Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  In less time than it took to think, Pirx was back in the chamber, armed with flare gun and cartridges. A minute later he was standing on top of the dome, firing as fast as he could load, straight down, in the direction of the Sun Gap. He had trouble ejecting the hot cartridges; the gun’s heavy butt kicked in his hand. There was no report, no loud bang, only a slight recoil followed by fiery efflorescence, a burst of brilliant green, then a purple glare; a shower of red drops, of sapphire stars… He fired indiscriminately, not being choosy about the colors. Finally, out of the impenetrable dark came a reply—an orange star that exploded over his head and showered him with iridescent ostrich feathers. Then another, this one in saffron-gold…

  Pirx kept firing away, with Langner returning his fire. The gun flashes began to converge. Before long he discerned the figure of a man, eerily silhouetted against the brilliance. Pirx suddenly went limp, felt woozy. He was drenched from head to foot. Dripping as if he’d just stepped out of the bathtub, still clutching the flare gun, knees buckling, he sat down and dangled his legs through the open hatch, and waited—short of breath—for his partner to join him.

  What had happened was this. After Pirx left, Langner had been so preoccupied with his powdered-egg recipe that it was a while—exactly how many minutes he couldn’t recall—before he remembered to check the monitors. It was clear that he did so around the time Pirx was tinkering with the headlamp. The moment Pirx disappeared from the radar’s scanning range, a servomechanism gradually reduced the antenna angle until the polarized pencil beam reached all the way to the foot of the Sun Gap. When a blip appeared on the screen, Langner automatically assumed it to be a space suit, the “magic eye,” now dormant because of Pirx’s momentary absence, confirming his suspicion. Whoever was out there—and he knew it had to be Pirx—was either unconscious or suffocating. Langner lost no time in suiting up and going out.

  Actually, the radar had picked up one of the aluminum stakes, the one at the top of the cliff, nearest the station. Langner might have discovered his mistake if not for the “eye,” which seemed to corroborate the radar input.

  The papers later reported that the “eye” and the radar tracking system were both controlled by an electronic brain; that at the time of Roget’s death, this brain had recorded the Canadian’s breathing pattern, storing it in its memory; and that given the same input data, it was “programmed” to reproduce the same pattern again. In effect, the phenomenon had been the result of a “conditioned reflex.”

  There was a much simpler explanation. The station’s monitoring system was controlled not by an “electronic brain” but by an automatic sequencer. The convulsive breathing pattern was the result of a simple mechanical failure—in this case, a burned-out condenser. When the outer hatch was inadvertently left open, the voltage jumped circuits, and that in turn was transmitted on the magic-eye grid as a “vibration.” Only at first glance did it resemble a dying man’s breathing pattern; closer inspection revealed it to be what it in fact was: a glitch.

  Langner had been lured to the cliff in the mistaken (as it turned out) belief that Pirx was stranded. He had used his headlamp to navigate in the dark and, when circumstances required it, the flares. That accounted for the two bright flashes seen by Pirx on his way back from the shaft. Within four or five minutes Pirx was up on the station dome, trying to capture Langner’s attention with the flares. And that’s how the drama ended.

  In the case of Challiers and Savage, the sequence of events was somewhat different. Savage, too, might have urged the departing Challiers to hurry back, just as Langner had done with Pirx. Then again, Challiers might have lost track of the time while reading, and fallen behind schedule. Whatever the reason, he neglected to close the hatch. But by itself the mechanical malfunction would not have been enough to cause the fatalities. Something else was needed, some purely fortuitous, coincidental factors. Because something must have distracted Challiers in the shaft long enough for the radio antenna, its inclination enlarging with every sweep, to reflect the aluminum marker on the cliff.

  What could have distracted him? A mystery. A headlamp malfunction? The odds spoke against it. Yet something definitely had delayed him, and in the interim there had appeared that fatal blip that Savage, and later Langner, had mistaken for a space suit. Subsequent tests established that the delay must have been at least thirteen minutes long.

  Savage had gone down to the cliff to look for Challiers. Challiers, returning from the shaft to find the station deserted, then saw the same image later observed by Pirx, which made him go out in search of Savage. Savage probably got as far as the Sun Gap, realized the blip was a reflection of the aluminum marker, but took a fall on his way back and punctured his faceplate. Or he may not have suspected a mechanical malfunction but, driven by his failure to locate Challiers, might have been lured into treacherous terrain and fallen. The exact circumstances of his death were never ascertained. Certain it was, however, that both Canadians were dead.

  Logically the accident must have struck around dawn. For if not for the radio blackout, the man on duty at the station could have communicated, without having left the kitchen, with the one outside. Haste must also have been a factor, since only when the outer hatch was left unsealed did the mechanical failure manifest itself. Too, the person bent on saving time was more apt to lose time through his haste—by dropping a packet of plates, by upsetting the plate rack… Too, a radar blip is indistinct enough for a metal marker located 2,000 meters away to be mistaken for a man’s space suit. The convergence of all these factors made such a tragedy not only possible but probable. Finally, the man on duty must have been in the kitchen, or somewhere else, but in any case not in the radio station, where he would have seen that his partner was correctly oriented, and would not have taken the blip in the southern perimeter for a space suit.

  It was no coincidence that Challiers’s body was found within a close radius of the spot where Roget had perished. He fell and landed directly below the site posted with the aluminum marker, deliberately placed there as a warning. Challiers was obviously steered in that direction by the radar input.

  The technical cause was simple and straightforward—to the point of being trivial. All it required was a series of coincidences and the presence of such factors as radio interference and an open pressure-chamber hatch.

  More noteworthy were the psychological factors. When the monitoring device, in the absence of any input, displayed the internal voltage oscillation as a “breathing,” pulsating butterfly, and when the radar screen projected a space-suit-like image, both men, first Savage and then Challiers, had been quick to accept these as reliable visual presentations, each believing the other to be in mortal danger. The same held true for Pirx and Langner.

  Such responses were only natural for men intimately acquainted with the details of Roget’s death, of that long and agonizing ordeal luridly and dramatically transmitted on the “magic eye.”

  If, then, as was purported, it was simply a case of a “conditioned reflex,” then it was manifested not by the hardware but by humans. Half-unconsciously, each of them, Pirx and Langner, had been aware of a possible repetition of Roget’s fate, this time with one of themselves as the victim.

  “Now that we know all the circumstances,” said Professor Taurov, a cyberneticist from the Tsiolkovsky team, “tell us, Pirx—what tipped you off? You said yourself you didn’t understand the cause-and-effect mechanism…”

  “I don’t know,” said Pirx. The blinding white of the Sun-glazed peaks throbbed through the window. Their needle tips—like baked bones—pierced the thick black firmament. “The plates, I guess. As soon as I saw them, I realized I had done exactly what Challiers had done with them—dumped them on the table. The plates—well, okay, that could have been a coincidence. But we were having omelets for supper—the same thing they were having that night. That was one too many; it had to be more than just a fluke, I figured. Yep, the omelets are what saved us…”

  “Yes,” said Prof
essor Taurov. “The open hatch was indeed a function of the omelets—or, more accurately, of your haste to make it back in time for supper. There your perceptions were quite apt. But,” he added, “they would not have saved you if you had trusted blindly in the monitors.” He paused. “On the one hand, we have no choice but to trust in our technology. Without it we would never have set foot on the Moon. But … sometimes we have to pay a high price for that trust.”

  “That’s true,” said Langner, rising up from his chair. “But, gentlemen, I must tell you what impressed me most about my cosmic colleague. As for me, that little stroll down the cliff … well, it fairly ruined my appetite. But this one”—he placed his hand on Pirx’s shoulder—“after all that happened, he polished off I don’t know how many omelets. Amazing! I mean, I always thought of him as a decent, regular sort of fellow…”

  “Huh?!” said Pirx.

  ON

  PATROL

  A red-shingled cottage, as yummy-looking as a raspberry gumdrop, stood on the floor of the little see-through box. One jiggle of the box and three little pigs came tumbling out of the bushes, so like three rosy-pink pearls. Simultaneously, a black wolf, its serrated, red-lined jaw chomping up and down at the slightest nudge, popped out of its hole by the forest—a make-believe forest painted on the rear wall, but amazingly lifelike—and made a beeline for the pigs. (The wolf was probably magnetized.) Now, it took a pretty steady hand to head off a massacre. The trick was to maneuver the pigs through the cottage door—not the most obliging of doors, by the way—by tapping the bottom of the box with the nail of your little finger. The box was no bigger than a ladies’ compact, but challenging enough to consume half a lifetime. But at the moment it was as good as useless, due to the zero gravity. Pirx gazed down at the accelerator controls, wistfully. A flick of the finger, the barest amount of thrust, and he would have just enough gravity to tinker with the pigs’ destiny—which beat staring idly into space any day.

  Regrettably, saving three rosy-pink piglets from an attacking wolf was not reason enough to justify activating the reactor, not according to the flying regs, anyway, which strenuously forbade any aimless maneuvers in space. Aimless, my foot!

  Pirx reluctantly slipped the box back into his pocket. Other pilots before him had stowed even wackier things aboard, this being especially the custom on long patrol flights, such as the one Pirx was now on. There was a time when the Base’s Flight Command used to wink at this splurging of uranium, which was used to launch not only manned spaceships but such personal items as toy windup birds—the kind that feed on bread crumbs—self-propelled hornets that chase after mechanical wasps, and nickel-plated Chinese puzzles inlaid with ivory. By now it was so commonplace that people had forgotten how it all began, that it was little Aarmens who first infected the Base with this mania when he started confiscating his six-year-old son’s toys before going out on patrol.

  The honeymoon lasted not quite a year—up until the time the ships stopped reporting back from their missions.

  In those halcyon times, patrol duty was still a cause for bitching, just as being assigned to a “space-combing mission” was interpreted as a sign of the CO’s personal malice. Pirx, on the other hand, took the news completely in stride. Patrols were like a bout of the measles: sooner or later everyone was bound to get them.

  Then Thomas failed to report back—big tubby Tom, who wore size 16 shoes, was always good for a gag, and who kept a bunch of poodles, the world’s smartest, of course. The pockets of his space suit were frequently home to hot-dog bits and sugar cubes, and the CO suspected him of occasionally sneaking the poodles aboard ship, though Thomas vehemently proclaimed his innocence. Maybe he was innocent, though the truth will probably never be known. Because one July afternoon Thomas embarked on a patrol mission—his last—loaded down with two Thermoses of coffee (he was also a coffee addict), and leaving behind a third in the pilots’ mess, filled to the brim, to make sure his favorite brew was waiting for him on his return: coffee mixed with grounds and boiled with sugar. The coffee was a long time waiting. The third day after takeoff, at 7:00 P.M., after the customary grace period had expired, Thomas’s name appeared—all by its lonesome—on the control-room blackboard. Such things were a relic of the past; only the oldest veterans could recall a time when missions were aborted, and they loved to fluster the younger pilots with grim stories of the days when meteorite warnings came fifteen seconds before impact—just enough time for a pilot to say his good-byes. By radio, of course. But such stuff was now ancient history. The blackboard in the control room was always empty, a permanent fixture sustained only through the sheer force of inertia.

  At nine o’clock it was still light outside; the pilots on duty, having just emerged from the control tower, stood on the lawn surrounding the concrete landing strip, gazing skyward. The tower was declared off limits. That evening the CO drove back from town, fished the tapes out of the canisters—the ones with the signal recordings of Thomas’s automatic transmitter—and went upstairs to where a glass-domed observatory gyrated in a madman’s frenzy as it combed the skies with its black radar dishes.

  Thomas was flying a small, one-man AMU, though its fuel supply was enough to propel the craft halfway around the Milky Way and back, as the NCO from the tanker squadron, a man unanimously regarded as a jerk, hastened to reassure the pilots. “Up yours, pal,” someone muttered the moment the NCO turned his back. Because the truth was the oxygen supply aboard an AMU—a five-day ration, with an eight-hour emergency store—was a mere drop in the bucket, and everybody knew it. For four consecutive days, then, the station’s eighty-some-odd pilots scoured the sector where Thomas was supposed to have disappeared, logging a total of nearly five thousand rocket hours. And each time they came back empty-handed, as if the man had simply vanished into space.

  The second one to disappear was Wilmer, who, if the truth be told, was beloved by hardly anyone. Although there was no one major reason to account for his unpopularity, there was also no shortage of minor ones. He was forever butting into the conversation, not content unless allowed to have his say; he had a goofy laugh, a knack for cackling in the least appropriate places, and the more he got under your skin, the louder the cackle. Whenever he didn’t feel like landing by the book, he’d think nothing of setting his ship down on the lawn adjoining the landing field, incinerating grass, roots, and topsoil to a depth of one meter. But let anyone encroach on his patrol sector, by as much as a milliparsec, and right away he’d report it, even if it meant ratting on a fellow rocket jockey from the Base. Not to mention a few other annoying habits, almost too petty to be mentioned, such as drying himself with other people’s towels, just to keep his own clean longer. The moment he failed to report back from patrol duty, however, Wilmer suddenly turned out to be a prince of a guy, a regular bosom buddy. Again the radar went berserk, the pilots were put on a round-the-clock shift, the flight controllers worked overtime, people took turns catnapping on a bench by the wall and had dinner brought upstairs; the CO, who was on vacation, flew back by special plane and ordered a four-day search mission, the Base morale having sunk so low by now that in retaliation for a single, lousy, imperfectly fitted rivet the men were ready to crack the skull of the mechanic responsible. Two commissions of experts came, an AMU-16—a twin copy of the ship flown by Wilmer—was dismantled screw by screw, clock-fashion, but the results were nil: not a single defective part was found.

  Although the sector measured 1,600 billion cubic kilometers, it was also thought to be a relatively tame one, undisturbed by any meteorite showers or the cold remnants of old comet tails, last seen hundreds of years ago—all the more remarkable, considering that comets of that vintage have been known to disintegrate in the vicinity of Jupiter, in its “perturbation mill,” and later to discard pieces of their nucleus onto their former course. But the sector was as good as empty, unmarred by any satellites or asteroids, and least of all by the Belt. And just because it was so “clean,” no one had a hankering to patrol it.r />
  Even so, Wilmer’s made the second disappearance in a row. His tape, which was played and replayed countless times, photocopied, blown up, and forwarded to the Institute, yielded as much information as Thomas’s: zilch. Sporadic signals for a while, then nothing. The signals sent by the transmitter had come at infrequent intervals, on the average of one per hour. Thomas had transmitted a total of eleven signals; Wilmer, fourteen. That was all.

  After the second disappearance, the CO swung into action. For starters, he had all the ships checked out from bow to stern—atomic pile, flight control systems, every nut and screw; one scratched dial and you were docked a week’s vacation. The timers in the transmitters had to be replaced—as if it were all their fault!—and ships on patrol were now required to radio back at eighteen-minute intervals. Not that there was anything wrong with that; what was bad was that henceforth two senior officers were stationed by the launch ramp, where they ruthlessly confiscated anything in a pilot’s possession—everything from windup birds (of both the feeding and tweeting variety), butterflies, and bees, to various games of skill—in time, transforming the CO’s office into a storeroom for every conceivable sort of novelty. The Base cynics maintained that the CO always kept his door locked because he liked to play with his toys in private.

  Given such obstacles, one is better able to appreciate the masterful cunning exercised by Pirx in smuggling aboard his AMU the little house with the three pigs. This despite the fact that, apart from a certain moral satisfaction, he derived little actual benefit from it.

  The patrol flight was grinding into its ninth consecutive hour. “Grinding” was precisely the word for it. Pirx was reclining in his contour couch, all bound and belted in, mummylike, with only his arms and legs free, and his listless gaze fixed on the screens. For six weeks they had been flying in teams of two, at a distance of 300 kilometers, when Base Command decided to revert to its original tactic, leaving the sector deserted, clean as a whistle, so that even one patrolship was one too many. But just so there wouldn’t be any stellar “holes” on the maps, the solo flights were resumed. Pirx’s was the eighteenth mission to be flown after the team flights were scrubbed.