Tales of Pirx the Pilot (15 page)

He was already standing by the dome, one hand clutching the rail, when a second burst of light cleaved the darkness. A flare! To the south! The metal bubble blotted any view he might have had of the rocket flare itself, but not the eerie luminescence reflected by the overhanging rocks, which lunged out of the dark and just as quickly retreated. He scampered monkey-fashion up to the peak of the dome. Impenetrable darkness. He regretted not having a flare gun with him. He switched on his radio. Static—the same goddamned lousy static! His eye fell on the hatch; it was open, a sign Langner was still inside.

“You dummy! Flare, my foot! It was a meteor! What you saw was a meteor colliding with the rocks at cosmic velocity!”

He dropped down into the chamber, sealed the hatch behind him, waited for the air pressure to reach a level of 0.8 kilogram per square centimeter, then opened the inner hatch. Undoing his helmet on the run, he stormed into the vestibule.

“Langner!”

Silence. Still in his g-suit, he barged into the kitchen. One sweeping glance told him it was empty. Dinner plates on the table, bowl of omelet batter on the counter, frying pan next to the red-hot burner…

“Langner!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. He flung down the exposed plates still in his hand and ducked into the radio station. Deserted. Something told him it was a waste of time to look in the observatory. So those
were
flares he had seen! Was it—yes, it had to be! Langner! But why had he left the station?

Then he saw it. The green eye was pulsating; Langner was out there—breathing, alive. He checked the scope. The tracing beam was picking up a small, tapered light pulse at the very bottom of the screen. Langner was heading for the cliff!

Without taking his eye from the screen, Pirx started screaming into the microphone:

“Langner! Stop! Stop! Hey, come back! Langner, stop!”

The receiver crackled with interference. The willow-green wings pulsated—not in rhythm to normal breathing, but sluggishly, tenuously, at times becoming alarmingly inert, signaling a possible respirator breakdown. The blip on the radar had reached the outer periphery; it was at the bottom of the coordinate grid, or roughly a kilometer and a half from the station, far enough to put Langner among the towering outcrops under the Gap. Then it ceased moving, flaring up with every sweep of the tracing beam, always in the same place.

Maybe he had fallen. Maybe he was lying unconscious…

Pirx dashed out into the corridor. Quick—outside! Get your ass into the pressure chamber! He got as far as the airtight door; as he was racing past the kitchen, something black against white had caught his eye. The photographic plates! They were lying right where he had dropped them in all the panic over his partner’s sudden disappearance…

He stood before the chamber door, too dumbfounded to move.

The whole thing was like a replay, a repeat performance. Langner cuts out in the middle of making supper, I take off after him, and—neither of us comes back. The hatch will be open… In a few hours the Tsiolkovsky team will start radioing the station… No one will answer…

A voice yelled, “Get going, you fool! What are you waiting for? He’s out there! Caught in an avalanche, for all you know. You can’t hear anything up here, remember? He’s still alive, pinned down somewhere, hurt, but alive, breathing! Come on, what are you waiting for?!”

He didn’t move. All of a sudden he spun around, stormed into the radio station, and checked the displays. Situation unchanged. The butterfly’s quivering, tenuous pulsations came at regular four- to five-minute intervals now; the blip on the radar was still hovering on the edge of the cliff…

He checked the position of the antenna. It was at the lowest possible angle, automatically positioned for maximum detection range.

He brought his face up close—very close—to the breathing monitor and remarked something peculiar. The green butterfly was not only furling and unfurling its tiny wings at regular intervals; it was also vibrating—like the breathing pulsations, but more accelerated and somehow overlapping them. Langner’s death throes? Convulsions? My God, the man was dying out there and all he, Pirx, could do was stand there, mouth agape, and monitor the movements of the cathode-ray tube, now aflutter with a double pulsation! Unexpectedly, acting purely on impulse, he grabbed the antenna cable and tore it out of the wall plug. At that point, something amazing happened: the butterfly, its antenna disconnected, cut off from any input, kept right on pulsating…

Guided by the same blind impulse, he lunged toward the console and enlarged the antenna angle. The blip under the Gap began drifting toward the edge of the screen. The radar kept sweeping the area at closer and closer range, then—suddenly—it picked up a second blip, this one larger and stronger than the first. Another space suit!

A man. It was moving like a man. Slowly, deliberately, it was proceeding downhill, skirting the obstacles in its path, now to the right, now to the left, heading straight for the Gap, toward that other, more distant dot—that other man?

Pirx’s eyes bulged. There were two dots—one close and mobile, the other far off and stationary. The Mendeleev station was manned by a team of two: Langner and himself. But the display said three. Impossible. The instrument had to be lying.

In less time than it took to think, Pirx was back in the chamber, armed with flare gun and cartridges. A minute later he was standing on top of the dome, firing as fast as he could load, straight down, in the direction of the Sun Gap. He had trouble ejecting the hot cartridges; the gun’s heavy butt kicked in his hand. There was no report, no loud bang, only a slight recoil followed by fiery efflorescence, a burst of brilliant green, then a purple glare; a shower of red drops, of sapphire stars… He fired indiscriminately, not being choosy about the colors. Finally, out of the impenetrable dark came a reply—an orange star that exploded over his head and showered him with iridescent ostrich feathers. Then another, this one in saffron-gold…

Pirx kept firing away, with Langner returning his fire. The gun flashes began to converge. Before long he discerned the figure of a man, eerily silhouetted against the brilliance. Pirx suddenly went limp, felt woozy. He was drenched from head to foot. Dripping as if he’d just stepped out of the bathtub, still clutching the flare gun, knees buckling, he sat down and dangled his legs through the open hatch, and waited—short of breath—for his partner to join him.

What had happened was this. After Pirx left, Langner had been so preoccupied with his powdered-egg recipe that it was a while—exactly how many minutes he couldn’t recall—before he remembered to check the monitors. It was clear that he did so around the time Pirx was tinkering with the headlamp. The moment Pirx disappeared from the radar’s scanning range, a servomechanism gradually reduced the antenna angle until the polarized pencil beam reached all the way to the foot of the Sun Gap. When a blip appeared on the screen, Langner automatically assumed it to be a space suit, the “magic eye,” now dormant because of Pirx’s momentary absence, confirming his suspicion. Whoever was out there—and he knew it had to be Pirx—was either unconscious or suffocating. Langner lost no time in suiting up and going out.

Actually, the radar had picked up one of the aluminum stakes, the one at the top of the cliff, nearest the station. Langner might have discovered his mistake if not for the “eye,” which seemed to corroborate the radar input.

The papers later reported that the “eye” and the radar tracking system were both controlled by an electronic brain; that at the time of Roget’s death, this brain had recorded the Canadian’s breathing pattern, storing it in its memory; and that given the same input data, it was “programmed” to reproduce the same pattern again. In effect, the phenomenon had been the result of a “conditioned reflex.”

There was a much simpler explanation. The station’s monitoring system was controlled not by an “electronic brain” but by an automatic sequencer. The convulsive breathing pattern was the result of a simple mechanical failure—in this case, a burned-out condenser. When the outer hatch was inadvertently left open, the voltage jumped circuits, and that in turn was transmitted on the magic-eye grid as a “vibration.” Only at first glance did it resemble a dying man’s breathing pattern; closer inspection revealed it to be what it in fact was: a glitch.

Langner had been lured to the cliff in the mistaken (as it turned out) belief that Pirx was stranded. He had used his headlamp to navigate in the dark and, when circumstances required it, the flares. That accounted for the two bright flashes seen by Pirx on his way back from the shaft. Within four or five minutes Pirx was up on the station dome, trying to capture Langner’s attention with the flares. And that’s how the drama ended.

In the case of Challiers and Savage, the sequence of events was somewhat different. Savage, too, might have urged the departing Challiers to hurry back, just as Langner had done with Pirx. Then again, Challiers might have lost track of the time while reading, and fallen behind schedule. Whatever the reason, he neglected to close the hatch. But by itself the mechanical malfunction would not have been enough to cause the fatalities. Something else was needed, some purely fortuitous, coincidental factors. Because something must have distracted Challiers in the shaft long enough for the radio antenna, its inclination enlarging with every sweep, to reflect the aluminum marker on the cliff.

What could have distracted him? A mystery. A headlamp malfunction? The odds spoke against it. Yet something definitely had delayed him, and in the interim there had appeared that fatal blip that Savage, and later Langner, had mistaken for a space suit. Subsequent tests established that the delay must have been at least thirteen minutes long.

Savage had gone down to the cliff to look for Challiers. Challiers, returning from the shaft to find the station deserted, then saw the same image later observed by Pirx, which made him go out in search of Savage. Savage probably got as far as the Sun Gap, realized the blip was a reflection of the aluminum marker, but took a fall on his way back and punctured his faceplate. Or he may not have suspected a mechanical malfunction but, driven by his failure to locate Challiers, might have been lured into treacherous terrain and fallen. The exact circumstances of his death were never ascertained. Certain it was, however, that both Canadians were dead.

Logically the accident must have struck around dawn. For if not for the radio blackout, the man on duty at the station could have communicated, without having left the kitchen, with the one outside. Haste must also have been a factor, since only when the outer hatch was left unsealed did the mechanical failure manifest itself. Too, the person bent on saving time was more apt to
lose
time through his haste—by dropping a packet of plates, by upsetting the plate rack… Too, a radar blip is indistinct enough for a metal marker located 2,000 meters away to be mistaken for a man’s space suit. The convergence of all these factors made such a tragedy not only possible but probable. Finally, the man on duty must have been in the kitchen, or somewhere else, but in any case not in the radio station, where he would have seen that his partner was correctly oriented, and would not have taken the blip in the southern perimeter for a space suit.

It was no coincidence that Challiers’s body was found within a close radius of the spot where Roget had perished. He fell and landed directly below the site posted with the aluminum marker, deliberately placed there as a warning. Challiers was obviously steered in that direction by the radar input.

The technical cause was simple and straightforward—to the point of being trivial. All it required was a series of coincidences and the presence of such factors as radio interference and an open pressure-chamber hatch.

More noteworthy were the psychological factors. When the monitoring device, in the absence of any input, displayed the internal voltage oscillation as a “breathing,” pulsating butterfly, and when the radar screen projected a space-suit-like image, both men, first Savage and then Challiers, had been quick to accept these as reliable visual presentations, each believing the other to be in mortal danger. The same held true for Pirx and Langner.

Such responses were only natural for men intimately acquainted with the details of Roget’s death, of that long and agonizing ordeal luridly and dramatically transmitted on the “magic eye.”

If, then, as was purported, it was simply a case of a “conditioned reflex,” then it was manifested not by the hardware but by humans. Half-unconsciously, each of them, Pirx and Langner, had been aware of a possible repetition of Roget’s fate, this time with one of themselves as the victim.

“Now that we know all the circumstances,” said Professor Taurov, a cyberneticist from the Tsiolkovsky team, “tell us, Pirx—what tipped you off? You said yourself you didn’t understand the cause-and-effect mechanism…”

“I don’t know,” said Pirx. The blinding white of the Sun-glazed peaks throbbed through the window. Their needle tips—like baked bones—pierced the thick black firmament. “The plates, I guess. As soon as I saw them, I realized I had done exactly what Challiers had done with them—dumped them on the table. The plates—well, okay, that could have been a coincidence. But we were having omelets for supper—the same thing they were having that night. That was one too many; it had to be more than just a fluke, I figured. Yep, the omelets are what saved us…”

“Yes,” said Professor Taurov. “The open hatch was indeed a function of the omelets—or, more accurately, of your haste to make it back in time for supper. There your perceptions were quite apt. But,” he added, “they would
not
have saved you if you had trusted blindly in the monitors.” He paused. “On the one hand, we have no choice but to trust in our technology. Without it we would never have set foot on the Moon. But … sometimes we have to pay a high price for that trust.”

“That’s true,” said Langner, rising up from his chair. “But, gentlemen, I must tell you what impressed me most about my cosmic colleague. As for me, that little stroll down the cliff … well, it fairly ruined my appetite. But this one”—he placed his hand on Pirx’s shoulder—“after all that happened, he polished off I don’t know how many omelets. Amazing! I mean, I always thought of him as a decent, regular sort of fellow…”