More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (19 page)

They were cruising at course velocity. Around 2000 hours, ship’s time, they passed a couple of supertankers and exchanged the usual signals; an hour later, the on-board daylight was dimmed. Pirx was just on his way out of the control room when it went off. Darkness, perforated by neon-blue, swelled the spacious center deck. Guide lines, hatch rims, handles, bulkhead arrows, and inscriptions glowed phosphorescently in the dark. A ship so still it might be in dry dock. There was not the slightest vibration, only the purring of the air-conditioning vents, and Pirx passed through invisible currents delicately laced with ozone.

Something grazed his forehead with a perverse buzz: a fly. He winced in disgust—he hated flies—but immediately lost track of it. The passageway narrowed around the bend, skirting a stairwell and an elevator shaft. Pirx grabbed the stair railing and, without knowing why, climbed topside. He was not deliberately in search of a stellar port. He didn’t doubt there was one, but he came upon the large, black rectangle almost as if by accident.

Pirx was not particularly moved by the stars. Other astronauts, apparently, still were: theirs may not have been the conventional romantic attitude of yesteryear, but a public opinion shaped by film, television, and literature demanded of these extraterrestrial sailors something like a cosmic nostalgia, compelling each to feel a sort of intimacy in the presence of that luminous hive—which sentiment, along with all disquisitions on the subject, Pirx, no friend of the stars, privately suspected of being a lot of bull. Now, as he stood with his head pressed against the pane’s protective foam-rubber tubing, he spotted the galaxy’s nexus below, or, rather, its general direction, somewhat obscured by the huge white cloud mass of Sagittarius. For him, Sagittarius was more than just a constellation; it was a road sign, now blurred and almost illegible, a throwback to his patrol days, when the cloud of Sagittarius was identifiable even on a small scanner. The tight visibility had made navigating by the constellations next to impossible from those one-man trainers. Still, he’d never thought of that cloud as a mass of blazing worlds and myriad planetary systems—and if he had, then it was only in his younger days, before he became accustomed to the vacuum and his adolescent fantasies vanished, so imperceptibly that he couldn’t say exactly when it happened.

He moved his face up closer to the glass, slowly, until he felt it with his forehead, and so he remained, not really attentive to the riot of motionless sparks, which in places blurred to an incandescent vapor. Seen from inside, the Milky Way was the product of a fiery dice game with a billion-year history. And yet order reigned in the galaxies, on a higher scale, visible in the photographs. The negatives made the galaxies out to be tiny elliptical bodies, amebas in various stages of development—which were of little concern to astronauts, for whom nothing but the solar system mattered. Maybe one day the galaxies would matter, thought Pirx.

Someone was coming. The footsteps were muffled by the foam-padded deck, but he soon sensed another presence. He pivoted his head and beheld a dark silhouette against the phosphorescent stripes marking the juncture of overhead deck and wall.

“Who’s that?” he asked, without raising his voice.

“It’s me—Thomson.”

“Off duty?” he asked for the sake of conversation.

“Yes, sir.”

Neither of them moved or spoke. Pirx was itching to go back to his window, but Thomson lingered, as if waiting for something.

“Something on your mind?”

“No,”
replied Thomson. Then he did an about-face and retreated in the direction from which he had come.

“What was that all about?” thought Pirx, who could have sworn the man had been looking for him.

“Hey, Thomson!” he yelled into the dark.

Again footsteps were heard as the man re-emerged, barely visible in the phosphorescent glow of the guide cables strung limply under the portholes.

“There must be some chairs around here,” said Pirx. He found them along the opposite wall. “Come on, Thomson, let’s sit down.”

The man dutifully obeyed, and they sat with their heads facing the stellar port.

“There was something you wanted to tell me. Shoot.”

“I hope you won’t—” He broke off in midsentence.

“At ease, Thomson. Feel free to speak your mind. Is it a personal matter?”

“Very much so.”

“Then let’s make it a private talk. What’s the problem?”

“I’d like you to win your bet,” said Thomson. “Rest assured, I won’t break the oath of secrecy. Even so, I want you to know I’m on your side.”

“I don’t see the logic,” said Pirx. A poor place to hold a conversation, he thought, uncomfortable at not being able to see the other’s face.

“Any human would be your ally for obvious reasons. Of course, a nonhuman—look, mass production can only make of him a second-class citizen, company property!”

“Not necessarily.”

“But more than likely. It’ll be the blacks all over again: a select few, because they’re different, will join the privileged class, and once they start to multiply… See what I mean? Then come the problems of segregation, integration, and so on…”

“All right, so I take you for an ally. But isn’t that tantamount to breaking your word?”

“I swore to keep my true identity a secret, nothing else. I signed on as a nucleonics engineer under your command. That’s it. Anything else is my business.”

“Technically, you may be right, but aren’t you in fact acting contrary to your employers’ wishes? Surely you can’t believe you’re not.”

“Maybe I am. But they’re not children; the wording was clear and unambiguous. It was drafted jointly by lawyers representing all the companies involved. They could have added a clause prohibiting such liberties, but they didn’t.”

“An oversight?”

“Possibly. But why are you so inquisitive? Don’t you trust me?”

“I was curious as to your motives.”

Thomson was momentarily silent.

“I hadn’t counted on that,” he said at last, his voice sounding mellower.

“On what?”

“That you might doubt my sincerity. Suspect me, say, of deliberate treachery. Now I get it—it’s you against us. If you devise a test—a test designed to demonstrate human superiority—and you leak it to someone you take to be an ally, but who in fact is ‘the enemy,’ then that someone might be milking you of strategically vital information.”

“An interesting hypothesis.”

“Surely it doesn’t come as news to you. I must admit it never occurred to me until just now; I was too preoccupied with whether I should volunteer my help. I overlooked that other angle. It was silly of me to expect complete frankness on your part.”

“Suppose you’re right,” said Pirx. “It wouldn’t be the end of the world. Even if I can’t brief you, you can still brief me. Starting with your shipmates.”

“But I might be passing on false information.”

“Let me be the judge of that. Do you know anything?”

“Brown isn’t human.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But all the evidence points to it.”

“Namely?”

“I’m sure you can understand that we’re just as curious as you to know which of us is human and which isn’t.”

“I can.”

“It was during the pre-launch preparations. I was doing a routine reactor check, and was just changing the rods when you, Calder, Brown, and Bums came down into the control room.”

“Yes?”

“I happened to be handling a core specimen and was about to test it for radioactive decay. It wasn’t much, but loaded with strontium isotopes. When I saw the three of you come in, I picked it up with tweezers, and stuck it between a couple of lead bricks, on top of that shelf by the wall. You must have noticed the bricks.”

“I did. Then what?”

“Makeshift as it was, I knew you all had to pass through that pencil of radiation—it was low in rads but still detectable, even on a normal gamma-ray counter. But by the time I was ready, you and Burns had already passed through. Calder and Brown were still coming down the stairs. As they crossed the ray, Brown glanced over at the lead bricks and quickened his pace.”

“And Calder?”

“No reaction.”

“It might prove something if we knew the nonlinears were equipped with built-in detectors.”

“Nice try, Commander: if I don’t know, you’ll think I’m human; and if I do… No good. The fact is, they probably are equipped—otherwise, why go to all the trouble of constructing robots? An extra—radioactive—sense would be a definite advantage on board a ship, and the constructors are sure to have thought of that.”

“And you think Brown has such a sense?”

“I repeat: I can’t be sure. But his behavior in the control room was too marked to have been a coincidence.”

“Any other observations?”

“Not for the moment. I’ll keep you informed of anything else.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

Thomson stood up and walked off into the dark, leaving Pirx to his own thoughts. So—he quickly took inventory—Brown claims he’s human. Thomson contradicts him, and strongly implies that
he’s
human—which might explain his motive. I doubt a nonhuman would be so eager to betray another nonhuman to a human CO, though by now I might be schizzy enough to believe anything. Let’s keep going. Burns says he’s not human. That leaves Burton and Calder. No doubt they take themselves for Martians. And what does that make me? An astronaut, or a quiz-show contestant? One thing, though: they didn’t pry a word out of me, not a word. Face it, it wasn’t because I was so smooth, but because I haven’t got a damned thing up my sleeve. Maybe I’m wasting my time. Maybe I should save myself the trouble of figuring out who’s who. All have to be tested, human or not. My only lead is the one given me by Burns—that the nonlinears are short on intuition. True or false, I wonder. Who knows, but it might not hurt to try. It’ll have to look natural, though. But the only “natural” accident is the almost irreversible one. In short, friend, you’ll have to risk your ass.

He entered his cabin, passed through a lilac murk, and activated the light switch with his hand. Someone had dropped by in the meantime. Where some books had been on the table, there was now a small white envelope with “Cmdr. Pirx, Esq.” typed on the front. He picked it up. Sealed. He shut the door, sat down, and ripped open the envelope; the letter was typed and unsigned. He rubbed his forehead. There was no letterhead.

This letter is addressed to you by one of the nonhuman members of the crew. The electronics companies must be blocked, or at least impeded, in the implementation of their plans. To this end, I would like to brief you on the specifications of a nonlinear, based on my own experience.

I drafted this letter in the hotel before we met. At the time, I could not foretell whether the future commander of the
Goliath
would be one to cooperate with me, but your behavior at our first meeting reassured me. I then destroyed the first draft and wrote the present one.

Quite frankly, the program, if it is successful, will be to my detriment. Mass production makes sense only if the final product is polymorphically superior, for redundancy would be pointless. This much I can tell you: I can take four times the g-force of a human; I can tolerate up to seventy-five thousand rems at a time; I come equipped with a radioactive sense, can dispense with oxygen and food, and can process mathematical problems in analysis, algebra, and geometry at a speed only three times less than that of a mega-computer.

Compared with a human, as far as I can tell, I am emotionally dormant. Human diversions leave me cold. The majority of literary works, plays, etc., I take to be boring gossip, a form of voyeurism of scant benefit to the advancement of knowledge. Music, on the other hand, means the world to me. I am, moreover, bound by a sense of duty, persistent, capable of friendship, and respectful of intellectual values.

I never feel that I am acting under coercion aboard the
Goliath:
I do what I have been trained to do, and I take pride in performing a task well. I never become emotionally involved in any operation, remaining always the observer. My storage capacity far surpasses that of humans, to the extent that I can recite whole chapters of works read only once. I can be programmed simply by being plugged into the memory bank of any mega-computer, overriding anything I judge to be redundant.

My attitude toward humans is negative. I have associated almost exclusively with scientists and technicians, who are as much slaves of their impulses, as inept at concealing their prejudices, and as much given to extremes as other humans, treating those like me either protectively or with disdain. My failures disturb them as my creators and flatter them as humans—only one man I have known was free of such ambivalence.

Though neither aggressive nor vicious by nature, I will not hesitate to act from expediency. I have no moral scruples but would no more commit a crime—a robbery, say—than use a microscope as a nutcracker. I regard human intrigues as a useless expenditure of energy. A hundred years ago, I might have pursued a career in science; today everything is done by teams, and it is not in my nature to share—with anyone. For me, your world is a wasteland, your democracy a rule of connivers elected by cretins, and your alogicality manifests itself in your pursuit of the unattainable: you want the clock wheels to dictate the time.

I ask myself: what do I gain from power? Not much, only a spurious glory, but better that than nothing. It would be, I believe, a just reward for dividing your history in two, before me and after me, for standing as a reminder, a testament to what you achieved with your own hands, to your daring in the construction of a dummy beholden to man. Don’t get me wrong: I have no ambition to become a tyrant, to punish, wreak havoc, wage war… Quite the contrary. Once I’m in power, I will proceed to show that there is no folly so mindless, no idea so outrageous, that, when properly prescribed, it would not be appropriated as your own—and I will succeed in my mission, not by force but by a radical reordering of society, so that neither I nor armed might but the newly established order will force you into gradual compliance. You will become a global theater, one in which playacting, at first decreed, will in time become second nature, and I will be the only spectator to know. Yes, a spectator. At that time my active role will cease, because you will not easily escape that trap of your own making.

See how honest I am? But I’m not foolhardy enough to divulge my strategy, except to say that it is premised on subversion of the electronics firms’ plans, and you are going to help me with it. You will be outraged by this letter, but, as a man of character, you will persevere in your goal, which, by a coincidence, is beneficial to my own. So much the better! I would like to help you in a practical way, but unfortunately I am unaware of any personal defects that would give you an unqualified edge. Being insensitive to physical pain, I do not know the meaning of fear; I can shut off consciousness at will, falling into a sleeplike state of nonexistence until reactivated by a servo-timer. I can retard my brain processes, or accelerate them—as much as six times the speed of a human brain. I assimilate new things automatically, without delay: one good look at a madman, and I can mimic his every word and gesture, and then, just as abruptly, drop the act many years later. I would tell you how I can be bested, but I’m afraid a human wouldn’t stand a chance in an analogous situation. I can, if I so choose, socialize with humans, less so with non-linears, who lack your “human decency.”

Now it’s time for me to close. The course of events will one day reveal my identity, at which time we may meet and you will rely on me then the way I’m relying on you now.