More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (22 page)

He felt a barely palpable vibration underfoot—a converter or a transformer. Otherwise, the same silence as before, penetrated, as if from another world, by the distant howl of a gale wind playing on the cosmodrome’s cables. That diabolical sand could eat through high-grade, five-centimeter steel cables. On the Moon you could leave anything, stow it in the rubble, and come back a hundred, a million years hence, secure in the knowledge that it would still be there. On Mars you couldn’t afford to drop anything, lest it sink forever. Mars had no manners.

At 0640 hours, the horizon reddened with the sunrise, and this splotch of brightness, this bogus dawn—or, rather, its reddish tint—brought back his dream. Jarred by the sudden recall, he slowly put his thermos down. It was coming back to him. Somebody was out to get him … no, it was he who killed someone else. The dead man came after him, chasing him through the ember-red dark; a death blow, then another, but to no effect. Crazy, yes, but there was something else: in the dream, he could have sworn he knew the other man; now he had no idea whom he’d fought to the finish. Granted, this feeling of familiarity could have been a dream illusion, too. He kept dogging it, but his self-willed memory balked, and everything retreated like a snail into its shell, so that he stood by the window, one hand on the metal doorframe, a trifle rattled, as if on the brink of something unnamable. Death. As space technology advanced, it was inevitable that people would start dying on planets. The Moon was loyal to the dead. It let them fossilize, turned them into ice sculpture, mummies, whose lightness and near-weightlessness seemed to diminish the reality, the seriousness of the tragedy. But on Mars, the dead had to be disposed of immediately, because the sand storms would eat through a spacesuit in a matter of days; and before the corpse had been mummified by the severe aridity, bones would sprout from the torn fabric—shiny, polished to perfection, until the whole skeleton was laid bare. Littered in this strange sand, under this strange sky, the bones of the dead were almost a reproach, an offense, as though by bringing along their mortality, people had done something improper, something to be ashamed of, that had to be removed from sight, buried… Screwy as they were, those were his thoughts at the moment.

The night crew went off at 0700, and visitors were allowed into the control tower between shifts. He packed away his few toilet articles and, thinking he’d better make sure the unloading of the
Cuivier
was going according to schedule, went out. All his package cargo had to be off by 1200 hours, and there were still a few things worth testing—such as the servo-reactor’s cooling system—all the more so since he was going back a man short (getting a substitute for Terman was wishful thinking). He mounted a spiral, polyfoam-padded staircase, his hand on the astonishingly warm (heated?) banister, and when he reached the upper level and opened the swinging glass door with frosted panes, he entered a world so different that he felt like someone else.

It could have been the interior of a giant head, with six enormous, bulging glass eyes fixed in three directions at once. The fourth wall was mounted with antennas, and the whole room rotated on its axis like a revolving stage. In a sense, it was a stage, where the same performance, that of lift-off and landing, clearly visible a kilometer away from behind the rounded control consoles that blended perfectly with the silver-gray walls, was played and replayed. The atmosphere was reminiscent both of an airport control tower and an operating room.

Along the wall of antennas, under a sloping hood, reigned the main space-traffic computer, always in direct contact, always blinking and ticking, continually carrying out its mute monologues and spewing reams of perforated tape. Near it were stationed three back-up terminals, with mikes, spotlights, swivel chairs, and the controllers’ hydrant-shaped hand calculators; and finally, a cute, contoured little bar with a softly humming espresso machine. So here was the coffee trough.

Pirx couldn’t see the
Cuivier
from the tower; he had parked it, in compliance with the controller’s instructions, five kilometers away, beyond all the clutter, to make way for the project’s first supership landing—as if it wasn’t equipped with the latest space- and astrolocational computers which, according to the bragging of the shipyard builders (nearly all personal acquaintances of Pirx), could plant that Goliath of a quarter-miler, that iron mountain, on a site no bigger than a kitchen garden. All three shifts were mustered for the occasion, which, for all its festivity, was not an official celebration: the
Ariel,
like every other prototype, had posted dozens of experimental flights and lunar landings, though, to be sure, never with a full cargo.

With a half hour to go before touchdown, Pirx greeted those who were off duty and shook hands with Seyn. The monitors were already activated, blurry smudges ran from top to bottom on the cathode-ray tubes, but the lights on the landing terminal were uniformly green, meaning they still had time to kill. Romani, the Base coordinator, offered him a glass of brandy with his coffee. Pirx hesitated—he wasn’t used to tippling at such an early hour—but, then, he was there as a private guest and was sensitive enough to see they were only trying to lend the event a touch of class. They’d waited months for the superfreighters, whose arrival was calculated to save Port Control untold headaches, since until now it had been a perpetual contest between the voracious appetite of the construction site, never satisfied by the project’s cargo fleet, and the efforts of transport pilots like Pirx to ply the Mars-Earth run as quickly and efficiently as possible. With the conjunction now over, both planets were beginning to move farther apart, the distances between them to increase yearly until reaching an alarming maximum of hundreds of millions of kilometers. It was in this, the project’s hour of greatest travail, that relief was at hand.

The talking was subdued, and when the green lights faded and the buzzers sounded, there was dead silence. A typical Martian day was breaking: not cloudy, not clear, no distinguishable horizon, no well-defined sky, as if devoid of any definable, measurable time. Despite the daylight, the perimeters of the concrete squares hugging the Agathodaemon floor were fringed with glowing lines—automatic laser markings—and the rim of the concrete circular shield, almost black, was edged with sparkling, starlike beads. The controllers, idled, made themselves comfortable in their armchairs, while the central computer flashed its diodes, as if to proclaim its indispensability, and the transmitters had begun to drone ever so softly when a clear bass came over the loudspeaker:

“Hello, Agathodaemon, this is
Ariel,
Klyne speaking; we’re on video, altitude six hundred, switching to automatic landing in twenty secs; over.”

“Agathodaemon to
Ariel,”
Seyn, having just put out his cigarette, replied eagerly, his beaklike profile up close to the mesh of the microphone. “We have you on all screens; lie down and let her roost; over.”

They’re goofing around, thought Pirx, who, superstitious as he was, didn’t like it, though they obviously had the landing procedure down pat.

“Ariel
to Agathodaemon: we have three hundred, switching to automatic, descending with no lateral drift, zero on zero, what’s the wind force? Over.”

“Agathodaemon to
Ariel:
wind at a hundred eighty per hour, north-northwest, won’t bother you; over.”

“Ariel
to everybody: descending in the axis, stern first, on automatic; over and out.”

Silence fell; only the transmitters were mincing away as a flaming white speck, swelling as fast as a bubble being blown out of fiery glass, appeared on the screens. It was the ship’s gaping tail section, descending as if on an invisible plumb line, without the slightest jerking or tilting or gyrating. Pirx thrilled to see it. Altitude at about a hundred kilometers, he guessed; no sense watching until it was down around fifty; besides, the observation windows were too crowded with craning heads as it was.

Ground control was in constant radio contact with the ship, but there was nothing to radio, leaving the crew to sit back in their antigravitational chairs and trust to the computers commanded by the ship’s primary computer, which had just ordered a shift from atomic to boron drive at an altitude of sixty kilometers, or at the point of atmospheric entry. Pirx now walked up to the middle window, the largest, and immediately sighted through the sky’s pale blur a bright green sparkle, microscopic but vibrating with uncommon radiance—as if the Martian horizon were being drilled from above with a burning emerald. From this incandescent speck, pale filaments fanned in all directions—cloud wisps, or, rather, those aborted clouds-to-be which in the local atmosphere served as surrogates for the real thing. Sucked up into the orbit of the ship’s rocket flare, they ignited and exploded like fireworks. The ship’s circular flange swelled. The air was visibly palpitating from the exhaust, which a novice might have mistaken for a slight vacillation, but Pirx was too experienced to be fooled. Things were going so smoothly, so routinely, that he was reminded of the ease with which the first human step on the Moon had been taken. By now the fuselage was a burning green disk ringed with a scintillating halo. He glanced at the main altimeter above the control terminals—the altitude of such a supership was easy to misjudge; eleven, no, twelve kilometers separated the
Ariel
, decelerating in response to the reverse thrust, from Mars.

Then several things happened at once.

The
Ariel’s
stern nozzles, in a nimbus crowned with green rays, began to vibrate in a different way. Over the loudspeaker came a tumult, a muffled cry, something like “Manual!” or maybe “Many!”—one inscrutable word shouted by a human voice, too altered to have been Klyne’s. A second later, the green blaze spewing from the
Ariel’s
stem paled, then ballooned into an awesome blue-white incandescence—and Pirx understood at once, in a shudder of dread that shook him from head to toe, so that the hollow voice booming from the loudspeaker surprised him not at all.

“
ARIEL
”—rasped the husky voice—“
COURSE ALTERATION. AWAY FROM METEORITE. FULL POWER AHEAD IN THE AXIS
!
ATTENTION
!
FULL THRUST
!”

It was the computer’s voice. Then another—this one human—yelled something in the background. Pirx had correctly diagnosed the change in exhaust: the reactor’s full thrust had taken over from the boron, and the giant spaceship, as if arrested by the powerful blow of an invisible fist, vibrating in all its joints, stopped—or so it seemed to those looking on—in the thin air, a mere four or five kilometers above the cosmodrome’s shield. To arrest a hundred-thousand-ton mass before reversing, without decelerating first, was unheard of, a maneuver in violation of every rule and regulation, defying all the basics of astronavigation. Pirx saw the giant cylinder’s hull in foreshortened perspective. The ship was losing its vertical trim; it was listing. Ever so slowly, it began to right itself, then tilted the other way, like a giant pendulum, resulting in an even steeper inclination of the quarter-mile-long hull. At such low velocity, a loss of stability of this amplitude was beyond correction. Only in those seconds did Pirx hear the chief controller scream:

“Ariel, Ariel!
What are you doing? What’s happening up there?!”

Pirx, standing by a parallel, vacant terminal, shouted into the mike:

“
KLYNE
!
SWITCH TO MANUAL OVERRIDE
!!!
TO MANUAL FOR LANDING
!!!
MANUAL
!!!”

Just then they were jolted by a thunderous roar—the
Ariel’s
delayed sound wave, unremitting, prolonged. How fast it had all happened! A concerted cry went up from the windows. The controllers jumped up from their consoles.

The
Ariel
plummeted like a stone, recklessly strewing the atmosphere with swirls of exhaust flare, rotating slowly, corpselike, an enormous iron tower flung from the sky onto dirty desert dunes. All stood nailed to the floor in a hollow, horrific silence fraught with impotence; the loudspeaker grated, crackled, rumbled with the distant clamor—like the roar of the sea—while a refulgent, white, incredibly long cylinder shot down with accelerated speed, seemingly aimed at the control tower. Pirx’s neighbor let out a groan. Instinctively everyone ducked.

The hull slammed into one of the shield’s low outer walls, halved, and, breaking up with an eerie slowness in a shower of fragments, buried itself in the sand; a ten-story cloud shot up, boomed, and rained stitches of fire. Above the curtain of ejected sand loomed the still blindingly white nose section, which, truncated from the rest, traversed the air a few hundred meters; then one, two, three powerful thuds with the force of earthquake tremors. The whole building heaved, rose and fell like a skiff on a wave. Then, in a hellish racket of cracking iron, everything was blotted out by a brownish-black wall of smoke and dust. Even as they raced downstairs to the airlock, Pirx, one of the first to suit up, had no doubts: in such a collision, there could be no survivors.

Soon they were running, buffeted by the gale winds; from far off, from the direction of the “bell,” the first of the caterpillar vehicles and hovercrafts were already on the move. But there was no reason to hurry. Pirx didn’t know how or when he returned to the control tower—the image of the crater and the crushed hull still in his dazed eyes—and only at the sight of his own suddenly grayed, somewhat shrunken face in a wall mirror did he come to.

By afternoon, a committee of experts had been set up to investigate the causes of the crash. Work crews with excavators and cranes were still clearing away the wreckage of the giant vehicle, and had yet to reach the deeply buried cockpit containing the automatic controls, when a team of specialists was bused over from Syrtis Major—in one of those quaint little helicopters with huge propellers, custom-designed for flight in the Martian air. Pirx kept out of the way and didn’t ask questions, knowing only too well that the case bordered on the unsolvable. During a routine landing, with all its hallowed sequences and clockwork programming, for no apparent reason the
Ariel’s
primary computer had shut down the boron power, signaled a residual meteorite alarm, and initiated an escape maneuver at full thrust; the ship’s stability, once lost during this neck-breaking action, was never regained. It was an event unprecedented in the history of astronavigation, and every plausible hypothesis—a computer failure, a glitch, a short in one of the circuits—appeared highly improbable, because there was not one but two programs for lift-off and landing, safeguarded by so many back-up systems as to make sabotage a more likely cause.