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

usually eat together. If you want me to show you—”
    “I’m not hungry,” I said in a distant voice.
    “Friends?” he repeated. There was an agony of uncertainty in his voice. I turned cold.
    “Privacy, Crow.”
    He looked wounded and vanished through the screen.
    “You’re a fool!” Loon cried. “He would die for you and so would I!” Then he, too, slipped through the shadow screen.
    I was seventeen years old, I held grudges, and I knew Crow had lied to me about my father and my mother and even about myself.
    All of them had lied to me, I thought sullenly, starting with Pipit.
    ****
    I read for ten minutes, then slipped quietly out of my hammock and went exploring—I wanted to see the ship for myself.
    The corridors were almost deserted; those few crewmen floating through them acknowledged me with a nod or ignored me altogether. There was a glow tube still on in Exploration but the compartment was empty. I pushed past it into one of the long residence passageways, listening to the faint sounds of slumber or the quiet hum of conversation from the other side of the shadow screens. By the time I reached the end of it, I was having second thoughts about my tour. I was tired and I wanted nothing more than to curl up in my hammock and drift off to sleep.
    I had just made up my mind to return when a quarantine sign by one of the shadow screens caught my eye. I hesitated, curious. If somebody was sick, why weren’t they in sick bay? I thought about it a moment longer, but my imagination had been too busy conjuring up mysteries about the ship and curiosity got the best of me. I pushed silently through the screen, all primed to apologize for intruding. The compartment was empty. The only signs of occupancy were some loose waistcloths floating in the stray air currents and a few books on the terminal ledge. I glanced at the titles, noting that a page had been turned down in one of them, sacrilege for anything that fragile. I picked it up and read the marked paragraph about life and death. The mere reading of it made me shiver. I started to back out,then noticed there were dark stains on the floor mat and on the bulkhead around the waste chute. I ran my fingers lightly over the mat. The stains weren’t quite dry; the mat was still damp to the touch. My fingers came away faintly streaked with red. I shivered and kicked back to the shadow screen.
    I paused again at the hatchway and took off my eye mask. The compartment falsie was far different from that of Crow and Loon’s. I was on a hillside just below the ruins of a castle whose main tower was circled with stone steps. The plain below was bare of grass, the few trees on it stripped of their leaves, their trunks blackened by fire.
    My eyes lingered on the steps around the tower and automatically followed them to the top—or tried to. Something was wrong with the perspective: The steps never quite got there. You went up and up but at the same time you were going down…
    It was a clever optical illusion. I guessed the falsie was meant as a joke, though a dark one. Then I coupled it with the passage in the book and wondered if it had been programmed as a commentary on life itself. For the first time, it occurred to me that there might be crewmen on board with problems more serious than my own.
    I pushed through the shadow screen and returned to my own living quarters, more tired than before and more thoughtful. I read for a few minutes,then turned off the glow tube, my mind preoccupied with the strange compartment, who had lived there, and what had happened to them. Just before I fell asleep it struck me as odd that the falsie had been left on and the deck mat was still damp with stains. The only reason I could think of was that an investigation was in progress and the dark-stained mat and the falsie were evidence that somebody had died in that compartment. And that they might have had help.
Chapter 5
    “S parrow! Wake up, mister!”
    I sat up, startled, reaching in a