Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  “Albatross-4 Aresterra calling PAL Central, PAL Central. Am coming down for refueling, sector II. Am coming down for refueling, sector II. Running on reserve supply. Over.”

  “A-7 Terraluna, calling PAL PATHFINDER…”

  The rest was lost in the buzzing. Then silence.

  “Central to Albatross-4 Aresterra, refuel quadrant seven, Omega Central, refuel quadrant seven. Out.”

  They would pick out this spot to rendezvous, thought Pirx, who was now swimming in his sweat-absorbent underwear. This way I won’t hear a thing.

  The fly was describing frenetic circles on the computer’s console, as if hell-bent on catching up with its own shadow.

  “Albatross-4 Aresterra, Albatross-4 Aresterra to PAL Central, approaching quadrant seven. Request radio guidance. Out.”

  The radio static grew steadily fainter until it was drowned out by the buzzing. But not before he managed to catch the following message:

  “JO-2 Terraluna, JO-2 Terraluna, calling AMU-27, AMU-27. Over.”

  I wonder who he’s calling? Pirx mused, and he nearly jumped out of his straps.

  “AMU—” he wanted to say, but not a sound could he emit from his hoarse throat. His earphones were buzzing. The fly. He closed his eyes.

  “AMU-27 to JO-2 Terraluna, position quadrant four, sector PAL, am turning on navigation lights. Over.”

  He switched on his navigation lights—two red ones at the side, two green ones on the nose, a blue one aft—and waited. Not a sound except for the fly.

  “JO-2 ditto Terraluna, JO-2 Terraluna, calling…” Buzz-buzz, hum-hum…

  Does he mean me? Pirx meditated in despair.

  “AMU-27 to JO-2 ditto Terraluna, position quadrant four, perimeter sector PAL, all navigation lights on. Over.”

  When both JO ships started transmitting at the same time, Pirx switched on the sequence selector, but there was too much interference. The buzzing fly, of course.

  “I’ll hang myself!” That such a remedy was out of the question, due to the effects of weightlessness, never occurred to him.

  Just then he sighted both ships on the radar screen. They were following him on parallel courses, spaced no more than nine kilometers apart, which was prohibited; as the pilot ship, it was up to him to make them adhere to the prescribed distance of fourteen kilometers. Just as he was checking the location of the blips on the radar screen, his old friend the fly landed on one of them. In a fit of anger he threw his navigation book at it, but it was deflected by the blister’s glass wall, and instead of sliding down, it bumped against the ceiling, where, because of the zero gravity, it fluttered aimlessly about in space. Seemingly unruffled, the fly strolled merrily on its way across the screen.

  “AMU-27 Terraluna to JO-2 ditto JO-2. I have you in range. You are hard aboard. Switch over to parallel course with a correction of zero-point-zero one. Stand by on completion of maneuver. Out.”

  Gradually the distance between the blips began to widen, all communication being temporarily interrupted by the fly as it embarked on a noisy little promenade around the computer’s microphone. Pirx had run out of things to throw; the flight book was still hovering overhead, lithely flapping its pages.

  “PAL Central to AMU-27 Terraluna. Abandon outer quadrant, abandon outer quadrant, am assuming transsolar course. Over.”

  He would try to screw things up! Pirx mentally fumed. What the hell do I care about the transsolar? Anyone knows that spaceships flying in group formation have priority. He began shouting in reply, and in this shouting of his there was vented all his impotent fury directed at the fly.

  “AMU-27 Terraluna to PAL Central. Negative, am not abandoning outer quadrant, to hell with your transsolar, am flying in tri-formation. AMU-27, JO-2 ditto JO-2, squadron leader AMU-27 Terraluna. Out.”

  I didn’t have to say “to hell with your transsolar,” he thought. That’ll cost me a few points for sure. Oh, they can alt damn well go to hell! I’ll probably get docked for the fly, too.

  It could only have happened to him. A fly! Wow, big deal! He could just see Smiga and Boerst busting a gut when they got wind of that crazy-assed fly. It was the first time since lift-off that he caught himself thinking of Boerst. But right now he didn’t have a moment to lose, because PAL was dropping farther and farther behind. They had been flying in formation for a good five minutes.

  “AMU-27 to JO-2 ditto JO-2 Terraluna. It is now 2007 hours. Insertion parabolic orbit Terraluna to commence at 2010 hours. Course one hundred eleven…” And he read off the course data from the flight sheet, which, by a feat of acrobatics, he was able to retrieve from overhead. The two JO ships radioed their reply. PAL dropped out of sight, but he could still hear it signaling ever so faintly. Or was that the fly he was hearing?

  For a moment the fly seemed to multiply, to be in two different places at once. Pirx rubbed his eyes. Just as he suspected: there was not one, but two of them. Where did the second one come from?!

  Now I’m really a goner, he reflected with absolute calm, without a sign of any emotion. He even felt relieved somehow, knowing that it no longer mattered—either way he was sunk. His thoughts were diverted by a glance at the clock: it was 2010 hours, the time he himself had scheduled for the maneuver—and he had yet to even place his hands on the controls!

  The daily grind of training exercises must have taken their toll because without a moment’s hesitation he grabbed both control sticks, pressed first the left and then the right one, and all the time kept his eye on the trajectometer. The engine responded with a hollow roar until it gradually tapered off to a whisper. Ouch! Something landed on his forehead, just under his visor, and remained stationary. The navigation book! It was blocking his vision, but he couldn’t brush it aside without taking his hands from the controls. His earphones were alive and astir as the two flies went about pursuing their love life on the computer. If only I had a gun on me, he thought, feeling the navigation book start to flatten his nose with the increase in acceleration. In desperation he began tossing his head around like a madman; he had to be able to see the trajectometer, for crying out loud! Suddenly the book crashed to the floor with a bang—and small wonder: at 4g it must have weighed nearly 3 kilos. He immediately decelerated to the level required by the maneuver, and at 2g put the levers on hold. He threw a glance at the mating flies. They were not the least bit fazed by the deceleration; on the contrary, they looked to be in seventh heaven. Hm, another eighty-three minutes to go. He checked the radarscope: the two JO ships were now trailing him at a distance of 70 kilometers. I must have jumped out in front that time I hit 4g, he thought. Oh well, no sweat.

  From now until the end of the accelerated flight he would have a little time to kill. Two g was tolerable, despite his combined weight of 142 kilos. How many times had he spent up to a half hour in the centrifuge at 4g!

  But then, it wasn’t exactly a picnic, either, what with your arms and legs weighing like iron, your head completely immobilized by the blinding light…

  He verified the position of the two ships, and again thought of Boerst, picturing to himself how very much the movie star he must have looked. What a jaw that guy had! Not to mention that perfectly straight nose, those steely gray eyes… You can bet he didn’t have to rely on any cribsheet! But come to think of it, so far neither had he… Silence reigned in his earphones. Both flies were crawling along the blister’s surface such that their shadows grazed his face, and for the first time he cringed at the sight of them—at their tiny black paws, grotesquely magnified to look like suction disks, at their bodies glittering metallically in the glare of the lights…

  “Dasher-8 Aresterra calling Triangle Terraluna, quadrant sixteen, course one-hundred-eleven-point-six. I have you on convergent course eleven minutes thirty-two seconds. Advise you to alter course. Over.”

  Just my luck! Pirx mentally grumbled. Always some smart-ass trying to bugger up the works… Can’t he see I’m flying in formation?

  “AMU-27 squadron leader Triangle Terralu
na JO-2 ditto JO-2, calling Dasher-8 Aresterra. Negative, am flying in formation, proceed to carry out deviation maneuver. Out.”

  While he was transmitting, he tried to locate the unwelcome intruder on the radar. There he was—less than 1,500 meters away!

  “Dasher-8 to AMU-27 Terraluna, reporting malfunction in gravimeter system, commence immediate deviation maneuver, point of intersection forty-four zero eight, quadrant Luna four, perimeter zone. Over.”

  “AMU-27 to Dasher-8 Aresterra, JO-2 ditto JO-2 Terraluna. Will commence deviation maneuver at 2039 hours. Yaw maneuver to commence at ditto hours behind squadron leader at optical range, northern deviation Luna sector one zero point-six. Am firing low-range thrusters. Over.”

  Simultaneously he fired both lower yaw jets. The two JO ships responded at once, all three veered off course, and stars glided across the video screens. Dasher thanked him as he flew off to Luna Central, and in a surge of self-confidence, Pirx wished him a happy landing—a touch of class, seeing as the other ship was in distress. He followed his navigation lights for another thousand kilometers or so, then began guiding the two JO ships back onto their original course, which was easier said than done: going off course was one thing, finding your way back onto a parabola was another. Pirx found it next to impossible, what with a different acceleration, a computer so fast he couldn’t keep up with its coordinates, and the flies, which, if they weren’t crawling all over the computer, were playing tag on the radar screen. Where did they get all the energy? he wondered. It was a good twenty minutes before they were back on course.

  Boerst probably has smooth sailing all the way, he thought. Him? Get into trouble? Not wonderboy Boerst.

  He adjusted the automatic thrust terminator to achieve a zero acceleration after eighty-three minutes, as instructed, and then saw something that turned his sweat-absorbent underwear to ice.

  Above the dashboard a white panel had come unclamped. Not only that, but it was starting to work its way down, a millimeter at a time. It was probably loose to begin with, he reasoned, and all the vibrating during the recent yaw maneuvers—Pirx’s handling of the ship hadn’t exactly been gentle—had loosened the pressure clamps even more. With the acceleration still running at 1.7g, the panel kept inching its way down as if being pulled by an invisible thread. Finally it sprang loose altogether, slid down the outer side of the glass wall, and settled motionlessly on the deck, exposing a set of four gleaming copper high-voltage wires and fuses at the back.

  Why all the panic? he told himself. An electrical panel has come loose—so, big deal. A ship can get along without a panel, can’t it?

  Even so, he couldn’t help feeling a trifle nervous; things like that weren’t supposed to happen. If a fuse panel can come loose, what’s to stop the stern from breaking off?

  There were still twenty-seven minutes of accelerated flight to go when it hit him that once the engines were shut down, the panel would become weightless. Could it do any damage? he wondered. Not much. It was too light for that, too light even to break glass. Nah, not a chance…

  What were the flies up to? He followed them with his gaze as they zoomed and buzzed and circled and chased each other around the outside of the blister before landing on the back of the fuse panel. That’s when he lost track of them.

  He took a reading of the two JO ships on the radarscope: both were on course. The face of the Moon now loomed so large on the front screen that it took up half of it. He recalled how during a series of selenographic exercises in the Tycho Crater, Boerst, with the help of a portable theodolite… Dammit, what a pro that guy was! Pirx kept an eye out for Luna Base on the outer slope of Archimedes. It was camouflaged so well among the rocks that it was almost invisible from high altitude, all except for the smooth surface of the landing strip with its approach lights—when in the night zone, that is, and not, as presently, when it was illuminated by the Sun. At the moment the Base was straddling the crater’s shadow line, the contrast with the blinding lunar surface being so intense that it overpowered the weaker approach lights.

  The Moon looked as if untrodden by human foot. Long shadows stretched all the way from the Lunar Alps to the Sea of Rains. He recalled, too, how on his first trip there—they were just passengers then—Bullpen had called on him to verify whether stars of the seventh magnitude were visible from the Moon, and how, dumb as he was, he had tackled the problem with the greatest of enthusiasm. He had clean forgotten, the dope, that no stars were visible from the Moon by day because of the solar glare reflected by the lunar surface. It was a long time before Bullpen stopped ribbing him on account of those stars.

  The Moon’s disk continued to swell, gradually crowding out the remaining darkened portion of the screen.

  “That’s funny—I don’t hear any more buzzing.” He glanced sideways and flinched.

  One of the flies was sitting and cleaning its wings on the exposed side of the panel, while the other fly was busy courting it. A few millimeters away, its copper terminal gleaming below the spot where the insulation ended, was the nearest cable. All four cables were exposed, about as thick in diameter as a pencil, and all in the 1,000-volt range, with a contact clearance of 7 millimeters. It was just by accident that he knew it was 7. Once, as an exercise, they had tom down the entire circuitry system, and when he, Pirx, couldn’t come up with the exact clearance, his instructor had read him off the riot act.

  In the meantime, the one fly took time off from its wooing and started venturing out along the live terminal. A harmless enough thing to do—unless, of course, it suddenly got an urge to hop over to the next one, and, judging by the way it sat there, humming, at the very end of the terminal, that’s precisely what it intended to do. As if it didn’t have room enough in the cabin! Now, thought Pirx, what would happen if it put its front paws on the one wire and kept its hind feet on the other…? Well, so what if it did. In the worst case it might cause a short circuit. But then—a fly?! Would a fly be big enough to do that? But even if it were, nothing much could happen; there would be a momentary blowout, the circuit breaker would switch off the current, the fly would be electrocuted, and the power would be restored—and good-bye fly! As if in a trance, he kept his eyes fixed on the high-tension box, secretly cherishing the hope that the fly would think better of it. A short circuit was nothing serious, a glitch, but who knows what else might happen…

  Only eight more minutes of gradual deceleration until touchdown. He was still staring at the dial when there was a flash—and the lights went out. It was a momentary blackout, lasting no more than a fraction of a second. The fly! he thought, and waited with bated breath for the circuit breaker to flip the power back on. It did.

  The lights stayed on for a while—dimmer and more orangish-brown than white—before the fuse blew a second time. A total blackout. Then the power came on again. Off again. On again. And so it went, back and forth, with the lights burning at only half their normal amperage. What was wrong? During the brief but regular intervals of light, he managed, with considerable squinting and straining of the eyes, to pinpoint the trouble: the insect was trapped between two of the wires, a charred sliver of a corpse that continued to act as a conductor.

  Pirx was far from being in a state of panic. True, his nerves were a trifle frayed, but then, when had he ever been completely relaxed since the launch count? The clock was barely legible. Fortunately, the instrument panel operated on its own lighting system, as did the radarscope. And there was just enough juice being supplied to keep the backup circuits from being tripped, but not quite enough to light the cabin.

  Only four minutes left until engine cutoff. Well, that was one load off his mind—the thrust terminator was programmed to shut down the engine automatically. Suddenly an icy chill ran down his spine. How could the kill-switch work if the circuit was shorted?

  For a second he couldn’t recollect whether they operated on the same circuit, whether these were the main fuses for the rocket’s entire power supply. Of course—they had to be. But what a
bout the reactor? Surely the reactor must have had its own power network…

  The reactor, yes, but not the automatic switch. He knew because he had set it himself. Okay, so now all he had to do was to shut off the power. Or maybe he should just sit back and give it a chance to work on its own.

  The engineers had thought of everything—everything except what to do when a fly gets into your cabin, a fuse panel comes unclamped, and you wind up with such a screwy short circuit!

  Meanwhile the lights kept shorting out. Something had to be done about it. But what?

  Simple. All he had to do was to flip the master switch located in the floor behind his seat. That would shut off all the main power circuits and trip the emergency system. Then all his worries would be over. Hm, he thought, not bad the way these buckets are rigged.

  He wondered if Boerst would have been as quick on his feet. Probably, if not quicker… Yikes, only two minutes left! Not enough time for the maneuver! He sat up: he had clean forgotten about the others.

  He closed his eyes in a moment of concentration.

  “AMU-27 squadron leader Terraluna, calling JO-2 ditto JO-2. Reporting short circuit in control room. Will be necessary for me to postpone lunar insertion maneuver for temporary equatorial orbit—uh—indefinitely. Proceed to execute maneuver at previously designated time. Over.”

  “JO-2 ditto to squadron leader Terraluna. Will commence joint lunar insertion maneuver for temporary equatorial orbit. You are nineteen minutes away from lunar landing. Good luck. Good luck. Out.”

  Pirx hardly heard a word because in the meantime he had disconnected the radiophone cable, the air hose, and another small cable—his straps were already undone. No sooner had he made it to his feet than the kill-switch flashed a ruby-red. The cabin sprang briefly out of the dark, only to be plunged back into an orangish-brown blur. The engine cutoff had failed. The red signal light kept staring at him from out of the dark, imploringly. A buzzer sounded: the warning signal. The automatic terminator was inoperative. Fighting to keep his balance, Pirx jumped behind the contour couch.