Tales of Pirx the Pilot (23 page)

He thumbed through the book slowly, his eye occasionally lingering over a bit of navigational lingo, course data, or computer figures—but only in passing, as if on the lookout for something else. Only one page stood out from all the others, the one headed:

Ship consigned to Ampers-Hart Shipyard for class A repairs.

The entry was three years old.

Let’s see what repairs were made. Out of idle curiosity he scanned the itemized list of part replacements, his incredulity growing from one item to the next: ablation shield, sixteen deck sections, shielding braces, airtight bulkheads…

New bulkheads and shielding braces?!

Okay, the agent
had
said something about an accident in the past. But accident, hell!
Disaster
would be more like it!

He flipped back a page to see what he could dig out of the entries that came before:

Port of destination: Mars. Payload: General cargo. Crew: Pratt—engineer and first officer. Wayne—second officer. Potter and Nolan—pilots. Simon—mechanic
…

Hm. No mention of the skipper.

He turned back another page and winced.

The date of the ship’s first command was—nineteen years ago! The signature of the ship’s first commanding officer read
Momssen, first navigator.

Momssen!

A dry heat engulfed him.

It can’t be! Not
the
Momssen! But … that was on another ship!

The date squared, though; it was exactly nineteen years ago that… Whoa, there! Easy does it…

He went back to the log. A strong and legible hand, in faded ink. First day out. Second day, third day… Moderate reactor leakage: 0.42 roentgen per hour. All leaks sealed. Course coordinates such-and-such… Stellar fix…

Come on, come on!

He was no longer reading, just skimming over the handwritten lines.

There it was!

The date he had been forced to memorize as a schoolkid, and underneath it:

1640 hours. Rec’d. Deimos’s met. warning re: cloud headed our way from Jupiter perturbation of the Leonids. Cloud approaching on a collision course at vel. 40 km/sec. MW confirmed. PM alert sounded for crew. Despite persistent reactor leakage of 0.42 roentgen per hour, full-thrust escape maneuver on a course approximating Orion delta.

New paragraph:

1651. Im
—

The rest of the page was blank.

No marks, no scribbling, no ink stains—nothing except for the final vertical stroke of the letter
m,
dipping down in willful defiance of the rules of good penmanship.

This wobbly, several-millimeters-long extension, breaking off the text to wander aimlessly across the white expanse of paper, told the whole story: the crash on impact, the exploding decompression, the shrieks of men at the moment their throats and eyeballs burst…

But Momssen’s ship had a different name. What was it called?

It was unreal. A ship almost as famous as Columbus’s, and he couldn’t remember the name of it!

What was the name of that ship, Momssen’s last ship?

He hopped over to the bookshelf. The fat volume of
Lloyd’s Shipping Register
seemed to plunk down right into his hands. A word that began with
C. Cosmonaut?
No.
Condor?
Not it, either. A longer name … the title of a play … a hero, a knight…

He flung the book down on the desk and squinted at the walls. Hanging between the chart cabinet and the bookshelf were some instruments: a hygrometer, a radiation counter, a carbon-dioxide gauge…

He scrutinized each of them, turning them this way and that. Not one inscription. They looked brand new, in fact.

Over in the corner!

Screwed into the oak paneling was a chronometer, plainly visible because of its shiny dial. A rather quaint-looking model, an antique, with cute little brass doodads around the dial… Wasting no time, he undid the screws, carefully slipped the chassis out with his fingertips, and cradled it in his palm. The glossy, brass-plated bottom bore the engraving
CORIOLANUS
.

That was it—the name of Momssen’s ship.

His eyes swept the cabin. So it was in this room and in this very same chair that Momssen had sat during the final moments!

He opened
Lloyd’s Skipping Register
to the C’s.
CONDOR, CORINTHIAN, CORSAIR, CORIOLANUS
:
Registered with the company of … rest mass 19,000 tons … launched in the year … uranium-hydrogen reactor, type … cooling system … maximum thrust … introduced on the Terra-Mars line; listed as missing following a collision with the Leonids; located sixteen years later by a patrolship in the aphelion of its orbit … underwent class A repairs at Ampers-Hart … reintroduced by the Southern Company on the Terra-Mars line … licensed as general cargo transport … insurance premium
… Ho hum… Ha, here it is: …
under the name
THE BLUE STAR
.

He shut his eyes… Gosh, it’s quiet in here. So that’s it—they changed the name. To make it easier to hire a crew, I bet. Maybe that’s what the agent had meant when he said…

He began thinking back to when he was still a cadet. One of their patrolships from the Base had discovered the wreckage… Those were the days when meteorite warnings always came too late… Then there was the Commission’s report, brief and to the point: “Conditions beyond control. No one at fault.”… What about the crew? The evidence indicated that not all of them had been killed instantly … that among the survivors was the skipper, and that, thanks to him, the crew—though cut off from one another by the collapsing bulkheads and with no hope of being rescued—had held out to the end, down to the last oxygen bottle… But there was something else, some morbid detail that the press had played up for weeks, until some new sensation had put it out of the public’s mind… What in the world was it?

Suddenly he saw the Institute’s huge lecture auditorium … his pal Smiga, caked with chalk, plodding his way through a blackboard full of math equations … and himself, his head bent over an open desk drawer, reading on the sly the newspaper spread out flat on the bottom:
“Only the Dead Survive
”… Of course! There was only one who
could
have survived, who was not in need of any oxygen or food… The robot! Sixteen years, and all that time it was lying there, buried under the rubble!

Pirx rose to his feet. Terminus! The lone surviver
had
to be Terminus! And to think that he had him right here on board his ship… Now was his chance, his golden opportunity…

To what? Pump a mechanical moron, a machine programmed for sealing leaks, by now so old it was almost deaf and blind? What a laugh. It was the press’s fault, the press in its eternal effort to sensationalize the hell out of everything, whose glaring headlines had made him a “mysterious witness” of the tragedy, even had him being interviewed by the Commission behind closed doors. He thought of Terminus’s imbecilic patter. What a put-on!

He slammed the log shut, tossed it back into the drawer, and checked the time.

0800 hours. No time to lose. He started rounding up the shipping papers. Everything was set for lift-off: hatches closed, health and port inspection out of the way, flight clearance, customs declarations… He skimmed through the bill of lading and was surprised not to find any cargo manifest. Machines, okay—but what kind of machines? What about the tare weight? And why no loading chart specifying the ballast? Nothing except for the gross tonnage and a rough plan showing the freight distribution in the holds. Why only 300,000 tons back aft? Was it to lighten the maximum load for takeoff? Say, why wasn’t this brought to his attention earlier? While he was rummaging through the files in search of something, he became so distracted that he completely forgot about the ship’s past history; the moment he laid eyes on the dismantled chronometer, however, he winced in recollection. A second later he found what he was after: a little slip of paper on which it was noted that the last hold—the one abutting on the reactor chamber—was stocked with forty-eight crates of what was generally described as “food perishables.” Why in the hold with the worst ventilation? he wondered. Didn’t they care about the spoilage?

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” he hollered, hurriedly gathering up the papers scattered on the desktop and stuffing them back into their folders. Two men entered but ventured no farther than the doorway.

“Boman, nuclear engineer.”

“Sims, engineer-electrician.”

Pirx got up from his desk. Sims was a young, lean man with squirrelish features, a nervous cough, and flickering eyes. One glance at Boman was enough for Pirx to know that he was dealing with a space veteran. His sunburned face had that peculiar orangish tint that comes from prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation. He barely came up to Pirx’s shoulder (ever since he had begun flying, Pirx had been accustomed to counting every kilo aboard ship). His face, in contrast to his scrawny build, was puffy, bloated, and there were dark bags under his eyes—the mark of a man who’s been tested many times over the years. He had a drooping lower lip.

“You’ll be looking like that yourself, one day”—it crossed Pirx’s mind as he went to greet them with outstretched hand.

Hell began at 0900 hours. The launch site was the scene of the usual bedlam: ships lining up for takeoff; loudspeakers blaring away every six minutes; warning rockets being fired; the screeching, rumbling, deafening roar of test-firing engines; the dust cascading down out of the sky after every blast-off, which no sooner would settle than the tower was already giving the go-ahead to the next ship; the constant hustling to gain a few extra minutes’ time—a familiar enough scene at any shipping port during the peak hours. Most of the ships were bound for Mars, now desperate for machines and fresh produce. People there hadn’t seen a piece of fruit or a vegetable in months, construction on the hydroponic solariums having barely got under way.

Meanwhile, last-minute deliveries continued right up until countdown: cranes, girders, bales of fiberglass, cement vats, crude oil, medical supplies… At the sound of a warning buzzer, the ground crews would take cover wherever they could—in the antiradiation bunkers, in special armored crawlers—and were back at their jobs before the pads had had time to cool. By ten o’clock a smoky, crimson, bloated sun hung over the horizon, the concrete safety barriers dividing the stands were already cracked, blackened with soot, and eaten away by exhaust. The deeper fissures were immediately doused with quick-drying cement, which shot up out of the hoses in a fountainlike spray, while antiradiation crews in helmeted suits piled out of transport vehicles and sandblasted the residue of radioactive fallout. Black-and-red-checkered patrol Jeeps careened in and out, their sirens wailing. Someone in the control tower was yelling himself hoarse over a megaphone. Huge, boomerang-shaped radar dishes combed the skies from the tops of gaunt towers… In a word, a routine workday.

Pirx was all over the place—taking aboard a last-minute shipment of meat, tanking up on drinking water, having his cooling system inspected (when the best it could do was -5, the SSA inspector shook his head but mercifully relented in the end), attending to the compressors, which, though just recently overhauled, began sweating around the valves… Pirx’s voice was beginning to sound more and more like the trumpet of Jericho. At one point it was discovered that the water ballast was off because some idiot had switched off the valve before the lower tanks had been properly filled. There were papers, up to a half-dozen at a time, that had to be signed—more often than not, blindly. It was 1100 hours, with one hour to go before lift-off, when the bombshell came.

The control tower was denying them clearance. The
Star’s
jet system was too old, they said, the radioactive fallout too risky; they should have had an auxiliary borohydride propulsion system like the one on the
Giant,
the freighter that took off at six… Pirx, now hoarse from shouting, took the news calmly. Did the traffic controller realize what he was saying? Had he just now noticed the
Star?
Another delay was bound to mean trouble—big trouble. Beg your pardon? Additional safeguards? What sorts of safeguards? Sandbags? How many? Three thousand? No sweat. You bet your sweet ass—lift-off as scheduled. Bill the Company? Be my guest.

He was dripping with perspiration. Everything was conspiring to make an already chaotic situation even more hopeless. The electrician was chewing out the mechanic for not checking out the emergency system; the second pilot had taken off on a “five-minute break”—to say farewell to his fiancée—and was still not back on board; the medical orderly was missing; the ship was besieged by an army of forty armored crawlers, and by men in dark overalls who, urged on by frantic semaphore signals from the tower, went about the job of piling sandbags; a radiogram came, was taken not by the pilot but by the electrician, who forgot to record it (“Sorry, not my department”)… Pirx went about in a daze, only pretending to be in control of things. At T minus twenty minutes he made a dramatic decision: he ordered all the water pumped from the nose tanks to the tail section. What the heck, in the worst case it might boil up a bit … but anything to get greater stability!

1140 hours. Time to test-fire the engines. The point of no return. As it turned out, not everybody on board was a bumbler. Take Boman, for instance—now there was a man to his liking. You might not see or hear him, but he had everything running like clockwork: engine purge, low thrust, full thrust… At T minus six minutes, by the time they got the signal to prepare for lift-off, they were ready. They were already strapped down when the orderly showed up, followed by the second pilot, who came back from his fiancée looking very down at the mouth. The loudspeaker snarled, bawled, barked until the automatic sequencer hit zero: lift-off,

Pirx knew enough to know that a 19,000-ton vessel wasn’t a patrol skiff where a man barely had room to crack a joke. He also knew that a spaceship wasn’t a flea: it didn’t just
hop
into the air; it had to build up thrust gradually. But he wasn’t prepared for anything like
this!
The gauge showed only half-thrust, the hull was on the verge of a breakup—and they hadn’t even left the pad yet! He was beginning to wonder if they hadn’t snagged on something—freak accidents like that were rare, but they happened—when the needle started fluttering. They went up on the fire column; the
Star
shook; the gravimeter went wild. Pirx sighed, sank back into his couch, and relaxed his muscles; from now on, it was out of his hands. They were no sooner in the ascent stage than they were reprimanded by radio: the Company was being fined for lifting off at full thrust, prohibited on account of the excess radioactivity. The Company? thought Pirx. Go right ahead. The Company be damned! Pirx brushed it off with a sneer; he didn’t even bother to dispute the charge by pointing out that he had bootstrapped at half-thrust. What was he supposed to do? Land, request a hearing, and demand that the reprimand be withdrawn from his uranographs? Like hell he would.