More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  Mars.

  Still flat on his back, he pondered, this time objectively, the reason for his awakening. He trusted his own body; it wouldn’t have been roused for nothing. OK, the landing had been a tough one, and he was all in after two round-the-clock watches—after Terman broke his arm when the automatic sequencer fired and smacked him against a bulkhead. After eleven years of flying, to bounce off the ceiling during a burn—what a wimp! That’d mean visits to the hospital. Was that the reason? No.

  One by one he started recalling yesterday’s events. Starting with the landing. Set down in a windstorm. Atmosphere as good as nil—but with a wind at two hundred sixty kilometers, per hour, try staying on your feet in that miserable gravity. No friction under your soles; to walk, you have to dig your shoes into the sand, sink in it up to your ankles. And that dust, scraping your g-suit with an icy hiss, seeping into every fold, not exactly red, not rust-colored, either; just ordinary sand, only fine-grained, the product of a few billion years of grinding. There was no Port Control office here, because there was no port in the normal sense. Now in its second year, the Mars project was still in a provisional state; anything they erected was immediately inundated with dust—hotels, hostels, whatever. Huge oxygen domes, each the size of ten hangars, squatted under an umbrella of radial steel cables anchored to concrete blocks barely visible from beyond the dunes. Quonset huts, corrugated sheet metal, piles and piles of crates, containers, tanks, bottles, cases, sacks: a city of cargo dumped from a conveyor belt.

  The only sealed, halfway decently furnished place was flight control, situated beyond the “bell,” three kilometers away from the cosmodrome where he was now lying in the dark, on a bed belonging to Seyn, the controller on duty.

  He sat up and groped for his slippers with his bare foot. He always packed them, just as he always changed before going to bed and felt lousy if he didn’t shave and wash. He couldn’t remember the layout of the room, so, to play it safe, he got up cautiously; too easy to bash your skull, what with the present shortage of materials (the project was all abuzz with the new austerity drive). It upset him that he couldn’t remember where the light switches were. A blind rat. He fumbled around; instead of the switch he touched a cold knob, pulled it. Something clicked and an iris shutter opened with a faint crunch. A dirty, hollow dawn. Standing before the window, which resembled more a ship’s porthole, Pirx felt the stubble on his cheek, scowled, sighed: everything seemed out of whack, and for no apparent reason. If he’d thought about it, he might have acknowledged the reason: he hated Mars.

  It was a purely personal thing; nobody knew his true feelings, and nobody cared. Mars, the embodiment of spent illusions—scoffed, ridiculed, but precious. Any other run would have been better. All that past glamorizing of the project was sheer hokum; the chances for colonization a fiction. Oh, Mars had fooled them all; besides, it had been fooling people for a hundred-odd years. The canals. One of the most beautiful, most uncanny episodes in the whole of astronomy. The rusty planet—a desert. The whitecaps of polar snows, last reservoirs of water. A perfectly geometric net as if diamond-etched in glass, running from the poles to the equator: evidence of a contest between reason and nullity, a powerful irrigation system watering millions of desert acres. But of course: come spring, and the coloring of the deserts changed, darkening with the budding vegetation, and in orderly fashion, from the equator to the pole.

  What bull! Not a trace of any canals. Vegetation? Those mysterious mosses, lichens protected against frost and windstorms? Polymerized compound carbon monoxides, covering the crust and evaporating when the nightmarish frost turned merely mean. Snow caps? Ordinary solidified C02. No water, no oxygen, no life—only rugged craters, dust-eaten rock buttes, tedious plains, a lifeless, flat, and grizzly landscape under a pale, rusty-dun sky. No real clouds, only a blurry haze, a pall, the gloom of a severe thunderstorm. Yet enough atmospheric electricity to last a lifetime, and then some.

  What was that humming sound? A signal? No, just the vibrations of the steel cables over the nearest “bubble.” In the dirty light (even the toughest windowpane soon succumbed to the wind-borne sand, which left the plastic dwelling domes looking as if blinded by cataracts), he switched on the bulb above the washbasin and began to shave. As he stretched his cheek muscles taut, he had a sudden silly intuition: Mars was a fraud.

  Yes, fraud: all those hopes dashed! It was part of the lore. Whose, may one ask? Who started it? No one individual. Nobody had invented it single-handedly, just as certain legends and beliefs have no known authors. On the contrary, it was a collective fantasy (of astronomers? the myths of observational astronomy?), like the one that gave rise to the vision of a white Venus, the morning and evening star, mysteriously obscured by a cloud mass, a young planet teeming with jungles and reptiles and volcanic oceans; in short, Earth’s past. And Mars—atrophying, rusty, rampant with dust storms and riddles (canals splitting lengthwise in two, twinning overnight—how many respectable astronomers had borne witness to such a phenomenon!); a Mars heroically pitting civilization against the twilight of life—such was Earth’s future: simple, unequivocally clear, intelligible. Only dead wrong, from A to Z.

  Under his ear were three little hairs that eluded the electric razor; without his safety razor—it stayed aboard ship—he tried every which way. No dice.

  Mars. The astronomers had a rich imagination, all right. Take Schiaparelli. What names he and his archenemy, Antoniadi, had coined to christen what he couldn’t even see, what was just a figment of his imagination. Like the project’s environs: Agathodaemon. Daemon we all know; Agatho—from agate, most likely, because it’s black. Or was it from agathon—wisdom? Too bad astronauts weren’t taught Greek.

  Pirx had a weakness for old astronomy textbooks, their touching self-assurance. In 1913 they proclaimed that Earth, seen from outer space, looked red, because the Earth’s atmosphere absorbed the blue component of the spectrum, leaving a residual reddish-pink as the only shade possible. What a gaffe! Yet when one browsed through Schiaparelli’s sumptuously decorated maps, it boggled the mind how he could have seen the nonexistent. Odder still, those who came after him saw it, too. It was a curious psychological phenomenon, one that later went unnoticed. The first four-fifths of any Mars study was devoted to topography and a topology of the canals. In the second half of the twentieth century, one astronomer even subjected the canal grid to a statistical analysis and discovered a topological resemblance to a railway or communications network—as distinct from a natural pattern formed by faults and rivers. And then poof! An optical illusion, pure and simple.

  Pirx cleaned his shaver by the window and stowed it back in its case, then cast another glance, now with undisguised antipathy, at the fabled Agathodaemon—at the mysterious “canal,” which turned out to be a boring, flat terrain framed by a blurry, rubble-strewn horizon. Compared with Mars, the Moon was positively homey. To someone who’s never left Earth, that might sound preposterous, but it’s the gospel truth. For one thing, the sun looked from the Moon just as it did from Earth—which can be appreciated only by someone not so much surprised as shocked to see it in the shape of a congealed, shriveled-up, faded fireball. And the lunar view of Earth—majestic, blue, lamplike, symbol of safe refuge, sign of domesticity, lighting the nights. Whereas the combined radiance of Phobos and Deimos was less than the Moon’s in its first quarter. And that lunar silence, the hush of deep space—no wonder it was easier to televise the first human step of the Apollo project than to transmit a similar spectacle from the Himalayas. The effects of an unremitting wind can be appreciated only on Mars.

  He checked his watch. Brand new, with five concentric dials, it gave the standard Earth time, ship’s time, and planetary time. Planetary time now read a few minutes past 0600 hours.

  “By this time tomorrow I’ll be four million kilometers away,” he thought, not without pleasure. He belonged to the Truckers’ Club, the project’s lifeline, though his days on it were now numbered: the new freighters, giants with
a hundred-thousand-ton rest mass, were already in service on the Ares-Terra line. The Ariel, Ares, and Anabis had been Mars-bound for several weeks, and the Ariel was due to land in two hours. He’d never seen a hundred-thousand-tonner land before (since Earth was off limits to them, they were loaded on the Moon; economists said it paid). Ten-to-twenty-thousand-tonners like his Cuìvìer were definitely being retired from service, to be used occasionally for hauling package cargo.

  It was 0620 hours—breakfast time for any sensible person. He was tempted by the thought of coffee. But where to get a bite to eat around here? This was his first stopover at Agathodaemon. Till now, he’d been servicing the main “beachhead” at Syrtis. Why did they have to storm Mars on two fronts separated by thousands of kilometers? He knew the scientific reason, but he had some ideas of his own, which he kept to himself. Syrtis Major was planned as a thermonuclear-intellectronic testing ground. It was a different kind of operation there. Some people called Agathodaemon the Cinderella of the project, and several times it was said to be on the verge of folding. But they were still banking on hitting frozen water, deep icebergs thought to be buried beneath the Martian crust… Sure, if the project could tap some local water, that would be a real feat, a breakthrough, seeing as up till now every drop had to be shipped from Earth and construction of the atmospheric steam condensers was now in its second year, with the date of operation constantly being postponed.

  No, Mars definitely didn’t send him.

  He wasn’t in the mood for going out yet—the building was so very quiet. He was becoming more and more used to the solitude. A ship’s commander can always have his privacy on board; after a long flight (with Earth and Mars no longer in conjunction, the Mars trip took over three months), he practically had to force himself to mix with strangers. And except for the controller on duty, he knew no one here. Look in on him upstairs? That wouldn’t be too nice. Mustn’t hassle people on the job. He was judging by himself: he didn’t like intruders.

  In his grip was a thermos with some leftover coffee, and a package of cookies. He ate, trying not to spill the crumbs, sipped his coffee, and stared out through the sand-scored port at the old, flat-bottomed, apathetic floor of Agathodaemon. That was the impression Mars made on him—that it didn’t care any more—which explained the haphazard accumulation of craters, so different from the Moon’s, looking more like washouts (“They look fake, doctored,” he once blurted out while browsing through some detailed blow-ups). The whimsicality of those wild formations that went by the name of “chaos” make them the pet sites of areologists: there was nothing like them on Earth. Mars seemed to have quit, not caring whether it kept its word, unconcerned with appearances. The closer one got to it, the more it lost its solid red exterior, the more it ceased to be the emblem of a war god, the more it revealed its drabness, spots, stains, its lack of any lunar or Earthlike contour: a gray-brown blight, rocked by eternal wind.

  He felt a barely palpable vibration underfoot—a converter or a transformer. Otherwise, the same silence as before, penetrated, as if from another world, by the distant howl of a gale wind playing on the cosmodrome’s cables. That diabolical sand could eat through high-grade, five-centimeter steel cables. On the Moon you could leave anything, stow it in the rubble, and come back a hundred, a million years hence, secure in the knowledge that it would still be there. On Mars you couldn’t afford to drop anything, lest it sink forever. Mars had no manners.

  At 0640 hours, the horizon reddened with the sunrise, and this splotch of brightness, this bogus dawn—or, rather, its reddish tint—brought back his dream. Jarred by the sudden recall, he slowly put his thermos down. It was coming back to him. Somebody was out to get him … no, it was he who killed someone else. The dead man came after him, chasing him through the ember-red dark; a death blow, then another, but to no effect. Crazy, yes, but there was something else: in the dream, he could have sworn he knew the other man; now he had no idea whom he’d fought to the finish. Granted, this feeling of familiarity could have been a dream illusion, too. He kept dogging it, but his self-willed memory balked, and everything retreated like a snail into its shell, so that he stood by the window, one hand on the metal doorframe, a trifle rattled, as if on the brink of something unnamable. Death. As space technology advanced, it was inevitable that people would start dying on planets. The Moon was loyal to the dead. It let them fossilize, turned them into ice sculpture, mummies, whose lightness and near-weightlessness seemed to diminish the reality, the seriousness of the tragedy. But on Mars, the dead had to be disposed of immediately, because the sand storms would eat through a spacesuit in a matter of days; and before the corpse had been mummified by the severe aridity, bones would sprout from the torn fabric—shiny, polished to perfection, until the whole skeleton was laid bare. Littered in this strange sand, under this strange sky, the bones of the dead were almost a reproach, an offense, as though by bringing along their mortality, people had done something improper, something to be ashamed of, that had to be removed from sight, buried… Screwy as they were, those were his thoughts at the moment.

  The night crew went off at 0700, and visitors were allowed into the control tower between shifts. He packed away his few toilet articles and, thinking he’d better make sure the unloading of the Cuivier was going according to schedule, went out. All his package cargo had to be off by 1200 hours, and there were still a few things worth testing—such as the servo-reactor’s cooling system—all the more so since he was going back a man short (getting a substitute for Terman was wishful thinking). He mounted a spiral, polyfoam-padded staircase, his hand on the astonishingly warm (heated?) banister, and when he reached the upper level and opened the swinging glass door with frosted panes, he entered a world so different that he felt like someone else.

  It could have been the interior of a giant head, with six enormous, bulging glass eyes fixed in three directions at once. The fourth wall was mounted with antennas, and the whole room rotated on its axis like a revolving stage. In a sense, it was a stage, where the same performance, that of lift-off and landing, clearly visible a kilometer away from behind the rounded control consoles that blended perfectly with the silver-gray walls, was played and replayed. The atmosphere was reminiscent both of an airport control tower and an operating room.

  Along the wall of antennas, under a sloping hood, reigned the main space-traffic computer, always in direct contact, always blinking and ticking, continually carrying out its mute monologues and spewing reams of perforated tape. Near it were stationed three back-up terminals, with mikes, spotlights, swivel chairs, and the controllers’ hydrant-shaped hand calculators; and finally, a cute, contoured little bar with a softly humming espresso machine. So here was the coffee trough.

  Pirx couldn’t see the Cuivier from the tower; he had parked it, in compliance with the controller’s instructions, five kilometers away, beyond all the clutter, to make way for the project’s first supership landing—as if it wasn’t equipped with the latest space- and astrolocational computers which, according to the bragging of the shipyard builders (nearly all personal acquaintances of Pirx), could plant that Goliath of a quarter-miler, that iron mountain, on a site no bigger than a kitchen garden. All three shifts were mustered for the occasion, which, for all its festivity, was not an official celebration: the Ariel, like every other prototype, had posted dozens of experimental flights and lunar landings, though, to be sure, never with a full cargo.

  With a half hour to go before touchdown, Pirx greeted those who were off duty and shook hands with Seyn. The monitors were already activated, blurry smudges ran from top to bottom on the cathode-ray tubes, but the lights on the landing terminal were uniformly green, meaning they still had time to kill. Romani, the Base coordinator, offered him a glass of brandy with his coffee. Pirx hesitated—he wasn’t used to tippling at such an early hour—but, then, he was there as a private guest and was sensitive enough to see they were only trying to lend the event a touch of class. They’d waited months for the superfreig
hters, whose arrival was calculated to save Port Control untold headaches, since until now it had been a perpetual contest between the voracious appetite of the construction site, never satisfied by the project’s cargo fleet, and the efforts of transport pilots like Pirx to ply the Mars-Earth run as quickly and efficiently as possible. With the conjunction now over, both planets were beginning to move farther apart, the distances between them to increase yearly until reaching an alarming maximum of hundreds of millions of kilometers. It was in this, the project’s hour of greatest travail, that relief was at hand.

  The talking was subdued, and when the green lights faded and the buzzers sounded, there was dead silence. A typical Martian day was breaking: not cloudy, not clear, no distinguishable horizon, no well-defined sky, as if devoid of any definable, measurable time. Despite the daylight, the perimeters of the concrete squares hugging the Agathodaemon floor were fringed with glowing lines—automatic laser markings—and the rim of the concrete circular shield, almost black, was edged with sparkling, starlike beads. The controllers, idled, made themselves comfortable in their armchairs, while the central computer flashed its diodes, as if to proclaim its indispensability, and the transmitters had begun to drone ever so softly when a clear bass came over the loudspeaker: