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planets in same system ninety-six percent. Chances are it will go off its orbit inside the critical period and hit its star." He looked up from his readouts. "Wanna blow it up?"
    He laughed.
    Pinback eyed him uneasily. Boiler didn't laugh very often, and Pinback could have done without even those occasional displays of humor on the corporal's part. But the information appeared to please Doolittle. He smiled broadly.
    "Real good, Boiler. Real good work. That's what I'm looking for. Chart a course as fast as you can." His mind was singing, one more planet, one more bomb—and then they could go home, go home, go home . . . back to warm, comfortable, feeling Earth, back to real grass and real booze and members of the opposite sex. Back to the other aliens, back where they belonged . . .
    Boiler was working feverishly at his console. "Hey, throw me the chart log, Pinback."
    "Name it, then blow it up. Name it, then blow it up—that's all you guys ever wanna do," grumbled Pinback. But he reached beneath his seat, brought out the thick-bound volume of star charts, and tossed it into Boiler's lap.
    Boiler glowered at him and just held the book for a second. Conscious of the suddenly charged atmosphere in the tiny control room, Doolittle watched the two men. Even Pinback, he realized, could be pushed past a certain critical point.
    Boiler held his stare for a moment longer, then opened the book and started thumbing through pages. Doolittle relaxed. What Pinback might do if pushed beyond that certain hypothetical region was anybody's guess. Probably go stand in a corner and cry. But you never knew. Sometimes he suspected that Sergeant Pinback had unplumbed depths. Doolittle spent as much time keeping him and Boiler apart as he did running the ship.
    There had never been as much trouble between the two when Commander Powell was alive. But that was all in the past. So much was all in the past, had been lost in Powell's death. You remove one corner of the pentagram, and the mystic symbol seemed to lose all of its power.
    "Let's have some music in here, Boiler," he said carefully.
    "Sure thing." Boiler, showing no signs of recent aggravation, reached for an upper panel. Strains of the song "Benson, Arizona" immediatly floated through the control room.
    Doolittle relaxed. He loved this particular tune almost as much as he hated it. Loved it for the memories it brought back to him, and hated it for reminding him of what he no longer had.
    Pinback spoke up a moment later—his usual obnoxious and cheerful self again. It didn't take Pinback long to break out of one of his pouts. He was incapable, it seemed to Doolittle, of getting really angry at anything.
    "Hey, don't you think it's time to make an entry in the log, Lieutenant? You know, bring the records up to date, record officially the new star, tell about our little amusing troubles, and all that."
    Doolittle turned over three cards, found himself stuck with the last jack buried on the bottom. He switched the jack with the top card, then put it up on the queen and played out the last two cards and the rest of the game. That made 342 straight games he'd played out—an impressive string he had no intention of breaking.
    "What, Pinback?"
    "I said, don't you think it's time for a log entry?" When Doolittle didn't exactly leap to his feet to race to the recorder, Pinback continued pleading. "Aw, come on, Lieutenant. You haven't made a log entry in a long time. One of these days that log'll be history. Little kids will study, it and gasp, and their great-grandparents will say, 'I remember when the Dark Star first did this or that.' The folks back home will—"
    "The folks back home," Doolittle started to say angrily, "won't give a flying . . .!"
    He stopped. It was impossible to get mad at Pinback. The sergeant was a terrible audience. He wouldn't do the decent thing and howl back at you. No, Pinback would either retreat into a heady pout or else try to make a joke out of your most heartfelt