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.