On Patrol ptp-3

by Stanisław Lem

  His anxiety grew. He had done everything in his power to identify this uncanny flying object—and was not the least bit wiser than at the beginning. Then, while he was sitting there, immobilized, his hands gradually turning numb on the controls, it suddenly hit him that Thomas and Wilmer must have experienced the very same thing. They, too, must have sighted the light, tried to pick up the call numbers of what they took to be a UFO, given chase when they got no answer, kept track of it through the telescopic range finder, spotted the lacy little squiggles, maybe even fired a balloon probe, and then—then done something that made it unlikely that they would ever return.

  When he realized how close he was to sharing the same fate, he felt not fear but despair. The whole thing was like a bad dream, a nightmare in which he couldn’t tell which part he was playing: himself, Thomas, or Wilmer. Because what was happening now was just a repeat performance—that much was clear. He sat paralyzed, profoundly convinced that the game was up. And worst of all, he couldn’t even say what the danger was, or from which direction it would come, with all this empty space around…

  Empty?

  Yes, the sector was empty, but then he had been chasing the little light for well over an hour, up to speeds of 230 kilometers per second. By now it was possible, if not altogether certain, that he was approaching the sector’s outer perimeter, or had already crossed it. And beyond that? Sector 1009, another 1.5 trillion kilometers of space. So there he was, surrounded by a void, by millions and millions of kilometers of nothing—and what should he have 2 kilometers off his bow but a pirouetting light!

  He exerted all his powers of concentration. What would they have done—Thomas and Wilmer—right now, at this very second? Because whatever they had done, he would have to do something altogether different. Otherwise he wouldn’t come back alive.

  Again he braked, again the needle shook, again his speed dropped—from 30, down to 22, to 13, to 5 kilometers per second—until the needle fluttered gently above zero. Technically speaking, he was already stopped; in space, speed is constant, always relative to something else; there’s no such thing as absolute zero, as on Earth.

  The light began to shrink, retreating farther and farther… becoming dimmer and dimmer; then it reversed the process, gradually gaining in size and color, until it came to a stop again, 2 kilometers off his bow.

  What would Thomas and Wilmer not have done? he wondered. What was the one thing they definitely would have avoided doing? Would they have made a run for it? Never! Not from a measly little speck, from such a dippy little dot!

  He had no desire to turn the ship around—too easy to lose track of the thing—nothing harder than to patrol when something is astern—no fun twisting your head around like a corkscrew to monitor the video screen… No, turning around was definitely out—better to keep it in full view at all times. So he started moving in reverse, using his braking rockets to accelerate—one of the many basic navigational skills a pilot was expected to have mastered. His gravimeter showed 1g… then -1.6… -2… The ship was harder to handle in reverse; the nose kept listing to one side… Retro-rockets were meant for braking, not accelerating.

  The little light seemed to hesitate. It hung back for a while, gradually diminishing, momentarily eclipsed Alpha Eridani, then slid away, gamboled among a few nameless stars, and—took off after him!

  It wasn’t about to be given the brush-off.

  Relax, he thought. Why should I sweat such a shining little pissant? Screw it. My job is to patrol the sector, and to hell with it.

  He might have thought this way, but not for a moment did he take his eyes off the light. Nearly two hours had gone by since he first sighted it. His eyes were beginning to sting and get a little watery. Wide-eyed and goggle-eyed, he kept the machine in reverse. Flying in reverse is slow going; the braking rockets were not designed for continuous thrust. He reached a top speed of 8 kilometers per second, and sweated it all the way.

  As time went on, he began feeling a funny sensation in his neck, as if someone were tweaking the skin under his chin, stretching it down toward his chest, and his mouth was starting to turn dry. But he refused to let it bother him, having more important things on his mind than a dry mouth and a tweaking sensation in the neck. A couple of times he had the eerie sensation of losing all sense of touch in his hands—but not his legs: he could feel the right one exerting pressure on the braking pedal.

  He tried moving his hands, but without taking his eyes off the light. It seemed to be gaining on him; it was now only 1.9 or 1.8 kilometers off his bow. Was it trying to catch up with him, or what?!

  He tried lifting his hand, but couldn’t. The other one was too numb to even attempt it! No sensation whatever; both hands as good as useless. He tried to catch a glimpse of them—his neck was stiff as a board.

  He was panic-stricken. Why had he neglected to do the one thing he was duty-bound to do? Why hadn’t he radioed the Base and reported the light at once?

  He was afraid of the embarrassment, just as surely as Thomas and Wilmer must have been. What a laugh they’d have had back in the radio shack! A light! A little white light that likes to chase and be chased! Come off it, Pirx! Knock off the dreaming and snap out of it!

  With a feeling of resigned indifference, he took another look at the video screen and said:

  “Patrolship AMU-111 reporting to Base…”

  Or at least that’s what he would have said if his voice hadn’t got stuck in his throat. But all that came out was a lot of incoherent mumbling. He strained every muscle and let out a howl. Then, for the very first time, his eyes shifted from the stellar screen to the mirror, where he saw, sitting in the pilot’s seat, in a round yellow helmet, the face of a freak.

  Huge, swollen, bulging eyes, full of ungodly terror; a gaping, froglike mouth with a blotchy, drooping tongue. Where his neck was he saw a bunch of stiffened cords, vibrating so hard they all but obliterated his lower jaw—and this monstrosity with the bloated, ashen face was yelling, yelling, yelling…

  He made to close his eyes… couldn’t. He tried to focus on the screen again… couldn’t. The freak shackled to the seat was twitching more and more violently, as if bent on snapping his straps. Powerless to do anything else, Pirx stared straight ahead at the monster. He himself was oblivious of the convulsions, of everything except a choking sensation in the chest: he couldn’t take in air.

  Somewhere in the vicinity he heard a hideous grinding of teeth. He was no longer himself, had no more identity, period; he knew nothing, had lost the use of his limbs and body, of everything except the leg on the braking pedal. His eyesight was dimming, getting blurrier by the second; soon it was teeming with lights—tiny, dazzling, multitudinous. He wiggled his leg; it started twitching. He raised it up; he let it back down. The mutant in the mirror was pale as ash, its mouth flecked with foam, its eyes bulging clear out of their sockets, its body convulsed.

  Then he did the only thing that still lay within his power. He cocked his leg, brought it up fast, and kneed himself in the face, full force. The blood ran down his chin; the pain in his mutilated lips blinded him; everything went black.

  “Ahhhh,” he gurgled. “Ahhhh…”

  The gurgling was his own voice.

  The pain abated, and the old numbness returned. Hey! What gives, anyway? Where the hell was he? He was nowhere; there was nothing anywhere…

  He went on battering, pulverizing his face with one knee, his body contorted in a madman’s convulsions. Then it stopped. The howling, that is. What he heard next was the sound of his own garbled, blood-choked, sickening cry.

  He had arms again, arms and hands. They were like wood, and ached with the slightest exertion, like torn ligaments, but he could move them. Blindly, with half-numb fingers, he groped for the straps and started undoing them, clutched the armrest with both hands, and stood up. His legs shook; his whole body felt beaten to a pulp. Grabbing hold of the line that stretched across the control room, he advanced toward the mirror and braced himself a
gainst its frame.

  The man in the mirror was Pirx.

  His face was no longer ashen, but bloodied; his nose was a swollen bruise. Blood was oozing from his mangled lips; his cheeks were livid, puffy; there were dark circles under his eyes and faint spasms under his chin—and all this was happening to him, Pirx. He wiped the blood from his chin, spit, coughed, took a few deep breaths—a hopeless physical wreck.

  He stepped back to check the screen. The machine was still cruising in reverse, unpowered. Through its own momentum. The white disk was still tailing him, 2 kilometers off his bow.

  Steadying himself on the cable, he made his way back to the contour couch—unthinking. His hands began to shake—the normal delayed reaction following a shock, no cause for alarm. Something not quite right in front of the seat…

  The top of the automatic transmitter cassette. Badly dented. He nudged the lid; it collapsed. Components badly damaged. How had that happened? He must have done it himself with his foot. When was that?

  He sank into the contour couch, fired his roll jets, went into a turn.

  The little disk hesitated, then began gliding toward the edge of the screen; but instead of disappearing, it bounced back out into the middle, like a tennis ball. For crying out loud!

  “You bastard!” His voice was full of vile loathing.

  Thanks to this latest gambit, he had almost gone into stationary orbit! Yet the fact remained: the light had not left the screen when he turned. That could mean only one thing: the light was artificial, generated by the screen itself. A screen, after all, is not a window. A manned spacecraft is equipped not with windows but with video scanners, with cameras mounted externally on the ship’s armored hull, together with a transformer for converting the electrical impulses into images on a cathode-ray tube. Was this just some screwy malfunction in the scanner? Had the same thing happened to Thomas’s and Wilmer’s? And what became of them, anyway?

  No time to think about such things now. Better to flip on the emergency transmitter.

  “Patrolship AMU-111 to Base,” he said. “AMU-111 to Base. Present reading: sector boundary one-zero-zero-nine-dash-one-zero-one-zero, equatorial zone. Have located trouble, am coming home…”

  Pirx landed some six hours later, at which time a full-scale inquiry was launched, the investigation lasting an entire month. The first thing to be overhauled was the scanner. It was a new, improved model, installed on all the AMU ships the year before and until now having a perfect performance record. Not a single malfunction had been reported.

  After laborious testing, the electronics engineers finally discovered the cause of the light. After several thousand hours of testing, the vacuum in the cathode-ray tube developed a leak, causing a loose charge to appear on the screen’s inner surface, observable on the outer screen as a milky-white spot. The movements of the charge were governed by a set of complicated laws. During periods of acceleration, the charge would become distended over a broad area, as if flattened against the inside glass, making it appear as if the speck were approaching. When reverse thrust was applied, the charge would withdraw deeper into the tube. Zero and constant acceleration brought the charge slowly back into the center of the screen. It was capable of unlimited movement, but its favorite resting position, during stationary orbit or periods of unpowered flight, was front center. Research on the charge continued, and its dynamics were represented by a sixth-order differential equation. It was also demonstrated that the charge tended to disperse in response to strong light impulses, and to become more concentrated only when the intensity of impulses received by the CRT was extremely low—such as in space, for example, when a ship was farthest from the Sun. If as much as a ray of sunlight brushed the screen, the charge would vanish for several hours.

  The findings of the electronics experts filled an entire volume, copiously laced with mathematical formulas. The next to tackle the case was a team of doctors, psychologists, and specialists in astroneurosis and astropsychosis. And again, after many hours of investigation, it was shown that the loose charge pulsated, which to the naked eye manifested itself as tiny dark squiggles creeping across the luminous disk.

  The frequency of these pulsations, too brief to be recorded individually by the eye, affected the so-called theta rhythm of the brain’s cortex, intensifying the oscillation potential to such a degree that it could induce a seizure identical to an epileptic fit. Other contributing factors were the state of absolute inertia and the absence of any external stimuli, except for prolonged and uninterrupted exposure to a pulsating light.

  The experts credited with these discoveries became internationally famous. Today electronics experts the world over are conversant with the Ledieux-Harper effect, caused by the formation of loose charges in high-vacuum cathode-ray tubes, whereas astrobiologists are familiar with Nuggelheimer’s atactic-catatonic-clonic syndrome.

  Pirx remained an unknown in the world of science. Only the most assiduous readers could infer, from remarks printed in fine type in some of the evening editions, that, thanks to Pirx, pilots of the future would be spared the fate of Thomas and Wilmer, those two unfortunate victims who perished in the outer regions of space after losing consciousness in a high-speed chase after an illusory light.

  The denial of fame did not bother Pirx in the slightest. Nor did he mind having a new tooth put in to replace the one demolished by his knee, nor even the fact that he had to pay for it out of his own pocket.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 566195c3-8141-4060-8882-21e76e2f425c

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 22.04.2011

  Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software

  Document authors :

  Verdi1

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