Not mollified, the commandant picked up the thread.
“To resume, then. The Mendeleev station is cut off at night. But communication or no communication, the work went on as usual—until recently, that is. One day last month, when the station failed to respond to any calls following the usual nighttime intermission, the Tsiolkovsky team set out and found the main hatch open, and inside the chamber—a body. The station was being manned by a team of Canadians, Challiers and Savage. The body in the chamber was Savage’s. His helmet was punctured. Death due to asphyxiation. Challiers’s body was found the next day at the foot of the Sun Gap—the victim of a fall. Otherwise the station was in perfect order: the monitoring systems checked out, stores untouched, not a sign of any damage or mechanical malfunction. You probably read about it.”
“Yes, I did,” said Pirx. “But it was reported in the papers as a double suicide. A case of temporary insanity brought on by a… psychosis of some kind…”
“Bull!” the commandant suddenly blurted out. “I knew Savage. From our days in the Alps. A guy like that would never have snapped. No, sir. The papers were full of it. You can read the report yourself, the one released by the joint inquiry commission. Listen here, Pirx, you fellas are given the same screening as pilots; the only difference is that you can’t fly until you’re breveted. And like it or not, you’ve got to put in your summer duty. If you sign on, you’ll fly tomorrow.”
“And my partner?”
“I don’t know his name. Some astrophysicist. The station can’t function without them. I’m afraid he won’t be exactly thrilled by your company, but, well, you might just pick up a little astrography in the process. Now you’re sure you understand the nature of your assignment? The commission ruled it was an accident, but certain aspects still remain under a cloud of… let’s call it ambiguity. Something unexplainable happened up there—exactly what, we don’t know. That’s why it was decided the next team should include someone with the psychological qualifications of a pilot. I saw no reason to turn down their request. Chances are, nothing sensational is going to happen. Of course you’ll have to keep your eyes and ears open. But remember, you’re not up there to play detective; no one is expecting any startling new discoveries or breakthroughs in the case. No, that’s not your mission. What’s the matter? Aren’t you feeling well?”
“Huh? No, no—I feel fine,” answered Pirx.
“I thought so. Well, think you can behave sensibly? Unless I’m mistaken, it’s already going to your head. Maybe we should call off—”
“I will behave sensibly,” said Pirx in the most emphatic voice he could muster.
“I doubt it,” said the commandant. “I’m sending you up there with some reluctance. If it weren’t for the grade—”
“The dip!” Pirx let it slip.
The commandant pretended not to have heard this last remark. He gave him the papers first, then his hand.
“Takeoff tomorrow at zero eight hundred hours. Travel light. You’ve been up there before, so you know what it’s like. Here’s your plane ticket and your reservation on the Transgalactic. You’ll fly straight to Luna Base; from there you’ll be transferred.”
He added a few more words. To wish him luck? By way of farewell? Pirx couldn’t tell. He was too far away in his thoughts to comprehend. His ears were already full of the roar of boosting rockets, his eyes blinded by the desiccating white glare of rocky lunar terrain, his face wrought with stunned bewilderment—the same look that must have accompanied the two Canadians to their mysterious deaths. He did an about-face and bumped into the large globe by the window; took the front steps in four lunarlike bounds; and was nearly run over by a car, whose screeching brakes brought everyone—excluding Pirx—to a standstill. Luckily the commandant had gone back to his papers and thus was spared this opening display of “sensible behavior.”
In the course of the next twenty-four hours, there was such a bustle of activity around, for the sake of, on behalf of, and with a view to Pirx, that at times he almost pined after the salty, lukewarm bath where nothing happened.
A person can be adversely affected as much by a lack of as by a surfeit of impressions. But Pirx was in no frame of mind to formulate such insights. All the commandant’s efforts to soft-pedal, reduce, and even dismiss the Mendeleev mission had been, to put it mildly, in vain. Pirx boarded the plane with a facial expression that made the comely stewardess recoil instinctively—though she was guilty of a gross injustice, for as far as Pirx was concerned she might just as well not have existed. Marching up the aisle like the commander of an armed legion, he took his seat; he, this William the Conqueror of the Space Age, this Cosmic Crusader, this Lunar Benefactor, this Explorer of Awesome Mysteries, this Monster Tamer of the Far Side (speaking potentially, of course, and hypothetically, which made his present bliss no less delectable; on the contrary, it made him profoundly benevolent toward his fellow passengers, who never suspected who was traveling with them in the belly of the big jetliner). He looked on them with the same amused detachment as Einstein, in the waning years of his life, must have felt watching children at play in a sandbox.
The Selene, a new vessel from the Transgalactic fleet, lifted from a Nubian cosmodrome deep in the heart of Africa. Pirx felt deeply satisfied. He didn’t exactly have visions of a plaque being installed here in his honor—that much of a dreamer he was not; but he was not very far from it. All the more bitter, then, were the drops of gall that began to creep into his cup of self-contentment as he boarded the Selene. That nobody aboard the jet had recognized him—well, that was bad enough. But aboard the spaceship? He took his seat on the lower deck—in tourist class, no less—and found himself surrounded by a bunch of wildly garrulous, camera-toting, jibber-jabbering Frenchmen. Pirx—sandwiched among a lot of loudmouthed tourists!
No one doted or fussed over him. No one offered to help him into his suit or to inflate it; no one asked how he was feeling or strapped on his oxygen bottles. For a while he consoled himself with the thought that it was to avoid recognition. Tourist class was like the seating compartment of any jet, except that the seats were bigger, roomier, and the NO SMOKING—NO STANDING sign stared one right in the face. Pirx tried to dissociate himself from this crowd of astronautical neophytes by adopting a more professional pose, folding one leg over the other, deliberately neglecting to fasten his safety belt—but to no avail. The only time he was noticed by the crew was when he was told to buckle up—this coming not from the pretty stewardess but from one of the copilots. Finally one of the Frenchmen—quite unintentionally, it seemed—offered him a jelly bean, which he took and chewed on until the gooey filling gummed up his teeth, then sank back resignedly into his cushioned seat and surrendered himself to his reveries. Gradually he renewed his faith in the perilousness of the Mission, savoring the impending danger in peace, without haste, looking forward to his upcoming trial like a confirmed wino being handed a moss-covered bottle of wine dating from the Napoleonic Wars.
Pirx was seated next to a port. No matter how strenuously he tried to ignore the familiar sight below, he couldn’t resist. From the moment the Selene settled into its circum-Terra orbit, before escaping onto a translunar course, his eyes were glued to the viewport. The most thrilling moment came when Earth’s surface, crisscrossed by roads and canals, speckled with cities, was gradually cleansed of any human presence; when nothing was visible below save the planet’s soft, round bulge, blotchy and cloud-flecked; when the eye, moving from the violet-black of oceans to the familiar shapes of continents, failed to locate a single trace of man’s technological genius. At an altitude of several hundred meters, Earth looked empty—eerily empty—and newborn, the warmer regions being denoted by a faint coating of green.
As often as he had been a spectator to this abrupt transition, it never ceased to jolt him into an awareness of something—something to which he found it hard to reconcile himself. Was it the lurid manifestation of man’s microscopic stature in relation to the cosmos? The transposition to another—planetary—scale? The visualization of mankind’s feeble and ephemeral efforts expended over the millennia? Or was it the overcoming of that frailty, the transcending of the blind and indifferent force of gravitation exerted by that formidable mass? The leaving behind of rugged mountain massifs, of polar shields, to brave the shores of other celestial bodies? These reflections, these unarticulated sensations, soon gave way to others as the ship changed course and, threading the gap in the radiation zone hugging the North Pole, shot up to the stars.
The stargazing stopped the second the lights went on.
Luncheon was served, during which the engines labored to create a semblance of gravity. The meal over and the lights once again extinguished, the passengers sat back in their seats and got their first glimpse of the Moon.
They were approaching from the side of the Moon’s southern hemisphere. A few hundred kilometers below the pole was the crater Tycho, a yawning white Sun-drenched pockmark with luminous bands radiating in all directions, whose stunning regularity had enthralled generations of Earthly astronauts, only to become, once the mystery of its symmetry was solved, the subject of student jokes. First-year students, for example, were made to believe that the circular white depression constituted the “Moon’s axle hole” and that the luminous rays were in fact thickly drawn meridians.
The closer they came to the bright sphere suspended in a black void, the more evident it was that the Moon was indeed a congealed, lava-caked version of the world as it must have existed billions of years ago, when the hot Earth wandered with its satellite through meteorite clouds and masses of planetisimals; when a continuous hailstorm of rock and iron pelted and pierced the Moon’s thin outer crust, tossing up huge amounts of magma onto the lunar surface; and when, the universe cleansed and purified at last, the era of tectonic cataclysms over, the airless planet died on the battlefield, to become a stony mask ravaged by bombardments—the inspiration of poets, the lyrical lamp of lovers.
The Selene, with is four-hundred-ton payload of freight and flesh, turned its tail to the expanding disk and commenced braking, slowly and in stages, until its gently throbbing hull roosted on one of the cosmodrome’s huge steel cone assemblies.
This was Pirx’s third lunar landing; on one of them, his solo, he had soft-landed in a practice field located a kilometer and a half from the passenger terminal.
He saw nothing of the field this trip; the Selene’s generous ceramite-plated frame was immediately hoisted onto a hydraulic winch and lowered into a hermetically sealed hangar. Customs inspection. Any narcotics? Alcohol? Material of an explosive, corrosive, or toxic nature? Uh, Pirx suddenly remembered that he had some toxic liquid in his possession—namely, a small flask of cognac, a present from Matters. He stashed it in his back pocket. Then came the health inspection—vaccination certificate, baggage sterilization (to guard against contamination)—which he whipped through in nothing flat.
He paused outside the gate to check whether anyone was on hand to greet him.
Later he stood on the mezzanine overlooking the hangar, an enormous concrete chamber hewn in the rock, with a hemispherical ceiling, level floor, and fluorescent light panels that flooded the interior with artificial sunlight. The place was aswarm with battery-powered dollies wheeling out baggage, cylinders of compressed gases, vats, crates, tubing, cable coils… Looming darkly, stolidly in the background was the cause of all this commotion—the Selene, its midships a gaping wound, its stern anchored far below the concrete in a cavernous shaft, its bow jutting up through an opening to the next level.
Pirx stood idly around, then remembered he still had to get squared away. An agent at the Port Authority office handed him an overnight pass, told him his ship wasn’t scheduled to leave for another eleven hours, then ducked out of sight, leaving him completely in the lurch. Pirx strode back out into the hallway, a little dazed by this display of bumbling inefficiency. Not a boo about whether they were to fly directly to the Tsiolkovsky station or over Mare Smythii. Come to think of it, where was his lunar sidekick? And the commission? And their work agenda?
The more he thought, the more disgruntled he became, his irritation gradually coalescing into a gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach. He was hungry. Chow time. The directory was in six languages; he studied it carefully, hopped on the right elevator, and rode down to the pilots’ cafeteria, where he was directed to the public cafeteria: this one was for pilots only.
That took the cake. He was about to make his way over to the damned restaurant when he remembered something: he had forgotten to claim his knapsack. Back upstairs to the hangar. To learn that his baggage had been sent to his hotel room. In disgust he stomped off to lunch without his pack. On the way he was caught up by two waves of tourists: some Frenchmen—the same ones—and a crowd of Swiss, Dutch, and Germans, just returned from a selenobus tour of the crater Eratosthenes. The French, doing what people normally did when getting their first taste of lunar gravitation, bunnyhopped instead of walked, bounced off the ceiling—to the squeals and cheers of the women—relished the slow descent from a height of three meters. The Germans, being more reserved by nature, filed into the spacious dining room, draped the backs of their chairs with camera gear, binoculars, tripods—with everything but high-powered telescopes—and over soup swapped samples of Moon rock fobbed off on them by the selenobus crews. Pirx sat hunched over his soup, drowning in a German-French-Greek-Dutch potpourri. Amid the general euphoria he was the only glum-faced customer. A Dutchman, taking pity on him, convinced that he was suffering from space sickness (“Your first trip to the Moon, no?”), offered him a pill. That was the drop that made his cup run over. Pirx skipped the second course, bought four packages of fruitcake at the snack bar, and took the elevator up to the hotel, venting his scorn on the porter. The man had offered to sell him a piece of the Moon—that is, a chunk of vitrified basalt.
“Get lost, you two-bit peddler! I was here before you were—” he barked and, trembling with rage, left the stupefied man standing there with jaw agape.
His room, a double, was already occupied by a short-to-medium-size man in a faded windjacket, sitting under the overhead lamp. Ginger-haired with a sprinkling of gray, a few wisps dangling over the forehead, a sunburned face, bespectacled. He took off his glasses the moment Pirx entered the room. His name was Langner—Dr. Langner—the astrophysicist who was to accompany him to Mendeleev. Pirx, already prepared for the worst, pronounced his name, mumbled something, and sat down. Langner looked to be a man in his forties—an old man in Pirx’s book—but still fairly fit for his age. He didn’t smoke, probably didn’t drink, and didn’t look like the talkative type. He was reading three books at once: a logarithm table, another brimming with formulas, a third with spectrograms. He kept a miniature calculator in his trouser pocket, using it sparingly but with effortless ease. From time to time, without taking his eyes off his formulas, he threw a question at Pirx—to which the cadet responded with a mouth full of fruitcake. Their cubicle was furnished with a set of bunkbeds and a shower stall barely big enough to accommodate someone on the beefy side, and was plastered with multilingual signs bearing entreaties to conserve water and electricity. Fortunately, breathing was permitted: a short while later, oxygen was delivered to their room. Pirx washed down his snack with tap water, so cold it set his teeth on edge—reservoirs just below the basalt crust, he thought. That’s funny. It was eleven by his watch, seven by the room’s electric clock, and ten past midnight by Langner’s.
They switched their watches to Lunar Time, knowing they would have to change again soon. The Mendeleev station was in a different time zone. The whole Far Side was in another time zone.
Lift-off was still nine hours away when, without a word, Langner got up and left the room. Pirx sat and did nothing for a while, later moved his chair into the light, browsed through some ragged-looking magazines lying on the table, and finally, in a fit of restlessness, went out. The corridor wound around before opening onto a small lounge where several armchairs stood facing a recessed TV set. A track and field meet was being telecast by special relay from Australia. Though not much of a track fan, Pirx flopped down into one of the chairs and watched until his eyelids drooped. As he stood up, he shot a half meter into the air: he had forgotten about the reduced gravity. Nothing to do but loaf around. When could he change out of his civvies and into his g-suit? Where were his instructions? Why all the stalling?
He would have nosed around, even raised hell, if what’s-his-name, Doctor Langner, hadn’t treated the whole thing so casually. Better to keep his mouth shut.
The track meet was over. Pirx switched off the set and shuffled back to his room. Gosh, if he had known it was going to be like this… While he was taking a shower he heard voices through the dividing wall: the tourists, still rhapsodizing over lunar splendors. Ho-hum. For lack of anything better to do, he changed his shirt. He was just stretching out on his bunk when Langner reappeared with a fresh supply of books. Four of them this time.
Pirx started to get the creeps. He began to suspect Langner of being one of those scientific fanatics, a younger version of Professor Merinus.
Spreading out some new spectrograms on the table and studying them more intently than Pirx had ever scrutinized his favorite pinup, Langner suddenly asked: “How old are you?”
“A hundred and eleven,” Pirx said, and added, when the other looked up, “in binary.”
Langner broke out in a smile—his first—a smile that lent him an almost human look. He had strong, immaculately white teeth.
“The Russians are picking us up in one of their ships,” he said. “We’ll stop off at their station on the way.”
“The Tsiolkovsky station?”
“Yes.”
The Tsiolkovsky station was on the Far Side. That meant another stopover. Pirx wondered how they would cover the remaining thousand kilometers. Not by land, surely. By ship? He refrained from asking, not wishing to betray his ignorance. Langner was about to say something, but it was too late. Pirx was sound asleep—in his clothes.
He woke up with a start. Langner was bent over his bunk, touching his arm.
“It’s time,” he said, not wasting any words.
Pirx sat up. Langner, judging by the stack of computations on the table, had been up the whole time, reading and writing. At first Pirx understood him to mean that it was time for dinner, but soon found out he was referring to takeoff. As he slung on his knapsack, he noticed that Langner’s was even bulkier and heavier. Rocks, he guessed. Later he discovered that aside from a few personal items—a couple of shirts, some toilet soap, a toothbrush—it held only books.