Tales of Pirx the Pilot (10 page)

All right! We’re standing on the column! Pirx thought, just to remind himself that he was a full-fledged—if not yet licensed—astronaut.

There was a jolt, a clank, then a hard thud, similar to a sledgehammer hitting a slab of rock; the cabin seesawed gently up and down; the hydraulics hissed and gurgled until the ship’s wobbly, twenty-meter-long legs finally wedged into the rubble.

The pilot applied a little pressure to the oil lines to quell the rocking; there was a long
pshhh,
and the cabin stabilized.

Crawling out through the deck hatch, the pilot opened a wall locker, and lo! their space suits.

Pirx’s sudden elation was quickly aborted. There were, it turned out, four suits: the pilot’s, a small, a medium, and a large. The pilot was suited up in nothing flat, but waited for the others before putting on his helmet. Langner was equally quick getting into his. But Pirx—flushed, sweaty, and inwardly fuming—was having a tough time of it. The medium-size suit turned out to be too small; the large, too large. When he tried on the medium, his head rammed into the impact liner of his helmet. In the large he floated around like a seed in a hollowed-out gourd. He was not without friendly advice, though. The pilot was quick to point out that better a baggy suit than one too tight, and suggested stuffing the gaps with underwear from his pack. If that didn’t do the trick, he would gladly lend him a blanket. For Pirx the very idea of stuffing his suit was somehow blasphemous, and he rebelled against it with all his astronautical soul.

He settled on the smaller one. The pilot and Langner held their peace. The pilot, leading the way, then opened the air lock; when all were inside, he unscrewed the manhole cover and pushed open the outer hatch.

If not for Langner, Pirx would have hopped right out onto the scree, which, in view of the twenty-meter drop, would have meant a sprained ankle or worse. Despite the lesser gravity, the weight of his space suit would have made the impact equivalent to jumping down into a pile of extremely loose rock from one story up.

The pilot lowered a collapsible ladder, and one by one they egressed onto the Moon.

There were no welcoming parties, no one with flowers, no trumpet blasts. In fact, there was not a living soul in sight. About a kilometer away, its armor-plated dome grazed by oblique rays of awesome lunar sunlight, the Tsiolkovsky station rose prominently above the plain. A little higher up, hewn in the rock, was a small landing pad, now occupied by a double row of rockets—transports, judging by their size.

Their ship, listing slightly to one side, hunkered down on its triadic, steel-footed assembly, blackening with exhaust the rocks directly beneath its thrust chambers. The terrain to the east was relatively flat, if an endless boulder-cluttered plain—some stones were the size of apartment houses—could be called flat. Rearing gently eastward, it fringed off into a wall of vertical faults to become the central massif of the Tsiolkovsky mountain. A blazing Sun, poised ten degrees above the ridge, blinded them every time they turned their gaze in its direction. Pirx, like the others, lowered his sun visor, but it failed to cut down the glare altogether, at most enabling him to look without squinting. Cautiously picking their way in and out of the shifting boulders, they shoved off for the station, eventually losing sight of the shuttle when they had to cross the flat-bottomed basin. The station commanded a view of the basin and the surrounding landscape, three-fourths of the structure being recessed in a wall of highland mass strangely evocative of a stone fortress from the Mesozoic era. Its lopped-off cornices bore a striking similarity to ancient turrets, but only from a distance; the closer one got to them, the more these “turrets” abandoned their symmetrical shape, the more clearly one saw their deep cracks, too easily mistaken for black stripes from far off. The terrain was fairly navigable by lunar standards. Each bootstep raised a cloud of dust—the celebrated lunar dust—that would climb waist-high, gird them in immaculate white, and refuse to settle, forcing them to walk three abreast. When they reached the station, Pirx cast a backward glance and saw three tubular, serpentine trails, brighter than any dust or powder he had ever known on Earth.

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.