Tales of Pirx the Pilot (22 page)

Ouch! They’ll pay a pretty penny for that, he thought, referring to the shipowners, and he stepped into the pool of shadow under the tail section. When he stood directly beneath the main thrust chamber, he tilted back his head. Its gaping flange, too high for him to reach, was caked with soot. He sniffed the air suspiciously. The engines were cold, but the acrid and familiar stench of ionized gas was still in the air.

“Over here!” someone shouted in back of him. He spun around but saw no one. The same voice again, coming from what seemed like no more than three steps away.

“Hey, anyone home?” he yelled, his voice rebounding under the black, domelike tail bristling with nozzles.

Silence.

He cut across to the other side. Three hundred meters away, some men, strung out in a line, were in the process of hauling a fuel hose across the ground. The pad was otherwise deserted. He kept his ears open; then he again heard voices—distorted and unintelligible—this time coming from higher up. The exhaust ducts, he thought—they’re acting like dish reflectors… He trotted back, picked up his bag, and headed for the gantry.

He climbed the six-story flight unthinkingly, his mind on matters he would have been hard put to name. The gantry ended in a platform surrounded by an aluminum guardrail, but Pirx did not so much as pause for a glimpse of the scenery. No farewell glances, no fond good-byes. Before flipping open the hatch, he ran his fingers along the armor plating. Rough as a rasp, as a badly corroded rock.

“Just my luck,” he muttered. The hatch gave grudgingly, as if blocked by a boulder. A pressure chamber like the inside of a wine barrel. He ran his hand along the pipes and rubbed the dust between his fingers. Rust.

As he was squeezing through the inner hatch, he had a chance to observe that the gasket was a patch job. Passageways lined with flush-mounted lamps ran up and down like vertical tunnels, the light coalescing at the far end into a bluish blur. In the background the steady hum of electric fans, the nasal clucking of an invisible pump. He pulled himself up straight. He was surrounded by such a solid mass of deck and armor plate that it nearly felt a part of him, a prolongation of his own body. Nineteen thousand tons… Goddam!

On his way to the cockpit, he met no one, saw no one. A dead, vacuumlike silence reigned in the passageway, as if the ship were already spaceborne. The padded walls were stained, the guide lines slack and decayed. He saw sleeve joints that had been spliced and welded so many times they looked more like charred bulbs left over from a fire. He crossed one ramp, then another, and came out in a hexagonal compartment with rounded metal doors set in each of the walls. Cord-wrapped copper handles instead of pneumatic releases.

The displays stared vacantly, like glass cataracts. He punched the keyboard; the relay clicked and the metal console hummed. The screen remained dark.

“Now what?” he sighed. “Run and complain to the SSA?”

He opened the hatch. It looked more like a throne room than a cockpit. He saw himself mirrored in the blank screens; in his rain-crumpled hat, light overcoat, and with his suitcase at his side, he made the impression of some errant, law-abiding citizen. The contoured pilot seats, rather imposing in size, their backrests still preserving the deep imprint of a man’s body, stood on a dais. Setting his suitcase down on the floor, he went up to the nearest one, its shadowy projection looming like the last navigator’s ghost. He slapped the backrest until the dust tickled his nose, broke out in a fit of sneezing, then anger, and wound up laughing. The foam-rubber padding on the armrest was shot, the computers like nothing he’d ever seen before. Their designer must have modeled them on a Wurlitzer, he mused. The consoles were peppered with dials; no man could have monitored them all at the same time, not with a hundred eyes. He made a slow about-face and let his eyes roam from wall to wall surveying the tangle of soldered cables, corroded isolation plates, emergency manual hatches polished smooth from handling, the faded red finish of the fire extinguishers… Everything about this ship was so old and decrepit and dingy…

He kicked the seat’s shock absorbers, and immediately the hydraulics sprang a leak.

Oh well, he thought, if others can get her up, so can I; went back out into the passageway, came out through another hatch into the outboard passage, and kept on going. Just past the elevator shaft he noticed that the wall bulged a little and was a shade darker in one spot. One touch of the hand, palm down, bore out his suspicions: a cement patch. He scoured the passageway for signs of other ruptures but couldn’t find any; the rest of the walls and the ceiling were like new. His eyes meandered back to the patch. The cement was bumpy in places; Pirx thought he could make out the vague outline of handprints, proof of a job executed in terrific haste. He got into the elevator and rode down to the reactor, the different deck levels indicated by lighted numerals flashing through the window: 7 … 6 … 5…

It was cold down below. The passageway curved before joining up with others to become a long and narrow corridor, at the end of which he sighted the door to the reactor chamber. The closer he came, the lower the temperature dropped, turning his breath to silver vapor in the light of the dusty lamps. He shook his head in consternation. The freezers, he thought. They must be somewhere close by. He paused to listen. The metal bulkheads pulsated with a weak but steady vibration. As he passed under the ceiling—a steeply inclined ceiling, echoing his every footstep—he couldn’t rid himself of the impression that he was descending underground. The door was hermetically sealed. He exerted all his weight on the handle; it wouldn’t budge. He was just about to force it with his foot when he realized that the safety bolt needed pulling out first,

A double door, as sturdy as a bank vault door, followed. At eye level, in places where the enamel finish hadn’t completely flaked away, a few letters painted in red were still legible:
NG R
.

The door opened onto an even narrower passage, this one almost pitch-black. The moment he set foot inside the door, something clicked, his face was struck by a blinding light, and a warning sign flashed a skull and crossbones.

They weren’t taking any chances in those days, were they? he thought. The metal stairway reverberated with a loud clanging as he went down into the chamber. Down below, he had the sensation of standing at the bottom of a dry moat; opposite him, rising up like the battlement of some medieval fortress, was the reactor’s gray, two-story shielding, its surface pitted with yellowish-green, pockmarklike indentations: scars of old radiation leaks. He started to do a quick count but gave up as soon as he walked out onto the catwalk and examined the reactor from above; in some places the concrete wall was totally obliterated by the sealed leaks.

Supported by metal uprights, the catwalk was insulated from the rest of the chamber by glass panels wrapping all the way around: a huge transparent cube. Lead glass, probably—to cut down the radiation. A relic of atomic architecture. How quaint.

The gamma-ray counters were clustered under a small canopy, fanlike, each one aimed straight at the reactor’s belly. He found the gauges housed in a separate compartment, all of them on zero except for one: the reactor’s idling gauge.

Pirx worked his way down, knelt, and peered into the observation well. The periscope mirrors were discolored with age. Too much radiation exposure, he thought. So what? This was a trip to Mars, not Jupiter—with a ten-day turnaround. Fuel supply okay, enough for several runs. He activated the cadmium rods. The needle quivered and grudgingly shifted to the other end of the scale. He checked the delay: it was close enough to squeak by the SSA, but just barely.

Something stirred in the corner. A pair of luminous green dots. He kept an eye on them, flinching as they slowly slinked away. He closed in on it. It was a cat. A black and bony cat. Meowing softly, it rubbed its spine against his shin. Pirx smiled, canvassed the room until his eye landed on something high up on a metal shelf: a row of cages. Now and then something white flickered inside, a glittering black bead would show through the netting. Mice. They were still in use on some of the older ships—as live radiation gauges. He stooped down to stroke the cat, but it slipped away from him, stopped dead in its tracks, and turned in the direction of the room’s darkest, narrowest corner. Arching its back, meowing softly, it crept on outstretched paws toward a concrete buttress, beyond which the mouth of a passage gaped rectangularly. Wiggling the end of its tail, now stiffly perpendicular, it advanced slowly, so black as to be almost indistinguishable in the dark. Pirx, intrigued, crouched down for a better look. A small door, halfway open, was set in a sloping wall; something glinted inside, which at first he took to be a coil of metal hose. The cat stood transfixed and immobile, its hair on end, its stiffened tail describing little curls in the air.

“Aw hell, there’s nothing in there,” he grumbled, at the same time squatting down for a closer view inside the dark compartment. Someone was sitting inside, the upper half of its body giving off a dull, metallic sheen. The cat, meowing all the while, started for the chute. Pirx’s eyes gradually got accustomed to the dark; soon he could make out a pair of pointed knees raised up high, and shinguards, made of a low-luster metal, around which a pair of segmented arms was wrapped. Its head was lost in the shadows.

“Me-o-w-w,” went the cat.

One of the arms creaked, reached out, and laid its metal fingertips down to form a sloping ramp; instantly the cat sprinted up the arm and onto the shoulder of the hunched-over figure.

“Hey, you!” Pirx cried out, not sure himself whether he meant to address the cat or that other creature. The arm had begun to retract slowly, as if having to overcome a powerful resistance, when Pirx’s barking cry paralyzed it, causing its fingers to clank against the concrete.

“Who-is-there?” came a voice that sounded as if it were being filtered through a metal tube.

“What are you doing here?” asked Pirx.

“Ter-minus … free-freezing in he-here … ca-can’t see…” the robot stuttered in a husky voice.

“Are you in charge of the reactor?” asked Pirx, who was beginning to despair of learning anything from the robot, whose condition seemed as run-down and dilapidated as the ship itself. But something—the green eyes?—urged him on.

“Ter-minus … re-reactor…” it stammered from its concrete refuge. “Terminus in charge … reactor,” it repeated with something like moronic self-complacency.

“Get up!” Pirx shouted for lack of anything better to say. He heard a crunching of metal, stepped back a little, and watched as two iron gauntlets with splayed fingers came out of the dark, swiveled around, clamped hold of the rim, and began hoisting the rest of its creaking torso. A metal hulk, half doubled up, soon emerged and, with a lot of grinding and screeching in the joints, drew itself up straight. Oil leaks in the couplings had combined with the dust to form a dark sludge. The robot rocked back and forth, more like a knight in armor than an automaton.

“Is this your station?” asked Pirx.

The robot’s glass eyes rotated in opposite directions in 180-degree sweeps, lending the flat metal face a look of even greater vacuity.

“Sealant pre-prepared … two, six, eight pounds … can’t see too well … cold…”

The voice issued not from the head but from the robot’s breastplate.

The cat, curled into a ball, contemplated Pirx from its perch on the robot’s shoulder.

“Seal-ant pre-pared…” Terminus continued to grunt, accompanying his words now with a scooping and shoveling of the hands—the preliminary gesture of a procedure well known to Pirx: the sealing of radioactive leaks. As the rocking of the oxidized trunk gained momentum, the black cat hissed and clawed the metal plating, then lost its balance and bolted down, brushing Pirx’s leg in flight. The robot appeared not to notice. The words had stopped, but not the hands, whose movement became more and more convulsive, residual, a mute echo of his words, until finally grinding to a halt.

Pirx glanced up at the reactor wall, its surface scarred and fossillike, riddled all around with the dark stains of cement patches, then back at Terminus. He must have been as old as the ship itself, maybe older. His right shoulder didn’t match his left, there were welding scars on his hips and thighs, and the treated metal around the seams had taken on a gray-blue luster.

“Terminus!” He hollered as loudly as if he were addressing a deaf man. “Report to your station!”

“I hear and obey. Terminus.”

The robot retreated, crablike, to his sanctuary and began squeezing inside to the sound of crushing metal. Pirx’s gaze swept the room in search of the cat; it was nowhere to be seen. He climbed back up the stairs, sealed the airtight door behind him, and rode the elevator up to the navigation room on the fourth deck.

A squat and spacious room, with reddish oak paneling, a low beamed ceiling, and brass-ringed portholes that let in the daylight, it had more the feel of a ship’s cabin. Forty years ago such nautical decor had been the rage, even the vinyl wall coverings were a deliberate imitation of the old-style wainscoting. He opened one of the portholes and nearly rammed his head into a blank wall: the daylight was fake, artificially simulated by means of camouflaged lighting. He slammed the window shut and turned around. Star maps, colored a pale marine-blue, like the sea illustrations in a world atlas, draped from the chart tables clear down to the floor; the corners were littered with reams of carbon paper decorated with course diagrams; a plotting board, its surface embossed with circular depressions, stood under a small spotlamp; there was a desk in the comer, next to it a swivel oak desk chair, bolted to the floor and flanked by a hefty recessed bookshelf.

A real Noah’s Ark.

Is that why the agent had commented, after the signing of the contract, “You’re getting a historic ship”?

But “old” was not quite the same as “historic.”

He began pulling out the desk drawers, one by one, until he found what he was looking for: the log—a big, glossy, leather-bound book with tarnished clasps. He examined it standing up, not yet having mustered the courage to sit down in the sprawling, worn-out desk chair. He turned back the cover. The first page bore the date of the ship’s trial run, along with a photocopy insert of its technical specs. He glanced at the date again and batted his eyes; he wasn’t even born then! He turned to the last, and most crucial, entry. It confirmed what the agent had told him: for the past week the ship had been taking on machine equipment and general cargo for Mars. Lift-off, originally scheduled for the twenty-eighth, had been several times postponed, making this the third demurrage day. That explained the rush; the demurrage fees in a terrestrial spaceport were steep enough to bust a millionaire.