Tales of Pirx the Pilot Page 11

  In his anxiety over Challiers’s silence, over his sudden and inexplicable disappearance, Savage must momentarily have lost his bearings. Or, as seemed more likely, since he was the more experienced climber of the two, he must have exposed himself unnecessarily to danger while combing the area, taken a fall, and shattered his visor in the process. Sealing the breach with his hand, he struggled back to the station and scrambled up the dome, but before he could seal the outer hatch and lower himself into the pressure chamber, his oxygen supply ran out and he collapsed in a fatal coma on the last rung of the ladder.

  Not satisfied with the commission’s version of the dual tragedy, Pirx checked the personality profiles. He paid special attention to Challiers’s, since, according to the commission, he was the inadvertent cause of the two deaths—his own and that of his partner. Challiers, at thirty-five, was an established astrophysicist and an accomplished mountain climber. A man in excellent health, with no known history of any illness, dizzy spells or otherwise. Previously he had done service on the Moon’s Near Side, where he was one of the founding members of the Club of Acrobatic Gymnastics, a typically lunar kind of sport whose adepts were capable of turning double-quadruple flips and of shouldering twenty-five-man pyramids. And this was the same Challiers who suddenly, for no apparent reason, was supposed to have suffered an attack of vertigo a hundred feet away from the station? A man who, even assuming he had been overcome by dizziness, was too weak to take the easiest way back, down the slope, but not too weak to make a detour by way of the cliff, knowing that to reach the salvaged portion of the road he would have to scale the wall of boulders at the rear of the station—and at night, no less?

  There was one other detail that to Pirx’s way of thinking (and not only his) directly contradicted the version set forth in the official record. Everything at the station was in its proper place, with one exception: the packets of plates found lying on the kitchen table. Supposing Challiers had really gone up to the shaft, made the switch, but instead of making a detour by way of the cliff, come straight back by the usual route, bringing the exposed plates with him. Now, then, why had he left them on the table? And where was Savage at the time? The commission theorized that the plates in the kitchen were from a previous batch, that one of the scientists must have accidentally left them lying on the table. Yet no plates were ever found on Challiers’s body, a circumstance the commission attributed to his fatal fall—that is, they could have slipped out of the pocket of his space suit and vanished in one of the thousand or more crevices lining the talus.

  To Pirx this smacked of stretching the facts to suit the hypothesis.

  He shoved the records back into their files, the files into the drawer. He no longer needed them; he already knew them by heart. He told himself—intuited with absolute certitude—that the missing clue was not to be traced to psychology, that the fatalities were caused by something other than a fainting spell, vertigo, or momentary blackout. The answer, he knew, lay somewhere inside or outside the station. With that in mind, he set out to inspect it, compartment by compartment, not in search of clues but simply to familiarize himself with its operational systems. He would do it leisurely; he had time. The pressure chamber seemed like a logical place to begin. First the inner door. Chambers of this type were usually equipped with a mechanism for releasing both the inner and outer hatches, and this one was no exception. The system was designed so that when the outer hatch was open, the inner door could not be opened, this to safeguard against accidents caused by a simultaneous opening of both hatches. As an added precaution, the inner hatch was designed to open toward the inside, so that in an emergency the pressure inside the station would slam it shut with a force of nearly eighteen tons, though the system was far from foolproof: a hand or an object—a tool, for example—could always get caught between the door and the frame, triggering an explosive decompression.

  To further complicate matters, the hatch was continuously monitored by a control located in the radio station. An open hatch was registered by a red light on the console, automatically tripping a green monitoring signal. This was a nickel-ringed eye, centered on a tracking screen. A pulsating “butterfly” in the eye meant that the subject outside the station was breathing normally; a calibrated line monitored his position, relative to the output source. The oscilloscope, rotating in unison with the dome-mounted radar antenna, displayed the station’s environment in phosphorescent outline. Each sweep of the oscilloscope flooded the tube with that familiar fluorescent glow, a space-suited body showing up as a blip of considerable luminosity. By monitoring this elongated emerald-green speck, one could plot its movements against the dimly illuminated background. The upper half of the screen corresponded to the terrain below the northern summit, the bottom half to the southern zone, which included the cliff area, strictly off limits at night.

  The remote respiration monitor and the radar tracking system functioned independently of one another. The “eye” was activated by a transmitter connected to the space suit’s oxygen-inlet valve; it operated on a near-infrared frequency, the radar beam on half-centimeter radio waves.

  The system was equipped with one tracker and one eye, since station regulations prohibited more than one egress at a time. The one remaining inside the station was required to keep the other under constant surveillance, hastening to the rescue in event of an emergency.

  In practice, the plate change was so routine and consumed so little time that the one staying behind could, simply by keeping the door to the radio station open, monitor the instruments without interrupting his kitchen duty. Radio contact could also be maintained, except during the predawn hours when the terminator, that boundary between night and day, whose arrival was always announced by a torrent of static, rendered voice communication next to impossible.

  Pirx experimented with the play of signals. He opened the hatch; the red light flashed, the willow-green “eye” went on but remained dormant, its winglike appendages collapsed into listless threads in the absence of any input. The oscilloscope sweep rotated on the face of the tube, conjuring up rigid silhouettes of rock: stone spirits inhabiting a petrified landscape. Not a single light pulse marred its orbital sweep, confirming the lack of input on the breathing monitor.

  The next time Langner went out to change the plates, Pirx was able to observe the monitoring system in action.

  The red signal flashed, then faded as Langner opened and closed the outer hatch behind him. The butterfly began to palpitate within a few minutes, the pulsations growing more accelerated as the astrophysicist started up the slope at a brisk pace. The light pulse transmitted by his space suit lingered on the screen after each sweep of the tracing beam. Suddenly the butterfly contracted, the screen went blank, the pulse vanished, as Langner descended into the shaft. The lead-lined walls were intercepting the wave transmissions, thought Pirx. Simultaneously the main console flashed a crimson ALARM and the profile on the screen changed.

  Then Pirx understood why. The radar antenna, its grid constantly gyrating, had reduced the angle of inclination to sweep increasingly distant sectors. The system was responding to the “unknown”: the subject had momentarily slipped out of the range of its electromagnetic vision. Three or four minutes later the butterfly resumed its fluttering motion and the radarscope picked up the missing target. Both components were again registering it, as Langner, now up out of the shaft, began heading back to the station. The alarm signal stayed on; unless switched off manually, it would stay on for another two hours before being shut off automatically. The shutoff was to prevent the system, if inadvertently left on, from consuming too much battery-stored electricity.

  The more expert he became at the station’s operational systems, the less complicated he found them to be. Langner never once got in the way of his experiments. To him the commission’s report seemed plausible enough. “Accidents do happen,” he said.

  “The plates?” he said in reply to Pirx’s objection. “The plates mean nothing. People do funny things
when they’re in a panic. Logic is the first thing to desert them, quicker than life. When that happens, anyone will act irrationally…”

  Pirx decided to drop the matter.

  The long lunar night was nearing the end of its second week. Pirx, for all his sleuthing, was no wiser now than at the beginning. Maybe he was up against one of those unsolvable, one-in-a-million-type cases… Bit by bit, he began lending Langner a hand with his experiments. He had to pass the time somehow. He even learned how to operate an astrograph (It’s turning out to be a routine training mission after all, he thought) and took turns trekking back and forth to the shaft.

  At last it came, the thing he had been waiting for: dawn. Eager for news of Earth, he fiddled with the radio dials, but for all his tinkering could pull in only a hailstorm of cosmic crackle announcing the sunrise. Soon it was time for breakfast. After breakfast there were plates to be developed. Langner sat poring over one in particular, having stumbled across a handsome specimen of mesonic decay. He called Pirx over to the microscope, but Pirx reacted indifferently to the wonders of nuclear transformation. Then it was time for lunch, an hour at the astrographs, some stargazing… By then it was suppertime. Langner was already about in the kitchen when Pirx—it being his turn today—stuck his head through the door and said he was on his way out. Langner, who was trying to decipher a complicated recipe printed on a box of dehydrated eggs, told him, in a mumbling voice, to hurry—the omelets would be ready in ten minutes.

  Suited up, with a fresh packet of plates in hand, tie-down straps secured to his neck ring, Pirx opened the doors to the kitchen and radio station, squeezed into the chamber, slammed the hermetic door shut, flipped the hatch, and crawled outside, leaving the hatch cover slightly ajar for a speedy return.

  He was circumscribed by cosmic darkness, incomparably thicker than any on Earth, where the atmosphere always emits a faint radiation of light. He took his bearings by the stars; where the patterns of known constellations were truncated by a starless black, a rocky presence made itself felt. He switched on his headlamp and, with a pale concentration of light bobbing rhythmically before him, made his way up to the shaft. He swung his heavy boots gracefully over the rim—lunar lightness was easy to master, far easier than readjusting to Earth’s gravity—groped for the top rung, and lowered himself into the well.

  As he squatted down and bent over the plate racks, his headlamp flickered and went out. He gave his helmet a pat; the light came back on. A loose contact, he thought. He had just started to collect the plates when the headlamp blinked—and went out again. Pirx deliberated in the dark. He wasn’t worried about the return trip—he knew the trail by heart. Besides, there were always the station’s dome lights—one green, the other blue—to guide him. But one false step in the dark and he ran the risk of damaging the plates. Another blow to the helmet: it worked; the light came back on.

  Losing no time, he jotted down the temperature, fitted the plates into their holders, but just as he was transferring the cassettes to the carrying case, the damned headlamp gave out again. This time he set aside the plates and gave his helmet several raps in a row. By now he had observed a certain pattern: when he stood up straight, the lamp worked fine; the moment he bent over, it went out. From then on he tried to hold his back straight while crouching down—an awkward position.

  Finally the light went completely dead. There was no going back to the station now, not with the plates scattered helter-skelter. Leaning his back against the lowest rung, he unscrewed the lamp’s outer cap and pushed the mercury-vapor lamp deeper into its socket, then screwed the cap back on. The light was working again, but fitfully; as happens sometimes, the thread refused to grab. He tried every which way to get it back on; finally, running out of patience, he shoved the glass cover into his pocket, quickly picked up the old plates, replenished the racks, and started back up the ladder.

  He was a half meter from the top when another light, wavering and fugitive, mingled with his own. He glanced up but saw only a star-pierced sky trapped in the well opening.

  Your eyes are playing tricks on you, he thought.

  He surfaced and, suddenly gripped by a vague unease, broke into a run, taking the downslope in enormous bounds—those long lunar hops that gave the illusion of speed, being, in fact, six times slower than the Earthly kind.

  He was already standing by the dome, one hand clutching the rail, when a second burst of light cleaved the darkness. A flare! To the south! The metal bubble blotted any view he might have had of the rocket flare itself, but not the eerie luminescence reflected by the overhanging rocks, which lunged out of the dark and just as quickly retreated. He scampered monkey-fashion up to the peak of the dome. Impenetrable darkness. He regretted not having a flare gun with him. He switched on his radio. Static—the same goddamned lousy static! His eye fell on the hatch; it was open, a sign Langner was still inside.

  “You dummy! Flare, my foot! It was a meteor! What you saw was a meteor colliding with the rocks at cosmic velocity!”

  He dropped down into the chamber, sealed the hatch behind him, waited for the air pressure to reach a level of 0.8 kilogram per square centimeter, then opened the inner hatch. Undoing his helmet on the run, he stormed into the vestibule.

  “Langner!”

  Silence. Still in his g-suit, he barged into the kitchen. One sweeping glance told him it was empty. Dinner plates on the table, bowl of omelet batter on the counter, frying pan next to the red-hot burner…

  “Langner!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. He flung down the exposed plates still in his hand and ducked into the radio station. Deserted. Something told him it was a waste of time to look in the observatory. So those were flares he had seen! Was it—yes, it had to be! Langner! But why had he left the station?

  Then he saw it. The green eye was pulsating; Langner was out there—breathing, alive. He checked the scope. The tracing beam was picking up a small, tapered light pulse at the very bottom of the screen. Langner was heading for the cliff!

  Without taking his eye from the screen, Pirx started screaming into the microphone:

  “Langner! Stop! Stop! Hey, come back! Langner, stop!”

  The receiver crackled with interference. The willow-green wings pulsated—not in rhythm to normal breathing, but sluggishly, tenuously, at times becoming alarmingly inert, signaling a possible respirator breakdown. The blip on the radar had reached the outer periphery; it was at the bottom of the coordinate grid, or roughly a kilometer and a half from the station, far enough to put Langner among the towering outcrops under the Gap. Then it ceased moving, flaring up with every sweep of the tracing beam, always in the same place.

  Maybe he had fallen. Maybe he was lying unconscious…

  Pirx dashed out into the corridor. Quick—outside! Get your ass into the pressure chamber! He got as far as the airtight door; as he was racing past the kitchen, something black against white had caught his eye. The photographic plates! They were lying right where he had dropped them in all the panic over his partner’s sudden disappearance…

  He stood before the chamber door, too dumbfounded to move.

  The whole thing was like a replay, a repeat performance. Langner cuts out in the middle of making supper, I take off after him, and—neither of us comes back. The hatch will be open… In a few hours the Tsiolkovsky team will start radioing the station… No one will answer…

  A voice yelled, “Get going, you fool! What are you waiting for? He’s out there! Caught in an avalanche, for all you know. You can’t hear anything up here, remember? He’s still alive, pinned down somewhere, hurt, but alive, breathing! Come on, what are you waiting for?!”

  He didn’t move. All of a sudden he spun around, stormed into the radio station, and checked the displays. Situation unchanged. The butterfly’s quivering, tenuous pulsations came at regular four- to five-minute intervals now; the blip on the radar was still hovering on the edge of the cliff…

  He checked the position of the antenna. It was at the lowest po
ssible angle, automatically positioned for maximum detection range.

  He brought his face up close—very close—to the breathing monitor and remarked something peculiar. The green butterfly was not only furling and unfurling its tiny wings at regular intervals; it was also vibrating—like the breathing pulsations, but more accelerated and somehow overlapping them. Langner’s death throes? Convulsions? My God, the man was dying out there and all he, Pirx, could do was stand there, mouth agape, and monitor the movements of the cathode-ray tube, now aflutter with a double pulsation! Unexpectedly, acting purely on impulse, he grabbed the antenna cable and tore it out of the wall plug. At that point, something amazing happened: the butterfly, its antenna disconnected, cut off from any input, kept right on pulsating…

  Guided by the same blind impulse, he lunged toward the console and enlarged the antenna angle. The blip under the Gap began drifting toward the edge of the screen. The radar kept sweeping the area at closer and closer range, then—suddenly—it picked up a second blip, this one larger and stronger than the first. Another space suit!

  A man. It was moving like a man. Slowly, deliberately, it was proceeding downhill, skirting the obstacles in its path, now to the right, now to the left, heading straight for the Gap, toward that other, more distant dot—that other man?

  Pirx’s eyes bulged. There were two dots—one close and mobile, the other far off and stationary. The Mendeleev station was manned by a team of two: Langner and himself. But the display said three. Impossible. The instrument had to be lying.