Tales of Pirx the Pilot (19 page)

Huge, swollen, bulging eyes, full of ungodly terror; a gaping, froglike mouth with a blotchy, drooping tongue. Where his neck was he saw a bunch of stiffened cords, vibrating so hard they all but obliterated his lower jaw—and this monstrosity with the bloated, ashen face was yelling, yelling, yelling…

He made to close his eyes … couldn’t. He tried to focus on the screen again … couldn’t. The freak shackled to the seat was twitching more and more violently, as if bent on snapping his straps. Powerless to do anything else, Pirx stared straight ahead at the monster. He himself was oblivious of the convulsions, of everything except a choking sensation in the chest: he couldn’t take in air.

Somewhere in the vicinity he heard a hideous grinding of teeth. He was no longer himself, had no more identity, period; he knew nothing, had lost the use of his limbs and body, of everything except the leg on the braking pedal. His eyesight was dimming, getting blurrier by the second; soon it was teeming with lights—tiny, dazzling, multitudinous. He wiggled his leg; it started twitching. He raised it up; he let it back down. The mutant in the mirror was pale as ash, its mouth flecked with foam, its eyes bulging clear out of their sockets, its body convulsed.

Then he did the only thing that still lay within his power. He cocked his leg, brought it up fast, and kneed himself in the face, full force. The blood ran down his chin; the pain in his mutilated lips blinded him; everything went black.

“Ahhhh,” he gurgled. “Ahhhh…”

The gurgling was his own voice.

The pain abated, and the old numbness returned. Hey! What gives, anyway? Where the hell was he? He was nowhere; there was nothing anywhere…

He went on battering, pulverizing his face with one knee, his body contorted in a madman’s convulsions. Then it stopped. The howling, that is. What he heard next was the sound of his own garbled, blood-choked, sickening cry.

He had arms again, arms and hands. They were like wood, and ached with the slightest exertion, like torn ligaments, but he could
move
them. Blindly, with half-numb fingers, he groped for the straps and started undoing them, clutched the armrest with both hands, and stood up. His legs shook; his whole body felt beaten to a pulp. Grabbing hold of the line that stretched across the control room, he advanced toward the mirror and braced himself against its frame.

The man in the mirror was Pirx.

His face was no longer ashen, but bloodied; his nose was a swollen bruise. Blood was oozing from his mangled lips; his cheeks were livid, puffy; there were dark circles under his eyes and faint spasms under his chin—and all this was happening to him, Pirx. He wiped the blood from his chin, spit, coughed, took a few deep breaths—a hopeless physical wreck.

He stepped back to check the screen. The machine was still cruising in reverse, unpowered. Through its own momentum. The white disk was still tailing him, 2 kilometers off his bow.

Steadying himself on the cable, he made his way back to the contour couch—unthinking. His hands began to shake—the normal delayed reaction following a shock, no cause for alarm. Something not quite right in front of the seat…

The top of the automatic transmitter cassette. Badly dented. He nudged the lid; it collapsed. Components badly damaged. How had
that
happened? He must have done it himself with his foot. When was that?

He sank into the contour couch, fired his roll jets, went into a turn.

The little disk hesitated, then began gliding toward the edge of the screen; but instead of disappearing, it bounced back out into the middle, like a tennis ball. For crying out loud!

“You bastard!” His voice was full of vile loathing.

Thanks to this latest gambit, he had almost gone into stationary orbit! Yet the fact remained: the light had not left the screen when he turned. That could mean only one thing: the light was artificial, generated by the screen itself. A screen, after all, is not a window. A manned spacecraft is equipped not with windows but with video scanners, with cameras mounted externally on the ship’s armored hull, together with a transformer for converting the electrical impulses into images on a cathode-ray tube. Was this just some screwy malfunction in the scanner? Had the same thing happened to Thomas’s and Wilmer’s? And what became of them, anyway?

No time to think about such things now. Better to flip on the emergency transmitter.

“Patrolship AMU-111 to Base,” he said. “AMU-111 to Base. Present reading: sector boundary one-zero-zero-nine-dash-one-zero-one-zero, equatorial zone. Have located trouble, am coming home…”

Pirx landed some six hours later, at which time a full-scale inquiry was launched, the investigation lasting an entire month. The first thing to be overhauled was the scanner. It was a new, improved model, installed on all the AMU ships the year before and until now having a perfect performance record. Not a single malfunction had been reported.

After laborious testing, the electronics engineers finally discovered the cause of the light. After several thousand hours of testing, the vacuum in the cathode-ray tube developed a leak, causing a loose charge to appear on the screen’s inner surface, observable on the outer screen as a milky-white spot. The movements of the charge were governed by a set of complicated laws. During periods of acceleration, the charge would become distended over a broad area, as if flattened against the inside glass, making it appear as if the speck were approaching. When reverse thrust was applied, the charge would withdraw deeper into the tube. Zero and constant acceleration brought the charge slowly back into the center of the screen. It was capable of unlimited movement, but its favorite resting position, during stationary orbit or periods of unpowered flight, was front center. Research on the charge continued, and its dynamics were represented by a sixth-order differential equation. It was also demonstrated that the charge tended to disperse in response to strong light impulses, and to become more concentrated only when the intensity of impulses received by the CRT was extremely low—such as in space, for example, when a ship was farthest from the Sun. If as much as a ray of sunlight brushed the screen, the charge would vanish for several hours.

The findings of the electronics experts filled an entire volume, copiously laced with mathematical formulas. The next to tackle the case was a team of doctors, psychologists, and specialists in astroneurosis and astropsychosis. And again, after many hours of investigation, it was shown that the loose charge pulsated, which to the naked eye manifested itself as tiny dark squiggles creeping across the luminous disk. The frequency of these pulsations, too brief to be recorded individually by the eye, affected the so-called theta rhythm of the brain’s cortex, intensifying the oscillation potential to such a degree that it could induce a seizure identical to an epileptic fit. Other contributing factors were the state of absolute inertia and the absence of any external stimuli, except for prolonged and uninterrupted exposure to a pulsating light.

The experts credited with these discoveries became internationally famous. Today electronics experts the world over are conversant with the Ledieux-Harper effect, caused by the formation of loose charges in high-vacuum cathode-ray tubes, whereas astrobiologists are familiar with Nuggelheimer’s atactic-catatonic-clonic syndrome.

Pirx remained an unknown in the world of science. Only the most assiduous readers could infer, from remarks printed in fine type in some of the evening editions, that, thanks to Pirx, pilots of the future would be spared the fate of Thomas and Wilmer, those two unfortunate victims who perished in the outer regions of space after losing consciousness in a high-speed chase after an illusory light.

The denial of fame did not bother Pirx in the slightest. Nor did he mind having a new tooth put in to replace the one demolished by his knee, nor even the fact that he had to pay for it out of his own pocket.

THE
ALBATROSS

It was a six-course meal—not counting the trimmings. Wine carts rolled noiselessly up and down the glass aisles. Spotlights illuminated the tables from above: lemon-yellow for the turtle soup, bluish-white for the fish dish, the roast chicken entrée being bathed in a rosy-pink, tinged with a warm, silky gray. Fortunately, there was no dimming of the lights with the espresso—because Pirx’s mood was somber enough as it was. The dinner had sapped all his energy. He swore that from now on he’d stick to the snack bar on the lower deck. Too swanky in here for his taste, too much time spent worrying about his elbows. And what a fashion show!

A sunken dining room, with the floor half a flight below level and a circular landing: an enormous, creamish-gold plate, arrayed with the world’s most sumptuous appetizers. The rustling of stiff, semitransparent gowns at his back. A gay and festive crowd. Live dance music … and live waiters, each decked out like a philharmonic conductor. “The
Transgalactic
offers you nonautomated service, cordial and intimate surroundings, genuinely human hospitality, and a completely live crew, each a master of his trade…”

Over coffee and a cigarette, Pirx tried to find a corner, some quiet place of refuge, to rest his eyes, A woman seated at a nearby table caught his fancy. Her neckline was shaded by a flat but rough stone. Not chrysoprase or chalcedony—most likely a souvenir from Mars. Must have cost a fortune, he thought, even though it looked like little more than a chunk of asphalt. Women shouldn’t have so much money.

He wasn’t overwhelmed. And he wasn’t appalled—just observant. Gradually he felt an urge to stretch his limbs. A stroll on the promenade deck, maybe?

He got up from the table, made a slight bow, and left the dining room. As he passed between some reflecting polygonal columns, he caught a glimpse of himself: a button was showing beneath the knot in his tie. Honestly, nobody wore these kinds of neckties anymore! In the corridor he paused to straighten his collar, stepped into the elevator, and zoomed up to the prom deck. The elevator door slid open without a sound. A sigh of relief: not a living soul in sight. One third of the vaulted ceiling, its glassed roof arching over several rows of deck chairs, resembled a gigantic eye fixed on the stars. The chairs were stacked with blankets, but were otherwise quite empty. Only one was occupied, at the very back—by an elderly eccentric, bundled to the neck, whose habit it was to dine an hour after everyone else, alone, in an empty dining room, veiling his face with a napkin if anyone so much as glanced in his direction.

Pirx settled himself in one of the chairs. Intermittently the deck was fanned by an undulating breeze that seemed to have its origin in the darkest recesses of space but was, in fact, pumped out by the ship’s invisible air-conditioning outlets. The engineers on the
Transgalactic
staff knew their stuff, all right. The deck chair was comfortable, more comfortable even than a pilot’s electronically designed contour couch. Pirx felt a slight chill, remembered the blankets, and bundled himself up as if making himself snug in a comforter.

Someone was coming. By way of the stairs—not the elevator. His dining-room neighbor. He tried to guess her age—no luck. She had on another dress, and he wondered whether it was the same woman. She stretched herself out, three chairs away from him, and opened a book. The artificial breeze ruffled the pages. Pirx looked straight ahead. The Southern Cross was palpably visible, as was the tail end of the Little Dipper, truncated by the window frame: a luminous speck against a black backdrop. A seven-day flight cruise. Hm. A lot could happen in a week’s time. He stirred deliberately, causing the thickish, neatly folded document in his inner pocket to crinkle softly. A surge of contentment: waiting for him on the other end was a second navigator’s berth. He knew his itinerary—the plane ride from North Land to Eurasia, then on to India. In his voucher were enough tickets to make a book, each blank a different color and in duplicate, stubs, coupons, gold trim—indeed, everything that belonged to the
Transgalactic
’s package deal fairly oozed with gold and silver. The woman sitting three chairs away from him was good-looking, very good-looking. The same, all right. Should he strike up a conversation? Introduce himself, at least? What a drag having such a short name—a name that was almost over before it began. And then, “Pirx” often came out sounding like something else. Talking on the telephone was the worst. Come on, say something. Fine, but what?!

He felt enervated again. From Mars the cruise had looked altogether different. Luckily for him, the shipowners on Earth were footing the bill—less out of generosity than for purely business reasons. He had logged nearly 3 billion kilometers, but this was his first trip on anything like a Titan. And what a far cry from a freighter! A rest mass of 180,000 tons; four main thrust reactors; a cruising speed of 65 kilometers per second; living accommodations for 1,200 passengers, with a choice of singles, doubles, or suites, all with private bath; guaranteed stable gravitation except during takeoff and landing; maximum safety conditions; all the modem conveniences; a 40-man crew, plus a staff of 260. Ceramite, steel, gold, palladium, chrome, nickel, iridium, plastic, Carrara marble, oak, mahogany, silver, crystal. Two swimming pools. Four movie theaters. Eighteen direct hookups with Earth—for the passengers alone! A concert hall. Six main decks, four promenade decks, automatic elevators, on-board booking on any ship in the fleet—a year in advance. Bars. Casinos. A department store. An artisans’ row—a true facsimile of an old-fashioned city lane, complete with wine cellars, gas lanterns, a moon, and a back-alley wall traversed by genuine back-alley cats. A greenhouse. And God knows what else. It would have taken a good month to make the grand tour, and then only one way!