Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  As often as he had been a spectator to this abrupt transition, it never ceased to jolt him into an awareness of something—something to which he found it hard to reconcile himself. Was it the lurid manifestation of man’s microscopic stature in relation to the cosmos? The transposition to another—planetary—scale? The visualization of mankind’s feeble and ephemeral efforts expended over the millennia? Or was it the overcoming of that frailty, the transcending of the blind and indifferent force of gravitation exerted by that formidable mass? The leaving behind of rugged mountain massifs, of polar shields, to brave the shores of other celestial bodies? These reflections, these unarticulated sensations, soon gave way to others as the ship changed course and, threading the gap in the radiation zone hugging the North Pole, shot up to the stars.

  The stargazing stopped the second the lights went on. Luncheon was served, during which the engines labored to create a semblance of gravity. The meal over and the lights once again extinguished, the passengers sat back in their seats and got their first glimpse of the Moon.

  They were approaching from the side of the Moon’s southern hemisphere. A few hundred kilometers below the pole was the crater Tycho, a yawning white Sun-drenched pockmark with luminous bands radiating in all directions, whose stunning regularity had enthralled generations of Earthly astronauts, only to become, once the mystery of its symmetry was solved, the subject of student jokes. First-year students, for example, were made to believe that the circular white depression constituted the “Moon’s axle hole” and that the luminous rays were in fact thickly drawn meridians.

  The closer they came to the bright sphere suspended in a black void, the more evident it was that the Moon was indeed a congealed, lava-caked version of the world as it must have existed billions of years ago, when the hot Earth wandered with its satellite through meteorite clouds and masses of planetisimals; when a continuous hailstorm of rock and iron pelted and pierced the Moon’s thin outer crust, tossing up huge amounts of magma onto the lunar surface; and when, the universe cleansed and purified at last, the era of tectonic cataclysms over, the airless planet died on the battlefield, to become a stony mask ravaged by bombardments—the inspiration of poets, the lyrical lamp of lovers.

  The Selene, with is four-hundred-ton payload of freight and flesh, turned its tail to the expanding disk and commenced braking, slowly and in stages, until its gently throbbing hull roosted on one of the cosmodrome’s huge steel cone assemblies.

  This was Pirx’s third lunar landing; on one of them, his solo, he had soft-landed in a practice field located a kilometer and a half from the passenger terminal.

  He saw nothing of the field this trip; the Selene’s generous ceramite-plated frame was immediately hoisted onto a hydraulic winch and lowered into a hermetically sealed hangar. Customs inspection. Any narcotics? Alcohol? Material of an explosive, corrosive, or toxic nature? Uh, Pirx suddenly remembered that he had some toxic liquid in his possession—namely, a small flask of cognac, a present from Matters. He stashed it in his back pocket. Then came the health inspection—vaccination certificate, baggage sterilization (to guard against contamination)—which he whipped through in nothing flat.

  He paused outside the gate to check whether anyone was on hand to greet him.

  Later he stood on the mezzanine overlooking the hangar, an enormous concrete chamber hewn in the rock, with a hemispherical ceiling, level floor, and fluorescent light panels that flooded the interior with artificial sunlight. The place was aswarm with battery-powered dollies wheeling out baggage, cylinders of compressed gases, vats, crates, tubing, cable coils… Looming darkly, stolidly in the background was the cause of all this commotion—the Selene, its midships a gaping wound, its stern anchored far below the concrete in a cavernous shaft, its bow jutting up through an opening to the next level.

  Pirx stood idly around, then remembered he still had to get squared away. An agent at the Port Authority office handed him an overnight pass, told him his ship wasn’t scheduled to leave for another eleven hours, then ducked out of sight, leaving him completely in the lurch. Pirx strode back out into the hallway, a little dazed by this display of bumbling inefficiency. Not a boo about whether they were to fly directly to the Tsiolkovsky station or over Mare Smythii. Come to think of it, where was his lunar sidekick? And the commission? And their work agenda?

  The more he thought, the more disgruntled he became, his irritation gradually coalescing into a gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach. He was hungry. Chow time. The directory was in six languages; he studied it carefully, hopped on the right elevator, and rode down to the pilots’ cafeteria, where he was directed to the public cafeteria: this one was for pilots only.

  That took the cake. He was about to make his way over to the damned restaurant when he remembered something: he had forgotten to claim his knapsack. Back upstairs to the hangar. To learn that his baggage had been sent to his hotel room. In disgust he stomped off to lunch without his pack. On the way he was caught up by two waves of tourists: some Frenchmen—the same ones—and a crowd of Swiss, Dutch, and Germans, just returned from a selenobus tour of the crater Eratosthenes. The French, doing what people normally did when getting their first taste of lunar gravitation, bunnyhopped instead of walked, bounced off the ceiling—to the squeals and cheers of the women—relished the slow descent from a height of three meters. The Germans, being more reserved by nature, filed into the spacious dining room, draped the backs of their chairs with camera gear, binoculars, tripods—with everything but high-powered telescopes—and over soup swapped samples of Moon rock fobbed off on them by the selenobus crews. Pirx sat hunched over his soup, drowning in a German-French-Greek-Dutch potpourri. Amid the general euphoria he was the only glum-faced customer. A Dutchman, taking pity on him, convinced that he was suffering from space sickness (“Your first trip to the Moon, no?”), offered him a pill. That was the drop that made his cup run over. Pirx skipped the second course, bought four packages of fruitcake at the snack bar, and took the elevator up to the hotel, venting his scorn on the porter. The man had offered to sell him a piece of the Moon—that is, a chunk of vitrified basalt.

  “Get lost, you two-bit peddler! I was here before you were—” he barked and, trembling with rage, left the stupefied man standing there with jaw agape.

  His room, a double, was already occupied by a short-to-medium-size man in a faded windjacket, sitting under the overhead lamp. Ginger-haired with a sprinkling of gray, a few wisps dangling over the forehead, a sunburned face, bespectacled. He took off his glasses the moment Pirx entered the room. His name was Langner—Dr. Langner—the astrophysicist who was to accompany him to Mendeleev. Pirx, already prepared for the worst, pronounced his name, mumbled something, and sat down. Langner looked to be a man in his forties—an old man in Pirx’s book—but still fairly fit for his age. He didn’t smoke, probably didn’t drink, and didn’t look like the talkative type. He was reading three books at once: a logarithm table, another brimming with formulas, a third with spectrograms. He kept a miniature calculator in his trouser pocket, using it sparingly but with effortless ease. From time to time, without taking his eyes off his formulas, he threw a question at Pirx—to which the cadet responded with a mouth full of fruitcake. Their cubicle was furnished with a set of bunkbeds and a shower stall barely big enough to accommodate someone on the beefy side, and was plastered with multilingual sings bearing entreaties to conserve water and electricity. Fortunately, breathing was permitted: a short while later, oxygen was delivered to their room. Pirx washed down his snack with tap water, so cold it set his teeth on edge—reservoirs just below the basalt crust, he thought. That’s funny. It was eleven by his watch, seven by the room’s electric clock, and ten past midnight by Langner’s.

  They switched their watches to Lunar Time, knowing they would have to change again soon. The Mendeleev station was in a different time zone. The whole Far Side was in another time zone.

  Lift-off was still nine hours away when, without a word, Langne
r got up and left the room. Pirx sat and did nothing for a while, later moved his chair into the light, browsed through some ragged-looking magazines lying on the table, and finally, in a fit of restlessness, went out. The corridor wound around before opening onto a small lounge where several armchairs stood facing a recessed TV set. A track and field meet was being telecast by special relay from Australia. Though not much of a track fan, Pirx flopped down into one of the chairs and watched until his eyelids drooped. As he stood up, he shot a half meter into the air; he had forgotten about the reduced gravity. Nothing to do but loaf around. When could he change out of his civvies and into his g-suit? Where were his instructions? Why all the stalling?

  He would have nosed around, even raised hell, if what’s-his-name, Doctor Langner, hadn’t treated the whole thing so casually. Better to keep his mouth shut.

  The track meet was over. Pirx switched off the set and shuffled back to his room. Gosh, if he had known it was going to be like this… While he was taking a shower he heard voices through the dividing wall: the tourists, still rhapsodizing over lunar splendors. Ho-hum. For lack of anything better to do, he changed his shirt. He was just stretching out on his bunk when Langner reappeared with a fresh supply of books. Four of them this time.

  Pirx started to get the creeps. He began to suspect Langner of being one of those scientific fanatics, a younger version of Professor Merinus.

  Spreading out some new spectrograms on the table and studying them more intently than Pirx had ever scrutinized his favorite pinup, Langner suddenly asked:

  “How old are you?”

  “A hundred and eleven,” Pirx said, and added, when the other looked up, “in binary.”

  Langner broke out in a smile—his first—a smile that lent him an almost human look. He had strong, immaculately white teeth.

  “The Russians are picking us up in one of their ships,” he said. “We’ll stop off at their station on the way.”

  “The Tsiolkovsky station?”

  “Yes.”

  The Tsiolkovsky station was on the Far Side. That meant another stopover. Pirx wondered how they would cover the remaining thousand kilometers. Not by land, surely. By ship? He refrained from asking, not wishing to betray his ignorance. Langner was about to say something, but it was too late. Pirx was sound asleep—in his clothes.

  He woke up with a start. Langner was bent over his bunk, touching his arm.

  “It’s time,” he said, not wasting any words.

  Pirx sat up. Langner, judging by the stack of computations on the table, had been up the whole time, reading and writing. At first Pirx understood him to mean that it was time for dinner, but soon found out he was referring to takeoff. As he slung on his knapsack, he noticed that Langner’s was even bulkier and heavier. Rocks, he guessed. Later he discovered that aside from a few personal items—a couple of shirts, some toilet soap, a toothbrush—it held only books.

  They moved directly to the upper level, this time without having to pass any inspections, customs or otherwise, and found a lunar shuttle waiting for them—a squat, dome-shaped vehicle, supported by three elbowlike legs measuring twenty meters in height. The ship’s original silver finish was now a dingy gray, Pirx had never been aboard such a ship. An astrochemist who was to have joined them failed to show in time. They took off without him, right on schedule.

  The Moon’s lack of atmosphere meant that no aerodynamic vehicles such as helicopters or airplanes could be used for transportation—only rocket-propelled ships. Not even hydroplanes, the vehicles most suited for rugged terrain, were practical, requiring as they did a large supply of air. Rocket ships were fast, but fickle about where they were landed: they had a special aversion to mountains and cliffs.

  Their shell-shaped, three-legged insect rumbled, roared, and went up candlestick-straight. The passenger cabin was twice as large as a hotel single. Portholes in the walls, a large round port in the ceiling, cockpit under the belly, snugly situated between the exhaust ducts for maximum ground visibility. Pirx felt a little like a parcel being shipped to an unknown destination. Not a clue as to the whys and wherefores.

  It was the same old story.

  They pitched into a parabola, the cabin tilting sharply, the ship trailing its long “legs,” the Moon scudding by underneath—a huge convex swelling of rock and dust, seemingly untrodden by human foot. In space there is a point somewhere between Earth and the Moon where both spheres appear equal in size. Pirx distinctly recalled the illusory impression from his first lunar flight: Earth, icy blue, wrapped in mist, its continental contours blurred beyond recognition, had seemed less real than the Moon—suspended like a stone pendant, its stationary mass looming almost palpably.

  They were flying over the Sea of Clouds, the crater Bullialdus already behind them, Tycho now situated to the southeast, a halo flinging its luminous rays clear across the south pole to the Far Side, the supreme symmetry of its rocky skull made even more awesome, more overwhelming from high altitude. Refulgent with sunlight, Tycho became the center of a dazzling design, its luminous white arms embracing and traversing Mare Humorum and Mare Nubium; its northernmost spur, the most prominent of all, vanishing over the horizon in the direction of Mare Serenitatis. But once past Circus Clavius to the east, once they began losing altitude over the equator and were flying over the Sea of Dreams on the Far Side, the illusion of symmetry was lost and the deceptively dark, smooth surface of the “sea” revealed its flaws and cracks. To the northeast the sawtoothed ridge of Verne stood out in brilliant relief. The closer they came to the lunar surface, the more authentic the view, the truer the image: plateaus, plains, crater basins, and ringed mountains riddled by cosmic bombardments; wreaths of debris and lava, overlapping and interlacing, as if the will unleashing this titanic shower had not been content with the ravages already inflicted. Before Pirx could locate the Tsiolkovsky massif, the shuttle, nudged by a brief burst of power, righted itself; his last glance was of the ocean of darkness swallowing the Moon’s whole western hemisphere, leaving only the blazing tip of Lobachevski Peak protruding above the terminator. The stars in the upper port came to a standstill. The shuttle went down like an elevator; as they plunged through the engine flare converging around the stern, gases rocked the ship’s skirt with all the booming force of an atmospheric entry. Their seats automatically reclined; the stars remained fixed in the port above; the downward plunge was gradually slowed by the timid but stubborn resistance of the rumbling retro-rockets. Suddenly the braking jets resounded full blast.

  All right! We’re standing on the column! Pirx thought, just to remind himself that he was a full-fledged—if not yet licensed—astronaut.

  There was a jolt, a clank, then a hard thud, similar to a sledgehammer hitting a slab of rock; the cabin seesawed gently up and down; the hydraulics hissed and gurgled until the ship’s wobbly, twenty-meter-long legs finally wedged into the rubble.

  The pilot applied a little pressure to the oil lines to quell the rocking; there was a long pshhh, and the cabin stabilized.

  Crawling out through the deck hatch, the pilot opened a wall locker, and lo! their space suits.

  Pirx’s sudden elation was quickly aborted. There were, it turned out, four suits: the pilot’s, a small, a medium, and a large. The pilot was suited up in nothing flat, but waited for the others before putting on his helmet. Langner was equally quick getting into his. But Pirx—flushed, sweaty, and inwardly fuming—was having a tough time of it. The medium-size suit turned out to be too small; the large, too large. When he tried on the medium, his head rammed into the impact liner of his helmet. In the large he floated around like a seed in a hollowed-out gourd. He was not without friendly advice, though. The pilot was quick to point out that better a baggy suit than one too tight, and suggested stuffing the gaps with underwear from his pack. If that didn’t do the trick, he would gladly lend him a blanket. For Pirx the very idea of stuffing his suit was somehow blasphemous, and he rebelled against it with all his astronautical soul.


  He settled on the smaller one. The pilot and Langner held their peace. The pilot, leading the way, then opened the air lock; when all were inside, he unscrewed the manhole cover and pushed open the outer hatch.

  If not for Langner, Pirx would have hopped right out onto the scree, which, in view of the twenty-meter drop, would have meant a sprained ankle or worse. Despite the lesser gravity, the weight of his space suit would have made the impact equivalent to jumping down into a pile of extremely loose rock from one story up.

  The pilot lowered a collapsible ladder, and one by one they egressed onto the Moon.

  There were no welcoming parties, no one with flowers, no trumpet blasts. In fact, there was not a living soul in sight. About a kilometer away, its armor-plated dome grazed by oblique rays of awesome lunar sunlight, the Tsiolkovsky station rose prominently above the plain. A little higher up, hewn in the rock, was a small landing pad, now occupied by a double row of rockets—transports, judging by their size.

  Their ship, listing slightly to one side, hunkered down on its triadic, steel-footed assembly, blackening with exhaust the rocks directly beneath its thrust chambers. The terrain to the east was relatively flat, if an endless boulder-cluttered plain—some stones were the size of apartment houses—could be called flat. Rearing gently eastward, it fringed off into a wall of vertical faults to become the central massif of the Tsiolkovsky mountain. A blazing Sun, poised ten degrees above the ridge, blinded them every time they turned their gaze in its direction. Pirx, like the others, lowered his sun visor, but it failed to cut down the glare altogether, at most enabling him to look without squinting. Cautiously picking their way in and out of the shifting boulders, they shoved off for the station, eventually losing sight of the shuttle when they had to cross the flat-bottomed basin. The station commanded a view of the basin and the surrounding landscape, three-fourths of the structure being recessed in a wall of highland mass strangely evocative of a stone fortress from the Mesozoic era. Its lopped-off cornices bore a striking similarity to ancient turrets, but only from a distance; the closer one got to them, the more these “turrets” abandoned their symmetrical shape, the more clearly one saw their deep cracks, too easily mistaken for black stripes from far off. The terrain was fairly navigable by lunar standards. Each bootstep raised a cloud of dust—the celebrated lunar dust—that would climb waist-high, gird them in immaculate white, and refuse to settle, forcing them to walk three abreast. When they reached the station, Pirx cast a backward glance and saw three tubular, serpentine trails, brighter than any dust or powder he had ever known on Earth.