Tales of Pirx the Pilot (13 page)

Langner came down from the observatory and started making supper, but so quietly and competently that everything was on the table by the time Pirx came in. “Pass the salt, please.” “Any bread left in the can?” “Tomorrow we’ll have to open a new one.” “Tea or coffee?” That was the extent of their table talk—which, at the present moment, suited Pirx just fine. What meal was this? Their third of the day? Fourth? Breakfast of the following day? Langner said he had some developing to do and scooted along upstairs. But Pirx was left with nothing to do.

Suddenly he understood. He had been sent up here for one reason only: to keep Langner company. Astrophysics? Cosmic radiation? That wasn’t his line. And Langner wasn’t about to break him in, either, by teaching him how to handle an astrograph. No, he was here because he had earned the highest grade in the class, because the psychologists said he wouldn’t go batty. So, fourteen nights and fourteen days in this sardine can, waiting for no one knew what, investigating no one knew what.

Suddenly the Mission, which only a while ago had seemed such a blessing, was showing him its true face: a blank. Protect Langner and himself? Okay, but from what? Hunt for clues?
What
clues? No one seriously believed that he, dumb clod that he was, would stumble onto something overlooked by a commission of lunar experts.

He went on sitting at the table. He knew there were dishes to be washed. That he would have to be stingy with the tap water—water, that precious commodity flown in in ice blocks and fired into the basin at the foot of the station on a two-and-a-half-kilometer parabola. They couldn’t afford to waste a drop of the wet stuff.

He knew all that and still didn’t budge. He couldn’t even muster the energy to lift his arm when it fell limply onto the edge of the table. His head was still reeling from the heat and the waste and the darkness and the silence that pressed on this steel shell from all sides. He rubbed his burning eyes that felt sand-whipped, stood up, and, feeling twice his normal weight, cleared the table and dumped the dirty dishes into the sink and started rinsing them with a trickle of warm water. And as he stood there scrubbing the dishes, turning them over in his hands, scraping off the little globs of fat, he smiled at his own dreams, which had been left behind somewhere on the trail leading up to the Mendeleev ridge, dreams that now seemed so distant in time and place, so absurdly inappropriate, that he did not even need to feel ashamed of them.

Langner never changed; whether you shared his company for a year or a day, he never altered his routine. He worked diligently, but always according to schedule, never hurrying. He was a man without any vices, eccentricities, or tics. Now, when you live with someone in such close quarters, the smallest trifle can begin to grate. Someone hogs the shower, or won’t open a can of spinach because he doesn’t like spinach, or grumps a lot, or starts sporting a prickly stubble, or shaves but pampers himself in front of the mirror… But Langner was not that sort. He ate everything, but without gusto. He never bellyached or sulked. When it was his turn to wash, he washed. When he was asked something, he replied. He was neither unsociable nor overbearing. And it was precisely this neutral, neither-here-nor-there behavior of his that began to get on Pirx’s nerves, because the first evening’s impression—when the image of the physicist fastidiously arranging his books on the shelf had seemed the embodiment of a quiet and unassuming heroism, of a truly enviable and noble-minded dedication—well, that impression had become tarnished, to say the least, to the point that his partner—his compulsory partner—now struck him as lackluster, even boring. Not that he actually was bored or irritated by Langner’s company. Because meanwhile he had found something else to occupy him—at least temporarily. Now that he was more at home in his surroundings, he began reviewing all the known facts in the case.

The avalanche had occurred when the station had been only four months in operation. Contrary to what one would have expected, it transpired not at dawn or dusk but in the middle of a lunar afternoon. Suddenly, with no advance warning, three-fourths of the overhanging wall known as the Eagle’s Wing had collapsed. By coincidence, that same day the station’s four-man crew had been mustered to receive a convoy of transports. They were all eyewitnesses to the tragedy.

Subsequent studies showed that the deep incisions on the Eagle’s main rib had indeed disturbed the crystal core and upset its tectonic equilibrium. The English shifted the burden of blame onto the Canadians, and the Canadians onto the English, their mutual loyalty being manifested only by their consistent failure to heed Professor Animtsev’s advice. The four crew members standing in front of the station, less than a mile from the scene of the accident, later described how the blinding wall had split in two, collapsing the system of wedges and barriers, how the avalanche swept away the road and spilled into the valley below, and how, for the next thirty hours, the basin had been a sea of undulating white. In the space of just a few minutes the flood of swirling debris had been carried by the slide’s momentum clear across to the other side of the crater.

Two transports had been within range of the avalanche. The one bringing up the rear of the column had been buried instantly by a ten-meter-thick layer of rubble. The other had already reached the upper road, was just out of range of the main flow, when an enormous mass of debris jumped the last of the barriers and swept the vehicle over the side of the three-hundred-meter cliff. At the last minute its driver managed to open the hatch and drop down onto the shifting scree. He became the disaster’s lone survivor, outliving his companions by only a few hours. For the witnesses those few hours became a living hell. The driver, a French-Canadian named Roget, who either remained conscious or regained consciousness later on, started radioing for help from somewhere inside the white cloud—his receiver had been damaged, but not his transmitter. There was no locating the injured man. The multiple refractions caused by the waves bouncing off the boulders—so mammoth the people moved in and out of the dusty labyrinth as through a city in ruins—made it impossible to get an accurate fix. Radar was out because of the iron sulfide content of the rock. An hour later, another avalanche, originating from up around the Gap, forced the men to call off their search. This second slide, though smaller than the first, portended still others. There was nothing to do but wait. And wait they did, all the while hearing Roget’s voice loud and clear at the station, the basin in which he was stranded acting as a dish reflector. Three hours later the Tsiolkovsky team arrived and drove out into the dust cloud with their ground crawlers, but the shifting talus kept tipping their vehicles on end—the reduced gravity made the angle of inclination commensurately greater on the lunar scree than Earthside. Rescue teams, dispatched into those areas not accessible to the crawlers, combed the rubble three times. One of the searchers fell into a crevasse; only his immediate transfer to Tsiolkovsky and prompt medical treatment saved his life. Despite this near-fatality, the search went on, prodded by the sound of Roget’s ever weaker but still audible voice.

Five hours later the voice fell silent, though they knew he was still alive. Every space suit had, in addition to a voice transmitter, a miniature automatic sensor hooked up to the respirator. The sensor relayed, electromagnetically, every breath to the station, where a special tracking device, similar to a “magic eye,” projected it as a luminous green butterfly-shaped blip, dilating and contracting in rhythm to the man’s respiration. The phosphorescent “butterfly” indicated that the unconscious Roget was still breathing. The pulsations grew steadily weaker, slower, but no one left the radio station. The people crowded inside waited, in helpless despair, for the inevitable.

Roget continued breathing for another two hours. Finally the green light on the magic eye flickered and shrank for good. The mutilated body was located some thirty hours later, stone-hard, so badly mangled that he was buried together with his aluminized space suit, as in a coffin.

Later a new road was staked out—the same rocky trail used by Pirx on his ascent to the station. The Canadians were all set to abandon the project, but their persistent English colleagues solved the logistical problem in a manner originally conceived during the assault on Mount Everest. It was rejected at the time as unworkable.

News of the accident circulated in numerous, often conflicting versions until the clamor finally subsided, to become a tragic chapter in the chronicle of man’s struggle with the lunar wilds. Meanwhile, astrophysicists on field assignment continued to take turns manning the station. Six lunar days and nights passed. Just when it seemed the sorely tested station had given rise to its last sensation, Mendeleev’s radio station failed to acknowledge Tsiolkovsky’s transmission at dawn. Again the Tsiolkovsky team set out on a rescue—or rather reconnaissance—mission. They arrived by ship, landing at the foot of the slide.

They reached the station when the crater floor was still untouched by the Sun’s rays. Except for the metal shell under the peak, glinting in the horizontal shaft of light, the entire basin was under a mantle of darkness. They found the outer hatch open, and down below, at the foot of the ladder, Savage’s body, slumped to the floor in a way that suggested he had slipped and fallen from the rungs. Death was attributed to asphyxiation, caused by a punctured faceplate. Faint traces of dust, later found lining the inside of his gloves, suggested that he had been returning to, not leaving, the station, though the traces could easily have remained from a previous climb. The body of the second Canadian, Challiers, was discovered only after a meticulous combing of the neighboring ravines and gullies. Rescuers lowered on three-hundred-meter ropes brought up the body from the base of the cliff, no more than fifty steps away from the place where Roget had expired.

No matter how they tried to reconstruct the sequence of events, not a single plausible hypothesis could be advanced. That’s when a combined English-Canadian commission decided to conduct an on-the-spot inquiry.

The inquiry disclosed that the hands of Challiers’s watch had stopped at exactly twelve o’clock—whether noon or midnight, it was impossible to say—and Savage’s at two. In the case of Savage, an expert’s examination of the watch’s works revealed that the mainspring had been fully wound; hence the time shown on the watch’s face did not necessarily coincide with the time of death.

Everything inside the station was found to be in perfect order. The log, recording only events of scientific relevance, contained nothing that could shed the faintest light on the unexplained fatalities. Pirx went through it carefully, entry by entry. They were written in the usual laconic style. Astrographic survey taken at such-and-such a time, so-and-so many plates exposed under such-and-such conditions… Not a single reference, however oblique, to whatever had transpired that night, Savage’s and Challiers’s last. Not only was the station found to be in perfect order, but all the evidence indicated that death had taken its inhabitants by surprise. An open book, with Challiers’s notes in the margin, was found lying face up, with another book on top to keep the pages from turning, under a burning lamp. A pipe, which had tipped over on its side and spilled a few cinders onto the table, lightly scorching the Bakelite top, lay beside it. Savage, from the looks of things, had been making supper. In the kitchen they found freshly opened cans, a mixing bowl full of omelet batter, and on the little white eating table, place settings for two and slices of stale bread.

The commission concluded that one of them had interrupted his reading, laying down his pipe in the manner of someone intending to be out of the room for only a few minutes. The other had walked off in the middle of preparing supper, leaving behind a greased frying pan and not even bothering to shut the refrigerator door. Two men had suited up and stepped out into a lunar night. Together? Separately? And, above all, why?

The two Canadians had been stationed at Mendeleev long enough—two weeks, to be exact—to know their way around. With sunrise only twelve or so hours away, the question naturally arose: Why hadn’t they waited until dawn, assuming their intent was to climb down to the crater floor? And in Challiers’s case, that was fairly safe to assume, going by the location of his body. But Challiers must have realized, as Savage must have, that it was an act of lunacy to go down the face of the mountain. The wall made a gradual and easy descent before falling off abruptly in the place where the avalanche had left a gaping hole. The new road bypassed the canyon, traveling a straight line along the route staked out by the aluminum markers. Everyone, even one-time visitors to the station, was aware of the danger. And yet here was one of its permanent staff members, a man who should have known better, attempting to navigate a sheer precipice. Why? A deliberate suicide? But would someone bent on committing suicide simply interrupt his reading, put aside his book and pipe, and go out to meet certain death?

And Savage. How to explain Savage’s punctured visor? Was he on his way into or out of the station? Had he gone out to look for Challiers when he failed to show up? Or had they left together? If that were so, how could he have let him go down the cliff?

There was no end to the unanswered questions.

The only item not in its proper place was a packet of photographic plates, the type used to record cosmic radiation. It was found lying on the kitchen table alongside two empty, spotlessly clean plates.

The commission postulated the following sequence of events. That day—the day of the accident—it was Challiers’s watch. Distracted by his reading, he suddenly noticed the time—eleven o’clock. Eleven was the time he was scheduled to restock the plates. The plates were exposed outside the station, a hundred paces up the slope, in a shaft tunneled in the rock—small and not too deep, with lead-lined walls to permit only the zenith rays to hit the plates. A routine exercise, one of the many performed at the station. Challiers, then, putting down his book and pipe, got up, grabbed a new packet of plates, suited up, and left the station through the pressure chamber. He went up to the shaft, climbed down the recessed ladder, switched the plates, and started back with the exposed ones.