Tales of Pirx the Pilot Read online

  “Ssss… Ssss…” The closer Pirx came within range of the robot, the more distinct the hissing became. Terminus interrupted his march again, this time in front of a ventilation shaft, tried—but without success—to squeeze his head through the grate, hissed, then straightened up and wobbled on his way. Pirx had heard and seen enough.

  “Terminus!” His yell brought the robot to an abrupt standstill, just as he was in the process of leaning over.

  “I hear and obey.”

  “What are you up to now?” Pirx demanded, staring at the same time into that misshapen metal mask of his, too expressionless to be a real face.

  “Cat… I look for cat,” replied Terminus.

  “You what?!”

  Terminus drew himself up to his full height, his arms dangling listlessly, almost forgetfully, at his sides. It was a slow, rising movement, accompanied by a faint creaking in the joints, so slow it seemed somehow fraught with menace…

  “I look for cat.”

  “The cat? What for?”

  Terminus, for just a moment, became a mute metal statue.

  At last he said, lowering his voice, “I don’t know.” Pirx was momentarily disoriented. With its dead silence, grim lighting, and rusty bed of rails skirting the sealed hatches, the passageway could have been an abandoned mine tunnel.

  “Well, this has got to stop,” he said. “Go on back to the reactor—and don’t let me see you up here again.”

  “I hear and obey.”

  Terminus turned on his heels and tramped back the same way he had come. Pirx lingered for a while, suspended midway between deck and ceiling, while an air current gently nudged him, centimeter by centimeter, into the direction of a gaping ventilator shaft. Bouncing off the wall with his feet, he veered toward the elevator and made his way topside, passing as he went the yawning chasms of the shafts, still reverberating with the robot’s footfalls, as regular as the swinging of a pendulum in a gigantic clock.

  In the course of the next few days, Pirx was consumed by problems of a more mathematical nature. After each burn, the reactor would heat up a little more and put out a little less. Boman speculated that the neutron reflectors were wearing out—a hunch corroborated by the slow but persistent increase in the amount of radioactive leakage. Using a complicated equation, the engineer tried to proportion the periods of propulsion and cooling; during shutdown, he would reroute the freezing liquid coolant from the portside holds to back aft, where the temperature was reaching truly tropical proportions. This balancing of extremes demanded much patience on Boman’s part, and he spent many hours at the computer, searching by trial and error for the right ratio. Thanks to Boman’s mathematical endeavors, they were able to cover 43 million kilometers with only a minimal delay. Finally, on the fifth day of the trip, despite Boman’s pessimistic predictions, they managed to achieve the desired speed level. Pirx ordered the reactor shut down, to allow for cooling prior to landing, and breathed a discreet sigh of relief. Commanding an old freighter like the Star was a full-time job; it left precious little time for stargazing. But then what did Pirx care about the stars, or even the copper-red disk of Mars, when he had the course charts to content him?

  On the last day of the flight, late in the evening, when the darkness, only intermittently relieved by the blue-tinted night-lights, seemed to swell the decks, he suddenly remembered that he had neglected to inspect the cargo holds.

  He exited from the mess hall, leaving Sims and Boman to finish their nightly game of chess, and rode the elevator down below. Since their last encounter he had neither seen nor heard Terminus. Only one thing served as a reminder—the cat. It had disappeared without leaving a trace, as if it had never been aboard in the first place.

  At midships the barely lighted passageway sighed with the continual flow of air. He opened the hatch to the first hold, and the dust-coated lamps filled the interior with a sullied glow. He covered the area, sailing from one end of the hold to the other. A narrow passage divided the crates, some of which were stacked as high as the ceiling. He checked the tension of the steel straps securing the pyramids of cargo to the deck. A draft created by the open hatch started sucking debris out of the dark corners, the sawdust and oakum rocking gently up and down like duckweed on a water swell.

  He was already back out in the passageway when he heard a succession of sounds, slow and cadenced:

  “A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n…”

  Three taps.

  Pirx drifted on an air current, which lifted him imperceptibly higher. Willing or not, he had to listen. It was a two-way transmission he heard now. The signals were weak, restrained, as if the object was to conserve strength. The rhythm varied: now slow, now fast; one of the parties kept making mistakes, as if rusty with the Morse alphabet. At times there would be a prolonged pause; at other times the signals would overlap. The dark, sparsely lit passageway seemed interminable, as if the fanning breeze had its origin in the cosmic void.

  “S-i-m-o-n-d-o-y-o-u-h-e-a-r-h-i-m…”

  “N-e-g-a-t-i-v-e”—pause—“n-e-g-a-t-i-v-e…”

  Pirx recoiled off the wall, tucked in his legs, and torpedoed his way back aft, each passageway a little darker than the one before, the gradual accumulation of powdery red dust around the lamps a sign that he was nearing the stern. The door to the reactor chamber was open. He peeked inside.

  He was struck by its coolness. The compressors, already shut down for the night, were quiet. The piping immured inside the concrete wall now and then emitted a strange, almost gurgling sound—gas bubbles impeding the flow of congealing liquid.

  Terminus, cement-splattered from the top down, was diligently at work. A fan whirred frantically just above his head, which kept shifting back and forth with a pendulumlike regularity. Holding on to the railing with one hand, Pirx glided down the stairs without touching the steps. The robot’s iron appendages barely echoed, their impact being cushioned by a freshly applied coat of cement.

  “N-e-g-a-t-i-v-e … o-v-e-r…”

  Whether by accident or by command of the same source dictating the transmissions in Morse, the fact was that the resonances were abating. Pirx stood an arm’s length away from the robot, close enough to see the overlapping segments of its belly, which, every time it doubled up, evoked the image of an insect’s crenulated pouch. The lights, reflected in miniature, swung back and forth in his glass eyes. Their impersonal stare impressed on Pirx the fact that he was alone in that empty chamber with its sheer concrete walls. Terminus was a machine, an insensate machine, capable of transmitting a prerecorded set of sounds—that and nothing more.

  “C-o-m-e-i-n-s-i-m-o-n…” He barely managed to decipher it, so faint and erratic were the signals that came now. Above the slaving robot’s head was a half-meter section of pipe; Pirx reached up and grabbed it. As he was adjusting his grip, his knuckles accidentally brushed the metal tubing. Terminus froze momentarily; the tapping broke off in the middle of a series. Seized by a sudden impulse, before he had time to reflect on the folly of his action, on this insane urge to intrude on a conversation from out of the deep past, Pirx rapped out the following quick message:

  “W-h-y-d-o-e-s-n-t-m-o-m-s-s-e-n-a-n-s-w-e-r…”

  At almost the exact instant his knuckles touched the pipe, Terminus responded with a rapping of his own. The two series ran parallel for a while, when suddenly, as if in recognition of his question, the robot’s hand stopped, remained poised until Pirx was finished hammering, and a few seconds later began packing cement into the fissures:

  “B-e-c-a-u-s-e-h-i-s-r-i-g-h-t…”

  A pause; Terminus bent over to scoop up another batch of paste. What did he mean by that? Was it the beginning of an answer? Pirx waited with bated breath. The robot straightened again and began pelting the shielding with cement, but so hard and so fast that the reverberating blows seemed to flow into a single, drawn-out drone:

  “I-s-t-h-a-t-y-o-u-s-i-m-o-n…”

  “T-h-i-s-i-s-s-i-m-o-n … w-h-o-i-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g…”


  Pirx ducked his head down: it was a regular barrage.

  “W-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g-i-d-e-n-t-i-f-y-y-o-u-r-s-e-l-f-w-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g … w-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g … w-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g-w-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-1-i-n-g-t-h-i-s-i-s-s-i-m-o-n-t-h-i-s-i-s-w-a-y-n-e-c-o-m-e-i-n…”

  “Terminus!” he suddenly cried out. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  The pounding ceased. Terminus stood up straight. His whole body was shaking—arms, shoulders, claws… The robot was convulsed by a fit of metal hiccups, racked by spasmodic jolts that seemed to arrange themselves into a familiar pattern:

  “W-h-o-i-s-s-i-g-n-a-1 … w-h-o … w-h-o…”

  “Stop it!!!” Pirx screamed a second time. He had a profile view of him now: the quaking shoulder blades, the light bouncing off the armored metal in mimicry of the sounds:

  “W-h-o…”

  The storm spent, the robot suddenly went limp. Hovering above the deck, he scraped loudly against the horizontal piece of pipe and hung there, in the dead calm, like a trapped animal. But even from a distance, Pirx could see that one of the robot’s drooping hands was still twitching in millimeter spasms:

  “W-h-o…”

  Somehow he wound up back in the passageway. The fans purred ever so softly. He swam topside into a cool, dry breeze coming from the upper decks. Pools of light slid across his face whenever he passed one of the wall lamps.

  The cabin was partially open, the desk lamp still on. Flat, wedge-shaped planes of light stretched to the base of the walls, cleaving the darkness.

  Who was calling? Was it Simon? Wayne? No, it couldn’t be! They’ve both been dead for nineteen years!

  Okay, who else could it have been? Terminus. But he was just a robot, good for patching leaky reactors. Pick his brain? Sure, and listen to a lot of mumbo jumbo about roentgens, neutron leakage, and cement patches! He knew nothing about anything, much less how his labor was being transformed nightly into a ghostly cadence!

  One thing was clear: his recorder was far from dead. Whoever those people were—those voices, those signals—you could talk to them, converse with them. You just had to have the guts, that was all…

  He pushed off from the ceiling and drifted leisurely over to the other wall. Goddamnit! He wanted to walk, to feel the ground under his feet again, to feel his own weight, to bang his fist down on the table! Oh, it was a cozy feeling, all right, this constant weightlessness that kept turning everything, including his own body, into flimsy shadows—as cozy as a bad dream! Everything he touched slipped away, drifted off—precarious, disembodied, fraudulent, a sham, a dream…

  A dream?

  Hold it. If I dream about someone, ask that person a question, I won’t know what that person has said until he has said it. Yet that someone is a product of my brain, a brief and momentary extension of it. It happens almost every day, or rather every night—in dreams, when the self splits up, divides, and begets pseudopersonalities. These dream personalities can be invented, or taken from real life. Don’t we sometimes dream of the dead? Carry on conversations with them?

  They were dead.

  Did that mean Terminus was…?

  Immersed in such thoughts, he circled around the cabin, ricocheting off the hard surfaces of the walls until he stood hovering in the hatchway. Holding on to the rim, he contemplated the long, dark passageway, the light trailing off into the darkness…

  Should he go back?

  Go back—and ask?

  It must involve some physical mechanism, he thought—one more complicated than the standard recorder. What the hell, a robot is not a sound-recording device. So it must be equipped with something else, some unique kind of recorder, one endowed with a certain autonomy, a certain mutability … one capable of being probed, of throwing light on the fates of those men—Simon, Nolan, Potter—and Momssen’s silence, that terrifying, inexplicable silence of the commander…

  What other explanation was there?

  None.

  He knew there wasn’t, but he still couldn’t bring himself to budge, to move from the hatchway, as if waiting, hoping for some other explanation…

  What was Terminus, anyway? An electronically wired box. Hell, anything alive, any living creature would have perished long ago in the wreckage. So now what? Rap out a few questions before his glass eyes? And even if he did that, what would he get out of him? Would they—those dead men—give him a neat and coherent narrative of what happened? Or wouldn’t he just hear a lot of screaming and yelling, cries for oxygen, for help… And what was he to tell him? That they didn’t exist? That they were only “pseudopersonalities,” isolated figments of his electronic brain—an illusion, a case of the hiccups? That the terror of those men was a fake terror, that their death struggle, repeated every single night, had as much meaning as a worn-out record? He recalled the response provoked by his question—that sudden burst of signals, and that cry, so full of shocked bewilderment and hope, and that frantic, urgent, unremitting pleading: “Come in! Who is signaling? Come in!!!”

  He could still hear it ringing in his ears, could feel it pulsating in his fingertips: the terrible despair and fury of those banging supplications.

  Didn’t exist? But then whose voices were those? Who were those people calling out for help? Oh, the experts would have an explanation, all right. They’d blame it on some electrical discharge, on the resonating effect of the vibrating metal. He sat down at his desk, pulled out a drawer, angrily slapped his hand down to keep the papers from fluttering away, fished out the printed form he was looking for, and carefully spread it out before him, pressing it flat so his breath wouldn’t disturb it. One by one he began filling in the blanks.

  MODEL: AST-Pm—15/0044.

  TYPE: Universal maintenance.

  NAME: Terminus.

  NATURE OF DAMAGE: Functional disintegration.

  RECOMMENDATIONS:…

  He hesitated, holding the pen up close to the paper, then pulling it away. He began thinking about the innocence of machines, about how man had endowed them with intelligence and, in doing so, had made them an accomplice of his mad adventures. About how the myth of the golem—the machine that rebelled against its creator—was a lie, a fiction invented by the guilty for the sake of self-exoneration.

  RECOMMENDATIONS: To be scrapped.

  And with a perfectly rigid face, he signed it:

  Pirx, first navigator.