Tall, quiet, compliant, insecure, affectionate, indifferent Diane.
Wherever she was now, he wished her well.
None of the connections were loose. Maybe the monitors on the tubing linkup…
Everything had worked out so fine, so nice, so natural, to the point where he had even stopped thinking of going on the mission. They could replace him easily enough.
That beautiful, deep brunette… and then she’d gone back to “the older guy,” the one she had “no serious relationship with.” Just up and disappeared out of his life.
That made it easy for him to score high on the tests, easy to devote himself to becoming part of the Dark Star itself. He hadn’t thought anything but cold, technological thoughts for a long time.
But lately… women. And especially a certain woman. Occasionally a part of him would stir with a violent internal tremor and cry, Diane, Diane!
“Easy.” A hand came down gentle, firm on his shoulder and his head snapped around, upward. “Easy, Boiler.” Doolittle said it softly.
Boiler let his emotions simmer, quiet, evaporate. Then he eased his hand carefully out of the slot, began tightening the bolts on the panel.
“I can’t find anything wrong with the reconstituters, Lieutenant. And the tubing connections seem firm.”
“It’s all right, Boiler. It’s all right. Maybe it’ll clear up. There might just be some accumulated blockage in the system. Let’s go get something corrosive to eat and see if we can’t clear it out.”
Boiler looked up at him and then smiled ever so slightly—as much as he ever smiled. Both Talby and Pinback were certifiably nuts, but what about Doolittle? He couldn’t figure the lieutenant out. What did Doolittle think about behind that Assyrian beard and Egyptian stare? What was he thinking about now, looking down at Boiler and not really seeing him?
Were they really on this last bomb run, the last run before they could start the long, lonely journey back to Earth? Or on some journey less profound and more internal—like Boiler’s own?
He shook his head once and tightened the last bolt. Leaving the driver carelessly on the floor, he followed Doolittle up the near ladder.
His thoughts shrank to a tiny ball and normal emotions replaced personal ones as Pinback joined them.
“Hey, guys. Guys?” Pinback began brightly. “You know the alien? The Beachball? Well, it attacked me, guys! Twice, and I tried to tranquilize it but I ended up killing it. But not because of the tranquilizer. That’s the interesting thing about it, you know?”
Doolittle led them through the door to the combination galley and dining room.
“Hey, yeah, this is a good idea, Lieutenant,” he blabbered. “I’m kinda hungry, too. Well, anyhow, I shot it with the tranquilizer gun and it just spewed out gas like crazy and shot around the room like a punctured balloon. I guess its insides were mostly just that, plain old gas. It was just filled with gas.”
This information was not met with a barrage of questions on the part of Doolittle and Boiler.
“Hey, guys, how could it live and just be filled with gas?”
“I wonder what we got to eat today?” Boiler grumbled.
“I thought I was gonna die. I was hanging to the bottom of the damned elevator for twenty minutes.”
“Probably chicken again,” Doolittle theorized. He had long suspected that the menu for the Dark Star had been planned by more than one colonel.
“I probably saved the ship,” Pinback continued excitedly. “Why, that thing might’ve…”
The kitchen-dining area was not very big. The men were not required to eat their meals there; it was merely suggested, since the area was equipped with powerful suction devices and cleansers that gleaned every drop of spilled food for reconstituting.
There were a couple of seats and three blank walls facing a fourth. That wall contained machinery as complex as anything on the bridge or up in the astronomer’s dome. Concentrated food was prepared here, waste products finally recycled into new food and drink.
“… could have done some real damage!” Pinback finished.
Boiler was down now, really down, after his internal outburst of a few moments ago. “God, I’m really sick of chicken.”
It was beginning to dawn on Pinback that his account of an overwhelming victory over the rampaging forces of alien malignancy were generating something less than an ecstatic response on the part of his audience. He folded his arms and retreated into the inevitable pout.
“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, then I just won’t talk about it anymore.”
“Hey, that sounds like a fine idea, Pinback,” Doolittle observed. He moved to the service oven and punched the DINNER call switch three times in measured succession. There was a click, a quiet whirr that lasted for several seconds, and then the door slid aside.
Doolittle peered in, wrinkling his nose as he got a whiff of the heated liquids inside.
“Chicken,” he muttered. He thumbed another switch and the door closed. Once more he activated the call button thrice. Another buzz, another whirr, a different smell.
“Ah, ham.” Either the machine had finally learned to read their discontent or else they had simply gotten a break. Why so much chicken had been programmed into their diet was beyond Doolittle’s imagining.
Actually, the only difference between the “chicken” and “ham"—or steak, seafood, or meat loaf they were offered—was in the artificial flavoring, since they were constantly consuming the same basic series of protein-carbohydrate-sugar solids. And since all the liquid concentrates looked the same, the psyche boys no doubt concluded that taste variety was important.
Why, then, this unnatural preponderance of processed fowl? Doolittle suspected that, like everything else on the Dark Star, there was a kink in the kitchen computer too. But that was one piece of instrumentation he didn’t want to chance fooling with. Not as long as it kept them alive.
Attempts at reprogramming the flavoring in their food might result in even worse offerings. They might get oyster stew for a month, something that had happened several years ago. Doolittle had nearly starved. He did not like the taste of oyster stew, or the look of oyster stew, or the smell of oyster stew.
Unquestionably, Doolittle was afflicted with an anti-oyster bias rooted deep in childhood neuroses.
That didn’t increase his fondness for chicken, however.
Thirty years of schooling come to this, he mused. A superbly trained technician and here he was, his mind reduced to debating the demerits of chickens and oysters. God, the workings of a technological society!
Talby was the only one who didn’t care. To Talby, food was so much fuel, something that distracted him from his primary task of observing the universe. Something to be gotten over with as fast as possible. A necessary if irritating activity, like going to the john or sleeping.
Juggling the three packages because of the heat, he removed them from the oven and handed one each to Boiler and Pinback.
“Dinner, fellows.”
“Chicken again?” Pinback asked, staring doubtfully down at his package.
“Almost, but no—ham for a change.”
“Oh… good.”
So much for pre-dinner conversation. They began peeling the foil from the tops of the metal containers. Each tray-shape held four transparent plastic packages of concentrated liquid food.
Doolittle tried to open his own without looking at the contents. A man could lose all his teeth in space—through calcium loss, say—and still survive in excellent health, thanks to this diet. But you wanted something to sink your teeth into after a while. They had experienced no calcium loss and had perfect artificial gravity. Therefore Doolittle felt he had a reasonable complaint. There was no reason why the corps could not have provided them with some real food.