More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  The airwaves, meanwhile, were jumping, as passenger ships began switching to alternate routes. Luna Base had its hands full. The ground stations that relayed the orbital data and course corrections were firing away signals at a clip too fast for the human ear to detect. The relays were also jammed with the voices of passengers who, for a hefty fee, were cabling reassuring messages to loved ones. Luna’s astrophysics station kept transmitting updates on the swarm’s more concentrated areas, along with spectroanalyses of its composition—in a word, a regular variety show.

  My mumps-stricken crew, already informed about the hyperbolic cloud, kept phoning in to the radio room—until I switched off the intercom system. I announced they would recognize any danger—a blowout, say—by the sudden loss of pressure.

  Around 2300 hours, I went below for a bite to eat. The radiotelegraph operator, who must have given up waiting for me, had vanished meanwhile, and I was too tired to hunt him down, much less think about him. The engineer returned from his watch, calmer and more visibly troubled by his brother-in-law than by the swarm. On his way out of the mess, when he wasn’t yawning like a whale, he mentioned that the radar’s left screen must have shorted, because it was showing a sort of green flicker. With these words he made his exit, while I, who was in the process of polishing off a can of corned beef, my fork stuck in an unappetizing gob of solid fat, fairly froze.

  The engineer knew radar about as well as I knew asphalt. A radar screen “shorted”…!

  A moment later, I was streaking to the cockpit (in a manner of speaking, of course, because I could accelerate only by shinnying with my hands and by bouncing, feet first, off the walls and overhead deck). The cockpit—when I finally reached it—was dead, its dashlights extinguished, its reactor controls like fireflies, and only the radar screens were still going, pulsating with every sweep of the scope. My eye was already on the left-hand one before I was inside the hatch.

  The lower-right quadrant showed a bright, immobile dot, which, when I came closer, became a coin-sized splotch, somewhat flat and spindle-shaped, perfectly symmetrical and fluorescent-green in color: a tiny, deceptively motionless fish in an otherwise empty ocean. If an officer of the watch had spotted it—not now, but a half hour earlier—he would have flipped the automatic tracking relay, alerted his CO, and requested the other ship’s course and destination. But I was without any watch officers, a half hour too late, and alone. I did everything at once: sent out the identification call, switched on the tracker, and fired up the reactor (it was as cold as a very old corpse) in order to have instant thrust ready at hand. I even managed to get the navigational computer going, only to discover that the other ship’s course was almost parallel to ours, with only a marginal difference between them, so that the chance of a collision, extremely low to begin with, was pushing zero.

  But the other ship played deaf. I shifted to another chair and began flashing Morse from my deck laser. It was too close for comfort, about nine hundred kilometers astern, and I could see myself being hauled before the Tribunal for violation of Paragraph VIII: “HA = Hazardous Approach.” But only a blind man could have missed my signal lights, I told myself. Meanwhile, that ship sat stubbornly on my radar, and not only did it not alter course, but it was actually starting to lap us—we were moving, as I said, on almost parallel tracks—along the quadrant’s outer perimeter. I visually clocked its speed at roughly hyperbolic, or ninety kilometers per second, which was confirmed by two readings taken within a ten-second interval; whereas we were lucky if we were doing forty-five.

  Still no response; it was gaining, and it looked splendid, even elegant. A pale-green, incandescent lens, which we viewed sideways; a smoothly tapered spindle. Suspicious about its size, I glanced at the radar range-finder: we were four hundred kilometers away. I blinked. Normally a ship looked no bigger than a comma from that distance. Damn—I thought—nothing works aboard this ship! I transferred the image to a small auxiliary radar with a directional antenna. The same effect. My mind went blank. Then a sudden brainstorm: another of Le Mans’s convoys, a string of some forty-odd hulks in tow… But why the spindle shape?

  The scopes went on sweeping, the range-finder kept clicking away. Three hundred, two hundred sixty, two hundred…

  I checked the course margin on the Harrelsberg because I smelled a near-collision in the making. When radar was first introduced at sea, everyone felt a lot safer, but ships went on sinking just the same. The data confirmed my suspicions: the other ship would clear our bow by some thirty to forty kilometers. I tested the radio and laser relays. Both functional, but still no response. Until now, I had been feeling a trifle guilty—for leaving the ship on automatic while I sat below and listened to the engineer bellyache about his brother-in-law, snacking on a can of corned beef because I was without a crew and had to do everything myself—but no more. Now it was as though the scales had fallen. Filled with righteous indignation, I knew who the guilty party was: this deaf-mute of a ship, too hell-bent across the sector to respond to another pilot’s emergency signals!

  I switched on the radiophone and demanded that the other ship display its navigational lights and send up flares, that it report its call numbers, name, destination, owner—all in the standard code, of course—but it kept cruising leisurely, silently along, altering neither course nor speed by so much as a fraction of a degree or a second. It now lay eighty kilometers astern.

  So far, it had been situated a little to the port side; now I could see it was lapping me. The angular correction meant that the clearance would be even tighter than the one projected by the computer. Under thirty kilometers, in any case, perhaps as low as twenty. The rules sad I should have been braking, but I couldn’t. I had a necropolis of over a hundred thousand tons behind me; I would have had to unhook all those dead hulks first. But alone, without a crew? Oh, no, braking was out of the question. Friend, I told myself, what you need now is not astronautical savvy but philosophy—starting with a little fatalism and, in case the computer’s projection was high, even a dabbling in eschatology.

  At exactly twenty-two kilometers, the other ship began to outstrip the Pearl. From now on the values would increase, which meant we were in the clear. All this time my eyes had been glued to the range-finder. I shifted my gaze back to the radar screen.

  What I saw was not a ship but a flying island. From twenty kilometers away, it now measured about two fingers in width. The perfectly symmetrical spindle had become a disk—better, a ring!

  I know what you’re probably thinking: an alien encounter. I mean, a ship measuring twenty kilometers in length…? An alien encounter. A catchy phrase, but who believes in it? My first impulse was to tail the thing. Really! I even grabbed the stick—then held back. Fat chance I’d have with all that scrap in tow. I heaved out of my seat and climbed a narrow shaft to the small, hull-mounted astrodome atop the cockpit. It was conveniently stocked with telescope and flares. I fired three in quick succession, aiming for the ship’s general radius, and tried to get a sighting in the glare. An island, yes, but still hard to locate right away. The flash blinded me for a few seconds, until my eyes adjusted to the brightness. The second flare landed wide, too far away to do any good; the third, just above it. In that immobilizing white light, I saw it.

  Only a glimpse, really, lasting no more than five or she seconds, because I was using one of those exceptionally bright flares that fade very fast. But in the space of those few seconds, I saw, looking down at an angle through my night glasses, whose eighty-power lenses brought it to within a few hundred meters, an eerily but sharply illuminated mass of metal. So massive, in fact, it barely fit into my field of vision. Stars showed in the center. A sort of hollow, cast-iron, spaceborne tunnel, but—as I noticed in the last glimmerings of light—somewhat squashed, more tire-shaped than cylindrical. I could see straight through the core, even though it wasn’t on the same axis; the monster stood at an angle to my line of vision, like a slightly tipped glass of water.

  There was no time f
or idle contemplation. I fired more flares; two failed to ignite, the third fell short, the fourth and fifth made it stand out—for the last time. Having crossed the Pearl’s tangent, it sheered off and quickly widened the gap—one hundred kilometers, two hundred, three hundred—until it was completely out of eye range.

  I immediately hustled back to the control room to plot its trajectory, because afterward I intended to sound a general alarm, in all sectors, such as had never been heard. I already had visions of a cosmic chase after the alien intruder—a chase using my trajectory—although secretly I was sure it belonged to the hyperbolic swarm.

  There are times when the human eye can behave like a camera lens, when a momentarily but brilliantly cast image can be not merely recalled but meticulously reconstructed as vividly as if viewed in the present. Minutes later, I could still visualize the surface of that colossus in the flare’s afterglow, its kilometers-long sides not smooth but pocked, almost lunar in texture; the way the light had spilled over its corrugated rills, bumps, and craterlike cavities—scars of its interminable wandering, dark and dead as it had entered the nebulae, from which it had emerged centuries later, dust-eaten and ravaged by the myriad bombardments of cosmic erosion. I can’t explain my certainty, but I was sure that it sheltered no living soul, that it was a billion-year-old carcass, no more alive than the civilization that gave birth to it.

  With my mind still astir with such images, I computed, for the fourth, fifth and sixth time, the elements of its trajectory, and, with each punch of the key, entered the data on the recording machine. Every second was precious; by now, the ship was a mere phosphorescent green comma, a mute firefly hugging the edge of the screen on the right, receding to a distance of two, then three, then six thousand kilometers.

  Then it was gone. Why did that bother me? It was dead, had no maneuvering ability, couldn’t run or hide. OK, it was flying at hyperbolic, but any ship with a high-power reactor and the target’s exact trajectory could easily outrun it.

  I opened the cassette recorder to remove the tape and take it down to the radio room—and froze. The metal sprocket was empty; the tape had run out hours, maybe even days ago, and nobody had bothered to refill it. I had been entering the data on nothing. All lost. No ship, no trace, nothing.

  I lunged for the screens. That goddamned baggage train! Oh, how I wanted to dump Le Mans’s treasures and take off. Where to? I wasn’t sure myself. Direction Aquarius, I think—but I couldn’t just aim for a constellation! Still? If I radioed the sector, gave the approximate speed and course data…?

  It was my duty as a pilot, my first and foremost duty, if I could still do anything at all.

  I took the elevator to midships, to the radio room. I foresaw everything: the call to Luna Central, requesting priority for future transmissions of the utmost urgency, which were sure to be taken by the controller on duty, not by one of their computers. Then my report about having sighted an alien craft intersecting my course at a hyperbolic velocity and conjectured to be part of a galactic swarm. When the controller asked for its trajectory, I would have to say that I had computed it but was missing the data, because, due to an oversight, the recorder’s tape cartridge had been empty. He’d then ask me to relay the fix of the pilot who was first to sight the ship. Sorry, no fix, either: the watch officer was a civil engineer. Next—provided he hadn’t begun to smell a rat—why hadn’t I instructed my radiotelegraph operator to relay the data while I was doing my computations? I’d have to tell him the truth: because the operator had been too drunk to stand watch. If he was then still in the mood to pursue this conversation, taking place across more than three hundred sixty-eight million kilometers, he would inquire why one of the pilots hadn’t filled in for the missing operator, to which I’d reply that the whole crew had been bedridden with the mumps. Whereupon, if he still harbored any doubts, he would safely conclude that I either had flipped or was myself drank. Had I tried to record the ship’s presence in any way—by photographing it in the light of the flares, for example, by transcribing the radar data on ferrotape, or at least by recording all my subsequent calls? But I had nothing, no evidence. I had been too rushed; and why bother with photographs—I recalled thinking—when Earth’s ships were bound to catch up with the target, anyway? Besides, all the recording equipment had been off.

  The controller would then do exactly what I would have done in his place: he would tell me to get off the air and would inquire of all ships in my sector whether anyone had sighted anything suspicious. None had, of course, because none could have observed the galactic intruder. The only reason I could was that I was flying within the plane of the ecliptic, strictly off limits because of circulating dust and the remnants of meteoroids and comet tails. But I had violated that ban to have enough fuel for the maneuvers that were to make Le Mans the richer by one hundred forty thousand tons of scrap iron. Luna’s coordinator would have to be told, naturally, in which case word was bound to reach the Tribunal’s Disciplinary Board. True, my having discovered the ship might outweigh an official reprimand, and possibly even a fine, but only on condition that the ship was actually tracked down. In short, it was a lost cause, because a pursuit would have meant dispatching an entire fleet into the zone of the ecliptic, twice as hazardous as usual because of the hyperbolic swarm. Even if he wanted to, the Luna coordinator lacked the authority to do it. And even if I did handstands and called COSNAV, the International Committee for Space Research, and the devil only knows who else, there would still be the conferences and meetings and powwow sessions, and then maybe, if they moved with lightning speed, they might reach a decision in three weeks’ time. By then—my mind, exceptionally quick that night, had already done its homework in the elevator—the ship would be a hundred ninety million kilometers away, beyond the sun, which it would skirt closely enough to have its trajectory altered, so that in the end the search area would amount to more than ten million cubic kilometers. Maybe twenty.

  Such were my prospects as I reached the radio room. I sat down and estimated the probability of a sighting through Luna’s giant radiotelescope, the most powerful radioastronomical unit in the system. Powerful, yes, but not powerful enough to pick up a target of that magnitude at a distance of four hundred million kilometers. Case closed. I tore up my computations, got up, and quietly retired to my cabin, feeling as though I had committed a crime. We’d been visited by an intruder from the cosmos, a visit that occurs, who knows, maybe once in a million years—no, once in hundreds of millions of years. And because of a case of the mumps, because of a man named Le Mans and his convoy of scrap, and a drunken halfbreed, and an engineer and his brother-in-law, and my negligence—it had slipped through our fingers, to merge like a phantom with the infinity of space. For the next twelve weeks, I lived in a strange state of tension, because it was during that time that the dead ship returned to the realm of the great planets and became lost to us forever. I was at the radio room every chance I got, nurturing a gradually diminishing hope that someone else might sight it, someone more collected than I, or just plain luckier, but it wasn’t meant to be. Naturally, I never breathed a word to anyone. Mankind is not often blessed with such an opportunity. I feel guilty, and not only toward our race; nor will I be granted the fame of Herostratus, since fortunately nobody would believe me any more. I must admit that even I have my doubts at times: maybe there never was any encounter—except with that can of cold, indigestible corned beef.

  THE ACCIDENT

  Translated by Louis Iribarne

  When Aniel wasn’t back by four, no one thought much of it. Around five it started to get dark, and Pirx, more puzzled than alarmed, had an impulse to ask Krull what could be keeping him. But he didn’t; he was not the team leader, and anyhow, such a question, harmless and even legitimate in itself, was bound to set off a chain reaction of mutual needling. He knew the symptoms, all the more predictable when, as in their case, the team was a randomly selected one. Three people of widely divergent specialization, stuck in the mountains
of an utterly worthless planet, on a mission that all, Pirx included, considered a waste of time.

  They had come—their transport, a mini-gravistat so old it was good only for scrap iron, was to be junked afterward—equipped with a collapsible aluminum Quonset hut, a smattering of hardware, and a radio terminal so fatigued that it gave more trouble than service. A seven-week “general recon” mission—what a laugh! Pirx would have turned it down had he spotted it for what it was—a mop-up detail, designed to follow up on probes initiated by the Base Exploration Department, to add one more digit to the raw data fed their memory banks for programming next year’s manpower and resource allocation. And for the sake of that perforated figure, they had sat nearly fifty days in a wilderness that, in other circumstances, might have had its attractions—say, for mountain-climbing. But mountain-climbing, understandably, was strictly against regs, and the best Pirx could do was to contemplate the first pitches while he was out doing his seismic and triangulation surveys.