More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

a different reason—would have felt cheated, disillusioned, if they, like he, had been made privy to the truth. For in this refutation of both pro and con, in the total impropriety of any concept vis-a-vis the enigma, was contained a bitter but dire, cruel but salutary lesson which—it suddenly dawned on him—bore directly on the present, on this brain-teaser of a calamity.

A link between the old astrography and the crack-up of the Ariel? But how? And what to make of this intuition, so vague and yet so compelling? A teaser, all right. But whatever the missing link between them, however distant and tenuous the connection, he knew it would no more be revealed now, in the middle of the night, than it would be forgotten. He would have to sleep on it.

As he switched off the light, it occurred to him that Romani was a man of much broader intellectual horizons than he had given him credit for. These books were his own private possession, and one had to fight for every kilo of personal gear shipped to Mars—special notices, appealing to the work crew’s loyalty and warning against the dangers of overloading, were plastered all over the Base, Earthside. Everywhere they were crying for expediency, and here was Romani, coordinator of the Agathodaemon project, who, in flagrant violation of the rules, had imported dozens of kilos of utterly useless books—and for what? Surely not for bedtime reading.

In the dark, already half asleep, he smiled as he realized the motive that justified the presence of these bibliophilic antiquities under the project’s dome. Granted, these books, these passe gospels, these discredited prophecies, had no business being there. But it seemed only fair—necessary, even—that these minds, which had once been the bitterest of enemies, which had given their best to the mystery of the red planet, should find themselves, now fully reconciled, here on Mars. They deserved it, and Romani, who understood, was a man worthy of his trust.

At 0500 hours, he woke from a deep sleep, as alert as if braced by a cold shower. Savoring a few minutes’ leisure—exactly five; it was becoming something of a habit—he thought of the commander of the shipwrecked Ariel. He wasn’t sure whether Klyne could have saved the ship with its thirty-man crew, or whether the man had even tried. Klyne belonged to a generation of rationalists, men trained to keep pace with their impeccably logical allies, the computers, which became more demanding as one made greater efforts to control them; in a sense, blind obedience was the wiser course. But Pirx was incapable of blind obedience. Distrust was in his bones. He flipped on the radio.

The furor had started. Pirx had been expecting it, but he’d underestimated the extent of it. The press kept hammering away at three themes: the suspicion of sabotage, the risk to the other Mars-bound ships, and, of course, the political fallout. The big papers tiptoed around the sabotage hypothesis, but the tabloids wallowed in it. The hundred-thousand-tonners also took flak: they weren’t flightworthy, they couldn’t lift off from Earth, and worse, they could neither abort a mission (their fuel supply was inadequate) nor be junked in circum-Martian orbits. It was true: they had to land on Mars. But three years before, unbeknownst to these self-styled experts, a test prototype equipped with a different computer model had successfully soft-landed on Mars, not once but several times. The political promotors of the Mars project were also subjected to a campaign of vilification, their critics badmouthing it as sheer lunacy. There were exposures of work-safety violations on both bases, of the project’s rubber-stamping and bench-testing methods, of bureaucratic bumbling among high-ranking administrators—in short, a Cassandralike outcry.

When he reported at 0600 hours, he found himself a member of a nonexistent committee, their self-appointed panel having just been abolished by Earth; it was to start all over again, now officially and legally reconstituted as an adjunct to Earth’s board of inquiry. Thus dissolved, the body reaped certain advantages. It was relieved of any decision-making, and so felt freer to make recommendations to its Earthly superior.

Logistically, the situation at Syrtis Major was ticklish but not critical, whereas a suspension of deliveries would sink Agathodaemon before the month was out. Any effective help from Syrtis was out of the question. Not only were building materials in short supply, but water as well. The situation called for the most stringent economizing.

Pirx listened to the update with one ear only, because meanwhile the, Ariel’s cockpit recorder had been rescued. The human remains were being stored in containers: no decision as yet on whether they would be buried on Mars. The tapes had to be processed before they could be analyzed, which explained why matters not directly related to the causes of the shipwreck were under discussion—such as whether a mobilization of smaller freighters could save the project from extinction, guaranteeing delivery of at least minimal bio-support cargo. While Pirx saw the wisdom of such deliberations, he couldn’t help thinking of the two Mars-bound hundred-thousand-tonners, whose existence had somehow been overlooked, almost as if it was taken for granted they would have to abort. But they had to land. By now, all were keenly aware of the reaction of the American press, and radiograms kept them up-to-date on the latest political diatribes. It didn’t look good: spokesmen for the project had yet to issue a public statement, and already the administration found itself caught in a firestorm of accusation, including insinuations of “criminal negligence.” Pirx, wanting no part of it, slipped out of the smoke-filled hall around ten, and, thanks to ground maintenance, drove out in a jeep to the site of the shipwreck.

By Martian standards, it was a warm, almost cloudy day, the sky more coral-hued than rust-gray. At such times Mars seemed possessed of its own, un-Earthly, raw, slightly veiled, even soiled beauty, the sort we expected to see fully revealed, crowned with a solar radiance, from the vortex of dust and haze, though this expectation went unfulfilled—Mars’s ephemeral beauty was not a promise but the very best the planet’s landscape could muster.

Having left the squat, bunkerlike ground control a few kilometers back, they reached the end of the launch- pad area, then got hopelessly mired just beyond it. Pirx wore a lightweight partial, which they were all using up here, bright blue, much more comfortable than the full, with a backpack made lighter by an open respirator. Even so, something was wrong with the air conditioning, because the moment he started sweating from the exertion of wading through the sand drifts, his helmet visor began to fog up. Fortunately, hanging like turkey wattles between his neck-ring disconnect and his breastplate were several hand pouches that he could use to dry the glass from the inside—crude but effective.

An immense crater, teeming with caterpillars: the excavation, lined on three sides with sheets of corrugated aluminum acting as sand barriers, resembled the mouth of a mine shaft. The Ariel’s midship—huge, like a trans-Atlantic liner storm-battered and shipwrecked against the rocks—took up half of the funnel; some fifty people bustled below her, both they and their dredging machines looking like ants on a giant’s carcass. The ship’s eighteen-meter nose section, almost intact, lay elsewhere, hurled a few hundred meters away in the crash. The force of impact had been awesome, to judge by the lumps of melted quartz: the kinetic energy had been immediately converted to thermal, producing a shock similar to that of a meteorite landing, despite a velocity less than the speed of sound. In Pirx’s mind, the disparity between Agathodaemon’s physical capacities and the enormity of the wreckage was not enough to justify the slipshod excavation; one had to improvise, of course, but the almost willful bedlam bespoke a resignation in face of the inconceivable. Even the ship’s water was wasted: with every on-board cistern ruptured, the sand had absorbed thousands of hectaliters before the remainder was turned to ice. This ice made a singularly macabre sight, gushing from the forty-meter gash in the ship’s fuselage in dirty, dazzling cascades, resting on the dunes like bizarre festoons, as if the exploding ship had spewed a frozen Niagara Falls—temperatures here reached eighteen below zero Celsius, dropping at night to sixty below. The Ariel’s ice-packed, ice-glazed hull made the wreckage look positively ancient, prehistoric.

Access to the ship’s interior was either through the ice, by drilling and jackhammering, or through the shaft. Through the latter they reached the salvageable boxes, piles of which littered the funnel’s slopes, yet the whole operation bordered on sloppy. The tail section was off limits; red pennons, strung on ropes and marking the area of radioactive contamination, fluttered furiously in the wind.

Pirx made a tour of the site, circling the lip of the embankment, and counted two thousand steps before he stood above the ship’s soot-blackened nozzles, rankling as he watched how the salvage crew, their chains slipping each time, tried futilely to pull out the one surviving fuel tank. He was there only a short while, or so it seemed to him, when someone tapped his shoulder and pointed to his respirator gauge. The pressure had fallen; since he didn’t have a spare, he had to go back. By his watch, a new chronometer, he’d spent almost two hours at the wreckage site.

The conference hall, meanwhile, had been rearranged: the locals were seated on one side of the long table, opposite six large, flat, freshly installed TV monitors. As usual, there was a glitch in the relay, so the session was postponed until 1300 hours. Haroun, the telegraph operator, whom Pirx had come across at Syrtis Major, and who, for some reason, treated him with great respect, gave him the first dubs of the tapes—the ones bearing the