Tales of Pirx the Pilot Page 4

  The master switch was housed in a cassette inserted in the floor. The cassette turned out to be locked. Natch! He tried yanking on the lid; it wouldn’t give. The key. Where was the key?

  There was no key. He tried forcing the lid again. No luck.

  He sprang to his feet and stared blindly into the forward screens, where, its surface no longer silver but an alpine-snow white, there now loomed a gigantic Moon. Craters came into view, their long, serrated shadows creeping stealthily along the surface. The radar altimeter could be heard clicking steadily away. How long had it been operating? he wondered. Little green digits flashed in the dark, and he read off his present altitude: 21,000 kilometers.

  The lights never stopped blinking as the circuit breaker continued to kick on and off. But now it was no longer pitch-dark when they went out; now the cabin’s interior was flooded with moonlight, an eerie, luminous glare that paled only imperceptibly beside the dim, soporific lighting inside the cabin.

  The ship was now flying a perfectly straight course, gaining velocity as the residual acceleration reached 0.2g and the Moon’s gravitational pull increased. What to do? What to do?! He rushed back to the cassette and kicked it with his foot. The metal casing refused to budge.

  Hold everything! My Gawd, how could he have been so stupid! All he had to do was to find a way to reach the other side of the blister. And there was a way! By the exit, at the point where the blister narrowed tunnellike to form a funnel ending with the air lock, there was a special lever painted a bright enamel red, beneath a plate that read FOR CONTROL SYSTEMS EMERGENCY ONLY. One switch of the lever was all that was needed to raise the glass cocoon a meter off the ground, leaving just enough clearance underneath. Once on the other side, all he had to do was to clear the lines, and with a piece of insulation…

  He was at the handle in less than no time.

  You moron! he thought, and he grabbed the metal handle and yanked until his shoulder joint cracked. The lever, its metal rod glistening with oil, was fully extended, but the blister hadn’t wiggled an inch. He stood staring at the glass bubble in stunned bewilderment, at the video screens ablaze with moonlight, at the blinking light overhead… He jerked on the lever again, even though it was out as far as it would go. Nothing.

  The key! The key to the cassette! He fell flat on the floor and searched under the seat. There was nothing to be seen except the cribsheet.

  The lights blinked; the circuit breaker switched. Now when the lights dimmed, the moonlight cast everything in a stark, skeleton-bone white.

  It’s all over, he thought. Should he fire the ejection rocket and bail out in the encapsulated seat? No, it wouldn’t work; without any atmospheric drag, the parachute wouldn’t brake. “Help!”—he wanted to yell, but there was no one to whom he could call in distress: he was all alone. What to do?! There just had to be a way out!

  He scrambled back to the emergency lever and almost tore his arm out of his socket, now so frantic he wanted to cry. It was all so dumb… Where was the key? And why the malfunction in the emergency lever? The altimeter. At one sweeping glance, he read off the displays: 9,500 kilometers. The saw-toothed ridge of Timocharis now stood out against the luminous background in sharp relief. He even had visions of where his ship was about to drill a hole in the pumice-covered rock. A loud crash, a blinding explosion, and…

  During a brief interval of light, his frantically shifting gaze fell on the set of four copper wires. The little black speck spanning the cables—all that was left of the incinerated fly—was clearly discernible, even from a distance. Sticking out his neck and shoulder like a soccer goalie about to make a flying save, Pirx lunged forward with all his weight, and was almost knocked unconscious by the force of the collision. He bounced off the blister’s glass wall like an inflated inner tube and crumpled to the floor. The outer shell did not so much as jiggle. Struggling to his feet, panting, with a bleeding mouth, he got ready to make another flying lunge at the glass wall.

  That’s when he happened to glance down.

  The manual override. Designed to give rapid, full-thrust acceleration in the 10g range. Operated by direct mechanical control and capable of providing an emergency thrust lasting less than a second in duration.

  But the greater the rate of acceleration, he suddenly realized, the faster his descent to the lunar surface. Or would it be? No, it would do just the opposite—it would have a braking effect! But wouldn’t the reaction be too short to act as a brake? The braking had to be continuous. So much for the override. Or was it?

  He made a dive for the control stick, grabbing it on his way down, and pulled for all he was worth. Without the contour couch to cushion his impact, he could have sworn all his bones had been fractured when he hit the deck. Another pull on the stick, another powerful lurch. This time he landed on his head, and if it hadn’t been for his helmet’s foam-rubber liner, his skull would have been shattered.

  The fuse panel started sizzling, the blinking suddenly stopped, and a soft and steady electric light lit up the cabin interior.

  The two bursts of acceleration, fired in quick succession by manual control, had been enough to dislodge the minute sliver of carbon from between the wires, thus eliminating the short circuit once and for all. With the salty taste of blood in his mouth, Pirx made a diving leap for the couch, but instead of landing in it, sailed high up over the back and rammed his head into the ceiling, the blow softened only somewhat by his helmet.

  Just as he was getting set to leap into the air, the now activated kill-switch cut off the rocket, and the last trace of gravitation disappeared. Propelled by its own momentum, the spacecraft was falling straight toward the rocky ruins of Timocharis.

  He bounced off the ceiling, spit, and the bloody saliva floated next to him in a galaxy of silver-red bubbles. Frantically he twisted and turned and stretched out his arm toward the couch. For added momentum he emptied his pockets and threw their contents to the back of him, the force of which propelled him downward, gradually and gently. His fingers, now so taut that his tendons threatened to snap, at first barely scraped the nickel-plated tubing before getting a firm grip on the frame. He didn’t let go. Like an acrobat doing a handstand on parallel bars, he tucked in his head and pulled himself into an upright position, grabbed hold of the seat belt, and lowered himself down on it, at the same time wrapping the belt around his trunk. Not stopping to buckle the belt, he stuck the loose end between his teeth; it held. Now for the control levers and the braking pedals!

  The altimeter showed 1,800 kilometers to lunar surface. Would he be able to brake in time? Impossible—not at a velocity of 45 kilometers per second. He would have to pull out of the nose dive by describing a steep turn. There was no other way.

  Firing his pitch rockets, he accelerated to 2g, 3g, 4g. Not enough! Not nearly enough!

  As he applied full thrust for the pullout recovery, the lunar surface, shimmering quicksilverlike on the video screen, and so like a permanent fixture until now, began to quiver and slowly subside, his contour couch squeaking under the increasing pressure of his body. The ship was going into a steep arc directly over the lunar surface, an arc with a radius large enough to compensate for the tremendous velocity. The control stick was pushed to the limit. Pressed against the spongy backrest, with his space suit not connected to the air compressor, he could feel the air being squeezed out of his lungs and his ribs being bent inward. He began seeing gray spots and waited for the blackout, his eyes riveted to the radar altimeter, which kept grinding out one set of digits after another; 990 … 900 … 840 … 760…

  He knew he was at maximum thrust, but he kept exerting pressure on the handgrip nonetheless. He was performing the tightest possible loop, yet kept on losing altitude as the digital values continued to drop—albeit at a slower rate—and he continued to find himself on the descending arm of the steep arc. Despite a paralysis of the head and eyeballs, he kept his eyes trained on the trajectometer.

  As always when a space vehicle approached the dang
er zone of a celestial body, the trajectometer displayed not only the ship’s flight curve—along with its projected course, faintly indicated by a pulsating line—but also the convex profile of the Moon, over which the maneuver was being executed.

  At one point the flight curve and lunar curve seemed to converge. But did they intersect? That was the question.

  Intersect—no, though the peak of the curve definitely formed a tangent. So there was no way of predicting whether he would simply skim over the lunar surface—or slam right into it. The trajectometer operated with a margin of error of 7 to 8 kilometers, and Pirx could only guess whether his flight curve ran 3 kilometers above the boulders—or below.

  His eyesight began to dim—the 5g’s were beginning to take their toll—but he remained conscious. He lay there, partially blind, his fingers tightly gripping the controls, and felt the seat’s foam-rubber cushion give way under the g-force. Somehow he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that he was done for. Unable to move his lips, he started counting mentally in the dark, slowly and deliberately: Twenty-one … twenty-two … twenty-three … twenty-four…

  At the count of fifty, it crossed his mind that if there was to be an impact, it would have to be now. Even so, he kept his hands on the controls. It was starting to get to him now—the suffocating sensation in the chest, the ringing in the ears, a throat all clogged with blood, the reddish-black in the eyes…

  His fingers relaxed their grip, and the control stick slid back on its own. He saw nothing, heard nothing. By degrees the darkness began to lift, turned grayer, and breathing became easier. He tried opening his eyes, only to discover that they had been open the whole time—his eyelids were completely dried out.

  He sat up.

  The gravimeter showed 2g; the forward screen—nothing but a star-infested void. Not a sign of the Moon. What had happened to it?

  It was there, all right—below him. He had pulled out of his lethal nose dive and was now cruising up and away with a diminishing escape velocity. How close had he shaved it? he wondered. The altimeter must have recorded the exact amount of clearance, but somehow he was not in the mood for taking a readout. Suddenly the alarm signal stopped. My Gawd, it had been on the whole time! A big help that was! Why not hang a church bell from the ceiling?! If you’re headed for the cemetery, then at least let a guy go out in style! There was another buzzing noise, this time very faint. The other fly! It was alive, the bastard! Alive and buzzing the blister’s ceiling. Suddenly he had an awful taste in his mouth, a taste similar to that of coarse canvas… The safety belt. He had been munching on it absentmindedly the whole time.

  He fastened the safety belt and grabbed hold of the controls; he still had to steer the ship back onto the assigned orbit. The two JO ships were nowhere in sight, which came as no surprise. Even so, he had to complete the mission and report to Luna Navigation. Or should he report first to Luna Base—because of the malfunction? Damned if he knew! Or maybe he should just keep quiet. No way! The moment he touched down they would spot the blood—which, as he now noticed for the first time, was splattered all over the ceiling. Besides, the on-board flight recorder would have the whole story on tape—the way the circuit breaker went berserk, the malfunction in the emergency lever… Boy, a swell piece of machinery these sports give us! They might as well send us up in a coffin!

  Okay, so he’d report it. But where? Then he had a brainstorm. He leaned forward, loosened his shoulder strap, and groped under the seat for the cribsheet. Why the hell not? Now’s when it could really come in handy.

  At that instant he heard something creak behind him—as if a door were being opened.

  A door? Behind him? He knew perfectly well there was no door behind him. But even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have turned around because of the straps. A streak of light fell across the screens, wiping out the stars still visible on them, and the next thing he heard was the CO’s soft and subdued voice:

  “Cadet Pirx.”

  He made an attempt to get up, was restrained by the straps, and fell back against the seat, convinced that he was hallucinating. Out of nowhere, the CO suddenly appeared in the passage separating the glass shell from the rest of the cabin. He stood before him in his gray uniform, fixed him with his gentle gray eyes', and smiled. Pirx was altogether confused.

  The moment the glass bubble went up, Pirx automatically started undoing his straps, then rose to his feet. The video screens in back of the CO went blank.

  “A good performance, Pirx,” said the CO. “Quite good.”

  Pirx was still dumbfounded. Then, as he was standing at attention in front of the CO, he did something that was strictly against the rules: he turned his head around, twisting it as far as his partially inflated neck collar would let him.

  To his amazement, the entire access tunnel had been dismantled, hatchway and all, making it look as if the rocket ship had split in half. In the evening light he made out the catwalk, where a group of people was now standing—the cable railings, the ceiling girders… Pirx stared at the CO with a gaping mouth.

  “Come along, son,” said the CO, who reached out and shook Pirx’s hand firmly. “On behalf of Flight Command, I commend you—and … offer you my personal apology. Yes, it’s … only right. Now, come along. You can clean up at my place.”

  He started for the exit, with Pirx trailing in his footsteps, still a little stiff and wobbly on his feet. It was chilly outside, a breeze was blowing through the sliding panel in the ceiling. Both ships were parked in the exact same place as before. Attached to the nose of each were several long and thick cables, droopingly suspended in space. They had not been there before.

  His instructor, who was among those waiting on the catwalk, made a remark, which Pirx had trouble hearing through his helmet.

  “What?” he instinctively blurted out.

  “The air! Let the air out of your suit!”

  “Oh, the air…”

  He pressed the valve, and the air made a hissing sound as it was released. From where he stood on the catwalk, he could make out the two men in white smocks waiting behind the railing. His rocket ship looked as if it had a fractured beak. At first he felt only a strange apathy, which turned to amazement, then disillusionment, and finally anger—pure and unmitigated anger.

  They were opening the hatch of the other ship. The CO was standing on the catwalk, listening to something the men in white smocks were telling him.

  A faint banging noise could be heard coming from inside.

  Then, from out of the cabin staggered a writhing hulk of a man in a brown uniform, his helmetless head bobbing around like a blurry blotch, his face contorted in a mute shriek…

  Pirx’s knees buckled.

  It was … Boerst.

  He had crashed into the Moon.

  THE

  CONDITIONED

  REFLEX

  It happened in his fourth year, shortly before the summer break. Pirx, fresh out of basic training, had passed his qualifying tests on the mock-ups, logged two unsimulated flights, and soloed once to the Moon. By now he fancied himself something of a rocket jockey, a space ace, whose real home was among the planets and who had only one set of clothes—his g-suit, much the worse for wear, of course—the first to sound the time-honored meteorite alert and with a brilliantly executed maneuver save his ship, himself, and his less keen-eyed buddies from certain disaster. That was how he liked to think of himself, anyway; and it always pained him, while shaving, to observe how unscathed his manifold experiences had left him: not a single telltale nick! Not even the nastiest of these experiences—the time the Harelsberg machine went off in his hands as he was setting his ship down in the Sinus Medii—had rewarded him with a single gray hair. Oh, well, maybe it was wishful thinking—but gee, how nice to have just a sprinkling of gray around the temples, a few crow’s-feet at least, the kind bearing witness to prolonged concentration on the reference stars. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be; he was what he was—a smooth-faced, chubby-cheeked c
adet. And so, while running his razor over his face, swallowing his shame, he would go on inventing all sorts of adventures, one more spine-tingling than the next, designed to show him off to his full heroic stature. Matters, who either knew of his frustration or merely intuited it, advised him to grow a mustache. Whether or not his advice was sincerely meant, the next day Pirx, in the privacy of his morning shave, stood before the mirror balancing a black shoelace on his lip—and nearly cracked up. From that day on, he had reason to doubt Matters’s sincerity, though not that of Matters’s sister—Matters’s very cute sister—who once confided that he had the look of a “decent, regular sort of fella.” That was the last straw.

  Nothing really bad happened that night at the discothèque; at least, none of his worst fears was realized. True, he danced the wrong dance once—something he discovered only after it was too late—but she was tactful enough not to rub it in. The rest of the evening went off without a hitch. He managed to stay off her feet and even to keep a straight face (his was the sort of grin that could stop traffic), and wasn’t refused when he offered to take her home. They got off at the last stop and traveled the rest of the way afoot, giving him time to brood. What could he do to prove to her that he was far from being the “decent, regular sort of fella” she took him to be? Ooo, how those words rankled! But by the time they got to her place, he’d fallen into a blue funk. For all his mental exertions, he’d drawn a blank; worse, they had left him altogether tongue-tied, his head like a void, differing from the cosmic version only in that it was consumed by a grim determination. Then he was struck by a meteorlike brainstorm: why not kiss her, ask her for a date, and squeeze her hand—suggestively, passionately, perversely … or something like that (echoes of something he had read somewhere)? A false alarm. There was no kiss, no asking for a date, and no hand squeezing. But when she said good night in that titillatingly throaty voice of hers, turned, and reached for the door handle, the demon in him was aroused. Was it that he detected a note of irony in her voice, real or imagined? Who knows. The fact was that, quite spontaneously, the moment she turned her back on him, so breezy in her bearing, so confident in her feminine charm, so very much the belle…