His mind shifted to muse on another G-type star, one he remembered fairly well, with a certain inconsequential world sputtering lazily around it. And, like a sol-type star, he supported more life than the rest of them put together. Cheerfully pathetic Pinback, always joking, never laughing, barely noticed. ![]() His name fitted.Īnd there was Pinback-Pinback, the average, ordinary, down-home G-type lightbulb. The most intense and the least demonstrative. ![]() He was the largest of them, and the smallest. But he held the ship together, had done so ever since Powell had been eclipsed.īoiler was a white dwarf, no reflection on his size. Alan dean foster books online free full#Doolittle was an angry red giant, full of passion and fire and anger that blazed uncontrolled at unpredictable, unguarded moments. He tried comparing them to his real friends. 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. Doolittle, Pinback, Boiler and Commander Powell. He had accomplished the neat feat of dividing the universe into three parts: himself, the rest of the cosmos, and his fellow crewmembers. No doubt one day Doolittle might insist it had been too many centuries. It had been only a few days, a few months, a few years. 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.Įmpty space-poor, sad Lieutenant Doolittle! It was only empty inside the ship. Poor middling souls-his greatest regret was that he couldn't share his pleasure with them. The others looked on his special relationship rather differently, of course. ![]() At least one man had succeeded in blending with the universe without inflicting himself on it. They never listened.īetter to do it this way. Talby shook his head, though there were none but the stars to see it. It was sad.Īnd 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. Never a moment to listen, to look, to try to see and understand. 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. That was the trouble with man's first extended explorations of deep space. They told you and were happy to, confessed all their secrets without prodding, without coercion, without being violated by clumsy, poking, grabby machines. Of course, when the stars were your best friends, you didn't have to work very hard to find out about them. Talby could distinguish almost every order of magnitude now. The chair would, swivel 90, 180, 270 degrees, and another section of the cosmos would come under Talby-scrutiny. Now and then the soft touch of a finger initiated a muted hum of precision machinery. Only Talby and his seat, floating in a hole on the top of the ship. Every imperfection had been scrubbed out of it, till now there seemed to be no dome. He'd buffed down the inside and outside so many times that the dome was almost impossible to see. He leaned back in the pneumatic astronomer's lounge, a pale bean in a pod of smooth maroon, and stared up through the dome. Ho could a man take the measure of a sun if he had to stop and think about it? Talby smiled. 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. With only the naked eye, most navigators could distinguish only a few degrees, magnitude, but Talby had had more practice than most navigators. ![]() It made a man free-one star, two stars, and baby makes three. Talby didn't see how anyone could appreciate a star by using mere mathematical charts.īut he kept counting. 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.Īnyhow, 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. 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. He didn't remember exactly when he'd lost count. Harris Enterprises, Inc.Īll rights reserved under International andĢ01 East 50th Street, New York, N.Y.
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