More Tales of Pirx the Pilot Page 6

  With all this he completely forgot where he was, and pushed the door handle so hard on his way out that he was thrown up to the ceiling. Embarrassed, he looked around, but no one was there. All Luna Base seemed empty. True, the big work was under way a few hundred kilometers to the north, between the Hypatia region and the Toricelli crater. The engineers and technicians, who a month ago were all over the place here, had already left for the construction site. The UN’s great project, Luna Base 2, drew more and more people from Earth.

  “At least this time there won’t be any trouble getting a room,” he thought, taking the escalator to the bottom floor of the underground city. The fluorescent lamps produced a cold daylight. Every other one was off. Economizing! Pushing a glass door, he entered a small lobby. They had rooms, all right! All the rooms you wanted. He left his suitcase (it was really more a satchel) with the porter and wondered if Tyndall would make sure that the mechanics reground the central nozzle. Ever since Mars the thing had been behaving like a damned medieval cannon! He really ought to see to it himself: the proprietor’s eye and all that. But he didn’t feel like taking the elevator back up those twelve flights, and anyway, by now they had probably split up. Sitting in the airport store, most likely, listening to the latest recordings.

  He walked, not really knowing where; the hotel restaurant was empty, as if closed—but behind its lunch counter sat a redhead, reading a book. Or had she fallen asleep over it? Her cigarette was turning into a long cylinder of ash on the marble top… Pirx took a seat and reset his watch to local time; and suddenly it became late, ten at night. And on board, why, only a few minutes before, it had been noon. This eternal whirl with sudden jumps in time was just as fatiguing as in the beginning, when he was first learning to fly. He ate his lunch, now turned into supper, washing it down with seltzer, which seemed warmer than the soup. The waiter, down in the mouth and drowsy like a true lunatic, added up the bill wrong, and not in his own favor, a bad sign. Pirx advised him to take a vacation on Earth, and left quietly, so as not to waken the sleeping countergirl.

  He got the key from the porter and rode up to his room. He hadn’t looked at the plate yet and felt strange when he saw the number: 173. The same room he had stayed in, long ago, when for the first time he flew “that side.” But after opening the door he concluded that either this was a different room or they had remodeled it radically. No, he must have been mistaken, that other was larger. He turned on all the switches, for he was sick of darkness, looked in the dresser, pulled out the drawer of the small writing table, but didn’t bother to unpack; he just threw his pajamas on the bed and set the toothbrush and toothpaste on the sink. He washed his hands—the water, as always, infernally cold, a wonder it didn’t freeze. He turned the hot water spigot—a few drops trickled out. He went to the phone to call the desk but changed his mind: there was really no point. It was scandalous, of course—here the Moon was stocked with all the necessities, and you still couldn’t get hot water in your hotel room!

  He tried the radio. The evening wrap-up—the lunar news. He hardly listened, wondering whether he shouldn’t send a telegram to the owner. Reverse the charges, of course. But no, that wouldn’t accomplish anything. These were not the romantic days of astronautics! They were long gone; now a man was nothing but a truck driver, dependent on those who loaded cargo on his ship. Cargo, insurance, demurrage… The radio was muttering something. Hold on—what was that?… He leaned across the bed and moved the knob of the apparatus.

  “—in all probability the last of the Leonid swarm.” The soft baritone of the speaker filled the room. “Only one apartment building suffered a direct hit and lost its seal. By a lucky coincidence its residents were all at work. The remaining meteorites caused little damage, with the exception of one that penetrated the shield protecting the storerooms. According to our correspondent’s report, six universal automata designated for tasks on the construction site were totally destroyed. There was also damage to the high-tension line, and telephone communication was knocked out, though restored within a space of three hours. We now repeat the major news. Earlier today, at the opening of the Pan-African Congress…”

  He shut off the radio and sat down. Meteorites? A swarm? Well, yes, the Leonids were due, but still the forecasts—those meteorologists were always fouling up, exactly like the synoptics on Earth. Construction site—it must have been that one up north. But all the same, atmosphere was atmosphere, and its absence here was damned inconvenient. Six automata, if you please. At least no one was hurt. A nasty business, though—a shield punctured! Yes, that designer, he really should have…

  He was dog-tired. Time had got completely bollixed up for him. Between Mars and Earth they must have lost a Tuesday, since it went directly from Monday to Wednesday; that meant they also missed a night. “I better stock up on some sleep,” he thought, got up, and automatically headed for the tiny bathroom. But at the memory of the icy water he shuddered, did an about-face, and a minute later was in bed. Which couldn’t hold a candle to a ship’s bunk. His hand automatically groped around for the belts to buckle down the quilt, and he gave a faint smile when he couldn’t find them; after all, he was in a hotel, not threatened by any sudden loss of gravitation.

  That was his last thought. When he opened his eyes, he had no idea where he was. It was pitch-black. “Tyndall!” he wanted to shout, and all at once—for no apparent reason—remembered how once Tyndall had burst terrified out of the cabin, in nothing but pajama bottoms, and desperately cried to the man on watch, “You! For God’s sake! Quick, tell me, what’s my name?” The poor devil was plastered; he had been fretting over some imagined insult or other and had drunk an entire bottle of rum.

  In this roundabout way Pirx’s mind returned to reality. He got up, turned on the light, went to take a shower, but then remembered about the water, so carefully let out first a small trickle—lukewarm; he sighed, because he yearned for a good hot bath, but after a minute or two, with the stream beating on his face and torso, he actually began to hum.

  He was just putting on a clean shirt when the loudspeaker—he had no idea there was anything like that in the room—said in a deep bass:

  “Attention! Attention! This is an important announcement. Will all men with military training please report immediately to Port Control, Room 318, with Commodore-Engineer Achanian. We repeat. Attention, attention…”

  Pirx was so astonished, he stood there for a moment in only his socks and shirt. What was this? April Fools’ Day? “With military training”? Maybe he was still asleep. But when he flung his arms to pull the shirt on all the way, he cracked his hand against the edge of the table, and his heart beat faster. No, no dream. Then what was it? An invasion? Martians taking over the Moon? What nonsense! Whatever it was, he had to go.

  But something whispered to him while he jumped into his pants, “Yes, this had to happen, because you are here. That’s your luck, old man, you bring trouble…”

  As he left the room his watch said eight. He wanted to stop somewhere and ask what the hell was going on, but the corridor was empty, and so was the escalator, as though a general mobilization had already taken place and everyone was scrambling God knows where at the front line. He ran up the steps; they were moving at a good clip to begin with, but he hurried as if he actually might miss a chance at derring-do. At the top he saw a brightly lit glass kiosk with newspapers and ran up to the window to ask his question, but there was no one to ask. The papers were sold by machine.

  He bought a pack of cigarettes and a daily, which he glanced at without slowing his pace; it contained nothing but an account of the meteorite disaster. Could that be it? But why military training? Impossible! Down a long corridor he went toward Port Control. Finally he saw people. Someone was entering a room with the number 318, someone else was coming up from the opposite end of the corridor.

  “I won’t find out anything now; I’m too late,” he thought as he straightened his jacket and walked in. It was a small room, with three windo
ws; behind them blazed an artificial lunar landscape, the unpleasant color of hot mercury. In the narrower part of the trapezoidal room stood two desks, the entire area in front of them being crammed with chairs, evidently brought in on short notice, since almost every chair was different. There were around fourteen or fifteen people here, mostly middle-aged men with a few kids who wore the stripes of navy cadets. Sitting apart was some elderly commodore—the rest of the chairs remained empty. Pirx took a seat next to one of the cadets, who immediately began telling him how six of them had flown in just the other day to start their apprenticeship “that side,” but they were given only a small machine, it was called a flea, and the thing barely took three, the rest had to wait their turn, then suddenly this business cropped up. Did Mr. Navigator happen to know…? But Mr. Navigator was in the dark himself. Judging by the faces of those seated, you could tell that they, too, were shocked by the announcement—they probably all came from the hotel. It must have occurred to the cadet that he ought to introduce himself, because he started going through a few gymnastics, nearly overturning his chair. Pirx grabbed it by the back, and just then the door opened and in walked a short, dark-haired man slightly gray at the temples. He was clean-shaven, but his cheeks were blue with stubble; he had beetle brows and small, piercing eyes. Without a word he passed between the chairs, and behind the desk pulled down from a reel near the ceiling a map of “that side,” on a scale of one to one million. The man rubbed his strong, fleshy nose with the back of his hand and said, without preamble:

  “Gentlemen, I am Achanian. I have been temporarily delegated by the joint heads of Luna Base 1 and Luna Base 2 for the purpose of neutralizing the Setaur.”

  Among the listeners there was a faint stir, but Pirx still understood nothing; he didn’t even know what the Setaur was.

  “Those of you who heard the radio are aware that here”—he pointed a ruler at the regions Hypatia and Alfraganus—“a swarm of meteors fell yesterday. We will not go into the effects of the impact of the others, but one—it may well have been the largest—shattered the protective shield over storage units B-7 and R-7. In R-7 was located a consignment of Setaurs, received from Earth barely four days ago. In the bulletins it was reported that all of these met with destruction. That, gentlemen, is not the truth.”

  The cadet sitting next to Pirx listened with red ears; even his mouth hung open, as if to take in every word. Meanwhile Achanian went on:

  “Five of the robots were crushed beneath the falling roof, but the sixth survived. More precisely—it suffered damage. We think so for the reason that as soon as it extricated itself from the ruins of the storage unit, it began to behave in a manner … to behave like a…”

  Achanian couldn’t find the right word, so without finishing his sentence he continued:

  “The storage units are situated near the siding of a narrow-gauge track eight kilometers from the provisional landing field. Immediately after the disaster, a rescue operation was initiated, and the first order of business was to check out all personnel, to see if anyone had been buried beneath the devastated buildings. This action lasted about an hour; in the meantime, however, it developed that from the concussion the central administration buildings had lost their full seal, so the work dragged on till midnight. Around one o’clock it was discovered that the breakdown in the main grid supplying the entire construction site, as well as the interruption of telephone communication, had not been caused by the meteors. The cables had been cut—by laser beam.”

  Pirx blinked. He couldn’t help feeling that he was participating in some sort of play, a masquerade. Such things didn’t happen. A laser! Sure! And why not throw in a Martian spy while you were at it? Yet this commodore-engineer hardly looked like the type who would get hotel guests up at the crack of dawn in order to play some stupid joke on them.

  “The telephone lines were repaired first,” said Achanian. “But at that same time a small transporter from the emergency party, having reached the place where the cables were broken, lost radio contact with Luna Base. After three in the morning we learned that this transporter had been attacked by laser and, as a result of several hits, now stood in flames. The driver and his assistant perished, but two of the crew—fortunately they were in suits, having got themselves ready to go out and repair the line—managed to jump free in time and hide in the desert, that is, the Mare Tranquilitatis, roughly here…” Achanian indicated with his ruler a point on the Sea of Tranquillity, some four hundred kilometers from the little crater of Arago.

  “Neither of them, as far as I know, saw the assailant. At a particular moment they simply felt a very strong thermal blast, and the transporter caught fire. They jumped before the tanks of compressed gas went off; the lack of an atmosphere saved them, since only that portion of the fuel which was able to combine with the oxygen inside the transporter exploded. One of these people later died, in as yet undetermined circumstances. The other succeeded in returning to the construction site, crossing a stretch of about one hundred forty kilometers, but he ran and exhausted his suit’s air supply and went into anoxia. Fortunately he was discovered and is now in the hospital. Our knowledge of what happened is based entirely on his account and needs further verification.”

  There was a dead silence. Pirx could see where all of this was leading, but he still didn’t believe it; he didn’t want to…

  “No doubt you have guessed, gentlemen,” continued the dark-haired man in an even voice—his profile stood out black as coal against the blazing mercury landscapes of the moon—“that the one who cut the telephone cables and high-tension line, and also attacked the transporter, is our sole surviving Setaur. This is a unit about which we know little; it was put into mass production only last month. Engineer Klarner, one of Setaur’s designers, was supposed to have come here with me, to give you gentlemen a full explanation not only of the capabilities of this model, but also of the measures that now must be taken to neutralize or destroy the object.” The cadet next to Pirx gave a soft moan. It was a moan of pure excitement, uttered without even the pretense of sounding horrified. The young man was not aware of the navigator’s disapproving look. But, then, no one noticed or heard anything but the voice of the commodore-engineer.

  “I’m no expert in intellectronics and therefore cannot tell you much about the Setaur. But among those present, I believe, is a Dr. McCork. Is he here?”

  A slender man wearing glasses stood up. “Yes. I didn’t take part in the designing of the Setaurs; I’m only acquainted with our English model, similar to the American one but not identical. Still, the differences are not so very great. I can be of help.”

  “Excellent. Doctor, if you would come up here. I’ll just present, first, the current situation. The Setaur is located somewhere over here”—Achanian made a circle with the end of his ruler around an edge of the Sea of Tranquillity—“which means it is at a distance of thirty to eighty kilometers from the construction site. It was designed, as the Setaurs in general were designed, to perform mining tasks under extremely difficult conditions, at high temperatures, with a considerable chance of cave-ins; hence these models possess a massive frame and thick armor… But Dr. McCork will be filling you gentlemen in on this aspect. As for the means at our disposal to neutralize it: the headquarters of all the lunar bases have given us, first of all, a certain quantity of explosives, dynamite and oxyliquites, plus line-of-sight hand lasers and mining lasers—of course, neither the explosives nor the lasers were made for use in combat. For conveyance, the groups operating to destroy the Setaur will have transporters of small and medium range, two of which possess light anti-meteorite armor. Only such armor can take the blow of a laser from a distance of one kilometer. True, that applies to Earth, where the energy absorption coefficient of the atmosphere is an important factor. Here we have no atmosphere; therefore those two transporters will be only a little less vulnerable than the others. We are also receiving a considerable number of suits, oxygen—and that, I’m afraid, is all. Around noon
there will arrive from the Soviet sector a ‘flea’ with a three-man crew; in a pinch it can hold four on short flights, to deliver them inside the area where the Setaur is located. I’ll stop here for the moment. Now, gentlemen, I would like to pass around a sheet of paper, on which I will ask you to write clearly your names and fields of competence. Meanwhile, if Dr. McCork would kindly tell us a few words about the Setaur… The most important thing, I believe, would be an indication of its Achilles’ heel…”

  McCork was now standing by Achanian. He was even thinner than Pirx had thought; his ears stuck out, his head was slightly triangular, he had almost invisible eyebrows, a shock of hair of indeterminate color, and all in all seemed strangely likable.

  Before he spoke, he took off his steel-rimmed glasses, as if they were in the way, and put them on the desk.

  “I’d be lying if I said we had allowed for the possibility of the kind of thing that’s happened here. But besides the mathematics, a cyberneticist has to have in his head some grain of intuition. It was precisely for this reason that we decided not to put our model into mass production just yet. According to the laboratory tests, Mephisto works perfectly—that’s the name of our model. And Setaur is supposed to have better stabilization for braking and activating. Or so I thought, going by the literature—now I’m not so sure,