Free The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel by Frank M. Robinson Page B

or another.” As Crow had when I asked too many questions, she suddenly became evasive. “I really don’t remember,I didn’t know you very well.”
    In seventeen years, it would have been difficult for Snipe not to know me very well. But whatever I had been like before, Snipe wasn’t about to tell me. She was no different from Crow in that respect. Thinking about Crow made me remember something from breakfast. “Crow and Pipit,” I said casually.
    “They’re lovers?”
    She pursed her lips. “Pipit’s a friend of mine. I won’t talk about her.”
    I smiled to myself; she would talk about Pipit, and probably as soon as possible. “How did Thrush know I had been to see the Captain?”
    She sniffed. “Thrush knows everything. Or thinks he does.” Without a pause she added: “He’s jealous with no reason to be. He and Pipit have already been with each other, why should he begrudge Crow?”
    At first, I didn’t realize what she meant. I wanted to ask her more,then decided against it. “Tell me about Tybalt .”
    “He’s my father.” She said it with an affectionate enthusiasm and I knew she meant he “took an interest.”
    She was relaxed arid talkative now and I asked her about other members of the crew. She had an endless supply of gossip and a ready imagination. I don’t think she ever consciously lied but I wasn’t always sure when she was telling the truth. To Snipe, what might have been was just as exciting as what was.
    She told me almost everything I had wanted to know about the crew on the Astron and quite a bit that I hadn’t. But of all her store of gossip, she hadn’t mentioned the one thing I thought she would.
    “Somebody died the other time period,” I said.
    She paused, her face suddenly pale.
    “People die,” she said in a faint voice.“All the time.” For once, she didn’t want to talk about it, and that surprised me more than anything else.
    The glow tubes suddenly flickered red around the palm terminal. It was time to report to Tybalt in Exploration.
    “I can’t stay with you this sleep period,” Snipe said casually. “I’m on shift.”
    I wondered how she knew. It had been a stray thought at best; I hadn’t been about to ask and I knew my body hadn’t given me away.
    “We’re still friends?” I remembered when Crow had asked that and had a glimpse of how much it had meant to him when I realized how much it now meant to me.
    “Oh, yes, we’re friends.” And then a speculative look crept into her eyes. “But we’re not friends, too.”
    It wasn’t until after we parted that I realized all the time I had been asking Snipe questions and judging her character, she had been judging mine. On a personal basis, I knew instinctively that I had passed. But she had been passing judgment on another level as well; what its qualifications were, and whether or not I met them, I had no idea. But I suspected that the dead crewman in the strange compartment had played a part.

Chapter 7
    T ybaltclung to the railing of the observation deck overlooking the main control room, watching me while I watched the crewmen swarming over the huge plotting globe in the control room below.
    “You don’t remember any of this, do you?”
    I shook my head. “No, sir, I wish I did—I’ve tried.”
    He slipped over the railing, motioning me to follow. Waving the operators aside, he pressed his hand to the palm terminal on the control board. The galaxy in the plotting globe exploded outward in light streaks that made the surface of the globe look like the working end of a brush. The streaks thinned and vanished, replaced by a single yellow star surrounded by seven planets, the two outer ones gas giants and the five inner ones iron core. The first was too close to the primary to have any prospects for life. The second was far more likely; the rest were too far away.
    “That’s Aquinas II,” Tybalt said, pointing. “We’ll be there in eight months. No sign of alien scouts, though there’s a