More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (2 page)

No, that book about cosmic romance and meteoroid typhoons was really my only escape. I even reread passages, some of them a dozen times. The book fairly brimmed with space hijinks—a rebellion of electrobrains, pirates’ agents with microtransmitters planted in their skulls, not to mention that beauty from an alien solar system—but not a single word about the mumps. Which was fine by me, obviously. I was sick of the mumps. Of astronautics in general.

During off hours I hunted high and low for the radiotelegraph operator’s liquor stock. Though I may be giving him too much credit, I suspect he deliberately left a trail just so I wouldn’t waver and give up the crusade. I never did locate his supply. Maybe he was a sponge and kept it stored inside. And I
searched
, my nose to the deck the way a fly hugs the ceiling, sailing around back aft and midships the way you do in dreams. I was all by my lonesome, too—my swollen-jawed crew quarantined in their cabins, my engineer up in the cockpit learning French from tapes, the ship like a funeral parlor except for the occasional wail or aria traveling through the air-conditioning ducts. The latter came from the Bolivian-Mexican, who every evening routinely suffered an attack of
Weltschmerz.
What did I care about the stars, not counting those in my book, of course, the juicier parts of which I knew by heart (mercifully forgotten by now). I was waiting for the mumps epidemic to end, because my Robinson Crusoe existence was beginning to tell.

I was even ducking the civil engineer. He was an OK sort of guy in his own way, but he swore he would never have signed on if his wife and brother-in-law hadn’t got him in debt. In short, he belonged to that species of man I can’t stand: the excessively confiding type. I don’t know whether he was gushy only with me. Probably not. Most people are guided by a sense of discretion, but this guy would confess anything, to the point of making my insides crawl. Fortunately, the
Pearl’
s twenty-eight-thousand-ton rest mass offered plenty of room to hide.

As you might have guessed, it was my first and last trip for Le Mans. Ever since, I’ve been much the wiser, which doesn’t mean I haven’t had my share of adventures. And I wouldn’t be telling you about this one—perhaps the most embarrassing of my career—if it weren’t for that other, fairytale, side of astronautics. Remember, I warned you this story would sound like a sci-fi tale.

The alert came when we were about even with Venus’s orbit. But either our operator was napping on the job or he forgot to record it, because it wasn’t until the next morning that I heard the news on Luna’s daily meteoroid forecast. At first, frankly, I thought it was a false alarm. The Draconids were far behind us and things were quiet except for the usual swarms, nor was it Jupiter up to its perturbational pranks, because this was on a different radiant. Besides, it was only an alert of the eighth degree—a duster, very low density, the percentage of large-sized particles negligible—although the front was, well … formidable. One glance at the map and I realized we’d been riding in it for a good hour, maybe two. The screens were blank. A routine shower, I thought. But the noon bulletin was far from routine: Luna’s long-range trackers had traced the swarm to another system!

It was the second such swarm in astronautical history. Meteoroids travel along elliptical paths gravitationally tied to the sun like yo-yos; an alien swarm from outside the solar system, from somewhere in the galaxy at large, is regarded as a sensation, although more by astrophysicists than by pilots. For us, the difference is one of speed. Swarms in our own system travel in circum-terrestrial space at speeds no greater than the parabolic or the elliptical; those from outside may—and, as a rule, do—move at a hyperbolic velocity. Such things may send meteoritologists and astroballisticians into ecstasy, but not us.

The radiotelegraph operator was fazed neither by the news nor by my lunchtime lecture. An engine burn (to low thrust, naturally) plus a course adjustment had given us just enough gravity to make life bearable: no more sucking soup through straws or squeezing meatloaf puree out of toothpaste tubes. I’ve always been a fan of plain, ordinary meals.

The engineer, on the other hand, was scared stiff. My talking about the swarm as casually as if it were a summer shower he took as a sure sign of my insanity. I gently reassured him that it was a dust cloud, moreover a very sparse one; that the odds of meeting up with a meteoroid large enough to do any damage were lower than those of being crowned by a falling theater chandelier; that we couldn’t do anything, anyway, because we were in no position to execute any evasion maneuvers; and that, as it happened, our course in good measure coincided with the swarm’s, thus significantly reducing the chances of a collision.

He seemed somehow unconsoled. By now, I’d had it with psychotherapy and preferred to work on the operator instead—that is, to cut him off from his liquor supply for at least a couple of hours, which the alert now made more urgent than ever. We were well inside Venus’s perimeter, a heavily traveled zone; traffic, and not only of the cargo variety, was fierce. I kept a four-hour watch by the transmitter, the radiotelegraph operator at my side, until 0600 hours—fortunately, without picking up a single distress call. The swarm was so low in density it took literally hours of squinting to detect it: a mass of microscopically small greenish phantomlike dots that might easily have been an illusion caused by eyestrain. Meanwhile, tracking stations on Luna and on Earth were projecting that the hyperbolic swarm, already christened Canopus after the radiant’s brightest star, would bypass Earth’s orbit and abandon the system for the same galactic void whence it had come, never to menace us again.

The civil engineer, more anxious than ever, kept nosing around the radio room. “Go back and man the controls!” I would bark. A purely cosmetic command, of course, first because we had no thrust, and without thrust there’s no navigating, and second because he couldn’t have executed the most rudimentary maneuver, and I wouldn’t have let him try. I just wanted to keep him busy and out of my hair. Had I ever been caught in a swarm before? How many times? Had there been any accidents? Were they serious? What were the odds of surviving a collision? He kept up a steady stream. Instead of answering, I handed him Krafft’s
Basic Astronautics and Astronavigation,
which he took but I’m sure never opened: the man craved first-hand revelations, not facts. And all this, I repeat, on a ship minus any gravity, weightless, when even the soberest of men moved in burlesque fashion—when, for example, the pressure exerted in writing with a pencil could land a man on the ceiling, head first. The radiotelegraph operator, however, coped not by belting up but by jettisoning things: trapped in the space between ceiling, deck, and walls, he would reach into his pants pockets, throw out the first item at hand—his pockets were a storage bin of miscellaneous weights, key chains, metal clips—and allow the thrust to propel him gently in the opposite direction. An infallible method, unerring confirmation of Newton’s second law, but something of an inconvenience to his shipmates, because, once discarded, the stuff would ricochet off the walls, and the resulting whirligig of hard and potentially damaging objects might last a good while. This is just to add a few background touches to that idyllic voyage.

The airwaves, meanwhile, were jumping, as passenger ships began switching to alternate routes. Luna Base had its hands full. The ground stations that relayed the orbital data and course corrections were firing away signals at a clip too fast for the human ear to detect. The relays were also jammed with the voices of passengers who, for a hefty fee, were cabling reassuring messages to loved ones. Luna’s astrophysics station kept transmitting updates on the swarm’s more concentrated areas, along with spectroanalyses of its composition—in a word, a regular variety show.

My mumps-stricken crew, already informed about the hyperbolic cloud, kept phoning in to the radio room—until I switched off the intercom system. I announced they would recognize any danger—a blowout, say—by the sudden loss of pressure.

Around 2300 hours, I went below for a bite to eat. The radiotelegraph operator, who must have given up waiting for me, had vanished meanwhile, and I was too tired to hunt him down, much less think about him. The engineer returned from his watch, calmer and more visibly troubled by his brother-in-law than by the swarm. On his way out of the mess, when he wasn’t yawning like a whale, he mentioned that the radar’s left screen must have shorted, because it was showing a sort of green flicker. With these words he made his exit, while I, who was in the process of polishing off a can of corned beef, my fork stuck in an unappetizing gob of solid fat, fairly froze.

The engineer knew radar about as well as I knew asphalt. A radar screen “shorted”…!

A moment later, I was streaking to the cockpit (in a manner of speaking, of course, because I could accelerate only by shinnying with my hands and by bouncing, feet first, off the walls and overhead deck). The cockpit—when I finally reached it—was dead, its dashlights extinguished, its reactor controls like fireflies, and only the radar screens were still going, pulsating with every sweep of the scope. My eye was already on the left-hand one before I was inside the hatch.

The lower-right quadrant showed a bright, immobile dot, which, when I came closer, became a coin-sized splotch, somewhat flat and spindle-shaped, perfectly symmetrical and fluorescent-green in color: a tiny, deceptively motionless fish in an otherwise empty ocean. If an officer of the watch had spotted it—not now, but a half hour earlier—he would have flipped the automatic tracking relay, alerted his CO, and requested the other ship’s course and destination. But I was without any watch officers, a half hour too late, and alone. I did everything at once: sent out the identification call, switched on the tracker, and fired up the reactor (it was as cold as a very old corpse) in order to have instant thrust ready at hand. I even managed to get the navigational computer going, only to discover that the other ship’s course was almost parallel to ours, with only a marginal difference between them, so that the chance of a collision, extremely low to begin with, was pushing zero.

But the other ship played deaf. I shifted to another chair and began flashing Morse from my deck laser. It was too close for comfort, about nine hundred kilometers astern, and I could see myself being hauled before the Tribunal for violation of Paragraph VIII: “HA = Hazardous Approach.” But only a blind man could have missed my signal lights, I told myself. Meanwhile, that ship sat stubbornly on my radar, and not only did it not alter course, but it was actually starting to lap us—we were moving, as I said, on almost parallel tracks—along the quadrant’s outer perimeter. I visually clocked its speed at roughly hyperbolic, or ninety kilometers per second, which was confirmed by two readings taken within a ten-second interval; whereas we were lucky if we were doing forty-five.

Still no response; it was gaining, and it looked splendid, even elegant. A pale-green, incandescent lens, which we viewed sideways; a smoothly tapered spindle. Suspicious about its size, I glanced at the radar range-finder: we were four hundred kilometers away. I blinked. Normally a ship looked no bigger than a comma from that distance. Damn—I thought—nothing works aboard this ship! I transferred the image to a small auxiliary radar with a directional antenna. The same effect. My mind went blank. Then a sudden brainstorm: another of Le Mans’s convoys, a string of some forty-odd hulks in tow… But why the spindle shape?

The scopes went on sweeping, the range-finder kept clicking away. Three hundred, two hundred sixty, two hundred…

I checked the course margin on the Harrelsberg because I smelled a near-collision in the making. When radar was first introduced at sea, everyone felt a lot safer, but ships went on sinking just the same. The data confirmed my suspicions: the other ship would clear our bow by some thirty to forty kilometers. I tested the radio and laser relays. Both functional, but still no response. Until now, I had been feeling a trifle guilty—for leaving the ship on automatic while I sat below and listened to the engineer bellyache about his brother-in-law, snacking on a can of corned beef because I was without a crew and had to do everything myself—but no more. Now it was as though the scales had fallen. Filled with righteous indignation, I knew who the guilty party was: this deaf-mute of a ship, too hell-bent across the sector to respond to another pilot’s emergency signals!

I switched on the radiophone and demanded that the other ship display its navigational lights and send up flares, that it report its call numbers, name, destination, owner—all in the standard code, of course—but it kept cruising leisurely, silently along, altering neither course nor speed by so much as a fraction of a degree or a second. It now lay eighty kilometers astern.

So far, it had been situated a little to the port side; now I could see it was lapping me. The angular correction meant that the clearance would be even tighter than the one projected by the computer. Under thirty kilometers, in any case, perhaps as low as twenty. The rules sad I should have been braking, but I couldn’t. I had a necropolis of over a hundred thousand tons behind me; I would have had to unhook all those dead hulks first. But alone, without a crew? Oh, no, braking was out of the question. Friend, I told myself, what you need now is not astronautical savvy but philosophy—starting with a little fatalism and, in case the computer’s projection was high, even a dabbling in eschatology.

At exactly twenty-two kilometers, the other ship began to outstrip the
Pearl.
From now on the values would increase, which meant we were in the clear. All this time my eyes had been glued to the range-finder. I shifted my gaze back to the radar screen.

What I saw was not a ship but a flying island. From twenty kilometers away, it now measured about two fingers in width. The perfectly symmetrical spindle had become a disk—better, a ring!

I know what you’re probably thinking: an alien encounter. I mean, a ship measuring twenty kilometers in length…? An alien encounter. A catchy phrase, but who believes in it? My first impulse was to tail the thing. Really! I even grabbed the stick—then held back. Fat chance I’d have with all that scrap in tow. I heaved out of my seat and climbed a narrow shaft to the small, hull-mounted astrodome atop the cockpit. It was conveniently stocked with telescope and flares. I fired three in quick succession, aiming for the ship’s general radius, and tried to get a sighting in the glare. An island, yes, but still hard to locate right away. The flash blinded me for a few seconds, until my eyes adjusted to the brightness. The second flare landed wide, too far away to do any good; the third, just above it. In that immobilizing white light, I saw it.