Tales of Pirx the Pilot (21 page)

“Dasher will be there first,” said Mindell, casting a side glance at the commander, “and forty minutes from now she’ll be radioing for help herself—”

He broke off as a voice filtered through the loudspeaker static.

“Dasher Aresterra to all those answering Albatross’s distress call. I have her on the monitor. She’s drifting on a course approximating ellipsis T-348 and her tail is cherry-red. No trace of any signal lights. SOS ship does not respond. Am shutting down to commence rescue operation. Out.”

Buzzers sounded next door. Mindell and another crew member stepped out of the room. Pirx’s muscles were cable-tense. Gawd, how he’d like to have been out there! A moment later Mindell came back.

“What’s all the ruckus?” inquired the commander.

“The passengers would like to know when they can resume dancing.” Mindell’s reply went unnoticed by Pirx, whose eyes remained riveted to the loudspeaker.

“It won’t be long now,” answered the skipper, calmly and without inflection, “Switch on the monitor; we’re coming within range. In a couple of minutes we should have a sighting. Mr. Mindell, better sound the alert again—we’re about to brake down to overdrive.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Mindell replied, and he left the room.

A voice came over the loudspeaker.

“Luna Base to Titan Aresterra, Sprite-702! Attention! Attention! Attention! Ballistic-8 reports sighting a flash with a luminosity of minus four in the center of sector sixty-five. No response from Dasher or Albatross. Possibility of a reactor explosion aboard Albatross. For reasons of passenger safety, Titan Aresterra is instructed to stop and report immediately. Ballistic-8 and Sprite-702 are to proceed at their own discretion. I repeat: Titan Aresterra is instructed…”

All eyes were on the commander.

“Mr. Mindell, can we stop within a milliparsec?”

Mindell consulted his wristwatch.

“No, sir. We’re coming in on video. I’d need at least 6
g
’s.”

“If we changed course?”

“Even then we’d get only 3
g
’s,” Mindell said.

“Well, that settles it.”

The commander got up and strode over to the microphone.

“Titan Aresterra to Luna Base. Impossible to stop at present velocity. Am altering course with a roll maneuver at half-thrust. Abandoning sector sixty-five for sector sixty-six, on a course of two-hundred-and-two. Clearance requested. Over.”

“Stand by for confirmation,” he said, turning and addressing the man who had been seated next to him earlier. Mindell barked into the intercom, buzzers sounded, lights flickered on the wall panels, and the room seemed to grow darker—a case of “dimout,” caused by a draining of blood from the eyes. Pirx planted his feet squarely on the floor. They were braking and turning at the same time. There were mild vibrations, the long, shrill whine of laboring engines.

“Sit down, all of you!” the commander suddenly yelled. “I don’t need any heroes around here!”

Everyone sat—or rather flopped—down on the floor, which was padded with a thick layer of foam rubber.

“All hell’s gonna break loose down below,” muttered a man sprawled at Pirx’s elbow. The commander overheard him.

“The insurance company will pay for it,” he said from his chair. The g-force was now three or better; Pirx could barely touch his face with his hand. By now all the passengers would be safe and sound in their cabins, he thought—but egads, what must it be like in the galleys and dining rooms! A whole shipload of broken china! And he could just see the greenhouse—what was left of it, that is!

“Ballistic-8 to all ships. I have the Albatross within scanner range, Hull completely clouded over, all except for stern, which is cherry-red. Am completing braking maneuver and sending out a search team to look for survivors. No response from Dasher. Out.”

The acceleration gradually lessened. Someone poked his head in through the door, permission was given to stand, and there was a quiet stampede to the door. Pirx was the last to enter the main control room. As in some movie theater for giants, the wall was taken up by a huge convex screen, measuring eight meters wide and sixteen meters tall. All lights were off in the control room. Against the black, star-studded background of space, in the left quadrant, lying somewhat below the Titan’s main axis, was the Albatross—a smoldering, incandescent sliver, its stern a glowing, fiery-red coal, not unlike the lit end of a cigarette. And this speck, this minute streak, formed the nucleus of a slightly flattened, diaphanous bubble, bristling with myriads of prickly, barblike extensions—a cloud blister gradually dissolving into starlight. Suddenly there was a slight surge in the direction of the screen. Down at the very bottom, in the lower-right-hand corner, a luminous dot had begun to pulsate. The Dasher!

“Uncontrollable chain reaction aboard the Albatross stop have casualties stop severe burns stop request doctors stop transmitter damaged by explosion stop reactor leaking stop preparing to jettison reactor if unable to control leakage stop”—Pirx deciphered from the steadily blinking light.

The hull of the Albatross was no longer to be seen—only a blistery, yellowish, amber-colored clump suspended among the stars. The farther it drifted into the lower-left-hand corner, the more the Titan towered over it as it steered a new course out of the disaster-ridden sector.

The door to the radio room was ajar, allowing a shaft of light to penetrate the darkness within—along with the sound of a radio transmission.

“Ballistic-8 to Luna Base. Am parked in the central region of sector sixty-five. Dasher located milliparsec below me. Reports casualties and reactor leakage. Signals that she’s preparing to jettison reactor. Am answering her call for medical assistance. Search mission hampered by contamination caused by radioactive cloud with a surface temperature in excess of 1,200. Titan Aresterra in range, passing over me at full thrust and heading for sector sixty-six. Am waiting for arrival of Sprite-702 to launch joint rescue operation. Out.”

“To your stations, men!” someone boomed just as the lights at the back of the control room flickered on. There was a sudden flurry of activity, a scattering in several directions at once; Mindell stood by the control desk, giving orders; a number of buzzers went off at the same time… Before long the only ones left in the room were the commander, Mindell, and Pirx—and the young radiotelegraph operator, who stood alone in the corner, opposite the screen, and watched as the bubble gradually swelled and faded into the background.

“Oh, I didn’t recognize you,” said the commander, his hand extended in a handshake, as if just noticing Pirx for the first time. “Any word from the Sprite?” he inquired over Pirx’s shoulder of someone standing in the doorway.

“Yes, sir. She’s backing up.”

“Good.”

They lingered for a while longer, their eyes resting on the screen. The last trace of polluted cloud had evaporated, the screen once again filling with a raw and starry blackness.

“What do you think? Any survivors?” asked Pirx, assuming for some reason that the commander was more in the know than he was. A commander, after all, was supposed to know everything.

“Their deadlights must have jammed,” the skipper replied. He was at least a head shorter than Pirx, with hair the color of lead. Pirx couldn’t remember whether it had always been that gray.

“Mindell!” the commander called out, catching sight of his engineer passing by. “Lift the passenger alert, will you? They can go back to their dancing now.” Addressing the silent Pirx, he said, “Ever aboard the Albatross?”

“No.”

“A western company. Twenty-three thousand tons.” He was interrupted. “Yes? What is it?”

The radio operator handed him a message. Pirx could make out only the beginning: “Ballistic to…”

He stepped back out of the way. When he saw that he was still blocking traffic, he retreated into the corner and stood against the wall. Presently Mindell came barging in.

“Any news of the Dasher?” asked Pirx. Mindell was mopping his brow with a handkerchief, this man whom Pirx was beginning to feel he had known for years,

“A close shave,” said Mindell, trying to catch his breath. “Got hit by the blast, sprang a leak in the cooling system—that sonofabitch is always the first to blow. First- and second-degree burns. The medics are already there.”

“Ballistic’s team?”

“Yep.”

“Commander! Luna Base!” Someone called out from the door leading to the radio room, taking the commander away. Pirx stood facing Mindell, who pocketed his handkerchief and instinctively touched his swollen cheek.

Pirx could have gone on grilling him, but thinking better of it, gave him only a slight nod and ducked into the radio room. The loudspeaker was deluged with inquiries about the Albatross and the Dasher—from ships scattered in five different sectors. Finally, Luna Base had to silence everyone so it could go about unscrambling the snarl that had sprung up around sector 65 as a result of the recent ban on traffic.

The Titan’s commander could be seen sitting and writing at his desk. Suddenly the telegraph operator took off his earphones and shoved them to one side, as if they were no longer needed—at least that was how Pirx interpreted his gesture. He was on the verge of asking about the crew of the Albatross, whether anyone had managed to escape, when the operator, sensing that someone was standing behind him, raised his head and looked him straight in the eye. Without saying another word, Pirx took his leave, through the door marked
STELLAR PERSONNEL ONLY
.

TERMINUS

It was still quite a hike from the stop, all the more so for someone carrying a suitcase. A predawn fog hugged the ground, spectral white in the half-light. Diesel trucks, announced by silvered columns of exhaust, tore along the asphalt highway with their tires humming, their taillights flashing bright red as they rounded the bend. Pirx shifted his suitcase to the other hand and gazed skyward, A low-lying fog, he thought, seeing stars overhead. Routinely he scouted the sky for the Mars reference star. Just then the gray dawn quivered and the fog was shot through with a searing green. Instinctively he lowered his jaw. There was a low rumble, a hot blast. Ground tremors. Seconds later a green sun rose above the land. The snow glared sinisterly all the way to the horizon, the shadows of the road posts skipped on ahead, and those things not already tinted a brilliant green were suffused with ember-red. Pirx set his suitcase down and, rubbing his hands, watched as one of the spiring minarets—eerily luminous, towering above the basin’s hilly skyline as though obeying some strange architectural whim—wrenched itself loose from Earth and began its majestic ascent atop a pinnacle of fire. The thunderous roar soon became something palpable, filling the atmosphere; through his fingers he saw in the distance a cluster of towers, buildings, and reservoirs bathed in a brilliant aureole. The windows of the control tower were ablaze, much as if a fire were raging inside; contours buckled and broke in the incandescent air as the instigator of this spectacle vanished into the heavens with a triumphant roar, leaving behind an enormous black ring of smoking earth. Before long a thick, warm shower of condensation descended from the star-studded sky.

Pirx picked up his bag and trudged on. It was as if the blast-off had breached the night; daylight came with a rush now, brightening everything around him: the melting snow lying in the ditches, the valley floor emerging from its misty cover.

Skirting the shiny, wet ships were long, grass-covered bunkers, the place where the ground crews took cover. The dead, water-soaked grass was slippery, hard to get a foothold on; but Pirx was in too much of a hurry to bother hunting for the nearest crossing. He took the grassy slope in one leaping charge—and feasted his eyes on her.

She stood alone, tall as a steeple, surpassing all others in height. An obsolete giant. He picked his way among the puddles on the concrete, the puddles soon tapering off where the water had been instantly evaporated by the thermal blast, until the rectangular slabs rang out hard and crisp under his feet as after a summer dry spell. The closer he got, the farther back went his head. The ship’s armored hull looked as if it had been plastered with glue, then buffed with mud-caked rags. An attempt had obviously been made to reinforce the tungsten shield with carbide asbestos fiber. And with good reason. Ships of that mass could have their hulls ripped to shreds—literally skinned—by the heat of air friction during atmospheric reentry. And stripping it did no good, either; the process just repeated itself, so horrendous was its aerodynamic drag. As for its stability, its maneuverability … it was downright criminal, a matter for the Cosmic Tribunal.

The suitcase was getting heavier, but Pirx took his sweet time, the itch to inspect the ship carefully from the outside being much too powerful to resist. The gantry stood etched against the sky like Jacob’s ladder; everything was coated the same dull gray: the hull, the empty crates strewn about on the concrete, the metal cylinders, the rusty scrap iron, the coils of metal hose… The random chaos testified to an expeditious loading. When he was within twenty paces of the gantry, he put down his suitcase and surveyed the launchpad. Hm, cargo already aboard, he thought, seeing the huge mobile loading ramp standing less than two meters from the ship’s hull, its grappling hooks dangling in midair. He circled the steel hold-down clamp being used to anchor the ship—now a soaring black tower against the crimson dawn—and stepped under the skirt. The concrete around the base of the clamp sagged under the tremendous weight, with cracklike fissures radiating in all directions.