Tales of Pirx the Pilot (14 page)

On his way back, he made a detour. Subsequent examination of his space suit, severely damaged in the fall, disclosed no malfunction in his respirator unit, ruling out the possibility of a sudden loss of memory due to anoxia.

The members of the commission hypothesized that Challiers must have suffered a momentary blackout, reasoning that he knew the terrain too well to have made a wrong turn. He could have had a fainting spell, an attack of dizziness, lost his sense of direction—whatever the reason, he went along in the mistaken belief that he was returning to the station. In reality, he was bound straight for the cliff, lying only a hundred meters or so ahead of him.

Savage, alarmed by his partner’s absence, interrupted his kitchen duty and tried to make radio contact—the transmitter was later found switched on, the frequency setting on ultrashortwave for local transmission. Admittedly, it might have been switched on earlier—if, say, someone in spite of the radio blackout had tried to make contact with the Tsiolkovsky station. But this was deemed highly improbable—first, because the Tsiolkovsky radio had received no calls, distorted or otherwise, and second, because both Savage and Challiers knew better than to attempt any communication just before the dawn, the time when interference was at its peak. Failing to make contact—Challiers by this time was dead—Savage, after suiting up, rushed out into the dark in search of his partner.

In his anxiety over Challiers’s silence, over his sudden and inexplicable disappearance, Savage must momentarily have lost his bearings. Or, as seemed more likely, since he was the more experienced climber of the two, he must have exposed himself unnecessarily to danger while combing the area, taken a fall, and shattered his visor in the process. Sealing the breach with his hand, he struggled back to the station and scrambled up the dome, but before he could seal the outer hatch and lower himself into the pressure chamber, his oxygen supply ran out and he collapsed in a fatal coma on the last rung of the ladder.

Not satisfied with the commission’s version of the dual tragedy, Pirx checked the personality profiles. He paid special attention to Challiers’s, since, according to the commission, he was the inadvertent cause of the two deaths—his own and that of his partner. Challiers, at thirty-five, was an established astrophysicist and an accomplished mountain climber. A man in excellent health, with no known history of any illness, dizzy spells or otherwise. Previously he had done service on the Moon’s Near Side, where he was one of the founding members of the Club of Acrobatic Gymnastics, a typically lunar kind of sport whose adepts were capable of turning double-quadruple flips and of shouldering twenty-five-man pyramids. And this was the same Challiers who suddenly, for no apparent reason, was supposed to have suffered an attack of vertigo a hundred feet away from the station? A man who, even assuming he had been overcome by dizziness, was too weak to take the easiest way back, down the slope, but not too weak to make a detour by way of the cliff, knowing that to reach the salvaged portion of the road he would have to scale the wall of boulders at the rear of the station—and at night, no less?

There was one other detail that to Pirx’s way of thinking (and not only his) directly contradicted the version set forth in the official record. Everything at the station was in its proper place, with one exception: the packets of plates found lying on the kitchen table. Supposing Challiers had really gone up to the shaft, made the switch, but instead of making a detour by way of the cliff, come straight back by the usual route, bringing the exposed plates with him. Now, then, why had he left them on the table? And where was Savage at the time? The commission theorized that the plates in the kitchen were from a previous batch, that one of the scientists must have accidentally left them lying on the table. Yet no plates were ever found on Challiers’s body, a circumstance the commission attributed to his fatal fall—that is, they could have slipped out of the pocket of his space suit and vanished in one of the thousand or more crevices lining the talus.

To Pirx this smacked of stretching the facts to suit the hypothesis.

He shoved the records back into their files, the files into the drawer. He no longer needed them; he already knew them by heart. He told himself—intuited with absolute certitude—that the missing clue was not to be traced to psychology, that the fatalities were caused by something other than a fainting spell, vertigo, or momentary blackout. The answer, he knew, lay somewhere inside or outside the station. With that in mind, he set out to inspect it, compartment by compartment, not in search of clues but simply to familiarize himself with its operational systems. He would do it leisurely; he had time. The pressure chamber seemed like a logical place to begin. First the inner door. Chambers of this type were usually equipped with a mechanism for releasing both the inner and outer hatches, and this one was no exception. The system was designed so that when the outer hatch was open, the inner door could not be opened, this to safeguard against accidents caused by a simultaneous opening of both hatches. As an added precaution, the inner hatch was designed to open toward the inside, so that in an emergency the pressure inside the station would slam it shut with a force of nearly eighteen tons, though the system was far from foolproof: a hand or an object—a tool, for example—could always get caught between the door and the frame, triggering an explosive decompression.

To further complicate matters, the hatch was continuously monitored by a control located in the radio station. An open hatch was registered by a red light on the console, automatically tripping a green monitoring signal. This was a nickel-ringed eye, centered on a tracking screen. A pulsating “butterfly” in the eye meant that the subject outside the station was breathing normally; a calibrated line monitored his position, relative to the output source. The oscilloscope, rotating in unison with the dome-mounted radar antenna, displayed the station’s environment in phosphorescent outline. Each sweep of the oscilloscope flooded the tube with that familiar fluorescent glow, a space-suited body showing up as a blip of considerable luminosity. By monitoring this elongated emerald-green speck, one could plot its movements against the dimly illuminated background. The upper half of the screen corresponded to the terrain below the northern summit, the bottom half to the southern zone, which included the cliff area, strictly off limits at night.

The remote respiration monitor and the radar tracking system functioned independently of one another. The “eye” was activated by a transmitter connected to the space suit’s oxygen-inlet valve; it operated on a near-infrared frequency, the radar beam on half-centimeter radio waves.

The system was equipped with one tracker and one eye, since station regulations prohibited more than one egress at a time. The one remaining inside the station was required to keep the other under constant surveillance, hastening to the rescue in event of an emergency.

In practice, the plate change was so routine and consumed so little time that the one staying behind could, simply by keeping the door to the radio station open, monitor the instruments without interrupting his kitchen duty. Radio contact could also be maintained, except during the predawn hours when the terminator, that boundary between night and day, whose arrival was always announced by a torrent of static, rendered voice communication next to impossible.

Pirx experimented with the play of signals. He opened the hatch; the red light flashed, the willow-green “eye” went on but remained dormant, its winglike appendages collapsed into listless threads in the absence of any input. The oscilloscope sweep rotated on the face of the tube, conjuring up rigid silhouettes of rock: stone spirits inhabiting a petrified landscape. Not a single light pulse marred its orbital sweep, confirming the lack of input on the breathing monitor.

The next time Langner went out to change the plates, Pirx was able to observe the monitoring system in action.

The red signal flashed, then faded as Langner opened and closed the outer hatch behind him. The butterfly began to palpitate within a few minutes, the pulsations growing more accelerated as the astrophysicist started up the slope at a brisk pace. The light pulse transmitted by his space suit lingered on the screen after each sweep of the tracing beam. Suddenly the butterfly contracted, the screen went blank, the pulse vanished, as Langner descended into the shaft. The lead-lined walls were intercepting the wave transmissions, thought Pirx. Simultaneously the main console flashed a crimson
ALARM
and the profile on the screen changed.

Then Pirx understood why. The radar antenna, its grid constantly gyrating, had reduced the angle of inclination to sweep increasingly distant sectors. The system was responding to the “unknown”: the subject had momentarily slipped out of the range of its electromagnetic vision. Three or four minutes later the butterfly resumed its fluttering motion and the radarscope picked up the missing target. Both components were again registering it, as Langner, now up out of the shaft, began heading back to the station. The alarm signal stayed on; unless switched off manually, it would stay on for another two hours before being shut off automatically. The shutoff was to prevent the system, if inadvertently left on, from consuming too much battery-stored electricity.

The more expert he became at the station’s operational systems, the less complicated he found them to be. Langner never once got in the way of his experiments. To him the commission’s report seemed plausible enough. “Accidents do happen,” he said.

“The plates?” he said in reply to Pirx’s objection. “The plates mean nothing. People do funny things when they’re in a panic. Logic is the first thing to desert them, quicker than life. When that happens, anyone will act irrationally…”

Pirx decided to drop the matter.

The long lunar night was nearing the end of its second week. Pirx, for all his sleuthing, was no wiser now than at the beginning. Maybe he was up against one of those unsolvable, one-in-a-million-type cases… Bit by bit, he began lending Langner a hand with his experiments. He had to pass the time somehow. He even learned how to operate an astrograph (It’s turning out to be a routine training mission after all, he thought) and took turns trekking back and forth to the shaft.

At last it came, the thing he had been waiting for: dawn. Eager for news of Earth, he fiddled with the radio dials, but for all his tinkering could pull in only a hailstorm of cosmic crackle announcing the sunrise. Soon it was time for breakfast. After breakfast there were plates to be developed. Langner sat poring over one in particular, having stumbled across a handsome specimen of mesonic decay. He called Pirx over to the microscope, but Pirx reacted indifferently to the wonders of nuclear transformation. Then it was time for lunch, an hour at the astrographs, some stargazing… By then it was suppertime. Langner was already about in the kitchen when Pirx—it being his turn today—stuck his head through the door and said he was on his way out. Langner, who was trying to decipher a complicated recipe printed on a box of dehydrated eggs, told him, in a mumbling voice, to hurry—the omelets would be ready in ten minutes.

Suited up, with a fresh packet of plates in hand, tie-down straps secured to his neck ring, Pirx opened the doors to the kitchen and radio station, squeezed into the chamber, slammed the hermetic door shut, flipped the hatch, and crawled outside, leaving the hatch cover slightly ajar for a speedy return.

He was circumscribed by cosmic darkness, incomparably thicker than any on Earth, where the atmosphere always emits a faint radiation of light. He took his bearings by the stars; where the patterns of known constellations were truncated by a starless black, a rocky presence made itself felt. He switched on his headlamp and, with a pale concentration of light bobbing rhythmically before him, made his way up to the shaft. He swung his heavy boots gracefully over the rim—lunar lightness was easy to master, far easier than readjusting to Earth’s gravity—groped for the top rung, and lowered himself into the well.

As he squatted down and bent over the plate racks, his headlamp flickered and went out. He gave his helmet a pat; the light came back on. A loose contact, he thought. He had just started to collect the plates when the headlamp blinked—and went out again. Pirx deliberated in the dark. He wasn’t worried about the return trip—he knew the trail by heart. Besides, there were always the station’s dome lights—one green, the other blue—to guide him. But one false step in the dark and he ran the risk of damaging the plates. Another blow to the helmet: it worked; the light came back on.

Losing no time, he jotted down the temperature, fitted the plates into their holders, but just as he was transferring the cassettes to the carrying case, the damned headlamp gave out again. This time he set aside the plates and gave his helmet several raps in a row. By now he had observed a certain pattern: when he stood up straight, the lamp worked fine; the moment he bent over, it went out. From then on he tried to hold his back straight while crouching down—an awkward position.

Finally the light went completely dead. There was no going back to the station now, not with the plates scattered helter-skelter. Leaning his back against the lowest rung, he unscrewed the lamp’s outer cap and pushed the mercury-vapor lamp deeper into its socket, then screwed the cap back on. The light was working again, but fitfully; as happens sometimes, the thread refused to grab. He tried every which way to get it back on; finally, running out of patience, he shoved the glass cover into his pocket, quickly picked up the old plates, replenished the racks, and started back up the ladder.

He was a half meter from the top when another light, wavering and fugitive, mingled with his own. He glanced up but saw only a star-pierced sky trapped in the well opening.

Your eyes are playing tricks on you, he thought.

He surfaced and, suddenly gripped by a vague unease, broke into a run, taking the downslope in enormous bounds—those long lunar hops that gave the illusion of speed, being, in fact, six times slower than the Earthly kind.