“Sims, engineer-electrician.”
Pirx got up from his desk. Sims was a young, lean man with squirrelish features, a nervous cough, and flickering eyes. One glance at Boman was enough for Pirx to know that he was dealing with a space veteran. His sunburned face had that peculiar orangish tint that comes from prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation. He barely came up to Pirx’s shoulder (ever since he had begun flying, Pirx had been accustomed to counting every kilo aboard ship). His face, in contrast to his scrawny build, was puffy, bloated, and there were dark bags under his eyes—the mark of a man who’s been tested many times over the years. He had a drooping lower lip.
“You’ll be looking like that yourself, one day”—it crossed Pirx’s mind as he went to greet them with outstretched hand.
Hell began at 0900 hours. The launch site was the scene of the usual bedlam: ships lining up for takeoff; loudspeakers blaring away every six minutes; warning rockets being fired; the screeching, rumbling, deafening roar of test-firing engines; the dust cascading down out of the sky after every blast-off, which no sooner would settle than the tower was already giving the go-ahead to the next ship; the constant hustling to gain a few extra minutes’ time—a familiar enough scene at any shipping port during the peak hours. Most of the ships were bound for Mars, now desperate for machines and fresh produce. People there hadn’t seen a piece of fruit or a vegetable in months, construction on the hydroponic solariums having barely got under way.
Meanwhile, last-minute deliveries continued right up until countdown: cranes, girders, bales of fiberglass, cement vats, crude oil, medical supplies… At the sound of a warning buzzer, the ground crews would take cover wherever they could—in the antiradiation bunkers, in special armored crawlers—and were back at their jobs before the pads had had time to cool. By ten o’clock a smoky, crimson, bloated sun hung over the horizon, the concrete safety barriers dividing the stands were already cracked, blackened with soot, and eaten away by exhaust. The deeper fissures were immediately doused with quick-drying cement, which shot up out of the hoses in a fountainlike spray, while antiradiation crews in helmeted suits piled out of transport vehicles and sandblasted the residue of radioactive fallout. Black-and-red-checkered patrol Jeeps careened in and out, their sirens wailing. Someone in the control tower was yelling himself hoarse over a megaphone. Huge, boomerang-shaped radar dishes combed the skies from the tops of gaunt towers… In a word, a routine workday.
Pirx was all over the place—taking aboard a last-minute shipment of meat, tanking up on drinking water, having his cooling system inspected (when the best it could do was -5, the SSA inspector shook his head but mercifully relented in the end), attending to the compressors, which, though just recently overhauled, began sweating around the valves… Pirx’s voice was beginning to sound more and more like the trumpet of Jericho. At one point it was discovered that the water ballast was off because some idiot had switched off the valve before the lower tanks had been properly filled. There were papers, up to a half-dozen at a time, that had to be signed—more often than not, blindly. It was 1100 hours, with one hour to go before lift-off, when the bombshell came.
The control tower was denying them clearance. The Star’s jet system was too old, they said, the radioactive fallout too risky; they should have had an auxiliary borohydride propulsion system like the one on the Giant, the freighter that took off at six… Pirx, now hoarse from shouting, took the news calmly. Did the traffic controller realize what he was saying? Had he just now noticed the Star? Another delay was bound to mean trouble—big trouble. Beg your pardon? Additional safeguards? What sorts of safeguards? Sandbags? How many? Three thousand? No sweat. You bet your sweet ass—lift-off as scheduled. Bill the Company? Be my guest.
He was dripping with perspiration. Everything was conspiring to make an already chaotic situation even more hopeless. The electrician was chewing out the mechanic for not checking out the emergency system; the second pilot had taken off on a “five-minute break”—to say farewell to his fiancée—and was still not back on board; the medical orderly was missing; the ship was besieged by an army of forty armored crawlers, and by men in dark overalls who, urged on by frantic semaphore signals from the tower, went about the job of piling sandbags; a radiogram came, was taken not by the pilot but by the electrician, who forgot to record it (“Sorry, not my department”)… Pirx went about in a daze, only pretending to be in control of things. At T minus twenty minutes he made a dramatic decision: he ordered all the water pumped from the nose tanks to the tail section. What the heck, in the worst case it might boil up a bit… but anything to get greater stability!
1140 hours. Time to test-fire the engines. The point of no return. As it turned out, not everybody on board was a bumbler. Take Boman, for instance—now there was a man to his liking. You might not see or hear him, but he had everything running like clockwork: engine purge, low thrust, full thrust… At T minus six minutes, by the time they got the signal to prepare for lift-off, they were ready. They were already strapped down when the orderly showed up, followed by the second pilot, who came back from his fiancée looking very down at the mouth. The loudspeaker snarled, bawled, barked until the automatic sequencer hit zero: lift-off.
Pirx knew enough to know that a 19,000-ton vessel wasn’t a patrol skiff where a man barely had room to crack a joke. He also knew that a spaceship wasn’t a flea: it didn’t just hop into the air; it had to build up thrust gradually. But he wasn’t prepared for anything like this! The gauge showed only half-thrust, the hull was on the verge of a breakup—and they hadn’t even left the pad yet! He was beginning to wonder if they hadn’t snagged on something—freak accidents like that were rare, but they happened—when the needle started fluttering. They went up on the fire column; the Star shook; the gravimeter went wild. Pirx sighed, sank back into his couch, and relaxed his muscles; from now on, it was out of his hands. They were no sooner in the ascent stage than they were reprimanded by radio: the Company was being fined for lifting off at full thrust, prohibited on account of the excess radioactivity. The Company? thought Pirx. Go right ahead. The Company be damned! Pirx brushed it off with a sneer; he didn’t even bother to dispute the charge by pointing out that he had bootstrapped at half-thrust. What was he supposed to do? Land, request a hearing, and demand that the reprimand be withdrawn from his uranographs? Like hell he would.
Besides, he had plenty of other things to worry about at the moment. Like the way they were breaking through the atmosphere. Never had he been aboard a ship that vibrated so much. He now knew how it must have felt to be at the head of a battering ram when storming a castle wall. The whole ship jumped, the men jumped—in their straps, no less!—even the accelerometer was jumping around: 3.8, then 4.9, at one point pushing its way up to 5, only to plummet pusillanimously back down to 3. What were those rockets firing, anyway? Dumplings? With the ship now on full power, Pirx had to squeeze his helmet with both hands to hear the pilot’s voice in his earphones. The noise was tremendous, but it was not a triumphant ballistic roar—more like a life-and-death struggle with Earth’s gravity. There were moments when he had the sensation not of a lift-off but of hanging in midair and repelling the planet by force, so physically palpable was the Star’s agonizing ordeal. The vibrations blurred the contours of everything—bulkheads, joints… At one point, Pirx thought he heard the seams giving way. But it was only an illusion; in that madhouse he would have been lucky to hear the horn of the Last Judgment.
The nose-cone heat sensor was the only instrument whose needle didn’t waver, didn’t fluctuate wildly, but climbed steadily higher: 2,500, 2,800… There were only a few more scale marks left on the gauge when Pirx happened to check the accelerometer. They weren’t even close to orbital velocity!
Fourteen minutes of flight and the best they could do was 6.6 kilometers per second. Pirx was struck by a horrible thought, one of those nightmarish fantasies with which space pilots are continually haunted: What if those weren’t clouds drifting by on the scanner but vapors escaping from the cooling ducts? Luckily it wasn’t so; they were definitely spaceborne. The orderly lay there pale as a sheet. A lot of help he’ll be in an emergency, thought Pirx. The engineers were holding up better. Boman wasn’t even perspiring; he lay there, a little peaked in the face, relaxed, scrawny—like a kid with its eyes shut. By now the hydraulic fluid was leaking out onto the floor with a vengeance; the pistons were in almost all the way. What happens when they really go? Pirx wondered.
Because he was used to more modern consoles, Pirx’s head kept turning in the wrong direction every time he went to check the thrust performance, cooling, velocity, thermal load, and, most important, their position relative to the synergic curve.
The pilot, who had to scream over the intercom to make himself heard, was having trouble keeping on course. True, they were only fractional deviations, but that was all it took, when escaping Earth’s atmosphere, to make one side heat up more than the other, setting up powerful thermal stresses in the outer structure, often with fatal consequences. Pirx’s only consolation was that the Star had survived plenty of other lift-offs in the past; chances were, it would make this one as well.
The thermocouple was now on maximum: 3,500 degrees. Ten more minutes of this and the hull would come apart at the seams, carbide or no carbide. What gauge was the skin? he wondered. No telling—except that it was, for sure, hot. He felt warmer himself, but it was only his imagination: the temperature in the control room was the same as at lift-off: 27 degrees. They were at the 61-kilometer mark, Earth’s atmosphere practically behind them, flying at a velocity of 7.4 kilometers per second, with less turbulence but still at 3g. The Star had as much oomph as a block of lead, its rapid acceleration nil. Damned if he could understand why.
A half hour later they were steering a course for the Arbiter; once past the last navigational satellite, they would be veering onto the Earth-Mars ellipsis. The crew was sitting up now; Boman was massaging his face; Pirx, too, felt swollen around the mouth, especially in the region of the lower lip. Everyone had bloodshot, stinging eyes, a dry cough, and a sore throat—all the usual symptoms, normally disappearing with-in an hour.
The reactor was working, but that was about all; if its performance didn’t decrease, neither did it increase, as well it should have in a vacuum. The Star appeared to defy even the laws of physics. They were up to 11 kilometers per second, barely above escape velocity. They would have to bring her up to cruising speed if they didn’t want to take months getting to Mars.
Pirx, like every other navigator, was expecting nothing but hassles from the Arbiter. Like getting reprimanded for having too big an exhaust flare, or getting bumped to make way for some more important mission, or hearing complaints about how his ionization discharge was causing radio interference. A false alarm. The Arbiter let them through without a boo, just a belated radiogram warning of a “high vacuum” ahead. Pirx acknowledged the warning, and thus ended this exchange of cosmic civilities.
As soon as they were locked onto Mars, Pirx ordered an increase in thrust, people got up, stretched, moved about, and the radio mechanic, who also doubled as crew cook, headed off to the galley. Everyone was famished, most of all Pirx, who had flown on an empty stomach and sweated pounds during takeoff.
The temperature in the cockpit was rising, as the heat generated by the shield began to make itself felt inside. There was also a faint odor in the air—the oil that had escaped from the hydraulics and which now formed neat little puddles around the seats.
The nuclear engineer went down to the reactor chamber to check for neutron leakage. Keeping one eye on the stars, Pirx shot the breeze with the ship’s electrician; it turned out they moved in the same crowd. For the first time since coming aboard, Pirx began to unwind, to see the brighter side of things. Whatever else the Star might be, 19,000 tons was nothing to sneeze at. Commanding a clunker that size was a lot tougher than piloting your ordinary freighter. Tougher, yeah, but also more prestigious, a good thing to fatten your dossier with.
They were 1.5 million kilometers out beyond the Arbiter when their morale suffered its first blow: the lunch was unfit for human consumption. The radio mechanic, it turned out, was no cook. But the man with the biggest gripe was the orderly, already nursing an upset stomach. Just before lift-off, the orderly had made a bargain on some chickens, one of which he had entrusted to the mechanic’s culinary art; the result was a broth full of quills. The rest of the crew was served rump steak, tough enough to consume a lifetime of hard labor.
“A little tough, eh?” commented the second pilot, who pronged his meat with such gusto that it flipped off the plate.
The mechanic, who also had a tough skin, told the orderly there was nothing wrong with the broth that a little straining wouldn’t cure. Pirx felt obliged to act as mediator in the dispute, to exercise some authority as the ship’s CO, but he was too choked with laughter to even open his mouth.
After a canned lunch, Pirx moseyed on back to the cockpit. He had the pilot take a star fix, entered the accelerometer readings in the log, and whistled when his glance landed on the reactor gauge. That was no reactor, brother—that was a volcano! Eight hundred degrees in the shielding after only four hours of flight was no laughing matter. Coolant circulated at a maximum pressure of 20 atmospheres. Hm. The worst was probably over. Landing on Mars would be a breeze—thinner atmosphere, with a gravity less than half Earth’s… But the reactor, what to do about the reactor…? He went over to the computer, to calculate how long it would take to reach a cruising velocity at their present rate of thrust. Anything less than 80 kilometers per second would mean a ferocious delay.
“Seventy-eight hours to go,” registered the display.
Seventy-eight hours?! By then the reactor would be blown to bits, splattered like an egg. As sure as his name was Pirx. He decided to build up speed gradually. It’ll mean screwing up the flight plan a little, thought Pirx, it’ll mean going without thrust for a while… it won’t be no joyride without any gravitation… but, well, it’s that or nothing. He told the pilot to keep an eye on the astrocompass, then took the elevator down to the reactor chamber. He was working his way down a dim passageway, with cargo holds to the right and left of him, when he heard something on the order of a hollow drumming—the sound an armored squadron riding over metal might make. He quickened his step. A cat—the same black cat—sprang out of nowhere and squirmed between his legs; not far off, a door banged shut. By the time he reached the cavelike mouth of the main passageway, it was quiet again. Before him lay a desolate stretch of bleakly blackened walls, an emptiness relieved only by a solitary lightbulb at the far end, still jittering from the impact of the slamming door.
“Terminus!” he called out blindly, but he got only an echo in reply. He turned and followed the passageway all the way back to the reactor chamber. Boman, who had already come down earlier on the elevator, was gone. The arid, desertlike air irritated his eyes. A hot wind seethed inside the air ducts, blending with all the boiler-room racket. The reactor was performing like any other reactor—in silence. The noise came from the cooling system, now strained to the maximum—a strangely rueful, yammering whine produced by the kilometers of tubing that circulated the ice-cold liquid deep inside the concrete shielding. The needles on the lenslike gauges of the pumps were uniformly tilted to the right. Standing out prominently from all the others, its dial radiant as the Moon, was the most critical gauge of all: the one measuring neutron flux density. Its indicator was verging on the red, a sight guaranteed to give any SSA inspector cardiac arrest.
The rugged, rocklike surface of the shielding gave off a deadly heat; the catwalk’s sheet-metal construction vibrated, sending unpleasant ripples through his body; the electric lights cast an oily glare on the vent covers. A white light flickered and went out; in its place a red warning signal came on. He ducked under the catwalk to check the timing switches but saw that Boman had already beat him to it; the automatic tinier was programmed to interrupt the chain reaction in four hours. Without tampering with the timer, he checked the gamma-ray counters. They were ticking gingerly away. The radiation monitor indicated a slight leak of 0.3 roentgen per hour. He tossed a glance into the chamber’s darkest corner. Empty.
“Hey, Terminus!”
No answer. The mice fidgeted in their cages—back and forth, like white specks—manifestly miserable in the subtropical temperature. Pirx climbed back up the stairs and bolted the door behind him. He felt a chill the moment he hit the cooler air in the passageway: his shirt was soaked through. On a whim he made his way aft, down a series of passage-ways that kept getting narrower as they approached the tail section, and came to a dead end. He placed one hand on the bulkhead. It was warm. He sighed, retraced his steps, rode the elevator up to the fourth deck, and entered the navigation room. The chronometer showed 2100 hours by the time he had finished plotting the ship’s course. Must have lost track of the time, he thought, a bit bewildered. He hit the lights and went out.
The deck seemed to slide out from under his feet the moment he stepped into the elevator. The timer had shut down the reactor as programmed.
At midships the passageway purred with the steady hum of fans in the subdued lighting. The lightbulbs on ahead smoldered in the circulating air currents. Using the elevator door as a springboard, he propelled himself swimmer-style down the passageway, one side of which was almost totally immersed in darkness. In the bluish haze he passed a series of hatches—hitherto unexplored—and black walls set off by ruby-red lights: the emergency escape hatches. With a fluent, somnolent motion, he glided weightlessly beneath the vaulted ceiling, his elusive, untrodden shadow creeping along the deck, wriggled through a partially open door, and entered the former mess hall. Below him, its surface streaked with light, stretched a long table flanked by chairs. He hung suspended above the furniture like a deep-sea diver exploring the interior of a sunken ship. Lights played in the shimmering panes along the wall before dispersing in a shower of blue sparks. The mess hall opened onto another, even darker room. Though his eyes were accustomed by now to the dark, he had to feel his way, blindly fingering everything as he went. His fingertips brushed something pliable—deck or ceiling, he couldn’t tell. He pushed himself away, twisted around like a swimmer, and glided on in silence. A row of white, geometrically shaped objects sparkled in the velvety darkness. Their smooth surface felt cold to the touch. Washbasins. The one closest to him was flecked with spots. Blood?
He stuck out his hand—cautiously. Grease spots.
A third hatch door. He opened it and, suspended obliquely in space, was confronted by an eerie procession of paper and books fluttering by in the shadowy penumbra before with-drawing with a faint rustling noise. He propelled himself in the opposite direction, using his feet this time, and wound up back in the passageway, hounded by a cloud of dust, which clung to him instead of dispersing—trailed after him like a long, reddish-brown veil.
The string of night-lights burned with a serene calm, inundating the decks with a watery blue shimmer. He swam up to a rope dangling from the ceiling; the moment he let go of the end, it coiled itself up lazily, snakelike, as if suddenly animated by his touch.
His head snapped back. A clunking noise, similar to a hammering on metal, sounded nearby. He swam in the direction of the echoes, their volume now rising, now falling; along the way spotted a set of rusty tracks embedded in the deck—once used for wheeling dollies to and from the holds, he guessed—and soon was sailing along so fast he could feel the air buffeting his face. The clanging kept getting louder. He sighted a pipe angling around the corner from the next passageway and running along the ceiling. A section of old, one-inch pipeline. He touched it with his hand; it jiggled. The resonances now came in clusters of twos and threes. That’s when it hit him. The banging was in Morse.
“A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n…”
The series came again:
“A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n…”
And again:
“A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n…”
Then the pipe chimed, “A-m-b-e-h-i-n-d-b-u-l-k-h-e-a-d.” By force of habit, he spliced the letters together, syllable by syllable.
“I-c-e-e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e…”
Ice? he wondered, caught completely off guard. What in…? Ice? What ice?
“R-e-a-c-t-o-r-v-e-s-s-e-l-c-r-a-c-k-e-d,” the pipe resonated. He wrapped his hand around it. Who was signaling? And where was it coming from? He tried to figure out which way the pipe ran—from the bow or back aft. If looked like one of those emergency pipelines, obsolete, with branches on ever deck. Maybe someone was practicing his Morse…? That’s crazy. The pilot up in the control room, maybe?
“C-o-m-e-i-n-p-r-a-t-t-c-o-m-e-i-n…”
A pause.