Tales of Pirx the Pilot Page 8

  On the subject of lunar dust Pirx was somewhat knowledgeable. He recalled how amazed the first explorers had been by its behavior. Although they had anticipated it, according to all laws known to them even the finest-particle dust should have settled in an airless vacuum; not lunar dust—but oddly enough, only during the daytime, under conditions of sunlight. Later it was discovered that electrical phenomena behave differently on the Moon. Lightning, thunder, St. Elmo’s fire, and other atmospheric discharges common to Earth are unknown on the Moon. Lunar rocks, because they are subjected to a constant bombardment of particle radiation, have the same charge as the dust mantling them. And since electrical charges of the same polarity are mutually repellent, the dust, if disturbed, remained in suspension, frequently for hours, thanks to this electrostatic repulsion. The more sunspots there were, the “dustier” the Moon. But the dust cloud phenomenon ceased at night—a night so biting cold that a man’s only protection was his specially designed double-ply Thermoslike space suit, which even in the Moon’s thinner atmosphere weighed like holy hell.

  These scientific musings were soon interrupted by their arrival at the station’s main entrance. They were given a warm welcome. The station’s scientific supervisor, Professor Ganshin, was an exceptionally tall man—tall even by Pirx’s standards, whose own height had always been seen as a compensation for his chubbiness. But Ganshin looked down on him—not figuratively, but literally. His colleague, Dr. Pnin, a physicist, turned out to be even taller—a towering two meters.

  There were four other Russians present, not counting those who may have been on duty. The station’s upper level housed an astronomical observatory and a radio station. A sloping concrete passage, tunneled through solid rock, led up to a small radome—huge gyrating dishes of the grid type. Through the side ports the eye made out, at the station’s edge, a shimmering, perfectly symmetrical spiderweb: the radio-telescope, the most powerful on the Moon.

  The station was deceptive, being much larger than it looked. There were, besides the station proper, several underground storage tanks containing water, air, and food; and transformers for converting solar energy into electricity, housed in a wing sequestered deep inside a rocky crevasse, so that it was not visible from below. And something else, the most sumptuous thing of all: a gigantic hydroponic solarium under a dome of steel-reinforced quartz, in the center of which, surrounded by myriad flowers and large vats of algae, the main source of vitamins and protein, there stood, of all things, a banana tree. Pirx and Langner were treated to their first Moon-grown banana. With a congenial smile, Dr. Pnin explained that bananas were excluded from the crew’s daily menu, being reserved strictly for guests.

  Langner, no amateur when it came to lunar engineering, began probing his host for details concerning the quartz dome’s construction, whose ingenious conception had aroused his admiration even more than the bananas. And it was, without doubt, ingenious. Because of its exposure to vacuum conditions, the dome had to withstand a constant pressure of nine tons per square meter, which, taking into account its surface area, yielded an impressive 2,800 tons. Under such atmospheric pressure, the confined air mass could easily burst the quartz bubble to smithereens. Having to dispense with ferroconcrete, the engineers had reinforced the quartz with welded ribs, transferring the main pressure load, roughly three million kilograms’ worth, onto the iridium plate at the apex. Powerful branching steel cables were strung outside, radially, where they were anchored deep within the surrounding basalt crust, transforming the dome into a bizarre “tethered quartz balloon.”

  It being lunchtime at the Tsiolkovsky station, they went directly from the solarium to the dining room. It was Pirx’s third meal of the day—the first was aboard the Selene, the second at Luna Base. From the looks of things, that’s all people did on the Moon: eat lunch. The dining room, which also functioned as a lounge, was rather cozy in size, paneled—not wainscoted—in natural pine, still redolent of resin. This uncanny touch of “worldliness,” after exposure to the blinding lunar landscape, was a welcome relief. But Professor Ganshin informed them that the wood paneling was only veneer, installed to ease the crew’s homesickness.

  Neither during nor after lunch was any mention made of anything even remotely connected with the Mendeleev station. Not a word about the accident, the fate of the two Canadians, or even about their upcoming departure. The prevailing mood was that of a leisurely social visit.

  The Russians fairly doted on them. Eager for news—any kind of news—they continuously plied their guests with questions. What news from Earth? From Luna Base? In a rush of sincerity, Pirx owned to having a basic dislike for tourists; by the responses, he had a sympathetic audience. Time passed. The Russians later took turns slipping in and out. They soon discovered why: a solar prominence had been sighted from the observatory—and was it ever a beaut! At the mere mention of the words “solar prominence,” Langner became a man totally obsessed. The whole table, in fact, was seized by that sort of self-obliterating passion common to the profession. Upstairs they examined the lab photos, then the film recorded by the coronograph, both of which revealed the prominence to be one of exceptional magnitude—750,000 kilometers in length. To Pirx it had the look and shape of some antediluvian monster with flaming jaws. But no one besides Pirx was at all interested in zoological comparisons. As soon as the lights came back on, Ganshin, Pnin, Langner, and a third astronomer launched into a heated discussion, with eyes aglitter and ears deaf to anything else. When someone alluded to lunch, the group shifted back into the lounge, there to begin, as soon as the table was cleared, a fury of computations on paper napkins.

  Dr. Pnin, noticing how baffled and bewildered Pirx was by all the shop talk, invited him to his room, which was minuscule in size but equipped with a large window that afforded a wonderful view of the massifs eastern summit. A low-lying Sun, gaping like the Gates of Hell, was superimposing on the riot of rock below an anarchy of shadow, an eerie excrescence of black, conjuring behind every boulder a hellish shaft that seemed to lead straight to the Moon’s interior. A dissolution of nothingness into mountain peaks, leaning towers, spires, and obelisks, all sprung from an inky realm; a fire turned to stone, petrified, arrested in midflight; a wild configuration in which the eye quickly lost itself in a tangle of irreconcilable forms, finding dubious relief only in those circular pits of black, those gouged-out sockets brimming with shadow, that were, in fact, the pools of miniature craters.

  It was a spectacle like no other. Pirx had been on the Moon several times—which he made a point of reiterating six times throughout the conversation—but never at this time of day, nine hours before sunset. He and Pnin kept each other company for quite a while. Pnin insisted on calling him his “colleague” and “friend,” leaving Pirx to fumble with the grammar to avoid using any direct forms of address. The Russian had a fantastic collection of photos from his mountaineering days, when he, Ganshin, and three other comrades had gone alpine climbing during a brief furlough Earthside.

  Attempts had been made to coin the phrase “Moon climbing,” but it failed to catch on, the term “Lunar Alps” only confusing the issue.

  Pirx, an ardent climber himself, even before his matriculation into the Institute, had found in Pnin a soulmate. He asked him how lunar mountain climbing differed from mountaineering on Earth.

  “As a rule of thumb,” Pnin said, “use the same techniques you would use back home. There is no ice up here—except, and then only rarely, in very deep cracks. And no snow, either, of course. That makes the climbing look deceptively easy. What makes it even more deceiving is that you can take a thirty-meter fall without seriously injuring yourself. But never let that enter your head.”

  Pirx looked puzzled. “Why is that?”

  “The lack of atmosphere,” Pnin explained. “No matter how long you work the terrain, you’ll never get the knack of judging distances. Not even with a telemeter—besides, who wants to lug around a telemeter? It’s like this. You’ll scale a peak, look over the
side of a cliff, and swear it’s fifty meters down. Maybe it really is fifty, but it could just as well be five or ten times that. I remember once… Well, anyway, you know the old saying. Once you tell yourself you’re going to fall, sooner or later you will. Fracture your skull on Earth and it will heal. Here, one solid jolt on the helmet, a punctured visor—and it’s all over. So don’t forget. When you climb, do the same things you would normally do in mountainous terrain; take the same chances you would take Earthside. With one exception: ravines. Even if it looks like only ten meters across—that’s a meter and a half by Earthly standards—toss a rock over to the other side and observe its flight. But my advice—my sincere advice—is: avoid any jumps. Because once you’ve cleared twenty meters, no cliff will seem too steep, no mountain too high. And remember, there’s no mountain rescue service up here…”

  Pirx inquired about the Mendeleev station. Why was it built high up under the ridge and not down below? And was it a rough climb?

  “No, not really. Only a few outcrops left by the slides, up around the gap—the road, you see, was wiped out by the avalanche. It would be tactless of me to comment on the choice of location, especially after what happened… But surely you must have read about it.”

  Pirx flushed with embarrassment and stammered something about having had exams at the time. Pnin smiled, then turned grimly serious.

  “Well, to begin with… The Moon has become internationalized; each country has its own sphere of scientific research—this hemisphere, for example, belongs to us. When it turned out that the Van Allen Belt was interfering with the process of cosmic radiation on the side facing Earth, the English asked our permission to build a station in our hemisphere. We agreed to it. Since we were at work on a station of our own on Mendeleev, we proposed they take it over from us, provided they reimburse us for materials already accumulated. They accepted but then turned the project over to the Canadians. Well, English or Canadians, it made no difference to us. Since we had already conducted a preliminary land survey of the area, one of our group, Professor Animtsev, was invited to join the Canadian planning team as a consultant on local conditions. Then we learned that the English wanted back in. They sent out their man Shanner, who advised that secondary radiation pencils at the bottom of the crater could adversely affect future research. Our experts disagreed, but by this time the English had decided to make the station their own and to locate it just under the ridge. Costs skyrocketed, with the Canadians agreeing to foot the bill. But that was none of our business. We don’t go around peeking into other people’s pockets.

  “Anyway, once the site was selected, a road survey was done. Animtsev tipped us off that the British were planning to lay concrete bridges across the ravines along the projected route but that the Canadians had rejected the idea as being too costly—double the original estimate. They decided to blast two ribs into the face of Mendeleev, using directional charges. I warned them that they ran the risk of disturbing the equilibrium of the basalt’s crystal core. But they wouldn’t listen. Well, what could we do? They weren’t kids, you know. We had all the selenological experience on our side—but then we thought if they won’t listen, we can’t force them to take our advice. Animtsev cast his dissenting vote, and that was that. They started blasting. One silly mistake compounded by another. The English built three slide barriers, got the station up, and brought in their crawler transports. So far, so good. But the station wasn’t three months in operation when, at the foot of the overhang, just under the Gap—the ridge’s western pass—cracks started to appear…”

  Pnin got up, opened a desk drawer, and produced several large photographs.

  “There,” he said, pointing to the cracks, “you’re looking at what is—or was—a kilometer-and-a-half-long wall. The road ran roughly a third of the way up the side—there, where you see that red line. The Canadians were the first to sound the alarm. Animtsev—who had hung around, still trying to convince them of their errors—told them, ‘Look, there’s a three-hundred-degree difference in temperature between day and night. The cracks are sure to expand. It’s no use. You can’t shore up a kilometer-and-a-half-long wall! Close the road, and since the station is already up, build a cable railway up there.’ Well, they began calling in the experts—from England, Canada… It was a farce: those who corroborated Animtsev’s opinion headed back as fast as they had come. The only ones left were those who advocated—cement. Yes, that’s right. They began pouring cement into those cracks. They injected, they put up abutments, they injected more cement, then more abutments, because whatever they cemented during the day would crack overnight. By this time the couloirs were beginning to spill over, but the walls held. To divert any worse slides they put up a system of wedges. That’s when Animtsev told them: ‘You’re worried about a few landslides when the whole wall is about to cave in!’

  “Poor Animtsev. I couldn’t bear to look at him when he came to see us. The man was frantic. He could see it coming but was helpless to do anything about it. Granted, the English have their share of top-notch specialists. But, you see, this wasn’t a problem for a specialist, it wasn’t a selenological problem. Their prestige was at stake! They had built that road and were damned if they were going to back out. Animtsev protested for the umpteenth time and finally resigned. We later heard that the English and Canadians had quarreled about what to do with the wall—the shoulder of what’s known as the Eagle’s Wing. The Canadians were all for blowing it up—let’s destroy the road, they said, and build a safer one later on. The English didn’t like the idea. Anyway, it was wishful thinking; Animtsev estimated it would have taken a six-megaton hydrogen blast, and the UN charter expressly prohibits the use of radioactive materials as explosives… Well, they kept bickering back and forth until, finally, the wall really did collapse… The English wrote that it was all the fault of the Canadians for having rejected their original proposal—those concrete viaducts…”

  Pnin pondered a blowup of the Gap; black dots marked the place where the landslide had obliterated the road and its abutments.

  “The station is reasonably accessible by day—just a few traverses along the outcrop I mentioned earlier—but almost impossible at night. We’re not back on Earth, you know…”

  Pirx understood; the Russian was alluding to the fact that the side of long lunar nights was not illuminated by Earth’s generous lamp.

  “Infrared doesn’t help?”

  Pnin grinned.

  “Infrared goggles, you mean? But how, my friend, when the surface temperature drops to minus 160 degrees within an hour after sunset? Theoretically, I suppose, radar might work, but have you ever tried climbing with a radarscope?”

  Pirx admitted he hadn’t.

  “And I wouldn’t advise you to, either. It’s an exceedingly complicated way of committing suicide. Radar is fine on level terrain, but not when you’re scaling—”

  Langner and the professor came in: time to shove off. A half-hour flight and a two-hour hike still lay ahead of them, and sunset was only seven hours away. Only? thought Pirx, for whom seven hours seemed like an ample amount of time.

  Dr. Pnin insisted on accompanying them to Mendeleev. The visitors politely protested, saying that it was not really necessary, but their hosts merely shrugged off their protests. Ganshin asked, as they were getting ready to leave, if there were any messages they wanted relayed to Earth. It would be their last chance: once they were inside the terminator, all radio communication would be suspended.

  Pirx was tempted to send Matters’s sister “Greetings from the Far Side” but lost his nerve. They thanked their hosts and went below, where, again, the Russians insisted on escorting them to their ship. Pirx broke down at this point and complained about his g-suit. The Russians offered him one of theirs, which he gladly exchanged, leaving the old one to hang in the Tsiolkovsky pressure chamber.

  The Russian suit was unconventional in a number of ways. For one thing it had three, instead of two, visors: one for high Sun, one for low, and one�
��shaded dark orange—for dust. The air-valve arrangement was different, and it was rigged with inflatable boots that cushioned the impact of rocks and gripped even the slipperiest surface; they called it the “high-mountain model.” Even the coloring was different: half in black and half in silver. When you stood with the black side facing the Sun, you broke out in a sweat; with the silver you were braced by a delicious coolness.

  Pirx found the idea had one basic flaw in it: a man couldn’t always be pointed in the direction of the Sun. So what was he supposed to do? Walk backward?

  The others chuckled and called his attention to a color alternator located on his chest. If he adjusted the knob, the colors could be reversed: black in front, silver in back, and vice versa. The mechanics of it were interesting. The suit’s outer ply was made of a clear, tear-resistant nylon fabric; between it and his body was a thin air barrier filled with two different kinds of dye, or rather semiliquid substances—one aluminized, the other carbonized. Pressure came from the air respirator.

  It was time to leave for the launchpad. Earlier he had been too blinded, having just emerged from the Sun, to notice anything inside the pressure chamber. Now he had occasion to observe that one of the walls operated on the same principle as a piston. “The advantage being,” said Pnin, in reply to his question, “that you can let in or out any number of people at one time, with no appreciable air loss.” Pirx, on hearing this, felt a slight twinge of envy; the Institute’s chambers were antiquated boxes by comparison, at least five years behind the time, a five-year lag in technology being tantamount to a whole epoch.