Dark Star (12 page)

The board was gone, and long wooden boards were not scattered haphazardly about the ship. If there were another way across the shaft.

Sure . . . Leaning out, he looked down and traced the tiny ledge that ran completely around the interior walls. It was only a few centimeters wide, but it would hold his weight easily, being part of the structure itself.

If he moved carefully, took a step at a time, the ledge ought to be negotiable.

Unaware that his breathing had suddenly grown stronger than normal, he stuck his head, turned upward, into the shaft. Hanging on to the inside of the hatchway with both hands, he slid one foot out and tested the strength of the ledge. It was part of the shaft wall, for sure.

Gritting his teeth and edging his body out a little at a time, he soon found himself standing upright on the ledge, his body pressed tight against the wall, hands outstretched and facing inward.

He only looked down once.

Now, if he could just edge around, make his way across the first corner . . . Trying to get a grip on the smooth metal walls, and wishing his members were as adhesive as the alien's seemed to be, he stepped over the first corner. Then the back foot, and he was already nearly halfway across.

Hell, this was easy! The Beachball gobbled at him, and Pinback felt secure enough to risk shaking a fist at it.

"Idiot! When I get out of here and get you back into your room—"

Another voice interrupted him sharply, and he looked wildly around the shaft.

"Attention, attention." Soft voice, feminine—the computer again. "The central trunk elevator shaft is now activated. All personnel please clear the area."

There was a snap, a brilliant flare, and the shaft suddenly appeared above and below him, fully lighted. Now he could see exactly how high it was, exactly how deep it was, and exactly where he was trapped in relationship to those extremes. He screamed. He was all right when he didn't have to look down and see a bottom, but now . . .

His fear quickly gave way to anger.

"Doolittle . . . Boiler, Talby. I'm in here, you idiots! In the shaft. What are you playing with the elevator for? Turn it off. Turn . . .!"

His voice faded. There was absolutely no reason for Doolittle to activate the elevator. There was no reason for Boiler to activate the elevator. And even if there had been a reason for Talby to activate the elevator, he probably wouldn't have bothered. This led him to the obvious explanation: there had been another malfunction, possibly keyed by his own presence in the shaft.

Leaning back against the cool metal, he closed his eyes and worked at fighting his recalcitrant muscles. He couldn't stay here. One way or another, he had to get moving. Otherwise, when the elevator got to this level its bottom would peel him off the wall as neatly as old skin off a beach-burned back.

"Help!" he streamed again. "
Help!
"

Now stop that and save your breath, Pinback. There's nobody here to hear you, and nobody's coming to rescue you. You've got to get out of this by yourself.

He was nearly to the hatchway on the other side, but it was still occupied by the twittering form of the alien. Making sure he was well set on his left leg, he kicked at it with his right, trying to force the creature back into the chamber beyond.

The alien bounced up and down violently in the portal, obviously agitated, but not struck sufficiently to be hurt. Pinback kicked at it again, and added some curses for added punch.

"Get out of there, you . . . go on, get out, move, you ignorant, stupid, ungrate . . .!"

Making an especially virulent gobbling sound, the alien leaped—not backward, but into the shaft. It landed on Pinback's chest and immediately began scratching at him with its claws. The claws had little clutching power behind them, but it was still damned uncomfortable.

"No, no!" Flailing at it hysterically with both hands, he tried to beat it off without sacrificing his balance. He couldn't keep it up indefinitely. If it got to his eyes . . .

Somehow he spun on the narrow ledge. Now he had his stomach and face pressed up against the wall. But the sudden twist had only temporarily dislodged the alien. It simply jumped free and reattached itself, this time to his upper back.

"Get off, get off!"

Still beating at it with little success, he started edging toward his right. Maybe it would leave him if he went back into the old hatchway. Taking another step, he arched his back slightly and took a good swat at the Beachball with his right hand. At the same time, it made a particularly strong wrench at his right side.

There was a loud, gobbling scream—from Pinback—as he slipped. Both hands caught the ledge as he slumped down. He hung like that, dangling over the seemingly bottomless shaft. Well, it was far from bottomless. But it was far too far away for him to risk a drop.

Grunting and twisting, he fought to get one leg back up on the ledge, swinging his body from side to side without much luck.

The alien had hopped free at the moment of falling and was now comfortably ensconced once more in the hatchway. It appeared to regard Pinback with interest, quivering and honking in its maddeningly unconcerned fashion.

Pinback had no trouble holding on—he'd been something of a gymnast in secondary school. No doubt with a little more effort he could get back up. At least, he thought so until he felt a frighteningly familiar light pressure on his shoulder blades.

"No . . . oh, no . . . I don't want to play anymore. Get off. Get offfff!"

The alien's weight was negligible. Its activities were not. After several moments of serene sizing-up, it started to squeeze at Pinback's rib cage. The sergeant started to scream, but soon found himself laughing uncontrollably. Occasionally the laugh would dissolve into a scream for help.

"Stop . . . s-s-stop! That's not . . . f-funny!" The alien continued its merciless tickling.

It shouldn't have known what it was doing—certainly Pinback couldn't recall any time when he'd done any tickling, or been tickled, in the alien's presence. He might have forgotten something, though.

In any case, he had no time to ponder the possibilities of a carefully camouflaged alien intelligence suddenly coming to the surface. The tickling was weakening him in a way that hanging on couldn't. At least nothing more could happen.

A mechanical voice drifted through the shaft.

"Attention, attention . . ."

"Arrghh . . . no!" Pinback howled.

"Elevator descending for midweekly proficiency check. Please clear the shaft."

"You crazy bundle of crossed circuits—this isn't midweek!"

"Your cooperation will be appreciated."

Pinback's gaze turned wildly upward. His laughter and his grip on the narrow ledge were fading fast. There was a muffled clank, followed by a whirring sound.

Above him, a smooth white panel began to grow larger—the bottom of the slowly descending elevator. His eyes widened. "Goddamn it!" Tears began to start from them, half from laughter, half from desperation.

Making a supreme effort, he somehow managed to get both arms up onto the ledge at the same time. This seemed to catalyze something in the Beachball's mind. Whether bored with the tickling or disappointed at its lack of success in getting Pinback to let go, or for some incomprehensible reason known only to animated Beachballs, the creature floated free and jumped back into the hatchway.

With a smooth whine, to indicate that all its components were functioning perfectly, the elevator continued to descend, a wide white foot coming down to crush Pinback.

He struggled wildly, got his foot, then his right leg back onto the ledge. Now that the alien had decided to leave him alone, his strength was coming back. Fighting frantically, he managed to get himself onto the ledge. Hands pressed against the wall, he started to stand.

He was just taking a retreating step toward the hatchway when the elevator touched his face—and stopped. Having detected interference, the lift would pause for a second, then move downward in stages unless it encountered stiff resistance. Pinback would not supply stiff resistance.

It would peel him off the ledge in slow jerks.

Even as he thought, the elevator dropped another tenth of a meter, bunching up his face and shoving him backward so that he was arching over the shaft. Another drop; and it would be impossible for him to keep his balance.

Just to one side of his scrunched-up face he saw a single metal bar suspended from the bottom of the lift. Reaching for it desperately, he just got a hand around it when the elevator dropped again.

Swinging out into open space, he grabbed with the other hand, rested in open air as the elevator slid another notch downward. That last one would have sent him tumbling down the shaft. His present position would not last forever, either, but it was better than lying broken fifty or sixty meters below.

There was a soft click, the pitch of the whining motor changed slightly, and he found himself rising as the elevator started up: He'd had some vague hope that it would continue downward until he could drop free. Now he dared not.

"Help . . . for God's sake, somebody, help!"

No one heard him, of course. And no doubt the malfunctioning elevator was stimulating no red warning light in the control room, so no one would be hurrying back here to check it out.

He wondered what the damn elevator would do next. How long did one of these automatic proficiency tests last, anyhow? It couldn't keep going up and down, up and down, forever—though it showed no sign of stopping.

There was no logic to it. Like the rest of the instrumentation on the
Dark Star
, it was operating in a typically haphazard manner.

As for the alien—he looked upward, and if he twisted his body, so, he could just see around one edge of the elevator. There was a brief flash of red, which had to be the Beachball clearing the shaft with ease. It squeezed through the other side, and as Pinback passed that level, with its open hatchways—open, unreachable hatchways—he saw it scampering along back to where he had disturbed it. Back to the emergency airlock.

Imitative creatures have one other characteristic in common with man—they are intensely curious. If Pinback had gone to the trouble of trying to root it out of the place it had been exploring, then it followed that there must be something in that place of particular interest to Beachballs. Anyhow, it was no longer curious about Pinback, now dangling helplessly in the shaft behind it.

The room certainly was an interesting place, though we have no descriptive referents capable of explaining exactly how the alien saw it. It was full of control panels, switches, blinking lights, five ranked sets of starsuits.

The Beachball examined each in turn, bouncing over open shelves and packages of emergency foodstuffs and even the triple knob that Pinback had sweated over—the one which, if engaged, would blow open the outer emergency door, an event that would be disastrous to anyone on the lock side of an airtight portal.

Not that the Beachball knew or could comprehend any of this. In any case, it elected not to play with the triple knob. Instead, its attention was drawn to a partial hole in the wall, where a protective plate had come loose and now swung from a last, reluctant screw. An interesting hum issued from within the hole, and there was an ugly dark spot on the outside of the loose plate where it had been scorched recently.

There was also a pretty glowing thing inside.

The alien couldn't read, either, so the characters etched into the swinging plate meant nothing to it beyond another smattering of red color. There was a lot of small print, and two big blotches of red, which spelled out:

CAUTION
. . .
LASER.

The Beachball took one bounce and stuck itself to the wall just outside the loose panel. It peered inward with whatever it used for eyes.

Two beams of intense red light flashed deeper into the dark interior, still steady, still in proper line. They issued from a complex instrument close by the portal.

If the Beachball had been at all familiar with starship construction, it would have noted instantly that the join between the light-emitting device and its base was no longer solid. Shifting its position on the wall, it reached in with both claws, touching, feeling, probing curiously for more tactile information about the thing that ended in the pretty lights.

The finely adjusted instrument moved slightly on its loosened mounting. There was a spark, a crackling flash. The Beachball honked in pain and jerked back out of the recess, bouncing at top speed out of the lock.

An occasional wisp of smoke came from the dark interior now, interspersed with odd electrical pops and crackles. It didn't seem very important.

Like everything else on the
Dark Star
, the appearances were deceptive . . .

They had twenty yards to go now for a first down—twenty yards to go because that schmuck Anderson had blown the last play totally and run into his own tight end.

Jesus, how could you run into your own tight end—even on an end around? But it had happened, and now they were back on their own ten instead of the twenty or maybe better, with twenty to go for a first and a third down and Coach had sent in Davis—that pansy Davis, the flanker—with the play and they were supposed to quick kick, fer crissake.

Quick kick with the third quarter almost over and them trailing and goddamnit that was no way to win football games.

Boiler pleaded and begged with O'Brien, the new quarterback. Just let them run another play. An off-tackle . . . a lousy off-tackle, geez! Fake the damn kick and have O'Brien take the snap and hand it to him and he'd follow Harris off the left side.

And O'Brien had hemmed and hawed and said what the hell, why not? He didn't like the coach and he didn't like kicking on third down and his girl friend wasn't putting out, so why the hell not?

The snap was made and Boiler yelled at Harris that if he didn't clear that hole for him he'd kick his teeth out after the game and the big black son-of-a-bitch just turned and smiled back at him and said don't worry, just follow me, man.