Dark Star

  "Drop!" he screamed at the flashing red warning lights. "Drop, drop, drop!"

  "Easy, Pinback," Doolittle said softly. "Take it easy, man."

  Pinback looked wildly over at him, panting hard. Then he stared back down at the two switches he had nearly pulled out of the board.

  "He'll be okay, I think," Doolittle said in response to Boiler's glance. "How about the bomb?"

  "It's just sittin' there," the corporal told him, turning his attention back to the readouts. "The damned thing's just sittin' there. What the hell's wrong?"

  And while they sat and wondered and fumed, above each man a series of numbers set into a box insert at the bottom of his screen, read: SIDEREAL BASE TIME 0014:40.6 DESTRUCTION SEQUENCE IN PROGRESS.

  The number changed even as he looked at it, changed while the honking sounded warningly throughout the bridge. It resounded in the bomb bay and in the badly damaged computer room and in the emergency airlock, where an unconscious Talby lay sprawled beneath twin lines of red, hands clasped over his face plate in a frozen attempt to reach his eyes.

  "Boiler," Doolittle said finally, nodding in the direction of the blaring speaker, "kill that thing."

  Boiler reached out and flipped a switch on the small panel marked Audio. The honking stopped. The red warning light stopped with it, but the chronometer insert in the screen did not, nor did the official one set into the main console. All continued to tick off the seconds, splitting the shrinking time period into tiny, manageable bits and pieces.

  "Oh, come on, Doolittle," a voice inside admonished himself. "Don't just sit there on your ass. Do something, and man, or the bomb'll do it for you. The bomb is stuck in the bomb bay and it's primed to go off in about fourteen minutes and if it does, baby, the shock wave you'll be riding won't come from that wave breaking tight behind you."

  He fumbled at his headset, spoke haltingly. "This is Lieutenant Doolittle calling bomb number twenty. Acknowledge, bomb number twenty."

  "I'm here, Lieutenant."

  "Sounds sane enough," Boiler observed.

  "Computer, this is Doolittle. Talk to the bomb and order it back to the bay, please."

  Silence.

  "Computer, acknowledge. This is Lieutenant Doolittle speaking."

  Quiet.

  "You talk to it, Doolittle," suggested Boiler.

  Doolittle nodded, cleared his throat. "There has been a malfunction again, bomb. You're to disarm yourself and return to the bomb bay immediately. There has been a malfunction. This bomb run is aborted. Return to the bomb bay immediately. Do you understand?"

  "Yes." The bomb's voice was calm, composed. "I am programmed to detonate in fourteen minutes thirty seconds. Detonation will occur at the programmed time."

  Frantic thoughts ran through Doolittle's mind. They were unencumbered by solutions. And on top of the bomb, he now had another problem to worry about.

  What was the matter with the central computer?

  "Bomb," he finally managed to sputter into the pick up, "this is Doolittle. You are not to detonate. I repeat, you are not to detonate in the bomb bay. Disarm yourself. This is an order. Do you read me, bomb?"

  "I read you, Lieutenant Doolittle," the bomb replied quietly. "Locale of detonation is not a concern of mine. That is always predetermined . . . and I will detonate in fourteen minutes. Detonation will occur at the programmed time."

  "You already said that," Doolittle said tightly. The bomb did not venture to argue this point.

  "Fourteen minutes to detonation," Pinback informed them with a touch of desperation. "What the hell's happening, Lietitenant? What's going on?"

  "I don't know." He spread his hands helplessly. "I can't figure out what—"

  "Attention attention," came a familiar feminine voice—a voice Doolittle had not expected to hear again. He stopped in mid-sentence.

  "I have sustained serious damage," the computer told them. "All fires in the region of the main computer room are now under control."

  "Fires?" exclaimed Pinback, twisting in his seat. "What fires?"

  "Shut up," Boiler whispered warningly. Pinback shut up.

  "Please pay close attention. Bomb number twenty has not malfunctioned. I repeat, bomb number twenty has not malfunctioned. The failure to drop on command from a compound malfunction of communication laser number seventeen, which primes and follows through all drop orders via the release mechanism in the grapple shaft.

  "All contact with the grapple shaft—and therefore with the bomb itself—is now cut off.

  "I have subsequently activated automatic dampers on board ship. With no planetary material to react with, this damping will confine the thermostellar trigger reaction to an annihilation area approximately one kilometer in diameter. This is all I can do at this time.

  "I am attempting to circumvent the damaged circuitry to reestablish contact with the grapple shaft and the bomb. I must inform you that prognosis for eventual success is not good. Repeat, not good. Damage can eventually be repaired, with manual human assistance, in twenty-four hours.

  "All estimates indicate that even with human assistants operating under drug-stimulated efficiency, these repairs cannot be duplicated in fourteen minutes. It's all up to you now, fellows."

  There was a moment's silence while the three crewmen digested this information. Boiler's voice was unnaturally subdued.

  "Did you hear that, Doolittle?"

  "Yeah, Doolittle," Pinback added pleadingly. "What are we gonna do? I mean, it's great that the automatic dampers will confine the explosion to an area only one kilometer in diameter, but if we and the ship are included in that kilometer, it's not gonna make a whole helluva lot of difference."

  "Don't just sit there and stare, Lieutenant," Boiler said anxiously. "Give us some orders. What do we do?"

  Why me? Why did he have to be the only officer left aboard when Powell died? Why couldn't he have been a simple underclassman like Boiler, or an indifferent loner like Talby, or even a posturing imposter like Pinback? Poor, well-meaning Pinback. Poor, ulcerous Boiler, Poor, distant Talby.

  Poor Doolittle.

  "I don't know," he said finally, honestly. "I don't know what we're going to do."

  And Pinback said, almost predictably, "Commander Powell would have known what to do."

  "Pinback," Doolittle said quietly, "if you say that one more time—if you even whisper it under your breath and I hear you—I'm going to kill you."

  Pinback sat back in his chair and crossed his arms indifferently. "Won't make any difference. We're all gonna be dead in"—he squinted upward—"thirteen minutes twenty-five and a half seconds, anyway." He sniffled. "Commander Powell would already have—"

  "That's it!" Doolittle screamed.

  Pinback gave a little jump and cowered in his seat, but Doolittle wasn't heading for him. Instead, he looked almost relieved.

  "That's the only thing left to do. I'll have to ask Commander Powell. I'll have to ask him what to do." Doolittle was unstrapping himself from the chair.

  "I don't mean to be a downer, Lieutenant," Boiler put in, "but Commander Powell's dead. He's been dead for a long time now. We put him—"

  "His body's dead, yes," admitted Doolittle, "but we've kept him iced and wired. We got to him right after the accident. You know I've been able to get through to him a couple of times since."

  Boiler was shaking his head disparagingly. "Freak shots . . . chance. There've been lots of times I've tried to talk to him and I get nothing but static . . . background noises from a half-dead mind."

  "I tell you, he's not completely gone," Doolittle insisted. "Only his body is dead. If we can get him back to Earth before the cells degenerate too far—"

  "If we can get ourselves back to Earth," Pinback mumbled.

  "I'm going to try it anyway," he told them. He left the bridge, hurried through the corridors of the Dark Star.

  Powell . . . Powell would know what do. Powell had always known what to do. Powell wasn't much older than the rest of them. Not physically.
But he'd always seemed to know exactly the thing to do, always known the right decision to make.

  It seemed to Doolittle that he relied more on Powell dead than when the commander had been alive.

  If only that damned seat circuit hadn't gone bad on them. But there might still be a chance. He had talked with Powell since the accident—with what was left of him. There might still be a chance. With the central computer helpless, there had to be a chance.

  He opened a secondary hatch, descended a ladder to a little-visited section of the ship. He remembered the trouble they'd had installing the linkups to Powell's brain. Remembered the pressure of that first attempt at contact.

  How dimly, almost imperceptibly, Powell had responded to his first hesitant probes. It had given Doolittle something else to do after he'd finished the organ, Powell had become something of a hobby.

  But he hadn't been down here in a long, long time. How badly had the leads disintegrated? How much had the supercold affected the linkages?

  Carefully avoiding the thick hatch cover in the center of the small chamber, whose top gave off continuous wisps of chilled air, he took the special insulated gloves from their place on the wall.

  Then he walked around behind the hatch and lifted it carefully, slowly. The cover to the cryogenic freezer compartment came up easily. He could feel the cold even through the thick hatch insulation, even through the specially treated gloves.

  Doolittle let the hatch cover down easily, took the linkup box from its niche in the wall. He plugged it into the open socket by the hatch cover and pulled out the compact mike. Adjusting dials on the box carefully, he watched an arrow move back and forth in a gauge.

  Occasionally a hum like the ocean heard inside a seashell would rise to audibility, then die out. Eventually it reached a point where he could hear it clearly, where the arrow locked into the proper slot on the gauge. He turned another switch, and the arrow stayed frozen in position. If he couldn't reach Powell now he'd never be able to.

  One other thing was certain. He'd never have another chance.

  Below him, encased in frozen gas and ice of unbelievably low temperature, was Commander Powell. The body of the maybe-dead commander was nude, his head facing the hatch opening, his feet the farthest away.

  The top of his skull was an intertwined blackbird's nest of long hair and wires and jumps and pickups and electrode paste. Both Boiler and Pinback had laughed at him for leaving Powell's hair unshorn—would have made it much easier to connect the myriad links. But Doolittle had insisted on leaving the commander as natural-looking as possible.

  Actually he'd been as shocked as any of them when that first successful contact had been made. But Powell really had very little to say, and the conversations obviously tired him, drained what little was left of the life force.

  So Doolittle had gone down to the cryo chamber less and less. And there had been many times when patient inquiry had drawn nothing but a confused mumbling from the commander's frozen brain.

  But now—now he had to make contact.

  He blew into his gloves and spoke hopefully into the box-microphone.

  "Commander Powell, Commander Powell, this is Doolittle. Can you hear me, sir?"

  Mumbling, becoming slightly louder, but still indistinct. He wasn't getting through. Wishing he had more delicate controls, he worked at the single fine tuner on the box.

  "Commander Powell, this is Doolittle. Something serious has come up, sir. I'm sorry to bother you, but I do have to ask you a question. It's vital, sir. I know how this tires you, but I didn't know what else to do."

  A slight turn of the tuner . . . and now words started to form, the mumbling started to take on recognizable form. The words were incomparably distant, faint . . . and cold. Cold with a chill born of vast distance and not the refrigerating material in which the commander was encased.

  There was a feebleness to the words that Doolittle tried hard to ignore, and again he found himself speculating on what Powell's preserved mind thought about down there in the cold and the dark. He shivered a little. Maybe his desperate attempts to preserve the commander's life had not been a good thing.

  But it might save them all, now.

  This time, Powell seemed actually happy for the company.

  "Doolittle . . . I'm so glad you've come to talk to me, Doolittle. It's been so long since anyone has come to talk to me."

  "Yes, sir, Commander," he answered hurriedly. This was no place for long pauses—he had to retain Powell's attention. It could fade at any time.

  "Sir, we have a big problem, and everything I've tried has failed. The computer is damaged and it can't seem to do anything, either. It's the last bomb, sir, bomb number twenty. It's stuck. It won't drop out of the bomb bay, and it refuses to abort, and it says it's going to detonate in"—he checked his wrist chronometer—"in less than eleven minutes . . . Do you understand me, sir?" His voice rose nervously. Had he lost the commander already?

  Powell's voice echoed from the box speaker, reassuringly strong. "Yes, Doolittle . . . I hear you. Doolittle, you must tell me one thing."

  "What's that, sir? Anything . . ."

  "Tell me, Doolittle," came the distant, icy whisper, "how are the Dodgers doing?"

  For a moment Doolittle sat frozen himself, trying to readjust his mind. "The . . . Dodgers?"

  "Yes, Doolittle, the Dodgers. Do they have a chance for the pennant this year?"

  Careful, now. His mind is wandering. Keep him happy, but keep him!

  "They broke up, I think, sir. Disbanded over fifteen years ago. The descendants of the original landowners finally won their suit and they had the stadium torn down. I think they grow grapes there now."

  "Oh," the ghost-voice moaned in disappointment. "Pity, pity. You see, Doolittle, all is transitory, nothing lasts. You realize that in here. It is surprising, but being dead has its advantages."

  "Yes, sir—but you don't seem to understand." He had the tiny microphone in a strangle grip. "It's the bomb. We can't get bomb number twenty to drop. It's stuck in the bomb bay, we can't seem to abort the final sequence, and it insists it's going to detonate."

  "Yes, Doolittle. But you must remember one thing."

  "What, sir?"

  "It's not a bomb. It's a thermostellar triggering device. There is a difference, you know."

  If he doesn't start talking about the bomb, Doolittle thought tightly, I'm going to kill him.

  "Whatever you choose to call it, sir, it's still going to go off. It'll kill us all."

  "That's really not much concern of mine, Doolittle." A vast sigh rolled out of the mike. "But I can see where it might bother you." Another sigh. "So many malfunctions. Sometimes I wonder if—"

  The voice stopped, then continued even more strongly. "Why don't you ever have anything nice to tell me when you come to visit me?"

  "I'm sorry, sir," Doolittle said in a carefully controlled tone. "It's hard to think of nice things to say . . . even if you do have a nice disposition for a dead man. But you know, sir, so many malfunctions, and me with the responsibility of running the ship . . . Boiler is a walking bomb, and Pinback is receding into infantilism in addition to his special problem, and Talby grows further away from us every day. It's been very hard for me, sir." He checked his wrist chronometer, "But we're managing, sir. But the bomb . . ."

  "Oh, yes. Ah, well . . . did you try the aesthemic clutch?"

  "Yes, sir," he responded gratefully. At last Powell appeared to recognize the problem!

  "What was that, Doolittle?"

  "Negative effect, sir."

  "It didn't work?" Powell moaned.

  "That's what I meant by negative effect, sir."

  "Don't get smart, Doolittle." A far-off, faintly heard wind. "What about the explosive bolts?"

  "No luck, sir," Doolittle told the box.

  "Tch. Well then, what about the aesthemic clutch?"

  Doolittle wanted to scream. "You already asked me about that, sir, and I told you it didn't work either." r />
  Rushing-water sounds of a distant, lonely creek. "Sorry, Doolittle. I've forgotten so much since I've been in here. So much . . . and I don't seem able to remember things in any order. I can remember some very complicated things, though, Doolittle, but I forget the simple ones, and I remember simple ones but forget the complicated ones, and forget the simple . . ."

  "Sir? What should we do, sir? Time is running out. The bomb's going to go off in a few minutes!"

  "Well, what you might try if everything else has failed is to—" A roar of static took over the mike and Doolittle worked frantically to reset the controls.

  "Commander?" He shook the box in deperation. Please let him finish, he pleaded with unknowable deities—please! "Hello . . . come in, Commander Powell!"

  "Hello, Doolittle."

  "Sorry, sir." Doolittle's turn to sigh. "You faded out for a couple of minutes there."

  "I'm sorry, Doolittle. It's hard to keep in touch. Tiring. It makes you sleepy. So . . . sleepy . . ."

  "The bomb, sir? What were you saying about the bomb—about what we might try?"

  "Oh, yes, I remember, Doolittle. Did you think my mind was going? It seems to me . . . sorry, I've drawn a blank. Can't seem to remember . . ."

  Doolittle was going to cry.

  "Hold it, hold it. I'll have it again in just a minute. I forget so many things. Hold on just a second . . . let me think. Oh yes, now I remember . . ."

  Tell me, tell me! "Yes, sir, what is it?"

  "You might try to reach station KAAY in Los Angeles with an extreme tight beam, using your full amplification on the communications transmitter. They should know how the Dodgers are doing."

  He covered the pickup with one hand and allowed himself the luxury of a single scream.

  He'd have to start all over again.

  "But you can't explode in the bomb bay," Pinback explained for the hundredth time. He stole a fast look at the chronometer insert in the screen overhead. It now showed 0009:08.1. It seemed like the numbers were changing faster now, but of course that was only his imagination working faster.