Tales of Pirx the Pilot Read online

  For lack of anything better to do, he began turning over in his mind all the possible things that could have happened to Thomas and Wilmer. The names of the missing pilots were seldom mentioned at the Base anymore, but nothing is more conducive to idle speculation than prolonged isolation during a manned space flight. He had logged not quite three years’ flight time—two years and four months, to be precise—and already he thought of himself as an old pro. Even so, this time the astro-boredom was beginning to get to him, though he was the last person to advertise it.

  Patrol flights have been compared, and aptly so, to waiting one’s turn at the dentist’s—the difference being that here the dentist never shows. Stars that never move, an Earth that either can’t be seen at all or, if you’re extremely lucky, looms as big as the tiny crescent of a bruised fingernail—during the first two hours of flight, that is, after which it assumes the same appearance as any star, in this case a moving one. And staring into the Sun, as everyone knows, is not too advisable, either. It’s times like these that a Chinese puzzle or a brain-teaser becomes an absolute must.

  Still, it was a pilot’s duty to hang suspended in a cocoon of belts, to monitor each and every screen—both radar and video—to check the reactor’s idling gauge, and to radio back at regular intervals. Once in a great while, it’s true, he might pick up a distress call—even an SOS!—coming from somewhere inside his sector, and off he’d go, at breakneck speed; but a pilot could count himself lucky if this happened more than once or twice a year.

  Under the circumstances, it is hardly astonishing that pilots are subject to myriad fantasies, fantasies which from the point of view of Earth, or of ordinary passengers, might seem wicked, but which in fact are quite normal. When you’re out there, surrounded by 1.5 trillion cubic kilometers of empty space, without so much as a flake of cigarette ash for company, the desire for action—be it even some hideous calamity—can grow to a genuine obsession.

  In the course of his 172 patrol flights, Pirx had run the gamut of psychic responses, having been subject to attacks of drowsiness, crotchetiness, even fits of feebleminded eccentricity … and once was on the verge of committing some far-from-harmless prank. Lately he had begun concocting plots to various stories, a hangover from his student days, some of which turned out to be so intricate in construction as to defy finding a resolution before the end of the flight. But did it help to relieve the boredom? Not a bit.

  As he ventured into the labyrinth of lonely contemplation, Pirx realized he would never solve the mystery of his two missing comrades, not when the most high-powered experts at the Base had been beating their brains out, for months on end, without cracking it. No, he was better off with his piggy game, a no less idle but certainly more harmless pastime—if only he could get it to work! But the engines were quiet, nor was there any reason to fire them up, what with the ship now cruising along the segment of a protracted ellipsis, one of whose foci was the Sun. No, the piggies would have to wait for sunnier days.

  Okay, so what could have happened to Thomas and Wilmer?

  An ordinary layman would have presumed a collision with something—with a meteor, for example, with a cloud of cosmic dust, a comet’s tail, or the wreckage of some old rocket ship. But the chances of such a collision’s occurring were about as remote as finding a mammoth diamond in the middle of a busy street; statistics showed, in fact, that the odds in favor of finding the diamond were much greater.

  From sheer boredom, Pirx began feeding figures into his computer and formulating equations to compute the probability of a collision. The result was a figure so large that the computer would have had to drop the last eighteen decimal places just to accommodate the number on its displays.

  Besides, the sector was empty. No comet tails, no clouds of cosmic dust—nothing. Theoretically, the wreckage of an earlier ship might just as well have turned up here as anywhere else in the universe—but only after an inconceivable number of years. But if that were the case, surely Thomas and Wilmer would have sighted it—say, from a distance of 250 kilometers. Suppose it had approached from the side of the Sun; in that case, the meteoradar would have sounded the alarm a good thirty seconds before impact. And even if the pilot had slept through the alarm, the automatic control would have triggered the yaw maneuver, whereas a malfunction in the automatic yaw control was practically unheard of: it might happen once, but not twice in a row in the space of a few days.

  All this a layman might have deduced, a layman who knew nothing of the hazards present aboard ship during a manned space flight—perils far greater than colliding with a meteorite or a decayed comet. A spacecraft, even one as small as an AMU, is made up of nearly 114,000 major parts—major in the sense that a malfunction in any one of them could have disastrous consequences. The minor parts number more than a million. But even assuming a fatal accident, a spaceship would not simply disintegrate into ether—since, to cite an old spaceman’s adage, nothing is ever lost in space: toss out a cigarette lighter, and all you have to do is to plot its trajectory and be in the right place at the right time, and the lighter, following its own orbital path, will with astronomical precision plop into your hand at the designated second. The fact that in space a body will orbit about another to infinity means that sooner or later the wreckage of any spaceship is almost always bound to turn up. The Institute’s megacomputers had plotted more than forty million possible orbits in which the missing ships could be traveling, each of which was probed by concentrated pencils of the most powerful radar tracking equipment available on Earth. With the aforementioned results.

  This is not to say that the entire solar system was systematically probed. Compared to the vastness of space, a rocket ship is something infinitesimally small, smaller even than an atom in relation to Earth. Still, they searched high and low, anywhere the ships might have been—assuming, of course, the pilots had not simply abandoned their assigned sector. But then, what reason would they have had to leave it? They had received no radio commands or distress calls, nor were they the victims of any collision—that much, at least, had been established.

  All indications were that Thomas and Wilmer had evaporated, spaceships and all, like drops of water on a blazing hot grill.

  A layman endowed with some imagination, unlike his more pedestrian colleague, would have hastened to attribute the mysterious disappearances to those enigmatic creatures from other planets, creatures possessed of an awesome yet sinister intelligence who are always on the prowl in space.

  But who in that advanced age of manned space exploration still believed in the existence of such creatures, not one of which had ever been encountered in the known universe? By this time the number of jokes about “creatures from outer space” far exceeded the number of cubic kilometers contained in the solar system. No one, except for the greenest recruits, whose only flight experience was in a chair suspended from the laboratory ceiling, would have bet a plugged nickel on them. If there were any inhabitants on other stars, then only on ones belonging to a distant galaxy.

  Add up the handful of primitive mollusks, lichens, bacteria, infusoria—all unknown on Earth—and you have the grand total of many years’ expeditions. Even were such creatures to exist, would they really have nothing better to do than to ambush measly little patrolships in one of the most desolate, godforsaken regions of space? And how could they get within striking distance without being noticed?

  The effect of such questions—and there seemed to be no end to them—was to reduce the whole hypothesis to a grand, monumental absurdity, to deprive the game of any semblance of reality. But prone as he was to the wildest fantasies during his ninth hour of flight, when faced with such ruthlessly sobering facts, even Pirx would have been strained to entertain something as preposterous as demonic beings from outer space.

  From time to time, despite the zero gravity, he would tire of sitting in the same position, adjust the angle of the contour couch in which he was pinioned, and shift his gaze from left to right—without, strange as
it may seem, distinguishing any of the 311 gauges, instrument lights, and pulsating dials and displays, as routinely familiar to him as the features of a face whose expression can be read without reference to any parting of the brows, arching of the lips, or pattern of wrinkles on the forehead. Just so, one glance, and dials, control lights—everything—would merge to form a single whole, a message telling him that all systems were go. Looking straight ahead, he commanded a view of both stellar screens—and between them, framed by a yellow, domeshaped helmet partially obscuring chin and forehead, his own face.

  In between the two stellar screens was a mirror, rather modest in size but mounted in such a way that a pilot could not possibly escape his own reflection. What it was actually doing there, what purpose it served, was never explained. That is to say, it was explained, but the rationale given, while ingenious, fooled hardly anyone. The mirrors were the brainchild of psychologists. Man, according to them, when subjected to long periods of unrelieved solitude, is apt to lose control over his own mind and emotions, can be lulled imperceptibly into a dreamless, wakeful sleep from which he is not always able to waken in time. Some have been known to fall victim to hallucinations of obscure origin, to fits of anxiety or severe emotional outbursts, and the ability to control one’s own physiognomy is thought to be an excellent corrective, though, to be sure, it was no fun having to stare at one’s own face for hours on end and dutifully record its every expression. And no one can appreciate this better than the pilots of patrolships. It may begin innocently enough: you make a face, you frown or grin at your own reflection, and that unleashes a torrent of grimaces, one more contorted than the next. That’s what can happen when a situation so contrary to nature goes beyond normal human endurance.

  Fortunately, Pirx was not so infatuated with his own image as others were with theirs. Though difficult to verify, stories were told of those who, overcome by a debilitating boredom, were given to such embarrassing acts as spitting at their own reflection, and how, overwhelmed with shame, and in violation of all the rules, they would unfasten their straps, get up, and proceed to walk—or rather to swim—through the cabin’s zero-gravity atmosphere to the mirror, to somehow clean it before landing. There were some who stubbornly maintained that Wuertz had drilled his ship thirty-three meters into the concrete landing strip because he had put off cleaning his mirror until the moment of reentry.

  Pilot Pirx had never experienced such symptoms, much less felt the temptation to spit at his own reflection—the struggle to resist often led to severe psychological damage that could have been amusing only to those who have never flown a lonely patrol. In the end, even during his worst spells, Pirx had always found something to distract him, some dependable spool around which to wind his jumbled thoughts and emotions, like a long and tangled thread.

  The dial—the normal one, measuring time—showed 11:00 P.M. In thirteen minutes he would reach his orbit’s aphelion. He coughed once or twice into the microphone to test it, on a whim made the computer derive the fourth root of 8769983410567396, then showed not the slightest interest when the computer displayed the answer with the utmost speed, grinding out the digits and jiggling them nervously in its CRTs as if it were a matter of life and death; and was thinking that the first thing he’d do after landing would be to toss a glove out through the hatch door—just for kicks—light up a smoke, march down to the mess hall, order himself something hot and spicy, seasoned with paprika, and wash it down with a tall draft of beer (he was a great beer lover)—when he spotted a light.

  He had been monitoring the left-front video screen, with one of those seemingly unseeing looks of his, but mentally already back in the mess hall (where he could almost smell the dark-brown camp fries, a whole batch of them, prepared especially for him), when into the center of the screen crept this luminous white dot, the sight of which stiffened his whole body with such a jolt that if not for his straps he would have slammed right into the ceiling.

  The screen measured about a meter in diameter, pitch-black except for Rho Ophiuchi in the center, and the Milky Way, dissected by a yawning black void that stretched clear to the other side of the screen, which was bordered on either side by glittering stardust. This perfect still-life spectacle was, slowly but steadily, invaded by a tiny brilliant light, which was not so tiny, however, that it couldn’t be distinguished from the stars. But then, it was not the brightness of it that had caught his attention, as much as the fact that it moved.

  Luminous moving dots in space usually mean one thing: a ship’s navigation lights. As a rule, a ship’s lights are not turned on except in response to a radio call, for purposes of identification. Different ships display different kinds of lights: passenger ships are identified by one kind, freighters by another, and the same applies to high-speed ballistic rockets, patrolships, rescue ships, tankers, and so on. The lights are mounted variously, depending on the ship, and they come in every conceivable color except one—white—to make the ships distinguishable at all times from the stars. When two or more vehicles are flying in tandem, a white light on the lead ship can too easily be mistaken for a stationary light, in which case the pilot following behind runs the risk of going off course.

  But the little speck floating leisurely across the screen was white as could be, and Pirx could actually feel his eyeballs coming loose from their sockets. Not once did he blink, afraid that he might lose track of it if he did—but the white dot sauntered gingerly along, undisturbed, now only a dozen or so centimeters away from the opposite side of the screen. Another minute and it would vanish from sight.

  Instinctively, Pirx’s hands went straight for the controls. The reactor, which had been idling, responded with instantaneous thrust, the acceleration shoving Pirx back into the seat’s foam-rubber cushion … stars scudding across the screen … the Milky Way running downhill, very much like a road of milk… This brought the mobile speck to a standstill, with the ship’s nose following right on its tail, aiming at it like a hunting dog pointing at a pheasant in the brush. Now was that classy handling, or wasn’t it?

  The whole maneuver consumed a mere ten seconds.

  Now, for the first time, he had the leisure to reflect, and it slowly dawned on him that what he was seeing was a hallucination, because such things were unprecedented. This deduction did him credit. On the whole, people tend to trust too much in the evidence of their senses; if they should happen to see a deceased acquaintance in public, they would sooner believe in a resurrection than admit to their own insanity.

  Pilot Pirx groped in one of the seat’s side pockets, pulled out a small flask, inserted its two small glass tubes into his nostrils, and inhaled until his eyes began to water. Psychraine was potent enough to disrupt the cataleptic trances of a Yogi or the mystical visions of a saint. But, much to his chagrin, the light continued its peregrinations in the center of the left screen. Having done the prescribed thing, he returned the flask to its proper place, maneuvered the ship’s rudders slightly to align himself with the other, and checked the radar to get a fix on the luminous object.

  And here he was in for his second shock: the meteoradar screen was blank. Its green tracing beam, incandescent as a strip of phosphorus exposed to a strong dose of solar radiation, swept around in a continuous circle, but without showing the slightest trace of any light—nothing. An absolute blank.

  Pirx was not so foolish as to think that he was pursuing a spirit with a shining halo. The fact was, he didn’t believe in spirits, although occasionally, especially in the company of women, he might shoot the breeze about them, but even then it was not born of any spiritualistic convictions.

  Of one thing he was sure: what he was following was not a dead celestial body, because such an object will always reflect a radar tracking beam, will always show up as a blip. Only objects that are artificially made and externally treated with a substance capable of absorbing, neutralizing, and dispersing centimeter waves will not produce any optical echoes.

  Pilot Pirx cleared his throat and s
poke deliberately, his Adam’s apple, with each measured phrase, bobbing up and down and pressing lightly against the laryngophone attached to his neck.

  “Patrolship AMU-111 calling object flying in sector one-thousand-two-point-two, steering a course approaching sector one-thousand-four-hundred-four, and showing one navigation light. Request your call numbers. Over.”

  He waited for the response.

  Seconds passed, the seconds turned into minutes—still no answer. Instead, Pirx noticed that the light was fading, which meant it was receding. Although the radar telemeter had flunked the test, he still had the more primitive optical range finder in reserve. He stretched one leg, pushed a pedal, and the range finder, similar in appearance to a telescope, dropped down from above,

  Pirx brought it up close to his eyes and adjusted the focus.

  He located the dot immediately—and discovered something else while he was at it. Magnified now by the lens, the speck assumed the proportions of a pea when see from a distance of 5 meters—which, by standards prevailing in outer space, was nothing short of gargantuan. Not only that, but its somewhat flattened surface was traversed by a number of tiny dark squiggles, much as if several thick black hairs were being pulled across the front lens. The squiggles were just as blurry and indistinct, though constantly in motion—always from right to left.

  Pirx tried to increase the sharpness of the image, but the luminous speck adamantly refused to be focused; so, using a second prism, one designed especially for this purpose, he cut the image in two, brought the two halves together—with positive results—checked the scale, and received his third shock.