“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?