The Test ptp-1 Read online

  The CO stepped back.

  “Board your rocket!” he bellowed in a magnificent voice, a voice that rose above the muffled roar of the cavernous hangar like a cathedral bell.

  Pirx did an about-face, grabbed the red pennon, bumped against the railing but regained his balance in the nick of time, and marched down the narrow gangway like a zombie. He was not halfway across when Boerst—looking for all the world like a soccer ball from the back—had already boarded his rocket ship.

  He stuck his legs inside, braced himself against the metal housing, and scooted down the flexible chute without so much as touching the ladder rungs—“Rungs are only for the goners,” was one of Bullpen’s pet sayings—and proceeded to “button up” the cabin. They had practiced it a hundred, even a thousand times, on mock-ups and on a real manhatch dismantled from a rocket and mounted in the training hangar. It was enough to make a man giddy: a half-turn of the left crank, a half-turn of the right one, gasket control, another half-turn of both cranks, clamp, airtight pressure control, inside manhole plate, meteor deflector shield, transfer from air lock to cabin, pressure valve, first one crank, then the other, and last of all the crossbar—whew!

  It crossed his mind that, while he was still busy turning the manhole cover, Boerst was probably already settled in his glass cocoon. But then, he told himself, what was the rush? The lift-offs were always staggered at six-minute intervals to avoid a simultaneous launch. Even so, he was anxious to get behind the controls and hook up the radiophone—if only to eavesdrop on Boerst’s commands. He was curious to know what Boerst’s mission was.

  The interior lights automatically went on the moment he closed the outside hatch. After sealing off the cabin, he climbed a small flight of steps padded with a rough but pliant material, before reaching the pilot’s seat.

  Now why in hell’s name did they have to squeeze the pilot into a glass blister three meters in diameter when these one-man rockets were cramped enough as it was? wondered Pirx. The blister, though transparent, was made not of glass, of course, but of some Plexiglas material having roughly the same texture and resilience as extremely hard rubber. The pilot’s encapsulated contour couch was situated in the very center of the control room proper. Thanks to the cabin’s cone-shaped design, the pilot, by sitting in his “dentist’s chair”—as it was called in spaceman’s parlance—and rotating on its vertical axis, was able to monitor the entire instrument panel through the walls of the blister, with all its dials, meters, video screens (located fore, aft, and at the side), computer displays, astrograph, as well as that holy of holies, the trajectometer. This was an instrument whose luminous band was capable of tracking a vehicle’s flight path on a low-luster convex screen, relative to the fixed stars in the Harelsberg projection. A pilot was expected to know all the components of this projection by heart, and to be able to take a readout from virtually any position—even upside down. Once seated in a semisupine position, the pilot had, to the right and left of him, two reactor and attitude control levers, three emergency controls, six manual stick controls, the ignition and idling switches, along with the power, thrust, and purge controls. Standing just above the floor was a sprawling, spoke-wheeled hub that housed the air-conditioning system, oxygen supply, fire-protection bay, catapult (in the event of an uncontrollable chain reaction), and a cord with a loop attached to a bay containing Thermoses and food. Located just under the pilot’s feet were the braking pedals, softly padded and attached with loop straps, and the abort handle, which when activated (this was done by kicking in the glass shield and shoving it forward with the foot) jettisoned the encapsulated seat and pilot, together with a drogue chute of the ringsail variety.

  Aside from having as its main function the bailing out of a pilot in an abort situation, the blister was designed with eight other reasons in mind, and under more favorable circumstances Pirx might have been able to enumerate them, though neither he nor his classmates found any of them that persuasive.

  Once in the proper reclining position, he had trouble bending over at the waist to attach all the loose cables, hoses, and wires—the ones dangling from his suit—to the terminals sticking out of the seat. Every time he leaned forward, his suit would bunch up in the middle, pinching him, so that it was no wonder he confused the radio cable and the heating cable. Luckily, each was threaded differently, but he had to break out in a terrific sweat before discovering his mistake. As the compressed air instantly inflated his suit with a pshhh, he leaned back with a sigh and went to fasten his thigh and shoulder straps, using both hands.

  The right strap snapped into place, but the left one was more defiant. Because of the balloon-sized neck collar, he had trouble turning around, so he had to fumble around blindly for the large snap hook. Just then he heard muffled voices coming over his earphones:

  “Pilot Boerst aboard AMU-18! Lift-off on automatic count-down of zero. Attention, are you ready?”

  “Pilot Boerst aboard AMU-18 and ready for lift-off on automatic countdown of zero!” the cadet fired back.

  Damn that hook, anyhow! At last it clicked into place, and Pirx sank back into the soft contour couch, as bushed as if he’d just returned from a deep-space probe.

  “Minus twenty-three, twenty-two, twen…” The count rambled on in his earphones with a steady patter.

  It happened once that at the count of zero two cadets were launched simultaneously—the one scheduled to go first, and the one next in line. Both rockets shot up like a couple of Roman candles, less than 200 meters apart, escaping a midair collision by a mere fraction of an arc second. Or so the story went. Ever since then—again, if the rumors were to be believed—the ignition cable was activated at the very last moment, by a radio command signal issued by the launch-site commander stationed inside his glass-paneled booth—which, if true, would have made a mockery of the whole countdown.

  “Zero!” a voice blared in his earphones. All at once Pirx heard a muffled but prolonged rumble, his contour couch shook, and flickers of light snaked across the glass canopy, under which he lay staring up at the ceiling panel, taking readings: astrograph, air-cooling gauges, main-stage thrusters, sustaining and vernier jets, neutron flux density, isotopic contamination gauge, not to speak of the eighteen other instruments designed almost exclusively to monitor the booster’s performance. The vibrations then began to slacken, the sheet of racket tapered off overhead, and the thunderous roar grew fainter, more like a distant thunderstorm, before giving way to a dead silence.

  Then—a hissing and a humming, but so sudden he had hardly any time to panic. The automatic sequencer had activated the previously dormant screens, which were always disconnected by remote control to protect the camera lenses from being damaged by the blinding atomic blast of a nearby launch.

  These automatic controls are pretty nifty, thought Pirx. He was still miles away in his thoughts when his hair suddenly stood on end underneath his dome-shaped helmet.

  My Gawd, I’m next, now it’s my turn! suddenly flashed through his mind.

  Instantaneously, he started getting the lift-off controls into ready position, manipulating each of them with his fingers in the proper sequence and counting to himself: “One, two three… Now where’s the fourth? There it is… okay… now for the gauge… then the pedal… No, not the pedal—the handgrip… First the red one and then the green one… Now for the automatic sequencer… right… Or was it the other way around—first green, then red…?!”

  “Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27!” The voice booming into his ear roused him from his predicament. “Lift-off on automatic countdown of zero! Attention, are you ready, pilot?”

  “Not yet!” he felt like yelling, but said instead:

  “Pilot Boer… Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27 and ready for—uh—lift-off on automatic countdown of zero.”

  He had been on the verge of saying “Pilot Boerst” because he still had Boerst’s words fresh in his memory. “You nut,” he said to himself in the ensuing silence. Then the automatic countdown—why did these re
corded voices always have to sound like an NCO?—barked:

  “Minus sixteen, fifteen, fourteen…”

  Pirx broke out in a cold sweat. There was something he was forgetting, something terribly important, a matter of life and death.

  “…six, five, four…”

  His sweaty fingers squeezed the handgrip. Luckily it had a rough finish. Does everyone work up such a sweat? he wondered. Probably—it crossed his mind just before the earphones snarled:

  “Zero!!!”

  His left hand—instinctively—pulled back on the lever until it reached the halfway mark. There was a terrific blast, and his chest and skull were flattened by some resilient, rubber-like press. The booster! was his last thought before his eyesight began to dim. But only a little, and then not for long. Gradually his vision improved, though the unrelenting pressure had spread to the rest of his body. Before long he could make out all the video screens—at least the three opposite him—now inundated with a torrent of milk gushing from a million overturned cans.

  I must be breaking through the clouds, he thought. His mind, though somewhat slower on the uptake, was totally relaxed. As time went by, he felt increasingly like a spectator to some strange comedy. There he was, lying fiat on his back in his “dentist’s chair,” arms and legs paralyzed, not a cloud in sight, surrounded by a phony pastel-blue sky… Hey, were those stars over there, or what?

  Stars they were. Meanwhile the gauges were working steadily away—on the ceiling, on the walls—each in its own way, each with a different function to perform. And he was supposed to monitor each and every one of them—and with two eyes, no less! At the sound of a bleeping signal in his earphones, his left hand—again by instinct—fired the booster separation, immediately lowering the pressure. He was cruising at a velocity of 7.1 kilometers per second, he was at an altitude of 201 kilometers, and his acceleration was 1.9 as he pitched out of his assigned launch path. Now he could afford to relax a while, but not for long, because pretty soon he would have his hands full—and how!

  He was just starting to make himself comfortable, pressing the armrest to raise the seat in back, when he suddenly went numb all over.

  “The crib! Where’s the cribsheet!”

  This was that awfully important detail he couldn’t remember at the time. He scoured the deck with his eyes, now totally oblivious of the swarm of pulsating gauges. The cribsheet had slipped down under the contour couch. He tried to bend over, was held back by his torso straps; without a moment to lose, with a sinking sensation as if perched on top of some collapsing tower, he flipped open his navigation book—which until now had been stored in his thigh pocket—and yanked the flight plan from the envelope. A mental blackout. Where the hell was orbit B68, anyway? That must be it there! He checked the trajectory and went into a roll. Much to his surprise, it worked.

  Once he found himself.on an elliptical path, the computer graciously presented him with the correctional data; he maneuvered accordingly, overshot his orbit, and braked so suddenly that he dropped down to -3g for a period of ten seconds, the negative gravity having little effect on him because of his exceptional physical endurance (“If your brain were half as strong as your biceps,” Bullpen once told him, “you’d have been really something”); guided by the correctional data, he pitched into a stable orbit and fed the computer, but the only output was a series of oscillating standing waves. He yelled out the figures again, only to discover that he had neglected to switch over; that remedied, the CRT showed a flickering vertical line and the windows flashed a series of ones. “I’m in orbit!” he piped with glee. But the computer indicated an orbital period of four hours and twenty-nine minutes, instead of the projected four hours and twenty-six minutes. Was that a tolerable deviation? he wondered, desperately searching his memory. He was all set to unbuckle the straps—the cribsheet was still lying underneath the seat, though a damned lot of good it would do him if the answer wasn’t there—when Professor Kaahl’s words suddenly came to mind: “All orbits are programmed with a built-in margin of error of 0.3 percent.” But just to play it safe, he fed the data into the computer, to learn that he was right on the borderline. “Well, that’s that,” he sighed, and for the first time he began surveying his surroundings.

  Being strapped to his seat, except for a feeling of weight-lessness, he hardly noticed the loss of gravitation. The forward screen was blanketed with stars, with a brilliant white border skirting the very bottom. The lateral screens showed nothing but a star-studded black void. But the deck screen—ah! Earth was now so immense that it took up the whole screen, and he feasted his eyes on it as he flew over at an altitude of 700 kilometers at perigee and 2,400 kilometers at apogee. Hey, wasn’t that Greenland down there? But before he could verify that it was, he was already sailing over northern Canada. The North Pole was capped with iridescent snow, the ocean stood out round and smooth—violet-black, like cast iron—there were strangely few clouds, and what few there were looked like gobs of watery mush splattered on top of Earth’s highest elevation points.

  He glanced at the clock. He had been spaceborne for exactly seventeen minutes.

  It was time to pick up PAL’s radio signal, to start monitoring the radar screens as he passed through the satellite’s contact zone. Now, what were their names again? RO? No—JO. And let’s see, their numbers were… He glanced down at the flight plan, stuck it back into his pocket along with the navigation book, and turned up the intercom on his chest. At first there was just a lot of screeching and crackling—cosmic interference. What system was PAL using? Oh, yeah—Morse. He listened closely, his eyes glued to the video screens, and watched as Earth slowly revolved beneath him and stars scudded by—but no PAL. Then he heard a buzzing noise.

  Could that be it? he wondered, but immediately rejected the idea. You’re crazy. Satellites don’t buzz. But what else could it be? Nothing, that’s what. Or was it something else? A critical malfunction?

  Oddly enough, he was not the least bit alarmed. How could there be a critical malfunction when he was cruising with his engine off? Maybe the old crate was falling apart, breaking up. Or could it be a short circuit? Good Lord, a short circuit! Fire Prevention Code, section 3(a): “In Case of Fire in Orbit,” paragraph… Oh, to hell with it! The buzzing was now so loud that it was drowning out the bleeping sounds of distant signals.

  It sounds like… a fly trapped in a jar, he thought, somewhat perplexed, and began shifting his gaze from dial to dial.

  Then he spotted it.

  It was a giant of a fly, one of those ugly, greenish-black brutes specially designed to make life miserable—a pestering, pesky, idiotic, and by the same token shrewd and cunning fly, which had miraculously—and how else?—stowed away in the ship’s control cabin and was now zooming about in the space outside the blister, occasionally ricocheting off the illuminated instrument gauges like a buzzing pellet.

  Whenever it took a pass at the computer, it came over his earphones like a four-engine prop plane. Mounted on the computer’s upper frame was a backup microphone, which gave a pilot access to the computer inside the encapsulated seat in the event his on-board phone was disconnected and he found himself without a laryngophone. One of the many backup systems aboard the ship.

  He started swearing a blue streak at the microphone, afraid that because of the static he might miss PAL’s signal. The computer was bad enough, but soon the fly began making sorties into other areas of the cabin. As though hypnotized, Pirx let his gaze trail after it until finally he got fed up and said to heck with it.

  Too bad he didn’t have a spray gun of DDT handy.

  “Cut it out!”

  Bzzzzz… He winced; the fly was crawling around on the computer, in the vicinity of the mike. Then nothing, dead silence, as it stopped to preen its wings. You lousy bastard!

  Then a faint but steady bleeping came over his earphones: dot-dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot-dash. It was PAL.

  “Okay, Pirx, now keep your eyes peeled!” he told himself
. He raised the couch a little, so as to take in all three video screens at once, checked the sweeping phosphorescent radar beam, and waited. Though nothing showed on the radar screen, he distinctly heard a voice calling:

  “A-7 Terraluna, A-7 Terraluna, sector III, course one hundred thirteen, PAL PATHFINDER calling. Request a reading. Over.”

  “Oh crap, how am I ever going to hear my two JOs now?”

  The buzzing in his earphones suddenly stopped. A second later a shadow fell across his face, from above, much as if a bat had landed on an overhanging lamp. It was the fly, which was crawling across the blister and exploring its interior. The blips were coming with greater frequency now, and it wasn’t long before he sighted the 80-meter-long aluminum cylinder, mounted with an observation spheroid, as it flew over him at a distance of roughly 400 meters, possibly more, and gradually overtook him.

  “PAL PATHFINDER to A-7 Terraluna, one-hundred-eighty-point-fourteen, one-hundred-six-point-six. Increasing linear deviation. Out.”

  “Albatross-4 Aresterra calling PAL Central, PAL Central. Am coming down for refueling, sector II. Am coming down for refueling, sector II. Running on reserve supply. Over.”

  “A-7 Terraluna, calling PAL PATHFINDER…”

  The rest was lost in the buzzing. Then silence.

  “Central to Albatross-4 Aresterra, refuel quadrant seven, Omega Central, refuel quadrant seven. Out.”

  They would pick out this spot to rendezvous, thought Pirx, who was now swimming in his sweat-absorbent underwear. This way I won’t hear a thing.

  The fly was describing frenetic circles on the computer’s console, as if hell-bent on catching up with its own shadow.

  “Albatross-4 Aresterra, Albatross-4 Aresterra to PAL Central, approaching quadrant seven. Request radio guidance. Out.”

  The radio static grew steadily fainter until it was drowned out by the buzzing. But not before he managed to catch the following message: