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

that we represented mankind’s furthest reach and were the only ship out there that could warn Earth of an alien invasion.
    I thrust out my hand to shake the Captain’s, to show him that he could count on me. In my haste, I brushed aside the small plastic cube with its tiny flowers trapped inside. I grabbed it before it could float too far away from the control panel and gripped it tightly, panicked at having disturbed it. It didn’t feel right. There should have been hard edges where the sides of the cube met but there weren’t any. It was subtly, oddly deformed.
    “It’s a paperweight, Sparrow—a memento of Earth.” The Captain was smiling faintly, watching my face. I opened my fingers and stared at the cube. The edges were rounded where the plastic had… slumped?
    Heat, I thought, then realized the Astron had probably been at a constant temperature since the day it was launched. The edges must have been worn from… handling? And if so, how long would it have taken? I set the cube down, its magnetic base gripping the panel top.
    “The begats ,” Isaid, my mind numb. “How far back do they go?”
    “A hundred and two generations.” He concentrated on his pipe again. “On board ship, a generation is approximately twenty years.”
    The Astron had spent two thousand years, give or take a few decades, in the depths of space. More than a hundred generations of crewmen had been born, lived, and died during its voyage. The security guard was drifting toward me; my session with the Captain was over. I shook his hand for the last time, smothering my surprise at what he had said.
    “The previous captains would be proud of you, sir.” I sounded as pompous as only a seventeen-year-old can sound, but I wanted to assure him that I was ready to march in his army. He shook his head, still faintly smiling, still watchful, still curious which way my thoughts might jump.
    “There’s been only one captain of the Astron , Sparrow. It’s an honor I’ve held since Launch.”
    For a long moment I couldn’t say anything. “I’m s-sorry, sir,” I finally stammered. “I didn’t know.” I sounded like I was offering condolences rather than trying to hide my shock. His smile turned sardonic.“I bear up, Sparrow.”
    The guard was by my side then and I followed him into the passageway, still unwilling to believe what I had heard.The Captain as old as the ship itself? I could think of no reason why he would lie, so I accepted it—and suddenly felt angry.
    How many times had he given a still-wet-behind-the-ears crew member the same enthusiastic speech he had given me?Two thousand times?Ten thousand times? And how often had he heard the same response? The slight quiver around his mouth as I had talked to him… He knew all the variations by heart, he had been mouthing what I was saying at the very moment I was saying it. I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know.
    It struck me then just how short my own life was when compared to the Captain’s, and I was both envious and afraid. He had enlisted me as friend and follower with ridiculous ease. Well, why not? He knew everything there was to know about human beings; he’d had more than two thousand years in which to study them, to learn how to manipulate them.
    I wanted to hate him for it but I couldn’t. The truth was, I wanted desperately to believe in a Captain who told me that he needed me, who had let me know that I was both friend and companion, whose outstretched arms had briefly encompassed the entire galaxy with its billions of stars and myriad life forms, who had given me the one thing in life I needed above all else—purpose. I would be willing to do a great deal for the man who gave me that.
    As I drifted down the corridor back to my compartment, I reminded myself that he had borne a crushing responsibility for those two thousand years. He had not only watched over all of us, he had led the crew in fulfilling the destiny for which the Astron had been launched so many years