Dark Star

by Alan Dean Foster

  ALL

  SYSTEMS—

  SNAFU!!!

  If anything could possibly go

  wrong aboard the scoutship

  Dark Star, sooner or later it

  would. Now in the 20th year

  of their mission—destroying

  unstable planets—the ship and its

  crew were falling apart . . .

  After 20 years in space,

  isolation and lonliness have

  left their mark. The four

  surviving crew members are bored

  beyond relief. Only an occasional

  bomb run or another of the

  inevtable malfunctions aboard

  ship upsets the monotony.

  Then, Bomb #20 is primed,

  armed and set to detonate—

  suddenly life on the Dark Star

  becomes frantic . . .

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  The Tar-Aiym Krang

  Bloodhype

  Luana

  Star Trek Log One

  Star Trek Log Two

  Icerigger

  Available from

  Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1974 by Jack H. Harris Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  ISBN 0-345-27727-9

  First Printing: October, 1974

  Third Printing: October, 1978

  Cover art by Michael Herring

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  BALLANTINE BOOKS

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  201 East 50th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

  Simultaneously published by

  Ballantine Books, Ltd., Toronto Canada

  CONTENTS

  Books

  Title

  Copyright

  DARK STAR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  "Auprès de ma blonde,

  qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.

  Auprès de ma blonde,

  qu'il fait bon dormir . . .!"

  1

  TALBY WAS COUNTING stars again.

  He didn't remember exactly when he'd lost count. Probably they were all noted down somewhere neat and official in the astronomer's records—or had he disconnected the tracker? It was hard to recall. There seemed to be something about uncoupling all the scientific instruments a while back, uncoupling them because it seemed blasphemous for such splendor to be reduced to a mere listing in a book.

  Anyhow, the number didn't matter, did it? There were plenty of stars to go around, and if the muddlers back on Earth wanted records of them, let them come out here for themselves and do their own tracking. Talby didn't see how anyone could appreciate a star by using mere mathematical charts.

  But he kept counting. It was easy. It was natural. It made a man free—one star, two stars, and baby makes three.

  With only the naked eye, most navigators could distinguish only a few degrees, magnitude, but Talby had had more practice than most navigators. And he lived his work.

  To get really good at it, you had to spend long stretches in practice, sharpening your perception and senses until eyes and mind operated instinctively. Ho could a man take the measure of a sun if he had to stop and think about it? Talby smiled.

  He leaned back in the pneumatic astronomer's lounge, a pale bean in a pod of smooth maroon, and stared up through the dome. He'd buffed down the inside and outside so many times that the dome was almost impossible to see. Every imperfection had been scrubbed out of it, till now there seemed to be no dome. Only Talby and his seat, floating in a hole on the top of the ship.

  Now and then the soft touch of a finger initiated a muted hum of precision machinery. The chair would, swivel 90, 180, 270 degrees, and another section of the cosmos would come under Talby-scrutiny.

  Five, six, pick up sticks.

  Talby could distinguish almost every order of magnitude now. Of course, when the stars were your best friends, you didn't have to work very hard to find out about them. You didn't even have to ask. They told you and were happy to, confessed all their secrets without prodding, without coercion, without being violated by clumsy, poking, grabby machines.

  That was the trouble with man's first extended explorations of deep space. He'd gone at it as he had gone at everything else throughout his history—hacking and clubbing and chopping, an ax in one hand and a scythe in the other. Never a moment to listen, to look, to try to see and understand. It was sad.

  And it was so easy not to make the same old mistakes over again! If only they would try it his way, if only he could make them see. Talby shook his head, though there were none but the stars to see it. Useless. They wouldn't listen. They never listened.

  Better to do it this way. At least he offended no one. At least one man had succeeded in blending with the universe without inflicting himself on it. And the universe repaid him in kind.

  The others looked on his special relationship rather differently, of course. Poor middling souls—his greatest regret was that he couldn't share his pleasure with them.

  Of them all, Doolittle came the closest to understanding, and even he insisted that the astronomer spent too much time up here in the dome, too much time alone, too much time staring into naked, empty space.

  Empty space—poor, sad Lieutenant Doolittle! It was only empty inside the ship. They'd never understand that, either.

  It had been only a few days, a few months, a few years. No doubt one day Doolittle might insist it had been too many centuries. It made no difference to Talby. He had accomplished the neat feat of dividing the universe into three parts: himself, the rest of the cosmos, and his fellow crewmembers. Doolittle, Pinback, Boiler and Commander Powell.

  No—no, that didn't sound right. There was something—oh, yes. Commander Powell had died. It occurred to him, as it sometimes did, that he should be forcing himself to make more of a contribution to ship life, to be more of a friend to the others.

  He had trouble relating to them, though. Every day it grew harder. He tried comparing them to his real friends.

  Let's see—Doolittle. Doolittle was an angry red giant, full of passion and fire and anger that blazed uncontrolled at unpredictable, unguarded moments. But he held the ship together, had done so ever since Powell had been eclipsed.

  Boiler was a white dwarf, no reflection on his size. He was the largest of them, and the smallest. The most intense and the least demonstrative. The likeliest to collapse or go nova. His name fitted.

  And there was Pinback—Pinback, the average, ordinary, down-home G-type lightbulb. Cheerfully pathetic Pinback, always joking, never laughing, barely noticed. And, like a sol-type star, he supported more life than the rest of them put together.

  His mind shifted to muse on another G-type star, one he remembered fairly well, with a certain inconsequential world sputtering lazily around it.

  He remembered that at one time he had lived on that world, that he probably (though it could not be verified without records) had been born on it.

  A finger touched and made a hum—forty-five degrees more of infinity filled his gaze. This old man, he played seven, he played seven's and's gone to Heave—

  There, in the upper quadrant of the Deeps—that looked like a binary. Of course, at this distance and using only the unaided eye it was quite impossible to tell a true double star from two stars that looked close together but were actually a thousand light-years apart.

  Talby smiled slightly again. He knew.

  For a moment he considered notifying Doolittle and
the others of his discovery. They liked binaries.

  No, they wouldn't be pleased. The rest of the crew was only interested in planets. At least, Boiler and Doolittle were. Pinback was interested in everything without being interested in anything.

  But the other two—they liked planets well enough. Habitable ones first of all and then unstable ones that might make the others uninhabitable at some unseen future time. Lately he felt that Doolittle in particular was growing more and more fond of the unstable ones, and that bothered Talby for reasons he couldn't pin down.

  Insignificant, germ-ridden dust specks—planets. Inconsequential motes, fungi on the skin of the galaxy. He tilted the chair more steeply and stared smugly outward.

  Let Doolittle and Boiler and Pinback have their moldy little worlds. He, Talby, existed in perfect oneness with the stars themselves. How could he bring himself to notice anything as minute as a mere planet?

  Oh, there were other things big enough to interest him. Occasional nebulae—delicate, pretty, but insubstantial. The infrequent aberrations, like black holes, were unaesthetic.

  Let Doolittle and the others think what they might about him; he wasn't troubled. He would stay civil no matter what dark thoughts they voiced. Let them think anything they liked so long as they kept the ship running efficiently for him.

  For that was how the head astronomer of the Dark Star had come to think of it. He was no longer a component of the ship—rather, the ship existed to support him. He sighed in perfect contentment

  As long as the others left him alone to commune with his friends, the stars, he was happy. The motionless myriad suns were companions enough for him. The suns, and perhaps, someday, the Phoenix.

  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 Sergean
t 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.

  But it didn't hurt to hope.

  Doolittle's eyes inclined easily upward, and after a while so did Boiler's—out of boredom, no doubt. A pause while the computer untangled, realigned, and enhanced the last of the high-beam, extreme-long-range communiqué. Then the screen cleared and an alien appeared in the middle of it.

  The alien had a wide pink face with unbearable pale pink skin. The rest of it was clad in a snug-fitting, freshly pressed uniform. It had two blue eyes, a divided nose, a mouth with the normal complement of teeth—now broadened into a wide smile—and was no older then anyone on board the Dark Star. This made it look no less impossibly young, and innocent. It was also clean-shaven and closely cropped on top, which made its face look obscenely naked. The alien was a human being.