music anyway.