Dark Star

8

“ATTENTION, ATTENTION, ALL personnel. I have finally identified the malfunction.” This would have been of some import to Talby, but he was asleep. He shouldn’t have been, but no one could dictate sleep periods to Talby any longer. Besides, there would always be someone else awake if he chose to dose off at an odd moment.

They were awake, all right, but they weren’t listening.

“Communications laser number seventeen has been damaged,” the voice continued. “This damage was apparently incurred during the passage through the electromagnetic energy vortex we recently encountered.

“As you will note, this laser monitors the jettison primer on the bomb-drop mechanism. Communications laser number seventeen is located in the emergency airlock. It is crucial to attend to this malfunction before engaging primer for the next bomb-run sequence. Thank you for observing all safety precautions.”

And Boiler slept on innocently under his girlie mag and Pinback was asleep under his thoughts and Doolittle played on and on and on and Talby lay asleep thinking about tomorrow’s stars…

Talby was musing on his new sky. Waking up in the dome was the usual exhilarating experience. A beautiful morning.

What a joke that was. He hadn’t seen a morning in twenty years, except for the false tint of a sun coming up over a soon-to-be-destroyed unstable world. Morning, indeed.

And he had another job to do, as necessary as it was distasteful. That of repairing the broken communications laser. Still, it shouldn’t be too hard to fix.

As usual, he was awake before any of the others. After a quick check to make sure all ship’s systems were operating more or less normally, he made his way to the emergency airlock. No point in waking Doolittle. Be easier to tell him about the successful completion of the repair job from the comfort of the dome.

The four suits were untouched, neatly ranked side by side in the open locker. The sooner he got this job over with, the better.

He probably didn’t need the starsuit. But if for some reason the laser should backfire, the suit was just reflective enough to deflect the beam away. It wouldn’t stand up to a direct blast from the laser for even seconds, but there was no point in taking any more chances than he had to.

While he busied himself with preparations, Doolittle, Boiler, and Pinback had already risen and dressed. It was Doolittle who aborted breakfast. A quick check forward revealed that they were about to come within drop range of the target world. Pinback argued for breakfast—the planet wasn’t going anywhere, and they had a couple hundred thousand years before it grew dangerous.

But there was no restraining Doolittle. This was the last planet, the last run, the last bomb. Boiler didn’t care about that so much, but he was always ready to destroy. Eating could wait.

They moved forward, slipped into their respective seats, and began checking out instrumentation. Suddenly they were a team again, a tripartate, animate machine, all personalities forgotten.

Boiler activated the overhead screens.

“There she is.” The planet that occupied most of the telescopic finder was deep red in color, showing a surface seething with titanic volcanoes higher than three or four Everests. Spewing, vomiting the insides of the globe outward, collapsing into glowing canyons many miles in depth—an unstable world if ever they had encountered one.

“Ninety-nine-percent-plus probability,” reported Boiler, checking his gauges, “that this world will deviate from its normal orbit within another twelve thousand rotations. It’ll spiral in toward its sun and—”

“Eventual nova,” finished Pinback.

“And this system has a perfectly good Earth-type world.” He gestured at the red monster glittering on their screens. “Sounds good. Let’s vaporize it.”

Operating in perfect unison, the three men set timing devices, adjusted minute controls, prepared the Dark Star for the drop to come—a unified force operating to produce a momentary orgy of destruction.

An orgy of which this was to be the final, conclusive orgasm, and then… home.

Pinback was the first, by a split second, to lean back in his seat. “Bomb-bay systems operational.”

There was a familiar hum from deep in the bowels of the ship, and once more the white coffin labeled “20” slid smoothly out of the ventral hatch. Doolittle donned his headset, leaned forward, and worked his console.

“Lock fail-safe.”

Pinback plugged in the dual jump for the required connection overhead, smiling as he did so. Doolittle, Boiler, Pinback: the names meant nothing now. How significant… but he had no time to think about it,

That’s why he liked these climactic runs. They gave him no time to think. He hit the double switch.

“Fail-safe in lock.”

“We have,” Boiler announced, “eight minutes until drop. Twenty-four minutes until detonation. All systems are go and functioning.”

Words and symbols alternated on separate screens in their confirmation.

“Sidereal time at sunlight velocity,” Pinback confirmed. “Destruction sequence status initiated.” There was a clearing of the screens and then the multiple zeros at the base all changed to twenty-four, Seconds began to tick away.

He sighed, leaned back in his seat—squirming uncomfortably for a moment, as he always did. Sure, Doolittle and Boiler could laugh, but Powell had been sitting next to him when they’d come out of hyperdrive and his seat circuit bad blown. Powell’s blank eyes had been staring him in the face.

Why wouldn’t they understand back at Earth Base, and send him replacement circuitry?

No time for this now, Pinback. You are On Duty.

He flicked the pickup that was set into his headset, heard the echo signifying operational status.

“This is Sergeant Pinback calling bomb number twenty. Sergeant Pinback calling bomb number twenty. Do you read me, bomb?”

“Bomb number twenty to Sergeant Pinback. I read you, Sergeant.”

“How’s it going, bomb?”

“All systems are functioning perfectly, Sergeant Pinback. Everything is going well.”

He’d heard the same answers many times before. Why, he wondered idly, couldn’t they at least give the bombs different voices? The answer occurred to him as soon as the thought was completed.

It wouldn’t do to give a suicidal machine a distinct personality. Not that it would make any difference to the bomb, which was barely conscious of itself as an individual organism, but Pinback could imagine that it might begin to get to the crew.

Why, if you weren’t careful you might start to think of the mechanical thermostellar triggering devices as people, people you were sending to an inevitable fate, people who had no chance to develop their really fine minds, people who…

Easy, Pinback. That’s a no-no. Better think the right thoughts or they’ll take away your teddy bear.

Elsewhere on the ship a different computer voice was reciting information to a suit-enclosed Talby.

“You are now in the emergency airlock. Please remember that in an emergency situation the surface door can be opened instantly without the need of prior depressurization. So be sure to wear your starsuit at all times. Thank you for observing all safety precautions.”

Talby ignored the message. He knew the regulations by heart and didn’t need to be reminded of them by a solicitous machine. All he wanted to do was finish this repair job and get back to his dome and stars.

He was already searching the room before the recorded message concluded. The emergency airlock wasn’t terribly big, so it didn’t take him long to locate the open slot over the communications laser where the protective panel had dropped away.

Even though there was no reason for the mirrors in the laser to be activated, he was cautious as he bent to inspect the interior. A laser was something like a tornado; you could pass within millimeters of the crucial area without being hurt, but cross the ultimate line and you got burned.

In addition to the scorched panel, he saw that the laser itself had been knocked slightly out of alignment. The mounting was loose. Well, that ought to be easy enough to correct. It would be a ticklish bit of work with the laser in operation, but there was nothing complicated or time-consuming about it.

He gave a little smile of satisfaction. This job wouldn’t take more than a few minutes of careful work with a screwdriver. Even if the mounting was broken he could easily readjust the angle of the beam to compensate.

Placing the little toolbox he’d brought along on the floor, he hunted inside for the driver with the proper head, then spoke into his helmet mike.

“Lieutenant Doolittle, sir… Talby here.”

Doolittle heard him, but he was monitoring drop instrumentation, for crissake, and had no time for Talby’s philosophical drivelings.

“Sssh, Talby,” he muttered absently into his own pickup. “We’re in the middle of a very complicated maneuver. Don’t bother me now.”

“I think this is important, sir,” the astronomer insisted. He was inspecting the interior of the laser housing again. “I think I’ve located the malfunction the computer announced. You remember, sir. I’m in the emergency airlock now, and—”

“Not now, Talby!” Doolittle said irritably. Damn the man! Spent all of his time isolated in his little dome, not even sharing a meal with his buddies… hell, not even sleeping with them, and he just wanted Doolittle to drop everything to listen to his personal problems.

“Well, I’m in the airlock, so I’m going to go ahead and—”

Thoroughly annoyed, Doolittle shut off his channel. Talby wouldn’t talk to him when he, Doolittle, needed somebody to talk to, so by God, he wasn’t going to sit here in the middle of a run—the last run—and exchange pleasantries with him.

He had a planet to destroy.

Odd how normal the ultramelodramatic phrase had come to sound. It was true—people could get used to anything. Repetition made playing God seem common place.

“Four minutes to drop, bomb,” Pinback was saying conversationally. He seemed to get along well with the bomb brains—better, in fact, than he did with either Doolittle or Boiler. Maybe it was because he had more in common with them. For example, there were plenty of times when he wished he could self-destruct, too.

“Have you checked your platinum-iridium energy shielding? That’s important, you know. We must remember to check our energy shielding,”

“Geezus,” muttered Boiler, appalled at Pinback’s attitude toward a metallic thing, as usual. And as usual, Pinback ignored him. Boiler couldn’t talk to the bombs. Even Doolittle had trouble sometimes. It was the one area in which Pinback excelled.

“Energy shielding positive function,” the bomb replied happily.

Pinback yawned. “Remember your detonation time?”

“Detonation in twenty minutes.”

“All right,” concurred Pinback. “That checks out here. Okay, bomb, arm yourself.”

Below the Dark Star there was a brief flash of lights on the bomb’s casing, after which it said calmly, “Armed.”

“Hello, Lieutenant Doolittle,” Talby repeated into his suit mike. “Hello, hello, can you read me? Boiler, Pinback—do you read me on the bridge?”

Damn, now what? Another malfunction, or was it just that Doolittle didn’t realize what he was doing back here? Didn’t he understand that Talby’d found the damage and was going to repair it?

Well, it probably didn’t make any difference. They were obviously busy with something forward. At least he wouldn’t be disturbed with silly suggestions. He started to lean into the open slot…

“Communications laser number seventeen,” the computer voice announced sharply, “monitoring the bomb-drop mechanism has now been activated and will switch into a drop mode. If you will look near the surface panel, you will see that the tell-tale light is on, thus indicating that the parallax receptive cell has been engaged.”

Tell-tale light… the surface panel had been knocked off. Talby pulled his head quickly out of the housing, screamed to himself in confusion.

What the hell did Doolittle think he was doing? Was that what their “complicated maneuver” was all about? They couldn’t run a bomb drop with a busted monitoring laser! Not only could something unimaginable go wrong with the drop, Talby could get himself punctured.

He stood there indecisively, debating whether to go ahead with the seconds-long repair or run forward to tell the others. But if it were only a couple of minutes to drop—a short run—he might not make it in time.

While he remained paralyzed, the computer voice continued. “The laser will now energize. Please stand clear of the path of the beam in the event that the protective panel should fail.”

What panel?… the panel was off, you stupid…

He took a hurried step backward.

“Communications laser number seventeen is now on test.”

There was a dull but distinct crack and two parallel beams of pure red light leaped across the emergency airlock just in front of Talby. They drilled a pair of neat holes in the far wall of the lock, but apparently cut through nothing serious. They were high-intensity, short-focus beams and wouldn’t go so far as to hull the ship, but some damage had already been done.

Worse might happen if he failed to repair the malfunction before the bomb was dropped.

He had already activated the darkening element in the starsuit helmet, so he could look at the beam without suffering retinal damage.

“Under no circumstances,” the computer continued, “remove the panel and enter the path of the double beam. Thank you for observing all safety precautions.”

“They’re actually going through with a bomb run,” Talby muttered. What was wrong with Doolittle? Had the lieutenant gone mad, like Pinback and Boiler?

“Doolittle… Lieutenant Doolittle, acknowledge. This is Talby. Emergency call… anybody on the bridge, acknowledge…”

Doolittle, Pinback, and Boiler—the anybodies—relaxed in their seats, each submerged in his own pre-drop thoughts. All ran their own obstacle course of emotions prior to a drop.

Boiler thought about the destruction on an unprecedented scale which they were about to commit, and smiled. Pinback didn’t even consider that they were about to obliterate a whole planet, remove an entire world from the scheme of things; his concern was for the unthought-of bomb.

Doolittle always went back to a book he had once read, an old book about the dropping of the first thermonuclear device on a city in… Japan, wasn’t it? Went back to the thoughts of the pilot after seeing what he had wrought.

Of course, this was considerably different, since no lives were involved. And the worlds they smote were unstable, a threat to the lives of future colonizers. But he couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that on any of the planets they had destroyed, despite careful pre-surveying, there might have been an indetectable, intelligent race to whom that world was home.

A race whose collective murder he bore on his conscience.

Ridiculous, absurd—instruments carefully checked each candidate for oblivion before they made their drop. But the thought persisted, mingled with those of that long-dead bomber pilot, and troubled him…

Pinback glanced at the chronometer and spoke into his headset pickup. “Everything looks fine, bomb. Dropping you off in about seventy-five seconds. Good luck?”

“Thanks,” came the mild reply from bomb number twenty.

Boiler was checking his readouts. “I get a quantum reading of thirty-five over thirty-five.”

“I read the same here,” agreed Doolittle.

If they didn’t abort the run—and there seemed no reason to assume they would—he had to adjust the laser. Talby closed the toolkit and spoke into the pickup at the same time.

“Doolittle… Doolittle. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m going to try and adjust the mounting under the laser to realign the beams properly. If you can hear me, hold off on the run till I finish. It won’t take long.”

Staying as much to the left side of the opening as he could, he balanced the driver in his right hand and controlled the haft of it with his left. Thus carefully balanced part in and part out of the alcove, he slid the driver toward the mounting.

He hit the proper screw on the first try and smiled to himself. It would all be over with in a minute.

Turning the driver slowly, he heard the click-click of the screw mechanism as the mounting tightened up, saw the laser housing start to shift on its base. Another couple of turns and he’d be through.

As the mounting shifted, it contacted a tiny printed circuit that had also been edged ever so slightly out of place. The circuit shorted, the current fed back into something it shouldn’t have, and the something exploded.

The laser wheeled crazily on its mount, the beams shifted, and the darkened face plate of the astronomer caught the full brilliance of the twin beams.

Talby staggered backward, dropping the driver and grabbing for his eyes and clutching only the smooth glass of his helmet.

“My God… I can’t see!”

Something was calling insistently behind the pain. “Attention, attention. The monitoring laser has malfunctioned. Under no circumstances…”

“Oh my eyes… I can’t see, I can’t…”

“… enter the path of the beams. To do so will cause the instrumentation to immediately…”

Staggering blindly about the airlock, Talby fell into the twin lines of crimson. A violent concussion shook the airlock. The ravening feedback traveled back up numerous electronic neurons all the way into the central computer itself.

Circuits shorted in the hundreds, fluid-state controls shattered. Small fires broke out in the central computer, were immediately snuffed out as automatic fail-safes isolated the injured sections, amputated the outraged portions of the badly damaged network.

The tell-tale lights on bomb number twenty flashed a second time. They flashed normally—and unexpectedly, because the primary drop sequence had already been engaged. There was no reason for them to flash again.

The single flare of light at the magnetic grapple was not normal.

On the bridge, however, all was quiet, all was as it should be.

“Begin final drop sequence,” said Pinback. The three men worked easily at their consoles. Then Pinback, after checking with his fellows, reached out and grasped the two switches which would do the thing.

“Marking… ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… drop,” and he turned both switches simultaneously to release the bomb.

He was rewarded instead with a brash, utterly alien honking that had all three of them looking wildly about the bridge.

Boiler finally spotted a couple of flashing red gauges, gauges he had never had occasion to observe in operation before. Pinback, meanwhile, had completely lost his aura of command and relaxation, exchanged it for one of more normal hypernervousness.

He looked around hopelessly, assuming that the end of their private universe was at hand. But neither Doolittle nor Boiler, though obviously worried, had panicked yet. He got a hold of himself and sat up straighter in his seat. They’d been too busy to notice his embarrassing reaction.

He waited for somebody to tell him what to do.

“Negative drop,” Doolittle finally said, confirming what all the instruments told them. Tiny knots were pulling tighter and tighter inside him.

“Try it again, Pinback. It’s just sitting in the bomb bay.”

All three reset their controls, readjusted all switches for a repeat of previous actions.

Pinback counted again, from ten, to five, four, three, two, one… drop. Turned the dual switches only to hear the violent honking resume.

“Negative drop,” Doolittle said again, no longer quite as calm of voice.

The bridge became a flurry of activity. Circuitry was checked and rechecked. Monitors were asked to produce explanations, yet insisted nothing was wrong. Gauges were studied for reasons overlooked; they stared back with blank glass faces and told nothing. As far as their instruments were concerned, the bomb had dropped and the crew of the Dark Star had gone off the deep end.

“Visual confirmation,” suggested Boiler. “Maybe its the non-drop pickup that’s malfunctioning.”

Doolittle flipped the necessary lever. The chronometer, still ticking away the seconds, vanished from his screen and was replaced by a camera-view of the bottom of Dark Star.

A long white box occupied much of the picture, resting serenely just below the open bay doors.

One glimpse was more than enough for Doolittle. He switched back to the chronometer, which now assumed a previously unheld importance. Overriding importance.

“It’s there, all right.” He thought rapidly. “Never mind the magnetic grapple. This is the last run. Let’s blow the attachments.” Boiler and Pinback nodded—Boiler once, curtly, Pinback hard enough to shake his hair.

“Rechannel all safety relays,” the corporal said. “Open quantum latches.”

“Open circuit fail-safes,” Pinback put in.

“Cancel thrust-drive fail-safes,” Doolittle added.

“Automatic valves open?” asked Pinback.

Boiler: “Check valves open… all connections severed… all explosive bolt fail-safes removed.”

“And prepare for manual drop,” Doolittle muttered grimly, “and… re-mark.”

“Resetting,” Pinback said quietly while both Doolittle and Boiler watched him. “Mark it… five, four, three, two, one, drop.” He turned the switches and the honking came. That loud, abrasive, hysterical honking.

It sounded damnably like a laugh. They were laughing at him again, Pinback thought emotionally. He wrenched at the switches, staring at the screen above, trying to stop the laughing.

First it was Boiler laughing at him and punching him in the arm when no one was looking and Doolittle had been terse and abrupt with him the whole trip and Talby up in the dome when he wasn’t staring at his idiot universe was probably laughing at him too and now, now the ship itself was laughing at him, at poor, stupid Bill Frug Pinback Frug Bill…

“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.”

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.

“Why not?” the bomb asked innocently.

“What do you mean, why not?” He had had about enough of this bomb. It was deliberately not cooperating. Playing with him. Probably laughing at him, too.

If only it didn’t have the last laugh.

“Because… because you’d kill us all. And that’s silly. There’s no reason for it. It’s different for you, bomb. You look forward to a short happy life and then going out in real style. We look forward to a long life and going out with a whimper. Damn it, bomb, listen to reason!”

“I always listen to reason,” the bomb replied easily. “And right now reason tells me that I am programmed to detonate in approximately nine minutes and that detonation will occur at the programmed time.”

Oh, what was the use? No matter how he argued, no matter what course of action he suggested or how logical he tried to be, the bomb always responded inexorably, “I am programmed to detonate in… detonation will occur at the programmed time.”

How could you argue with a stubborn machine with a one-track mind? There had to be a way—surely it must be equipped with mental as well as mechanical failsafes! Surely its builders had foreseen every possibility!

“Look,” he said hopefully into the mike, “wouldn’t you consider an alternate course of action? I’m not saying you don’t ever not have to detonate… of course you’re going to detonate. I want you to detonate. Boiler wants you to detonate… don’t you, Boiler?”

Boiler nodded his head vigorously.

“Even Talby wants you to detonate. But it doesn’t have to be right away, does it? Think of the advantages of waiting… of just sitting around for a while so we can disarm you. All that time you could spend contemplating your eventual magnificent demise. You know, they say planning for a trip is half the fun. Just for a couple of hours, bomb, until we can fix your grapple and get you all nice and properly detached from the ship. Then we’d fix you up again as good as new. How about it, bomb? Huh? C’mon, how ’bout it?”

“No,” the bomb said petulantly.

“Geez, it sounds like you,” snorted Boiler.

Pinback ventured a look promising the corporal sudden death—which, under the circumstances, was not unlikely—and then turned his attention back to the mike.

“Look, bomb, be reasonable. You don’t really wanna die, do you? I mean, I know that’s what you’re programmed for, but survival is the strongest instinct of all, and deep down inside, you’ve thought about it, haven’t you? We can fix it so you never die. Then we could have nice long chats like this all the time.”

“Death has no meaning for me, except as an end unto itself,” the bomb intoned meaningfully. “Death is my reason for existence. I am born unto destruction. I am Vishnu, Destroyer of Worlds… not that I let this influence my pleasant disposition, mind.”

“Oh, Christ,” muttered Boiler, “a Hindu bomb.”

“Listen, bomb,” Pinback pleaded, “pretty bomb, logical bomb, lovely reasonable thermostellar triggering device…”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” the bomb insisted.

“If you won’t do it because it’s the right thing to do, if you won’t do it because it’s the reasoning thing to do, if you won’t do it to save the ship or the mission,” he asked intensely, “would you do it just as a favor to me? A personal favour… mind to mind?”

“Well-l-l…” For a second, only a second, the bomb seemed to hesitate. “I might… if I knew who you were.”

“Who am I? Who am I?” A Niagra of emotions flooded Pinback’s brain, a cascade of conflicting questions he’d tried so hard to suppress, to keep under control, especially when around the others.

And now this… thing, this machine, this insolent mechanical servant of man, dared to put forth the ultimate insult.

“I am Sergeant Pinback, that’s who I am, and I outrank you, bomb. Do as you’re told and get back into the bomb bay and disarm yourself or… or I’ll see you court-martialed when we get back to Earth!”

“Well, if you’re going to get huffy about it, forget the whole thing,” the bomb said, thoroughly miffed.

“Oh geez,” whispered Boiler, looking upward. Pinback sat back in his seat, shaking, trembling, cradling the headset mike in unsteady fingers. From behind him, Boiler whispered on, low and dangerous now.

“You’d better hope that bomb does detonate, Pinback, because if it doesn’t kill you, I will.”

“Well then, you talk to it, bigmouth!” shouted Pinback back, whirling on the bigger man. “Let’s see if you can make it understand!”

Boiler gave a curt shake of his head. “You can’t reason with a dumb machine. You can’t talk sense to it anymore than you can to Talby.”

“That’s a thought,” said Pinback. “What about having Talby talk to it?”

Boiler shook his head again. “Fat chance. He’d talk with it about the view Outside until the thing went off. Probably consider annihilation an interesting sensation to experience, worthy of careful study… even if you can only do it once… No, we’d better hope Doolittle gets something out of what’s left of Powell.”

“Commander, sir,” Doolittle was saying tiredly at that very moment, “are you still there?”

“Oh, yes, Doolittle,” Powell’s voice echoed back. “I… I was thinking.”

“We’re really running out of time, sir.” he checked his wrist again. “I mean, really, sir. I don’t mean to break in on your contemplation, but…”

“Oh, yes,” Powell mumbled thoughtfully. “Well, if you can’t get it to drop normally, and the aesthemic clutch doesn’t work, and the explosive bolts have failed, and it still insists on detonating, then you’ll just have to talk to it.”

“Sir?” said a puzzled Doolittle.

“You’ll have to talk to the bomb.”

“I tried talking to it, sir. I’ve been talking to it. Pinback’s talking to it right now.”

“No, no, Doolittle. Not Pinback,” Powell husked. “You talk to it. Teach it… phenomenology, Doolittle.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Phenomenology.”

“But what good will that do, sir? I’m not even sure what you mean by—Sir? Sir?”

He turned knobs, boosted power, went 180 degrees with the fine tuning, but Powell—for a while, at least—had sunk back into whatever unimaginable realms of semisentient existence he lived in, and Doolittle was unable to coax him back.

Turning all the controls on the box to zero, he carefully unhooked it from the plug running to Powell’s labyrinth and pickups and electrodes, placed it neatly back in its compartment in the wall.

Then he closed and relatched the hatch cover to the cryo storage compartment, put the gloves back on their hook, blew on his hands, and sat down to think.

After a while a near-hysterical voice sounded over a nearby speaker as he made his way up to the main airlock. Pinback’s voice.

“Doolittle… what are you doing back there, Doolittle? Six minutes to detonation! Doolittle!”

Doolittle heard him but he paid no attention. He’d never liked listening to Pinback and he was much too busy to waste time listening to him now. He was constructing a mental plan of action and needed all his brainpower for it.

He smiled. He’d been right all along. Just get in touch with Powell, and the commander would find a solution. Even dead, he was the most valuable man on the ship.

It still might not work—there were no fail-safes built into this method—but it was the only way left. Powell had recognized that, and made Doolittle see it. Six minutes. He had to hurry.

The main airlock was located near the top of the ship, just behind the astronomer’s station. Talby might see him go out. A nagging thought crept into his battle plan—hadn’t Talby tried to call him about something just before the abortive drop run had started?

Couldn’t be important, or Talby would have told him personally. He had no time to speculate now.

The lock held five ranked starsuits in a locker—duplicates of those in the emergency airlock. There were duplicates of everything vital on the Dark Star—except living quarters and toilet paper, he mused.

Not that it would matter, once they fixed this crazy bomb. Then they’d be going home—and his reports would blister the ears of some of the ship’s designers and outfitters.

Of course, they would all be thirty years older, now…

The suit went on easily enough—no malfunctions in it, at least—and he made his way into the depressurization chamber at the top of the lock. A quick flip of several switches and his outside aural receptors picked up a soft, hissing sound.

The light depressurization complete, a warning light winked on and the door in the roof of the chamber slid back. He touched a yellow button on the belt of the suit. Special cells in the backpack cancelled out the artificial gravity of the ship.

Weightless now, he activated his suit jets and floated gently out the open hatch. As he left the ship he glanced forward at the dome, but all he saw was the back of the curving seat-lounge. Talby might have been there, but he couldn’t tell.

“Doolittle, Doolittle!” Pinback was yelling into the mike. Now what? Had Doolittle gone off the deep end under the pressure? Had he maybe gone down into the freezer to join Commander Powell in trouble-free, chill isolation?

If so, that would mean that as next highest ranker on board, he would be in charge. And that was almost as frightening a thought as the bomb going off in the bomb bay.

“Doolittle,” he howled into the pickup again, “what the hell are you doing?”

BoiIer interrupted him, staring at a tell-tale that had suddenly begun flashing on his console. “Dorsal airlock’s been activated,” he said tightly. “Must be the lieutenant. He’s gone outside.”

“But what for?” Pinback wondered, looking helplessly at the corporal. “And why doesn’t he answer?”

“Maybe he got through to Powell… maybe. And Powell told him what to do to the bomb. Either that or he’s trying to get outside the detonation area.”

Pinback blinked. “That’s crazy—where could he go? No, you’re right—he’s going to disarm the bomb! He’s going to save the ship!”

“Yeah,” Boiler muttered doubtfully.

Like the rest of the starsuit, Doolittle’s jet pack was working perfectly. Maybe it was a sign that things were finally breaking their way. A couple of spurts brought him around and then beneath the ship. Then he was approaching the bomb.

He stopped a couple of meters away from its back end, where the tiny thrusters were located. He had checked the circuits beforehand and his suit’s broadcast unit should be operating on open channel, which meant the bomb would pick it up. There was no guarantee it would even listen to him, but if it would talk to Pinback…

Odd how harmless it looked. A long white rectangular box, looking more like a large shipping crate than anything else. He felt he could take it apart with a crowbar and find nothing inside. Certainly nothing capable of setting off a chain reaction in the core of a planet.

Certainly nothing that even powerful dampers could only hold to a total destruct radius of one kilometer.

“Hello, bomb,” he ventured into the suit mike. “Are you with me?”

“Of course,” the bomb replied brightly, as though they had been talking for hours. Inwardly Doolittle breathed a little freer. At least he was getting through.

“Uh… are you willing to entertain a few speculative philosophical concepts, bomb?”

“In regard to what?”

“Oh, nothing terribly profound… the reasons for being and not being, the meaning of existence, the why of it all.”

“I am always receptive to suggestions,” the bomb said, “so long as they are not particularly garrulous. Especially now.”

Thank God it was still capable of reasoning. Doolittle had been afraid that the bomb had been driven so paranoid by Pinback that it wouldn’t listen to anyone. But apparently its brain was more adaptable than that.

He wished he’d made a deeper study of the bomb-brain mechanism and circuitry, but it was a bit late for that now. He would have to rely on the assumptions inherent in Powell’s suggestion—that the bomb could think clearly enough to be affected.

“Fine. Think about this, then. How do you know you exist?”

Up on the bridge, Boiler and Pinback exchanged glances. They could hear the conversation clearly, since Doolittle was talking on open channel, and the bomb’s replies automatically were carried open. The time left on the destruction sequence, as shown by the overhead chronometers, was 0004:33.4.

“What is he doing now?” wondered Boiler.

“I think he’s talking to it,” Pinback replied.

“Well, that’s what you were doing, wasn’t it? What makes him think he’ll do any better?”

“I was talking to it, yeah, but not like this,” Pinback told the corporal, making shushing sounds. Doolittle was talking again and he didn’t want to miss anything.

It would have made fascinating casual listening, if onIy their lives didn’t hang on the outcome.

“Well, of course I exist,” the bomb replied, after a moment’s thought.

“Ah, but how do you know you exist?” Doolittle was insistent. But if he was bothering the bomb, it didn’t show in the secure reply.

“It is intuitively obvious.”

“Intuition is an absract mental concept and no real proof,” Doolittle countered. “What concrete evidence do you have that you exist? Something incontrovertible. Something not founded on speculation.”

“Hmm,” hmmmed the bomb. “Let’s see… Well, I think, therefore I am.”

“That’s good,” Doolittle admitted, a tiny hysterical laugh building up inside him. Not now, he cried, not now… be calm, be composed; be as reasonable as this mad machine.

“That’s very good. But how do you know anything else exists?”

“My sensory apparatus reveals it to me,” the bomb answered confidently.

“Ah, yes, right,” Doolittle agreed, swinging an arm to encompass the galaxy and nearly throwing himself into an uncontrollable spin. A quick burst of the suit jets realigned him facing the bomb.

“This is fun,” the bomb said with obvious pleasure. It was apparently enjoying itself immensely.

“Now listen. Listen very carefully,” said Doolittle, his voice dropping as if he were about to impart some information of vast significance. “Here’s the one big question: “How do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct?”

Boiler took another glance at the destruction sequence status panel. It read 0003:01.1. Three hundred one point one, Three hundred meters. Anything between 250 and 350 meters, he could hit anything in that range, just give him a decent—

There was an explosion in his skull and he nearly fell out of his seat.

“The gun!” he shouted violently.

“What gun… what?” Pinback was looking around wildly without knowing what he was looking for.

Boiler pulled Pinback erect, shook him by the shoulders as he stared into the paralyzed sergeant’s eyes.

“The support pins on the bomb, the bolts that hold it to the grapple and failed to fire, I can shoot them out. Shoot them out and the bomb will stay there but we can move the ship!”

“Boiler,” said Pinback, staring right back at him, “you’re out of your mind. The laser’s not one of your favorite target rifles… it’s not that accurate.” Boiler pushed him away and started for the corridor.

“We can stop the bomb. Stay out of my way.”

Pinback hurriedly moved to block the corporal’s path. “Don’t… don’t try it, Boiler. You idiot, you—”

Boiler started flailing at Pinback, trying to run from the bridge and shake the other man off him at the same time. Pinback followed, grabbing tenaciously at the big man.

“Idiot yourself,” he yelled back at Pinback. “Don’t you see? I can shoot the support pins out of the bomb and we can save the ship.”

“Boiler . . you can’t, Boiler. Don’t do it.” The corporal started up the ladder to the storage room holding the laser, Pinback clinging to his legs.

“Get out of my way or I’ll kick your teeth in,” Boiler warned, jabbing backward at Pinback’s face with his boots. Pinback gobbled at him and Boiler howled back.

“Get out of my way… let go. I’ve gotta save the damn ship. I’ve gotta save you, fer crissake!”

Pinback fell free, hurriedly got to his feet and followed Boiler up the ladder. In the upper corridor he took a dive and managed to tackle him cleanly. The two men rolled over and over, Boiler fighting to get his arms loose, Pinback hanging on and screaming warnings at him

“Don’t do it, Boiler! You can’t use the laser like a toy pistol. And you’re a bad shot. You’ll hit the bomb, or you’ll hit Doolittle. He’ll save us if you don’t kill him. You idiot, you’re crazy!”

“I’m crazy… you damn pansy fool, shooting the bomb won’t hurt it even if I do miss! What do you think, the damn thing’s full of gunpowder? And I won’t hit Doolittle. Besides, what difference would that make? I’d still save the ship. I’d still save us.”

“But Doolittle’s going to save us anyway,” Pinback countered. “You can’t do it, Boiler. You’re a—”

Boiler hit him with a neat right cross and Pinback tumbled off him.