More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (12 page)

The gully ended in a shallow pathway—there in the sun stood the first masses of the lava flow, black on the far side and glittering on the southern, about one hundred meters down. “I got myself into it this time,” he thought. From here one could practically reach out and touch the region in which the Setaur was at large. He glanced rapidly to the left and to the right. He was alone; the ridge lay high above him, a broiling steepness against the black sky. Before, he had been able to look down into the narrow places between the rocks almost with a bird’s-eye view, but now that crisscross maze of fissures was blocked out for him by the nearest masses of stone. “Not good,” he thought. “Better go back.” But for some reason he knew that he wasn’t going back.

However, he couldn’t just stand there. A few dozen steps lower was a solitary block of magma, evidently the end of that long tongue which once had poured red-hot off the great crags at the foot of Toricelli—and which had meandered its way finally to this sinkhole. It was the best cover available. He reached it in a single leap, though he found particularly unpleasant this prolonged lunar floating, this slow-motion flight as in a dream; he could never really get used to it. Crouched behind the angular rock, he peered out over it and saw the Setaur, which came from behind two jagged spires, went around a third, brushing it with a metal shoulder, and halted. Pirx was looking at it from the side, so it was lit up only partially; the right arm glistened, dully like a well-greased machine part, but the rest of its frame lay in shadow.

Pirx had just raised the laser to his eye when the other, as if in a sudden premonition, vanished. Could it be standing there still, having only stepped back into the shadow? Should he shoot into that shadow, then? He had a bead on it now, but didn’t touch the trigger. He relaxed his muscles; the barrel fell. He waited. No sign of the Setaur. The rubble spread out directly below him in a truly infernal labyrinth. One could play hide-and-seek in there for hours—the glassy lava had split into geometrical yet eerie shapes.

“Where is he?” Pirx thought. “If it were only possible to hear something, but this damned airless place, it’s like being in a nightmare… I could go down there and hunt him. No, I’m not about to do that,
he’s
the mad one, after all… But one can at least consider everything—the outcrop extends no more than twelve meters, which would take about two jumps on Earth; I would be in the shadow beneath it, invisible, and could move along the length of it, with my back protected by the rock at all times, and sooner or later he’d walk out straight into my sights.”

Nothing changed in the labyrinth of stone. On Earth by this time, the sun would have shifted quite a bit, but here the long lunar day held sway, the sun seemed to keep hanging in the very same place, extinguishing the nearest stars, so that it was surrounded by a black void shot through with a kind of orange, radial haze… He leaned out halfway from behind his boulder. Nothing. This was beginning to annoy him. Why weren’t the others showing up? It was inconceivable that radio contact hadn’t been established by now. But perhaps they were planning to drive it out of that rabble… He glanced at the watch beneath the thick glass on his wrist and was amazed: since his last conversation with McCork barely thirteen minutes had elapsed.

He was preparing to abandon his position when two things happened at once, both equally unexpected. Through the stone arch between the two magma embankments that closed off the basin to the east, he saw transporters moving, one after the other. They were still far away, possibly more than a kilometer, and going at full speed, trailing long, seemingly rigid plumes of swirling dust. At the same time two large hands, human-looking except that they were wearing metal gloves, appeared at the very edge of the precipice, and following them came—so quickly he hadn’t time to back away—the Setaur. No more than ten meters separated them. Pirx saw the massive bulge of the torso that served as a head, set between powerful shoulders, and in which glittered the lenses of the optic apertures, motionless, like two dark, widely spaced eyes, along with that middle, that third and terrible eye, lidded at the moment, of the laser gun. He himself, to be sure, held a laser in his hand, but the machine’s reflexes were incomparably faster than his own. He didn’t even try leveling his weapon. He simply stood stock-still in the full sun, his legs bent, exactly as he had been caught, jumping up from the ground, by the sudden appearance of
him,
and they looked at each other: the statue of the man and the statue of the machine, both sheathed in metal. Then a terrible light tore the whole area in front of Pirx; pushed by a blast of heat, he went crashing backward. As he fell he didn’t lose consciousness but—in that fraction of a second—felt only surprise, for he could have sworn it wasn’t the Setaur that had shot him, since up to the very last instant he had seen its laser eye dark and blind.

He landed on his back, for the discharge had passed him—but clearly it had been aimed at him, because the horrible flash was repeated in an instant and chipped off part of the stone spire that had been protecting him before; it sprayed drops of molten mineral, which in flight changed into a dazzling spider web. But now he was saved by the fact that they were aiming at the height of his head while he was lying down.

It was the first machine; they were firing the laser from it. He rolled over on his side and saw then the back of the Setaur, who, motionless, as if cast in bronze, gave two bursts of lilac sun. Even at that distance one could see the foremost transporter’s entire tread overturn, along with the rollers and guiding wheel; such a cloud of dust and burning gases rose up there that the second transporter, blinded, could not shoot. The giant slowly, unhurriedly, looked at the prone man, who was still clutching his weapon, then turned and bent its legs slightly, ready to jump back where it had come from, but Pirx, awkwardly, sideways, fired at it—he intended only to cut the legs from under it, but his elbow wavered as he pulled the trigger, and a knife of flame cleaved the giant from top to bottom, so that it was only a mass of glowing scrap that tumbled down into the field of rubble.

The crew of the demolished transporter escaped unhurt, without even bums, and Pirx found out—much later, it’s true—that they had in fact been firing at him, for the Setaur, dark against the dark cliffs, went completely unnoticed. The inexperienced gunner had even failed to notice that the figure in his sights showed the light color of an aluminum suit. Pirx was pretty certain that he would not have survived the next shot. The Setaur had saved him—but had it realized this? Many times he went over those few final seconds in his mind, and each time his conviction grew stronger that from where the Setaur had been standing, it could tell who was the real target of the long-range fire. Did this mean that it had wished to save him? No one could provide an answer. The intellectronicians chalked the whole thing up to “coincidence”—but none of them was able to support that opinion with any proof. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and the professional literature made no mention of such incidents.

Everyone felt that Pirx had done what he had to do—but he wasn’t satisfied. For many long years afterward there remained etched in his memory that brief scene in which he had brushed with death and come out in one piece, never to learn the entire truth—and bitter was the knowledge that it was in an underhanded way, with a stab in the back, that he had killed his deliverer.

“Next witness—Shennan Quine!”

“Quine, sir!”

“You are to testify before the Cosmic Tribunal, now in session, over which I am presiding. You will please address me as ‘Your Honor’ and members of the jury as ‘Your Honors.’ You are to answer promptly all questions put to you by the jury and by myself; those of the prosecution and defense, only with the Tribunal’s prior consent. Only testimony based on first-hand knowledge will be admissible, nothing on hearsay. Are my instructions clear?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Is Shennan Quine your proper name?”

“It is, Your Honor.”

“But aboard the
Goliath
you used an alias, did you not?”

“It was one of the conditions of my contract with the shipowners.”

“Were you aware of the reason for this alias?”

“I was, Your Honor.”

“Were you aboard the
Goliath
on an orbital flight from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of October of this year?”

“I was, Your Honor.”

“What were your flight duties?”

“I was the copilot.”

“Kindly tell the Tribunal what happened aboard the
Goliath
on the twenty-first of October, during the afore-mentioned voyage, starting with a description of the ship’s bearings and objectives.”

“At 0830 hours, ship’s time, we crossed the perimeter of Saturn’s moons at a hyperbolic velocity and commenced braking until 1100 hours. Dropping below the hyperbolic to a double-zero orbital, we prepared to launch the artificial satellites onto the plane of the rings.”

“By double zero, you mean a velocity of fifty-two kilometers per second?”

“Correct, Your Honor. At 1100 hours I went off duty, but since the perturbations required constant course corrections, I simply traded places with the chief pilot; from then on, he piloted and I navigated.”

“Who told you to switch?”

“The CO, Your Honor; it was standard procedure. Our mission was to get within safe distance of the Roche limit on the rings’ plane, and from there, practically orbital, to fire a series of three automatic probes, to be guided by remote control inside the Roche. One probe was to be injected into the Cassini Division, the other two were for tracking the first. Shall I elaborate?”

“Please do.”

“Very well. Each of Saturn’s rings is composed of small meteorlike bodies, the ring widths reaching thousands of kilometers. The satellite, once placed in orbit inside the Cassini Division, was to monitor the perturbations in its gravitational field and the interaction of the ring particles. To stop the satellite from being thrown by the perturbations onto the outer or inner rings, we had to use satellites powered by low-thrust ionic engines in the .20-.25-ton range. The two radar-equipped ‘guardians’ were to keep the third satellite, orbiting inside the Division, on course. The satellites were equipped with on-board computers for course corrections and rocket control, with enough thrust to keep them orbital for a couple of months.”

“Why two monitors? Wouldn’t one have been enough?”

“Definitely. The second ‘guardian’ was to serve as back-up, in case of a malfunction or a meteorite collision. Circum-Saturnian space—rings and moons aside—looks empty from Earth, but in fact it’s a junkyard. That’s why our mission was to maintain orbital velocity—nearly all of Saturn’s particles revolve on its equatorial plane at primary cosmic velocity. This reduced the chances of collision to a minimum. We were also equipped with meteorite deflectors, which could be deployed manually or by a servo-mechanism hooked up to the ship’s radar.”

“Did you personally consider such a mission difficult or dangerous?”

“Neither, sir, provided we kept to our trajectory. Circum-Saturnian space has a bad name in our trade, worse than Jupiter’s, though it sure beats Jupiter for accelerating.”

“What do you mean by ‘in our trade’?”

“Among pilots and navigators, sir.”

“Astronauts, in other words?”

“Affirmative. Well, a little before 1200 hours, we’d almost reached the outermost ring—”

“On its plane?”

“Yes. The densimeters were showing high particle density, about four hundred microcollisions per minute. We entered the Roche zone above the rings, as programmed, and prepared to launch the probes from our orbit, now almost parallel to the Cassini Division. We fired the first at 1500 hours and jockeyed it into the gap, I was in charge of guidance. The pilot helped by maintaining minimal thrust, locking us into almost the same orbital velocity as the rings. Calder was doing a great job, giving just enough thrust to keep the ship properly trimmed, to keep her from cartwheeling.”

“Besides yourself and the chief pilot, who else was in the control room?”

“The whole crew, sir. The CO sat between Calder and myself, his chair positioned so he could be closer to the pilot. Seated behind me were the two engineers. Dr. Burns, as I recall, sat behind the CO.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I wasn’t paying attention; I was too busy. Besides, it’s hard to see over a pilot’s high-backed couch.

“Was the probe visually inserted?”

“Not only that, sir. I was tracking it on video and with the radar altimeter. After checking its coordinates, I decided it was situated well enough, more or less in the center of the gap, and told Calder I was ready.”

“Ready?”

“For the next probe launch. Calder fired the sledge, the hatch opened, but the probe wouldn’t eject.”

“The ‘sledge’?”

“The hydraulically driven piston that ejected the probe from the launch bay once the hatch was opened. There were three, all mounted aft, to be fired in rapid succession.”

“So the second satellite never left the ship?”

“No, it got jammed in the launcher.”

“Please tell us exactly how it happened,”

“The sequence works as follows. The outer hatch is opened, the hydraulics are activated, and as soon as the clearance signal comes on, the servo-starter is fired. The starter self-ignites after a hundred-second delay, so there is always time to abort in case of a failure. Once the small solid-fuel booster is fired, the satellite takes off on its own fifteen-tons-per-second thrust. The object is to clear it from the mother ship as fast as possible. When the booster burns out, an ionic engine, remote-controlled by the navigator, fires automatically. In our case, Calder had switched on the servo-starter as soon as the satellite started to clear—and when it suddenly stalled, he tried to shut down booster ignition, but couldn’t.”

“You’re positive the chief pilot tried to switch off the probe’s servo-starter?”

“Yes. He was yanking on the abort switch, but it kept flipping back. I don’t know why the starter ignited. But I heard him yell: ‘Jammed!’”