Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  “C-o-m-e-i-n-m-o-m-s-s-e-n…”

  He lay on his back, wide awake. The darkness teemed with a proliferation of flickering images. Let’s see, Pratt must have wandered back aft, then run out of oxygen. Wayne and Simon knew where he was but couldn’t get to him. Why didn’t Momssen return their signals? Maybe he was already a goner. Impossible—Simon said he heard him. In which case he must have been quite close by—next door, even. Next door? That would mean there was air in Momssen’s compartment. Otherwise, Simon wouldn’t have heard anything. What did he hear, I wonder? Footsteps? Why were they calling him in the first place? And why no answer?

  The voices of a life-and-death struggle, reduced to a lot of dashes and dots… Terminus. But how? Hold it. Wasn’t he found in the wreckage? Hm. I’ll bet I know where, too—in the spot where the piping runs outside. From there he could have picked up all the signaling back and forth… I wonder how long they were able to keep it up. With a good oxygen supply, they could have held out for months. Food supply, ditto. Okay, so he was trapped in the wreckage… Wait a minute. If there was zero gravity, what immobilized him? The cold temperature, probably. Robots can’t function at extremely low temperatures. The oil congeals in the joints. The hydraulic fluid freezes up, busts the lines. All that’s left then is the electronic brain. Terminus’s computerized brain must have picked up and recorded the signals, preserved them in the electronic coils of his memory. And he doesn’t know… He doesn’t realize that those signals are regulating the rhythm of his work. Or was he lying? Nah, robots don’t lie.

  Fatigue overran his senses like a black liquid. Maybe it was wrong of him to eavesdrop. There was something obscene about it, about being a spectator to someone else’s death throes, witnessing it in all its gruesome detail and later analyzing every signal, every plea for oxygen, every shriek… It was immoral—if you could do nothing to help…

  He was fading fast, now so far gone he could no longer keep track of his thoughts, though his lips kept repeating, inaudibly, as if in protest:

  “No … no … no…”

  Then nothing—a total blank.

  He woke up with a start, circumscribed by darkness. He tried to sit up but was held back by the restraining blanket, fumbled blindly with the straps, then switched on the light.

  The engines were running. Wrapping a coat around his shoulders, he did a few knee bends to gauge the rate of acceleration. His body must have weighed a good 100 kilos. He pegged the acceleration at about 1.5g. The ship was turning; he could feel the vibrations. The wall cabinets rattled ominously, one of the cabinet doors flew open with an angry bang; everything that wasn’t secured—shoes, clothes—started sliding, imperceptibly and in unison, aft, as if animated by some conspiratorial plot.

  He walked over to the intercom box, flipped open a little door, and spoke into a gadget reminiscent of the old-style telephone receiver.

  “Control room!” he barked, wincing at the sound of his own voice. He had a headache. “First navigator speaking. What in hell is going on up there?”

  “Course correction, sir,” came the pilot’s distant reply. “We strayed off course a little, that’s all.”

  “How much off course?”

  “Six … maybe seven seconds.”

  “Reactor temperature?” he demanded in a slow, deliberate voice.

  “Six hundred twenty in the shielding.”

  “How about the holds?”

  “Fifty-two in the port holds, forty-seven in the bow, twenty-nine and fifty in the stern.”

  “Give me the yaw correction again, Munro.”

  “Seven.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he said, and he slammed the receiver down. The pilot was lying through his teeth. You didn’t need that much acceleration to make a seven-second correction. He guessed the deviation to be more in the neighborhood of several degrees.

  Those holds were getting too damned hot. What did they have stored back aft, anyway? Food? He sat down at the desk.

  Blue Star Terra-Mars to Compo Earth. Skipper to shipping agent. Reactor causing overheating in holds stop cargo in jeopardy stop no manifest available for cargo aft stop guidance requested navigator Pirx out.

  He was still writing when the engines shut down, eliminating the last vestige of gravity, with the result that when he pressed down on the pencil he was catapulted up out of his seat. He bounced impatiently off the ceiling, settled back down in his chair, and ran through the radiogram message again.

  On second thought, he tore up the radiogram and stuffed the scraps into a drawer. He decided not to get dressed—always a rather tricky affair during weightlessness, involving a lot of awkward gymnastics and a fair amount of wrestling—and so, dressed as he was, with a coat draped over his pajamas, he left the cabin.

  The bluish ambience made the dismal state of the wall padding less conspicuous. The nearby fresh-air vents—recessed, gaping, black—were sucking up the particles of dirt eddying in the corners. The whole ship was blanketed by silence, deep and unbroken. Hanging almost immobile above his own shadow, whose oblique extension could be seen climbing the wall, he shut his eyes in silent concentration. It happened that people sometimes fell asleep in this position, which was a hazardous thing to do, since the slightest burst in acceleration—in preparation, say, for a maneuver—could slam a person smack against the deck or ceiling.

  Soon he couldn’t hear a sound—not the fans, not even his own heartbeat. The nocturnal silence aboard ship was unlike any he had ever experienced. Earthly silence has limits; one senses its finite, transitory quality. Even when you’re out among the lunar dunes, you’re always accompanied by your own private little silence; trapped by your space suit, it magnifies every squeak of your shoulder straps, every crack of your bone joints, every beat of your pulse—even the act of breathing itself. Only on a ship at night can you be truly immersed in a black and glacial silence.

  He brought his watch up to eye level: it was going on 3:00 A.M.

  If this keeps up, I’ll collapse, he thought. He caromed off a convex partition wall and, stretching out his arms like a bird braking its speed, landed on the cabin doorstep. It was then he heard it—a faintly audible sound that seemed to resonate from an iron interior:

  Bong—bong—bong.

  Three times.

  He uttered a profanity, slammed the hatch door shut, and recklessly flung his coat into space, where it swelled and ascended upward like some grotesque phantom. He turned off the light, climbed under the covers, and buried his head in the pillow.

  “Idiot! Goddamned metal-plated idiot!” He kept muttering with his eyelids closed, shaking with a rage that even he found hard to justify. But fatigue got the better of him, and he was out before he knew what hit him.

  It was going on seven when he opened his eyes. Still half-asleep, he lifted his arm up high; it didn’t want to come back down. Zero g, he thought. He got dressed, went out. On his way to the control room, he instinctively kept his ears open. A hush. He paused in front of the hatch. The cabin’s twilight interior was suffused with the greenish, almost aqueous luminescence given off by the low-luster radar screens. The pilot was reclining in his contour couch, smoking a cigarette; the flat wreaths of smoke hung in front of the screens, refracting the sea-green light. From somewhere came the subdued tinkling of Earthly music, punctuated by cosmic static. Pirx lowered himself into the contour couch directly behind the pilot; he didn’t even feel like checking the gravimeter readings.

  “How long till the next burn?” he asked.

  The pilot saw through his question. “Not till eight. But I can fire ’em up now, skipper, if you feel like a bath.”

  “Nah… We’d better stick to our timetable,” mumbled Pirx.

  The ensuing silence was marred only by the persistent buzz of the loudspeaker music, monotonous in its endless repetition of the same mindless melody. Pirx felt himself getting sleepy. Several times he would manage to shake it off, be wide awake, then slowly surrender to a drowsy stupor. Or he would have
visions of cats’ eyes in the dark—big green cats’ eyes—which, the moment he blinked, turned into luminous instrument dials. He went on like this, treading that thin line between sleep and reality, until the loudspeaker began to crackle.

  “This is Deimos on the air. The time is exactly 0730. Stay tuned for the daily meteorite report for the inner zone. A frontal disturbance influenced by the gravitational field of Mars has been reported in the Draconids, last seen leaving the Van Allen Belt. In the next twenty-four hours the storm is expected to hit sectors eighty-three, eighty-four, and eighty-seven. The meteorite station on Mars estimates the cloud to be in the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer range. Sectors eighty-three, eighty-four, and eighty-seven are hereby declared closed to all traffic until further notice. Stand by for the cloud’s composition, as relayed by Phobos’s ballistic probes. According to the latest report, the cloud is made up of micrometeorites of the X, XY, and Z type…”

  “Whew! Am I glad we’re not affected,” sighed the pilot. “I just ate breakfast, and I’d sorely hate to have to rev up the engines.”

  “Present velocity?”

  “Over fifty.”

  “Really? Not bad,” mumbled Pirx. Before heading off to the mess hall, he took a course reading, consulted the uranograph readings, and checked the radiation count—it was holding steady. The other two officers were already in the mess. Pirx kept waiting for someone to squawk about all the nocturnal clamor, but, to his surprise, the conversation never once left the subject of the next lottery draw. Sims, visibly the more excited of the two, kept up a steady recital of friends and acquaintances who, at one time or another, had hit the jackpot.

  After breakfast Pirx stopped by the navigation room to plot the distances already traveled. Suddenly, in the middle of it, he dug his compass into the plotting board, tore open the desk drawer, pulled out the logbook, and scanned the Coriolanus's last crew list:

  Officers: Pratt and Wayne. Pilots: Nolan and Potter. Mechanic: Simon…

  He pondered long and hard the commander’s vigorous handwriting. Finally he tossed the book back into the drawer, finished plotting the ship’s course, and rode down to the control room, taking the carbons with him. It took him a half hour to compute their exact time of arrival on Mars. On his way back, he peeked through the window in the mess-hall door. The officers were playing chess; the orderly sat slouched in front of the TV, with a heating pad on his stomach.

  Pirx shut himself up in his cabin, browsed through the radiograms handed him by the pilot, and, before he knew it, was lulled into a light snooze. Once or twice he thought he heard the engines running, tried to rouse himself, and dreamed instead of having gone down to an empty cockpit and of having combed the pitch-dark passageways back aft in search of one of the crew… When he awoke he was seated at his desk, drenched with sweat—peeved at the prospect of a sleepless night brought on by such a long afternoon nap.

  When, toward evening, the pilot reignited the engines, Pirx took advantage of the gravity to indulge in a hot bath. Feeling greatly revived, he then stopped by the mess, poured some coffee into himself, and phoned upstairs for a temperature reading. The reactor was up around the 1,000-degree mark, demurring, for some reason, at crossing the danger point. Around 2100 hours he was summoned to the control room: a passing ship was requesting medical assistance—to help out with an acute appendicitis on board. Pirx was debating whether to dispatch his orderly when a nearby passenger liner radioed that it was willing to stop and offer assistance.

  Thus began a fairly routine and uneventful day. At 2300 hours sharp, the white lights on all the decks—except for those in the control room and reactor chamber—were switched off, and the blue night-lights came on. Only one light was left on in the mess hall—the one over the chessboard, where Sims, the electrician, stayed up until around midnight playing chess by himself.

  Pirx went below to check the temperature in the cargo holds. On the way down, he ran into Boman, just returning from an inspection of the reactor. The ship’s engineer was in good spirits; the leakage was stable and the cooling system checked out okay.

  The engineer said good night and retired to his cabin, leaving Pirx alone in the dark and deserted passageway. A draft was blowing in the direction of the bow, gently ruffling the remains of spiderwebs clinging to the air vents.

  The passageway between the main holds rose up tall and cavernous, like a church nave. Pirx meandered back and forth for a while, until a few minutes after midnight when the engines shut down.

  At once a variety of sounds, muted and high-pitched, assailed him from all sides. Liberated by the drop in acceleration, objects not secured began shifting and colliding with walls, ceilings, decks; the reverberations, diverse and multitudinous, bestowed on the ship a strange animation. They hung in the air for a while before giving way to silence, a silence made even more extreme by the monotonous hum of the fans.

  Pirx suddenly remembered that a desk drawer in the navigation room needed fixing, so he set off in search of a wood chisel. A long, narrow passageway that ran between the port holds and a cable duct took him to the toolroom; a dirty place at any time, the room now fairly swarmed with dust that wouldn’t settle, so that Pirx was almost asphyxiated by the time he groped his way to the exit.

  He was almost amidships when footsteps sounded in the passageway. Footsteps? In zero gravity? It could be only one thing, he knew. The clicking of magnetic suction disks gripping the deck was a confirmation. Pirx waited until a dark silhouette appeared in the passageway, its back to the lights at the far end. Terminus advanced with a rocking motion, paddling his arms for balance.

  Pirx stepped out of the shadows.

  “Hey, Terminus!”

  “I hear and obey.”

  The ponderous figure halted; the upper half of his body was pitched forward by the force of inertia, then gradually righted itself.

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “Mice restless.” A voice resonated from behind the armored breastplate, a voice strongly suggestive of a husky-voiced midget. “Mice cannot sleep. Fidgety. Thirsty. When thirsty, must have water. Mice drink much when temperature high…”

  “So what are you doing about it?”

  The robot swayed on its stiltlike legs.

  “High temperature. Must move. Always move when temperature high. Water for mice. When drink and sleep—good. Often errors when temperature high. On duty. Must report back. Water for mice…”

  “You bring the mice water?”

  “Yes. Terminus.”

  “Where do you get the water?”

  Twice the robot repeated the words “high temperature”; then, fully as if some human were prompting him from within, he lifted up both hands in a gesture of surprise—a gesture as abrupt as it was pathetic—passed each hand before the lenses rotating in their socketlike orbits, and fixed his gaze on his sheer metallic palms.

  “No water… Terminus.”

  “Well, where is the water?” Pirx pressed, squinting up at the towering robot. After uttering a few unintelligible sounds, Terminus unexpectedly intoned in a deep bass:

  “I … forgot.”

  It was pronounced with such helplessness that Pirx almost lost his composure. He studied him for a while, this figure swaying before him, and said:

  “Forgot, did you? Go on back to the reactor, y’hear?”

  “I hear and obey.”

  Terminus made a crunching about-face and walked off in the same stiff, almost senile fashion as before, gradually diminishing in the receding distance. He stumbled on one of the ramps, paddled his arms oarlike, managed to regain his balance, and disappeared around the bend into the adjoining passageway. His marching step rebounded off the walls for a while.

  Pirx was already on his way back to his cabin when he suddenly changed his mind; hugging the deck, he glided noiselessly along until he came to the sixth ventilator shaft. Although the shafts were strictly off limits, a rule that applied even during engine shutdown, he shoved off from the guardra
il and covered the seven flights separating the midships from the tail section in a matter of seconds. This time, however, instead of entering the reactor chamber, he swam up to a sliding trap set at head level in the wall, slid back the metal plate, and found himself staring through a steel-framed, rectangular window of leaded glass. The back of the mice cages. How convenient—an observation port. The littered cages on the other side of the glass were empty; through the wire netting in front his attention was drawn to the center of the chamber, where, reflecting the light from above, his torso glistening with water, the robot hung almost horizontally in space, twirling his arms in a slow, comatose motion. The panoplied body was crawling with white mice; scurrying over brassards and breastplate, they congregated in the hollows of the robot’s segmented abdomen—where the water had generously gathered into drops—drank, somersaulted, and flew strange patterns in the air, while Terminus tried hard to retrieve them, only to have them slip through his metal pincers each time, their tails describing weird arabesques as they squirmed their way to freedom… It was a spectacle so bizarre, so comical, that Pirx could hardly contain himself. Once, as Terminus went about corraling the mice, his metal face narrowly missed Pirx’s gaze. The last of the mice finally captured, Terminus shut the cages and vanished from sight, leaving only his behemothian shadow to fall crosslike from the main pipe joint, clear across the reactor’s concrete wall.

  Pirx quietly slid the door back into place, returned to his cabin, undressed, and climbed under the covers. Unable to sleep, he opened a volume of Irving’s memoirs—of astronavigator fame—and read until his eyes began to burn. With a groggy head, yet feeling as alert as ever, he contemplated in despair the number of hours still separating him from daylight, then climbed out of bed, threw on his coat, and went out.

  He picked up the plodding footsteps at the point where the main passageway merged with the outboard passage. He brought his head up close to the air vent; the noise was coming from below, resonating in the shaft’s iron well. A push of the hands propelled him forward, feet first, toward the nearest vertical shaft, and he dropped down to the tail section. The echoing footsteps grew louder, then fainter. He strained to listen; they started up again, more booming than before. He was coming back. Pirx hovered motionlessly, high up under the ceiling, and waited. The deck reverberated with the clinking, clanking of metal-plated soles. Then silence. Just as he was running out of patience, the measured treading resumed, and a large shadow, with Terminus marching at the rear of it, flooded the passageway. He came toward him, passing so close underneath that Pirx could hear his hydraulic heartbeat. After he had taken a dozen or so steps, he stopped and emitted a high-pitched, hissing sound, tilted several times to the right and left, as if bowing to the iron bulkheads, and moved on. When he came to a side passage, he halted just this side of its gaping mouth, peeked around the comer, and hissed a second time. His fingertips grazing the high ceiling, Pirx trailed after the hulking figure.