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

didn’t want to. I also realized they really weren’t attacking Tybalt , they were attacking the Captain, and for that I despised them.
    “What difference does it make how he lost it?” I protested, sullen. Ophelia stared at me. “You and Tybalt recently inspected some suits, didn’t you?”
    She apparently knew everything I had done during shift. I nodded and she said, “How many expeditions do you think they’ve been used for?”
    I shrugged.“Hundreds.”
    “And how many more do you think they’ll be good for?”
    I didn’t want to answer.
    “Well, Sparrow, how many?” she repeated.
    I cleared my throat. “A dozen,” I said slowly. “Not many more.”
    “And how many more generations do you think the Astron will support?”
    “I don’t know. I have no idea.” I had never consciously thought about it until then.
    “Guess,” Ophelia said in a tight voice.“A hundred?Two hundred?”
    I was no engineer, I was a seventeen-year-old tech assistant who had lost his memories and had little knowledge of the ship. But I remembered the glow tubes that had burned out, the worn decks of the compartments and the passageways, the layers of dust on the hangar deck and on the equipment in Shops, the cannibalized Rovers, the rotting fabric of the exploration suits, and the all-pervasive stink of thousands of years of oil and sweat.
    “Not two hundred. Not one hundred. I… don’t know how many.”
    I glanced at Crow for moral support but his only expression was one of pity. Corin was studying his hands, probably worried about what I might say the next time I saw Tybalt . Loon nervously fingered his harmonica; neither he nor Snipe looked at me. Oddly, Noah met my stare but with a look of such desperation that I felt as much pity for him as Crow obviously did for me. Ophelia kicked over to the palm terminal and pressed her hand to it. The bulkhead fell away, to be replaced by Outside. The deck of the compartment now stopped abruptly at outer space, the illusion so convincing that I grabbed for a floor ring to keep from floating out. It occurred to me that the Captain had not been entirely truthful when he said that what I saw on the bridge was what I got. Perhaps that was true of the bridge itself, butOutside had been a simulation and I had looked at it with eyes that gilded it with color and a sense of wonder. What I looked at now was stark and forbidding, a universe of harsh light, glowing dust, and filaments of flaming gases. No part of it reminded me of diamonds or emeralds or rubies.
    Ophelia was outlined against Outside, floating against a background of broken crystal. She pointed out the limbs of the galaxy and the blackness between.
    “ Kusakawants to take the Astron to a region where the stars are closer together and older and where, presumably, there would be more planets to explore. Theoretically, that would increase our chances of finding life.” She placed her palm on an edge of one of the limbs of the galaxy, two-thirds of the distance from the center. “We started here.” She moved her hand to a nearby spur of stars, closer toward the center. “We’re going there. But to get there, we have to cross the Dark.”
    She pointed at the blackness between and was silent for a moment. I stared at the empty space covered by her hand and tried to translate it into distance and time. I shivered.
    “It would take a thousand generations. The planetary systems are very few and far apart. We would run out of mass for the converters as well as most of the elements we need for subsistence and repairs. And we would run out of them in a generation— this generation, Sparrow.” She hesitated,then said flatly:
    “Even if that part of space weren’t empty, we would never see the other side. The Astron is falling apart, it can’t make it.”
    “The Captain knows the ship as well as you,” I objected, jittering on the inside with panic and anger.
    “Why would he risk it and his crew?”
    “Because he can’t