Stanislaw Lem - Tales of Pirx the Pilot

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Tales of Pirx the Pilot
by Stanislaw Lem
Opowiesci o pilocie Pirxie translated by Louis Iribarne
a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF
Back Cover:
THROUGH SPACE BY THE SEAT OF HIS PANTS
Pilot Pirx is an astronaut, a fresh-faced physical powerhouse, but no genius. His superiors send
him on the most dangerous missions, either because he is expendable, or because they trust his bumbling
ability to survive in almost any habitat or dilemma. Follow Pirx now through a world of hyper-technology
and super-psychology from his early days as a hopelessly inept cadet soloing with a pair of sex-crazed
horseflies. . . to a farside moon station built by bickering madmen. . . to a chase through space after a
deadly sphere of light. . . to an encounter with a mossy old robot whose programming has slipped.
"Stanislaw Lem is wildly comic," says Theodore Sturgeon in The New York Times. "He is sardonic,
perplexing, insightful." Anthony Burgess in The Observer calls him "one of the most intel-ligent, erudite,
and comic writers working today." Tales of Pirx the Pilot is "pure gold for an SF buff and an exotic
new alloy for literary sorts. " -- Boston Globe
A portion of this work originally appeared in
Omni and Penthouse magazines
AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10019
English Translation Copyright © 1979 by Stanislaw Lem
Published by arrangement with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-1832
ISBN: 0-380-55665-0
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this
book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as
provided by the U. S. Copyright Law.
For information address Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.,
757 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10017
Lem, Stanislaw.
Tales of Pirx the pilot.
Translation of Opowiesci o pilocie Pirxie.
CONTENTS: The test. -- The conditioned reflex. --
On patrol. -- The Albatross. -- Terminus.
1. Title.
PZ4.L537Tal 891.8'5'37
First Bard Printing, August, 1981
BARD TRADEMARK REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER
COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U. S. A.
Printed in the U. S. A.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Contents
The Test
The Conditioned Reflex
On Patrol
The Albatross
Terminus
The Test
"Cadet Pirx!"
Bullpen's voice snapped him out of his daydreaming. He had just had visions of a two-crown
piece lying tucked away in the fob pocket of his old civvies, the ones stashed at the bottom of his locker.
A jingling, shiny silver coin -- all but forgotten. A while ago he could have sworn nothing was there, an
old mailing stub at best, but the more he thought about it, the more plausible it seemed that one might be
there, so that by the time Bullpen called out his name, he was absolutely sure of it. The coin was now
sufficiently real that he could feel it bulging in his pocket, so round and sleek to the touch. There was his
ticket to the movies, he thought, with half a crown to spare. And if he settled for some newsreel shorts,
that would leave a crown and a half, of which he'd squirrel away a crown and the rest blow on the slot
machines. Oh, what if the machine suddenly went haywire and coughed up so many coins into his waiting
hands that he couldn't stuff his pockets fast enough. . .? Well, why not -- it happened to Smiga, didn't it?
He was already reeling under the burden of his unexpected windfall when Bullpen roused him with a
bang. Folding his hands behind his back and shifting his weight to his good leg, his instructor asked:
"Cadet Pirx, what would you do if you were on patrol and encountered a ship from an alien
planet?"Pirx opened his mouth wide, as if the answer were there and all he had to do was to force it out.
He looked like the last person on Earth who knew what to do when meeting up with a vessel from an
alien planet.
"I would maneuver closer," he answered, his voice muted and strangely hoarse.
The class froze in welcome anticipation of some comic relief.
"Very good," Bullpen said in a fatherly sort of way. "Then what would you do?"
"I would stop," Pirx blurted out, sensing that he was drifting off into realms that lay vastly beyond
his competence. Furiously he racked his empty brains in search of the appropriate paragraphs from his
Space Manual, but it was as if he had never laid eyes on it. Sheepishly he lowered his gaze, and as he did
so, he noticed that Smiga was trying to prompt him -- with his lips only. One by one he deciphered
Smiga's words and repeated them out loud, before he had a chance to fully digest them.
"I'd introduce myself."
A howl went up from the class. Bullpen struggled for a moment; then he, too, exploded with
laughter, only to assume a serious expression again.
"Cadet Pirx, you will report to me tomorrow with your navigation book. Cadet Boerst!"
Pirx sat down at his desk as if it were made of uncongealed glass. He wasn't even sore at Smiga
-- that's the kind of guy he was, always good for a gag. He didn't catch a word of what Boerst was
saying; Boerst was trying to plot a graph while Bullpen was up to his old trick of turning down the
electronic computer, leaving the cadet to get bogged down in his computations. School regs permitted
the use of a computer, but Bullpen was of a different mind. "A computer is only human," he used to say.
"It, too, can break down." Pirx wasn't sore at Bullpen, either. Fact is, he wasn't sore at anyone. Hardly
ever. Five minutes later he was standing in front of a shopwindow on Dyerhoff Street, his attention caught
by a display of gas pistols, good for firing blanks or live ammo, a set consisting of one pistol and a
hundred cartridges priced at six crowns. Needless to say, he only imagined he was window-browsing on
Dyerhoff Street.
The bell rang and the class emptied, but without all that yelling and stampeding of lowerclassmen.
No sir, these weren't kids anymore! Half of the class meandered off in the direction of the cafeteria
because, although no meals were being served at that time, there were other attractions to be had -- a
new waitress, for example (word had it she was a knockout). Pirx strolled leisurely past the glass
cabinets where the stellar globes were stored, and with every step saw his hopes of finding a two-crown
piece in the pocket of his civvies dwindle a little more. By the time he reached the bottom of the
staircase, he realized the coin was just a figment of his imagination.
Hanging around the lobby were Boerst, Smiga, and Payartz. For a semester he and Payartz had
been deskmates in cosmodesy, and he had him to thank for all the ink blots in his star atlas.
"You're up for a trial run tomorrow," Boerst let drop just as Pirx was about to overtake them.
"No sweat," came his lackadaisical reply. He was nobody's fool.
"Don't believe me? Read for yourself," said Boerst, tapping his finger on the glass pane of the
bulletin board.
He had a mind to keep going, but his head involuntarily twisted around on its axis. The list
showed only three names -- and there it was, right at the top, as big as blazes: Cadet Pirx.
For a second, his mind was a total blank.
Then he heard a distant voice, which turned out to be his own.
"Like I said, no sweat."
Leaving them, he headed down a walkway lined with flower beds. That year the beds were
planted with forget-me-nots, artfully arranged in the pattern of a descending rocket ship, with streaks of
now faded buttercups suggesting the exhaust flare. But right now Pirx was oblivious of everything -- the
flower beds, the pathway, the forget-me-nots, and even of Bullpen, who at that very instant was hurriedly
ducking out of the Institute by a side entrance, and whom he narrowly missed bumping into on his way
out. Pirx saluted as they stood cheek to jowl.
"Oh, it's you, Pirx!" said Bullpen. "You're flying tomor-row, aren't you? Well, have a good
takeoff! Maybe you'll be lucky enough to. . . er. . . meet up with those people from alien planets."
The dormitory was situated behind a wall of sprawling weeping willows on the far side of the
park. It stood overlooking a pond, and its side wings, buttressed by stone columns, towered above the
water. The columns were rumored to have been shipped back from the Moon, which was blatant
nonsense, of course, but that hadn't stopped the first-year students from carving their initials and class
dates on them with an air of sacrosanct emotion. Pirx's name was likewise among them, four years having
gone by since the day he had diligently inscribed it.
Once inside his room -- it was too cramped to serve as anything but a single -- he debated
whether or not to open the locker. He knew exactly where his old pants were stashed. He had held on to
them, despite the fact that it was against the rules -- or maybe because of that -- and even though he had
hardly any use for them now. Closing his eyes, he crouched down, stuck his hand through the crack in
the door, and gave the pocket a probing pat. Sure enough -- empty.
He was standing in his unpressurized suit on the metal catwalk, just under the hangar ceiling, and,
with neither hand free, was bracing himself against the cable railing with his elbow. In one hand he held
his navigation book, in the other the cribsheet Smiga had lent him. The whole school was alleged to have
flown with this pony, though how it managed to find its way back every time was a mystery, all the more
so since, after completing the flight test, the cadets were immediately transferred from the Institute to the
north, to the Base Camp, where they began cramming for their final exams. Still, the fact remained: it
always came back. Some claimed that it was parachuted down. Facetiously, of course.
To kill time while he stood on the catwalk, suspended above a forty-meter drop, he wondered
whether he would be frisked -- sad to say, such things were still a common practice. The cadets were
known for sneaking aboard the weirdest assortment of trinkets, including such strenuously forbidden
things as whiskey flasks, chewing tobacco, and pictures of their girl friends. Not excluding cribsheets, of
course. Pirx had already exhausted a dozen or so hiding places -- in his shoes, between his stocking legs,
in the inner pocket of his space suit, in the mini-atlas the cadets were allowed to take aboard. . . An
eyeglass case. . . now that would have done the trick, he thought, but, first of all, it would have had to be
a fair-sized one, and secondly -- he didn't wear glasses. A few seconds later it occurred to him that if he
had worn glasses he never would have been admitted to the Institute.
So Pirx stood on the metal catwalk and waited for the CO to show up in the company of both
instructors. What was keeping them? he wondered. Lift-off was scheduled for 1940 hours, and it was
already 1927. Then it dawned on him that he might have taped the cribsheet under his arm, the way little
Yerkes did. The story went that as soon as the flight instructor went to frisk him, Yerkes started
squealing he was ticklish, and got away with it. But Pirx had no illusions; he didn't look like the ticklish
type. And so, not having any adhesive tape with him, he went on holding the pony in his right hand, in the
most casual way possible, and only when he realized that he would have to shake hands with all three did
he switch, shifting the pony from his right to his left hand and the navigation book from left to right. While
he was juggling things around, he managed to make the catwalk sway up and down like a diving board.
Suddenly he heard footsteps approaching from the other end, but in the dark under the hangar ceiling it
took him a while to make out who it was.
All three were looking very spiffy -- as was customary on such occasions, they were decked out
in full uniform -- especially the CO. Even uninflated, however, Pirx's space suit looked as graceful as
twenty football uniforms stuck together, not to mention the long intercom and radiophone terminals
dangling from either side of his neck ring discon-nect, the respirator hose bobbing up and down in the
region of his throat, and the reserve oxygen bottle strapped tightly to his back -- so tightly that it pinched.
He felt hotter than blazes in his sweat-absorbent underwear, but most bothersome of all was the gadget
making it unnecessary for him to get up to relieve himself -- which, considering the sort of single-stage
rockets used on such trial flights, would have posed some-thing of a problem.
Suddenly the whole catwalk began to undulate as someone came up from behind. It was Boerst,
suited up in the same, identical space suit, who gave him a stiff salute, mammoth glove and all, and who
went on standing in this position as if just aching to knock Pirx overboard.
When the others had gone ahead, Pirx asked, somewhat bewilderedly:
"What're you doing here? Your name wasn't on the flight list."
"Brendan got sick. I'm taking his place."
Pirx was momentarily flustered. This was the one area -- the one and only area -- in which he
was able to climb just a millimeter higher, to those empyreal realms that Boerst seemed to inhabit so
effortlessly. Not only was he the brightest in the program, for which Pirx could fairly easily have forgiven
him -- he could even muster some respect for the man's mathematical genius, ever since the time he had
watched Boerst take on the computer, faltering only when it came to roots of the fourth power -- not
only were his parents sufficiently well-heeled that he didn't have to bother dream-ing about two-crown
pieces lying tucked away in the pocket of his civvies, but he was also a top scorer in gymnastics, a
crackerjack of a jumper, a terrific dancer, and, like it or not, he was handsome to boot -- very handsome
in fact, something that could not exactly be said of Pirx.
They walked the distance of the catwalk, threading their way between the girders, filing past the
rockets parked next to each other in a row, before emerging in the shaft of light that fell vertically through
a 200-meter sliding panel in the ceiling. Two cone-shaped giants -- somehow they always reminded Pirx
of giants -- each measuring 48 meters in height and 11 meters in diameter, in the first-stage booster
section, stood side by side on an assembly of concrete exhaust deflectors.
The hatch covers were open and the gangways already in place for boarding. At about the
midway point, the gangways were blocked by a lead stand, planted with a little red pennon on a flexible
staff. He knew the ritual. Question: "Pilot, are you ready to carry out your mission?" Answer: "Yes, sir, I
am" -- and then, for the first time in his life, he would proceed to move aside the pennon. Suddenly he
had a premonition: during the boarding ceremony he saw himself tripping over the railing and taking a
nose dive all the way to the bottom -- accidents like that happened. And if such accidents happened to
anyone, they were bound to happen to Pirx. In fact, there were times when he was apt to think of himself
as a born loser, though his instructors were of a different opinion. To them he was just a moron and a
bumbler, whose mind was never on the right thing at the right moment. Granted, he had no easy time of it
when it came to words; between his thoughts and his deeds there yawned. . . well, if not an abyss, then at
least an obstruction, some obstacle that was forever making life difficult for him. It never occurred to
Pirx's instructors -- or to anyone else, for that matter -- that he was a dreamer, since he was judged to
be a man without a brain or a thought in his head. Which wasn't true at all.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Boerst had stationed himself in the prescribed place,
a step away from the gangway, and that he was standing at attention, his hands pressed flat against the
rubber air pouches of his space suit.
On him that wacky costume looks tailor-made, thought Pirx, and on me it looks like a bunch of
soccer balls. How come Boerst's looked uninflated and his own all puffy in places? Maybe that's why he
had so much trouble moving around, why he had to keep his feet spread apart all the time. He tried
bringing them together, but his heels refused to cooperate. Why were Boerst's so cooperative and not his
own? But if it weren't for Boerst, it would have slipped his mind completely that he was supposed to
stand at attention, with his back to the rocket, facing the three men in uniform. Boerst was the first to be
approached. Maybe it was a fluke, and maybe it wasn't, or maybe it was simply because his name began
with a B. But even if accidental, it was sure to be at Pirx's expense. He was always having to sweat out
his turn, which made him nervous, because anything was better than waiting. The quicker the better --
that was his motto.
He caught only snatches of what was said to Boerst, and, ramrod-stiff, Boerst fired off his
answers so quickly that Pirx didn't stand a chance. Then it was his turn. No sooner had the CO started
addressing him than he suddenly remembered something: there were supposed to be three of them flying.
Where was the third? Luckily for him, he caught the CO's last words and managed to blurt out, just in the
nick of time:
"Cadet Pirx, ready for lift-off."
"Hm. . . I see," said the CO. "And do you declare that you are fit, both physically and mentally. .
. ahem. . . within the limits of your capabilities?"
The CO was fond of lacing routine questions with such flourishes, something he could allow
himself as the CO.
Pirx declared that he was fit.
"Then I hereby designate you as pilot for the duration of the flight," said the CO, repeating the
sacred formula, and he went on.
"Mission: vertical launch at half booster power. Ascent to ellipsis B68. Correction to stable
orbital path, with orbital period of four hours and twenty-six minutes. Proceed to rendezvous with
shuttlecraft vehicles of the JO-2 type. Probable zone of radar contact: sector III, satellite PAL, with
possible deviation of six arc seconds. Establish radio contact for the purpose of maneuver coordination.
The maneuver: escape orbit at sixty degrees twenty-four minutes north latitude, one hundred fifteen
degrees three minutes eleven seconds east longitude. Initial acceleration: 2.2g. Terminal acceleration:
zero. Without losing radio contact, escort both JO-2 ships in tri-formation to Moon, commence lunar
insertion for temporary equatorial orbit as per LUNA PATHFINDER, verify orbital injection of both
piloted ships, then escape orbit at acceleration and course of your own discretion, and return to
stationary orbit in the radius of satellite PAL. There await further instructions."
There were rumors that the conventional cribsheet was about to be replaced by an electronic
pony, a microbrain the size of a cherry pit that could be inserted in the ear, or under the tongue, and be
programmed to supply whatever informa-tion was needed at the moment. But Pirx was skeptical,
reasoning -- not without a certain logic -- that such an inven-tion would nullify the need for any cadets.
For the time being, though, there weren't any, and so he had little choice but to give a word-for-word
recap of the entire mission -- and repeat it he did, committing only one error in the process, but that being
a fairly serious one: he confused the minutes and seconds of time with the seconds and minutes of latitude
and longitude. He waited for the next round, sweating buckets in his antiperspiration suit, underneath the
thick coverall of his space suit. He was asked to give another recap, which he did, though so far not a
single word of what he said had made the slightest impression on him. His only thought at the moment
was: Wow! They're really giving me the third degree!
Clutching the pony in his left hand, he handed over his navigation book with the other. Making
the cadets give an oral recitation of the mission was a deliberate hoax, since they always got it in writing,
anyhow, complete with the basic diagrams and charts. The CO slipped the flight envelope into the little
pocket lining the inside cover, and returned the book to him.
"Pilot Pirx, are you ready for blast-off?"
"Ready!" Pirx replied. Right now he was conscious of only one desire: to be in the control cabin.
He dreamed of the moment when he could unzip his space suit, or at least the neck ring.
The CO stepped back.
"Board your rocket!" he bellowed in a magnificent voice, a voice that rose above the muffled roar
of the cavernous hangar like a cathedral bell.
Pirx did an about-face, grabbed the red pennon, bumped against the railing but regained his
balance in the nick of time, and marched down the narrow gangway like a zombie. He was not halfway
across when Boerst -- looking for all the world like a soccer ball from the back -- had already boarded
his rocket ship.
He stuck his legs inside, braced himself against the metal housing, and scooted down the flexible
chute without so much as touching the ladder rungs -- "Rungs are only for the goners," was one of
Bullpen's pet sayings -- and proceeded to "button up" the cabin. They had practiced it a hundred, even a
thousand times, on mock-ups and on a real manhatch dismantled from a rocket and mounted in the
training hangar. It was enough to make a man giddy: a half-turn of the left crank, a half-turn of the right
one, gasket control, another half-turn of both cranks, clamp, airtight pressure control, inside manhole
plate, meteor deflector shield, trans-fer from air lock to cabin, pressure valve, first one crank, then the
other, and last of all the crossbar -- whew!
It crossed his mind that, while he was still busy turning the manhole cover, Boerst was probably
already settled in his glass cocoon. But then, he told himself, what was the rush? The lift-offs were always
staggered at six-minute intervals to avoid a simultaneous launch. Even so, he was anxious to get behind
the controls and hook up the radiophone -- if only to eavesdrop on Boerst's commands. He was curious
to know what Boerst's mission was.
The interior lights automatically went on the moment he closed the outside hatch. After sealing off
the cabin, he climbed a small flight of steps padded with a rough but pliant material, before reaching the
pilot's seat.
Now why in hell's name did they have to squeeze the pilot into a glass blister three meters in
diameter when these one-man rockets were cramped enough as it was? wondered Pirx. The blister,
though transparent, was made not of glass, of course, but of some Plexiglas material having roughly the
same texture and resilience as extremely hard rubber. The pilot's encapsulated contour couch was
situated in the very center of the control room proper. Thanks to the cabin's cone-shaped design, the
pilot, by sitting in his "dentist's chair" -- as it was called in spaceman's parlance -- and rotating on its
vertical axis, was able to monitor the entire instrument panel through the walls of the blister, with all its
dials, meters, video screens (located fore, aft, and at the side), computer displays, astrograph, as well as
that holy of holies, the trajectometer. This was an instrument whose luminous band was capable of
tracking a vehicle's flight path on a low-luster convex screen, relative to the fixed stars in the Harelsberg
projection. A pilot was expected to know all the components of this projection by heart, and to be able
to take a readout from virtually any position -- even upside down. Once seated in a semisupine position,
the pilot had, to the right and left of him, two reactor and attitude control levers, three emergency
controls, six manual stick controls, the ignition and idling switches, along with the power, thrust, and
purge controls. Standing just above the floor was a sprawling, spoke-wheeled hub that housed the
air-conditioning system, oxygen supply, fire-protection bay, catapult (in the event of an uncontrollable
chain reaction), and a cord with a loop attached to a bay containing Thermoses and food. Located just
under the pilot's feet were the braking pedals, softly padded and attached with loop straps, and the abort
handle, which when activated (this was done by kicking in the glass shield and shoving it forward with the
foot) jettisoned the encapsulated seat and pilot, together with a drogue chute of the ringsail variety.
Aside from having as its main function the bailing out of a pilot in an abort situation, the blister
was designed with eight other reasons in mind, and under more favorable circum-stances Pirx might have
been able to enumerate them, though neither he nor his classmates found any of them that persuasive.
Once in the proper reclining position, he had trouble bending over at the waist to attach all the
loose cables, hoses, and wires -- the ones dangling from his suit -- to the terminals sticking out of the
seat. Every time he leaned forward, his suit would bunch up in the middle, pinching him, so that it was no
wonder he confused the radio cable and the heating cable. Luckily, each was threaded differently, but he
had to break out in a terrific sweat before discovering his mistake. As the compressed air instantly
inflated his suit with a pshhh, he leaned back with a sigh and went to fasten his thigh and shoulder straps,
using both hands.
The right strap snapped into place, but the left one was more defiant. Because of the
balloon-sized neck collar, he had trouble turning around, so he had to fumble around blindly for the large
snap hook. Just then he heard muffled voices coming over his earphones:
"Pilot Boerst aboard AMU-18! Lift-off on automatic count-down of zero. Attention, are you
ready?" "Pilot Boerst aboard AMU-18 and ready for lift-off on automatic countdown of zero!" the cadet
fired back.
Damn that hook, anyhow! At last it clicked into place, and Pirx sank back into the soft contour
couch, as bushed as if he'd just returned from a deep-space probe.
"Minus twenty-three, twenty-two, twen. . ." The count rambled on in his earphones with a steady
patter. It happened once that at the count of zero two cadets were launched simultaneously -- the one
scheduled to go first, and the one next in line. Both rockets shot up like a couple of Roman candles, less
than 200 meters apart, escaping a midair collision by a mere fraction of an arc second. Or so the story
went. Ever since then -- again, if the rumors were to be believed -- the ignition cable was activated at the
very last moment, by a radio command signal issued by the launch-site commander stationed inside his
glass-paneled booth -- which, if true, would have made a mockery of the whole countdown.
"Zero!" a voice blared in his earphones. All at once Pirx heard a muffled but prolonged rumble,
his contour couch shook, and flickers of light snaked across the glass canopy, under which he lay staring
up at the ceiling panel, taking readings: astrograph, air-cooling gauges, main-stage thrusters, sustaining
and vernier jets, neutron flux density, isotopic contamination gauge, not to speak of the eighteen other
instruments designed almost exclusively to monitor the booster's performance. The vibrations then began
to slacken, the sheet of racket tapered off overhead, and the thunderous roar grew fainter, more like a
distant thunderstorm, before giving way to a dead silence.
Then -- a hissing and a humming, but so sudden he had hardly any time to panic. The automatic
sequencer had activated the previously dormant screens, which were always disconnected by remote
control to protect the camera lenses from being damaged by the blinding atomic blast of a nearby launch.
These automatic controls are pretty nifty, thought Pirx. He was still miles away in his thoughts
when his hair suddenly stood on end underneath his dome-shaped helmet.
My Gawd, I'm next, now it's my turn! suddenly flashed through his mind.
Instantaneously, he started getting the lift-off controls into ready position, manipulating each of
them with his fingers in the proper sequence and counting to himself: "One, two three. . . Now where's
the fourth? There it is. . . okay. . . now for the gauge. . . then the pedal. . . No, not the pedal -- the
handgrip. . . First the red one and then the green one. . . Now for the automatic sequencer. . . right. . . Or
was it the other way around -- first green, then red. . .?!"
"Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27!" The voice booming into his ear roused him from his predicament.
"Lift-off on automatic countdown of zero! Attention, are you ready, pilot?"
"Not yet!" he felt like yelling, but said instead:
"Pilot Boer. . . Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27 and ready for -- uh -- lift-off on automatic countdown
of zero."He had been on the verge of saying "Pilot Boerst" because he still had Boerst's words fresh in his
memory. "You nut," he said to himself in the ensuing silence. Then the automatic countdown -- why did
these recorded voices always have to sound like an NCO? -- barked:
"Minus sixteen, fifteen, fourteen. . ."
Pirx broke out in a cold sweat. There was something he was forgetting, something terribly
important, a matter of life and death.
". . .six, five, four. . ."
His sweaty fingers squeezed the handgrip. Luckily it had a rough finish. Does everyone work up
such a sweat? he wondered. Probably -- it crossed his mind just before the earphones snarled:
"Zero!!!"
His left hand -- instinctively -- pulled back on the lever until it reached the halfway mark. There
was a terrific blast, and his chest and skull were flattened by some resilient, rubber-like press. The
booster! was his last thought before his eyesight began to dim. But only a little, and then not for long.
Gradually his vision improved, though the unrelenting pressure had spread to the rest of his body. Before
long he could make out all the video screens -- at least the three opposite him -- now inundated with a
torrent of milk gushing from a million overturned cans.
I must be breaking through the clouds, he thought. His mind, though somewhat slower on the
uptake, was totally relaxed. As time went by, he felt increasingly like a spectator to some strange
comedy. There he was, lying fiat on his back in his "dentist's chair," arms and legs paralyzed, not a cloud
in sight, surrounded by a phony pastel-blue sky. . . Hey, were those stars over there, or what?
Stars they were. Meanwhile the gauges were working steadily away -- on the ceiling, on the
walls -- each in its own way, each with a different function to perform. And he was supposed to monitor
each and every one of them -- and with two eyes, no less! At the sound of a bleeping signal in his
earphones, his left hand -- again by instinct -- fired the booster separation, immediately lowering the
pressure. He was cruising at a velocity of 7.1 kilometers per second, he was at an altitude of 201
kilometers, and his acceleration was 1.9 as he pitched out of his assigned launch path. Now he could
afford to relax a while, but not for long, because pretty soon he would have his hands full -- and how!
He was just starting to make himself comfortable, pressing the armrest to raise the seat in back,
when he suddenly went numb all over.
"The crib! Where's the cribsheet!"
This was that awfully important detail he couldn't remem-ber at the time. He scoured the deck
with his eyes, now totally oblivious of the swarm of pulsating gauges. The cribsheet had slipped down
under the contour couch. He tried to bend over, was held back by his torso straps; without a moment to
lose, with a sinking sensation as if perched on top of some collapsing tower, he flipped open his
navigation book -- which until now had been stored in his thigh pocket -- and yanked the flight plan from
the envelope. A mental blackout. Where the hell was orbit B68, anyway? That must be it there! He
checked the trajectory and went into a roll. Much to his surprise, it worked.
Once he found himself.on an elliptical path, the computer graciously presented him with the
correctional data; he maneuvered accordingly, overshot his orbit, and braked so suddenly that he
dropped down to -3g for a period of ten seconds, the negative gravity having little effect on him because
of his exceptional physical endurance ("If your brain were half as strong as your biceps," Bullpen once
told him, "you'd have been really something"); guided by the correc-tional data, he pitched into a stable
orbit and fed the computer, but the only output was a series of oscillating standing waves. He yelled out
the figures again, only to discover that he had neglected to switch over; that remedied, the CRT showed
a flickering vertical line and the windows flashed a series of ones. "I'm in orbit!" he piped with glee. But
the computer indicated an orbital period of four hours and twenty-nine minutes, instead of the projected
four hours and twenty-six minutes. Was that a tolerable deviation? he wondered, desperately searching
his memory. He was all set to unbuckle the straps -- the cribsheet was still lying under-neath the seat,
though a damned lot of good it would do him if the answer wasn't there -- when Professor Kaahl's words
suddenly came to mind: "All orbits are programmed with a built-in margin of error of 0.3 percent." But
just to play it safe, he fed the data into the computer, to learn that he was right on the borderline. "Well,
that's that," he sighed, and for the first time he began surveying his surroundings.
Being strapped to his seat, except for a feeling of weight-lessness, he hardly noticed the loss of
gravitation. The forward screen was blanketed with stars, with a brilliant white border skirting the very
bottom. The lateral screens showed nothing but a star-studded black void. But the deck screen -- ah!
Earth was now so immense that it took up the whole screen, and he feasted his eyes on it as he flew over
at an altitude of 700 kilometers at perigee and 2,400 kilometers at apogee. Hey, wasn't that Greenland
down there? But before he could verify that it was, he was already sailing over northern Canada. The
North Pole was capped with iridescent snow, the ocean stood out round and smooth -- violet-black, like
cast iron -- there were strangely few clouds, and what few there were looked like gobs of watery mush
splattered on top of Earth's highest elevation points.
He glanced at the clock. He had been spaceborne for exactly seventeen minutes.
It was time to pick up PAL's radio signal, to start monitoring the radar screens as he passed
through the satellite's contact zone. Now, what were their names again? RO? No -- JO. And let's see,
their numbers were. . . He glanced down at the flight plan, stuck it back into his pocket along with the
navigation book, and turned up the intercom on his chest. At first there was just a lot of screeching and
crackling -- cosmic interference. What system was PAL using? Oh, yeah -- Morse. He listened closely,
his eyes glued to the video screens, and watched as Earth slowly revolved beneath him and stars
scudded by -- but no PAL. Then he heard a buzzing noise.
Could that be it? he wondered, but immediately rejected the idea. You're crazy. Satellites don't
buzz. But what else could it be? Nothing, that's what. Or was it something else? A critical malfunction?
Oddly enough, he was not the least bit alarmed. How could there be a critical malfunction when
he was cruising with his engine off? Maybe the old crate was falling apart, breaking up. Or could it be a
short circuit? Good Lord, a short circuit! Fire Prevention Code, section 3(a): "In Case of Fire in Orbit,"
paragraph. . . Oh, to hell with it! The buzzing was now so loud that it was drowning out the bleeping
sounds of distant signals.
It sounds like. . . a fly trapped in a jar, he thought, somewhat perplexed, and began shifting his
gaze from dial to dial.
Then he spotted it.
It was a giant of a fly, one of those ugly, greenish-black brutes specially designed to make life
miserable -- a pestering, pesky, idiotic, and by the same token shrewd and cunning fly, which had
miraculously -- and how else? -- stowed away in the ship's control cabin and was now zooming about in
the space outside the blister, occasionally ricocheting off the illuminat-ed instrument gauges like a buzzing
pellet. Whenever it took a pass at the computer, it came over his earphones like a four-engine prop
plane. Mounted on the computer's upper frame was a backup microphone, which gave a pilot access to
the computer inside the encapsulated seat in the event his on-board phone was disconnected and he
found himself without a laryngophone. One of the many backup systems aboard the ship.
He started swearing a blue streak at the microphone, afraid that because of the static he might
miss PAL's signal. The computer was bad enough, but soon the fly began making sorties into other areas
of the cabin. As though hypnotized, Pirx let his gaze trail after it until finally he got fed up and said to heck
with it. Too bad he didn't have a spray gun of DDT handy.
"Cut it out!"
Bzzzzz. . . He winced; the fly was crawling around on the computer, in the vicinity of the mike.
Then nothing, dead silence, as it stopped to preen its wings. You lousy bastard!
Then a faint but steady bleeping came over his earphones:
dot-dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot-dash. It was PAL.
"Okay, Pirx, now keep your eyes peeled!" he told himself. He raised the couch a little, so as to
take in all three video screens at once, checked the sweeping phosphorescent radar beam, and waited.
Though nothing showed on the radar screen, he distinctly heard a voice calling:
"A-7 Terraluna, A-7 Terraluna, sector III, course one hundred thirteen, PAL PATHFINDER
calling. Request a reading. Over."
"Oh crap, how am I ever going to hear my two JOs now?"
The buzzing in his earphones suddenly stopped. A second later a shadow fell across his face,
from above, much as if a bat had landed on an overhanging lamp. It was the fly, which was crawling
across the blister and exploring its interior. The blips were coming with greater frequency now, and it
wasn't long before he sighted the 80-meter-long aluminum cylinder, mounted with an observation
spheroid, as it flew over him at a distance of roughly 400 meters, possibly more, and gradual-ly overtook
him. "PAL PATHFINDER to A-7 Terraluna, one-hundred-eighty-point-fourteen,
one-hundred-six-point-six. Increasing linear deviation. Out."
"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 guid-ance. 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
摘要：

TalesofPirxthePilotbyStanislawLemOpowiesciopilociePirxietranslatedbyLouisIribarnea.b.e-bookv3.0/NotesatEOFBackCover:THROUGHSPACEBYTHESEATOFHISPANTSPilotPirxisanastronaut,afresh-facedphysicalpowerhouse,butnogenius.Hissuperiorssendhimonthemostdangerousmissions,eitherbecauseheisexpendable,orbecausethey...

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