Tales of Pirx the Pilot (3 page)

“Zero!” a voice blared in his earphones. All at once Pirx heard a muffled but prolonged rumble, his contour couch shook, and flickers of light snaked across the glass canopy, under which he lay staring up at the ceiling panel, taking readings: astrograph, air-cooling gauges, main-stage thrusters, sustaining and vernier jets, neutron flux density, isotopic contamination gauge, not to speak of the eighteen other instruments designed almost exclusively to monitor the booster’s performance. The vibrations then began to slacken, the sheet of racket tapered off overhead, and the thunderous roar grew fainter, more like a distant thunderstorm, before giving way to a dead silence.

Then—a hissing and a humming, but so sudden he had hardly any time to panic. The automatic sequencer had activated the previously dormant screens, which were always disconnected by remote control to protect the camera lenses from being damaged by the blinding atomic blast of a nearby launch.

These automatic controls are pretty nifty, thought Pirx. He was still miles away in his thoughts when his hair suddenly stood on end underneath his dome-shaped helmet.

My Gawd, I’m next, now it’s my turn! suddenly flashed through his mind.

Instantaneously, he started getting the lift-off controls into ready position, manipulating each of them with his fingers in the proper sequence and counting to himself: “One, two three… Now where’s the fourth? There it is … okay … now for the gauge … then the pedal… No, not the pedal—the handgrip… First the red one and then the green one… Now for the automatic sequencer … right… Or was it the other way around—first green, then red…?!”

“Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27!” The voice booming into his ear roused him from his predicament. “Lift-off on automatic countdown of zero! Attention, are you ready, pilot?”

“Not yet!” he felt like yelling, but said instead:

“Pilot Boer… Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27 and ready for—uh—lift-off on automatic countdown of zero.”

He had been on the verge of saying “Pilot Boerst” because he still had Boerst’s words fresh in his memory. “You nut,” he said to himself in the ensuing silence. Then the automatic countdown—why did these recorded voices always have to sound like an NCO?—barked:

“Minus sixteen, fifteen, fourteen…”

Pirx broke out in a cold sweat. There was something he was forgetting, something terribly important, a matter of life and death.

“…six, five, four…”

His sweaty fingers squeezed the handgrip. Luckily it had a rough finish. Does everyone work up such a sweat? he wondered. Probably—it crossed his mind just before the earphones snarled:

“Zero!!!”

His left hand—instinctively—pulled back on the lever until it reached the halfway mark. There was a terrific blast, and his chest and skull were flattened by some resilient, rubberlike press. The booster! was his last thought before his eyesight began to dim. But only a little, and then not for long. Gradually his vision improved, though the unrelenting pressure had spread to the rest of his body. Before long he could make out all the video screens—at least the three opposite him—now inundated with a torrent of milk gushing from a million overturned cans.

I must be breaking through the clouds, he thought. His mind, though somewhat slower on the uptake, was totally relaxed. As time went by, he felt increasingly like a spectator to some strange comedy. There he was, lying flat on his back in his “dentist’s chair,” arms and legs paralyzed, not a cloud in sight, surrounded by a phony pastel-blue sky… Hey, were those stars over there, or what?

Stars they were. Meanwhile the gauges were working steadily away—on the ceiling, on the walls—each in its own way, each with a different function to perform. And he was supposed to monitor each and every one of them—and with two eyes, no less! At the sound of a bleeping signal in his earphones, his left hand—again by instinct—fired the booster separation, immediately lowering the pressure. He was cruising at a velocity of 7.1 kilometers per second, he was at an altitude of 201 kilometers, and his acceleration was 1.9 as he pitched out of his assigned launch path. Now he could afford to relax a while, but not for long, because pretty soon he would have his hands full—and how!

He was just starting to make himself comfortable, pressing the armrest to raise the seat in back, when he suddenly went numb all over.

“The crib! Where’s the cribsheet!”

This was that awfully important detail he couldn’t remember at the time. He scoured the deck with his eyes, now totally oblivious of the swarm of pulsating gauges. The cribsheet had slipped down under the contour couch. He tried to bend over, was held back by his torso straps; without a moment to lose, with a sinking sensation as if perched on top of some collapsing tower, he flipped open his navigation book—which until now had been stored in his thigh pocket—and yanked the flight plan from the envelope. A mental blackout. Where the hell was orbit B68, anyway? That must be it there! He checked the trajectory and went into a roll. Much to his surprise, it worked.

Once he found himself on an elliptical path, the computer graciously presented him with the correctional data; he maneuvered accordingly, overshot his orbit, and braked so suddenly that he dropped down to -3
g
for a period of ten seconds, the negative gravity having little effect on him because of his exceptional physical endurance (“If your brain were half as strong as your biceps,” Bullpen once told him, “you’d have been really something”); guided by the correctional data, he pitched into a stable orbit and fed the computer, but the only output was a series of oscillating standing waves. He yelled out the figures again, only to discover that he had neglected to switch over; that remedied, the CRT showed a flickering vertical line and the windows flashed a series of ones. “I’m in orbit!” he piped with glee. But the computer indicated an orbital period of four hours and twenty-nine minutes, instead of the projected four hours and twenty-six minutes. Was that a tolerable deviation? he wondered, desperately searching his memory. He was all set to unbuckle the straps—the cribsheet was still lying underneath the seat, though a damned lot of good it would do him if the answer wasn’t there—when Professor Kaahl’s words suddenly came to mind: “All orbits are programmed with a built-in margin of error of 0.3 percent.” But just to play it safe, he fed the data into the computer, to learn that he was right on the borderline. “Well, that’s that,” he sighed, and for the first time he began surveying his surroundings.

Being strapped to his seat, except for a feeling of weightlessness, he hardly noticed the loss of gravitation. The forward screen was blanketed with stars, with a brilliant white border skirting the very bottom. The lateral screens showed nothing but a star-studded black void. But the deck screen—ah! Earth was now so immense that it took up the whole screen, and he feasted his eyes on it as he flew over at an altitude of 700 kilometers at perigee and 2,400 kilometers at apogee. Hey, wasn’t that Greenland down there? But before he could verify that it was, he was already sailing over northern Canada. The North Pole was capped with iridescent snow, the ocean stood out round and smooth—violet-black, like cast iron—there were strangely few clouds, and what few there were looked like gobs of watery mush splattered on top of Earth’s highest elevation points.

He glanced at the clock. He had been spaceborne for exactly seventeen minutes.

It was time to pick up PAL’s radio signal, to start monitoring the radar screens as he passed through the satellite’s contact zone. Now, what were their names again? RO? No—JO. And let’s see, their numbers were… He glanced down at the flight plan, stuck it back into his pocket along with the navigation book, and turned up the intercom on his chest. At first there was just a lot of screeching and crackling—cosmic interference. What system was PAL using? Oh, yeah—Morse. He listened closely, his eyes glued to the video screens, and watched as Earth slowly revolved beneath him and stars scudded by—but no PAL.

Then he heard a buzzing noise.

Could that be it? he wondered, but immediately rejected the idea. You’re crazy. Satellites don’t buzz. But what else could it be? Nothing, that’s what. Or was it something else?

A critical malfunction?

Oddly enough, he was not the least bit alarmed. How could there be a critical malfunction when he was cruising with his engine off? Maybe the old crate was falling apart, breaking up. Or could it be a short circuit? Good Lord, a short circuit! Fire Prevention Code, section 3(a): “In Case of Fire in Orbit,” paragraph… Oh, to hell with it! The buzzing was now so loud that it was drowning out the bleeping sounds of distant signals.

It sounds like … a fly trapped in a jar, he thought, somewhat perplexed, and began shifting his gaze from dial to dial.

Then he spotted it.

It was a giant of a fly, one of those ugly, greenish-black brutes specially designed to make life miserable—a pestering, pesky, idiotic, and by the same token shrewd and cunning fly, which had miraculously—and how else?—stowed away in the ship’s control cabin and was now zooming about in the space outside the blister, occasionally ricocheting off the illuminated instrument gauges like a buzzing pellet.

Whenever it took a pass at the computer, it came over his earphones like a four-engine prop plane. Mounted on the computer’s upper frame was a backup microphone, which gave a pilot access to the computer inside the encapsulated seat in the event his on-board phone was disconnected and he found himself without a laryngophone. One of the many backup systems aboard the ship.

He started swearing a blue streak at the microphone, afraid that because of the static he might miss PAL’s signal. The computer was bad enough, but soon the fly began making sorties into other areas of the cabin. As though hypnotized, Pirx let his gaze trail after it until finally he got fed up and said to heck with it.

Too bad he didn’t have a spray gun of DDT handy.

“Cut it out!”

Bzzzzz… He winced; the fly was crawling around on the computer, in the vicinity of the mike. Then nothing, dead silence, as it stopped to preen its wings. You lousy bastard!

Then a faint but steady bleeping came over his earphones: dot-dot-dot—dash—dot-dot—dash-dash—dot-dot-dot—dash. It was PAL.

“Okay, Pirx, now keep your eyes peeled!” he told himself. He raised the couch a little, so as to take in all three video screens at once, checked the sweeping phosphorescent radar beam, and waited. Though nothing showed on the radar screen, he distinctly heard a voice calling:

“A-7 Terraluna, A-7 Terraluna, sector III, course one hundred thirteen, PAL PATHFINDER calling. Request a reading. Over.”

“Oh crap, how am I ever going to hear my two JOs now?”

The buzzing in his earphones suddenly stopped. A second later a shadow fell across his face, from above, much as if a bat had landed on an overhanging lamp. It was the fly, which was crawling across the blister and exploring its interior. The blips were coming with greater frequency now, and it wasn’t long before he sighted the 80-meter-long aluminum cylinder, mounted with an observation spheroid, as it flew over him at a distance of roughly 400 meters, possibly more, and gradually overtook him.

“PAL PATHFINDER to A-7 Terraluna, one-hundred-eighty-point-fourteen, one-hundred-six-point-six. Increasing linear deviation. Out.”

“Albatross-4 Aresterra calling PAL Central, PAL Central. Am coming down for refueling, sector II. Am coming down for refueling, sector II. Running on reserve supply. Over.”

“A-7 Terraluna, calling PAL PATHFINDER…”

The rest was lost in the buzzing. Then silence.

“Central to Albatross-4 Aresterra, refuel quadrant seven, Omega Central, refuel quadrant seven. Out.”

They
would
pick out this spot to rendezvous, thought Pirx, who was now swimming in his sweat-absorbent underwear. This way I won’t hear a thing.

The fly was describing frenetic circles on the computer’s console, as if hell-bent on catching up with its own shadow.

“Albatross-4 Aresterra, Albatross-4 Aresterra to PAL Central, approaching quadrant seven. Request radio guidance. Out.”

The radio static grew steadily fainter until it was drowned out by the buzzing. But not before he managed to catch the following message:

“JO-2 Terraluna, JO-2 Terraluna, calling AMU-27, AMU-27. Over.”

I wonder who he’s calling? Pirx mused, and he nearly jumped out of his straps.

“AMU—” he wanted to say, but not a sound could he emit from his hoarse throat. His earphones were buzzing. The fly. He closed his eyes.

“AMU-27 to JO-2 Terraluna, position quadrant four, sector PAL, am turning on navigation lights. Over.”

He switched on his navigation lights—two red ones at the side, two green ones on the nose, a blue one aft—and waited. Not a sound except for the fly.

“JO-2 ditto Terraluna, JO-2 Terraluna, calling…” Buzz-buzz, hum-hum…

Does he mean me? Pirx meditated in despair.

“AMU-27 to JO-2 ditto Terraluna, position quadrant four, perimeter sector PAL, all navigation lights on. Over.”

When both JO ships started transmitting at the same time, Pirx switched on the sequence selector, but there was too much interference. The buzzing fly, of course.

“I’ll hang myself!” That such a remedy was out of the question, due to the effects of weightlessness, never occurred to him.

Just then he sighted both ships on the radar screen. They were following him on parallel courses, spaced no more than nine kilometers apart, which was prohibited; as the pilot ship, it was up to him to make them adhere to the prescribed distance of fourteen kilometers. Just as he was checking the location of the blips on the radar screen, his old friend the fly landed on one of them. In a fit of anger he threw his navigation book at it, but it was deflected by the blister’s glass wall, and instead of sliding down, it bumped against the ceiling, where, because of the zero gravity, it fluttered aimlessly about in space. Seemingly unruffled, the fly strolled merrily on its way across the screen.

“AMU-27 Terraluna to JO-2 ditto JO-2. I have you in range. You are hard aboard. Switch over to parallel course with a correction of zero-point-zero one. Stand by on completion of maneuver. Out.”