Free Dark Star by Alan Dean Foster

impressed.
    He put a black eight on a red eight: an impossibility to resolve, even for an accomplished cheater. Taking the rest of the cards, he threw them down on top of the pile.
    "Damn it!" He glared briefly at Pinback, who recoiled under that momentary unaccustomed blast of intense hatred, and left the room.
    He was furious at himself. Furious for putting the wrong card on the wrong card. Furious at Pinback and his idiotic rubber fowl. Furious at the universe that mocked him, and worse—ignored him.
    A badly confused Pinback let the rubber chicken hang loosely at his side and looked dazedly over at Boiler.
    "Now what do you suppose is the matter with him?"
    He had to calm down, Doolittle told himself. Had to. The others were depending on him. He couldn't continue to fly off the handle at poor Pinback like that. Of course, the sergeant only invited it with his infantile attempts at humor, but Doolittle ought to be able to cope with that by now. Pinback wasn't responsible for his childish activities.
    In fact, it seemed for a moment to Doolittle that Pinback wasn't even responsible for being on this mission. But that was a ridiculous thought!
    Got to relax, got to take it easy, he instructed himself.
    The music room. That was it, he'd go to the music room. He walked faster. It wasn't far.

3
    H E SLID BACK to the door. The music room was a subdivided section of the common recreation chamber, walled off for his own use. Closing the door behind him, he turned and gazed reverently at the organ.
    Using up almost all of their preformed wood scraps and everything he could generate out of the glass-making set, he'd made the instrument entirely by hand in the ship's crafts-and-manual-hobby shop.
    Out of what he could create from that, and from material cannibalized from several musical instruments (provided by the thoughtful psychometricians), he had produced something that resembled a cross between a weaver's loom, an upright piano, and a spice vendor's pushcart.
    Dozens of bottles and bells and pieces of wood were suspended from a high wooden rack-and-shelf arrangement. All were connected by a mad spiderweb of strings and wires to a central keyboard.
    Sitting gently in the chair, he took a mallet and tried several bottles for sound. The first few were fine, but eventually he struck one that gave back an inconsistent hollow bong. That same damned half-liter jug. It would never stay tuned.
    A pitcher of water was standing to one side. Half of it had evaporated since he had last played here. Had it been that long? Ah well, nothing was lost. The water was recycled constantly by the ship, from normal breathing, excretion, and standing jugs.
    Taking up the mallet, he tapped the half-liter again, poured some water into it, tapped it. More water, another tap, and a last dram of liquid should make it just right.
    Someday he would finish the organ and get it properly tuned. Someday. Tuning an organ was, after all, a considerable job. But now it was as ready as he could get it. He raised his hands dramatically over the keyboard, brought them down,
    Here, in the isolated corner of the Dark Star , was the one place where he could create; the one place where he desired to produce and not destroy; the one place that reminded him even a little of home. This was his temple, his equivalent of Talby's dome, Boiler's picture-wall, Pinback's comic books.
    Probably it was all the water. The blue rushing water—under him, over him, behind him. The friendly, familiar water lifting him up, up, and then sliding down the glassy green front. Always the blue-blue-green water.
    His hands moved freely over the keys, loosening the final, flowing toccata from Widor's "Sixth Organ Concerto"—a piece of music at once as light and powerful as the deepest ocean swells. It rose up around him, engulfed the tiny room in sound and then in slick sliding wetness.
    He played harder, faster now, riding the fugal structure to its foaming coda—the music building to a