More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

So there I was, commander of a ghost ship, or almost: I still had a radiotelegraph operator and a second engineer. Never mind that the operator was stinko from breakfast on. Not altogether gone: whether he was a sipper or he had a cast-iron stomach, the fact is he never stopped bustling, especially when we were weightless (which was most of the time, not counting a few minor course corrections). But the stuff was in his eyes, in his brain, so that every order, every errand, had to be checked and rechecked. I had fantasies of getting even the moment we touched down—because how could I cripple him up there? Sober, he was a typical rat, gray, sneaky, always unwashed, with a charming habit of calling certain people by the worse obscenities during mess. In Morse. That’s right, in Morse, tapping it out on the table with his finger and almost triggering a few fistfights in the process (naturally, all were fluent in Morse), claiming it was a nervous tic the moment he was cornered. When I told him to keep his elbows at his sides, he’d tap with his foot or his fork—the guy was a real artist.

The only really able-bodied man was the engineer—who turned out to be a civil engineer. No fooling. Signed on at half pay, no questions asked, and it never crossed my mind to quiz him when he came aboard. The agent had asked him whether he knew his way around construction sites and machines, and of course he said yes. He neglected to mention what kind of machines. I told him to stand watch, though he couldn’t tell the difference between a planet and a star. Now you know why Le Mans made such huge profits. For all his agents knew, I might have been a submarine navigator. Oh, sure, I could have deserted them for my cabin. I could have, but I didn’t. That agent wasn’t so dumb. He was counting, if not on my loyalty, then on my instinct for self-preservation. On my desire to get back in one piece. And since the scrap, more than a hundred thousand tons’ worth, was weightless, uncoupling it wouldn’t have boosted our speed by a millisecond. Besides, I wasn’t a bastard. Not that I didn’t flirt with the idea as I made my morning rounds with the cotton, baby oil, bandages, rubbing alcohol, aspirin…

No, that book about cosmic romance and meteoroid typhoons was really my only escape. I even reread passages, some of them a dozen times. The book fairly brimmed with space hijinks—a rebellion of electrobrains, pirates’ agents with microtransmitters planted in their skulls, not to mention that beauty from an alien solar system—but not a single word about the mumps. Which was fine by me, obviously. I was sick of the mumps. Of astronautics in general.

During off hours I hunted high and low for the radiotelegraph operator’s liquor stock. Though I may be giving him too much credit, I suspect he deliberately left a trail just so I wouldn’t waver and give up the crusade. I never did locate his supply. Maybe he was a sponge and kept it stored inside. And I searched, my nose to the deck the way a fly hugs the ceiling, sailing around back aft and midships the way you do in dreams. I was all by my lonesome, too—my swollen-jawed crew quarantined in their cabins, my engineer up in the cockpit learning French from tapes, the ship like a funeral parlor except for the occasional wail or aria traveling through the air-conditioning ducts. The latter came from the Bolivian-Mexican, who every evening routinely suffered an attack of Weltschmerz. What did I care about the stars, not counting those in my book, of course, the juicier parts of which I knew by heart (mercifully forgotten by now). I was waiting for the mumps epidemic to end, because my Robinson Crusoe existence was beginning to tell.

I was even ducking the civil engineer. He was an OK sort of guy in his own way, but he swore he would never have signed on if his wife and brother-in-law hadn’t got him in debt. In short, he belonged to that species of man I can’t stand: the excessively confiding type. I don’t know whether he was gushy only with me. Probably not. Most people are guided by a sense of discretion, but this guy would confess anything, to the point of making my insides crawl. Fortunately, the Pearl’s twenty-eight-thousand-ton rest mass offered plenty of room to hide.

As you might have guessed, it was my first and last trip for Le Mans. Ever since, I’ve been much the wiser, which doesn’t mean I haven’t had my share of adventures. And I wouldn’t be telling you about this one—perhaps the most embarrassing of my career—if it weren’t for that other, fairytale, side of astronautics. Remember, I warned you this story would sound like a sci-fi tale.

The alert came when we were about even with Venus’s orbit. But either our operator was napping on the job or he forgot to record it, because it wasn’t until the next morning that I heard the news on Luna’s daily meteoroid forecast. At first, frankly, I thought it was a false alarm. The Draconids were far behind us and things were quiet except for the usual swarms, nor was it Jupiter up to its perturbational pranks, because this was on a different radiant. Besides, it was only an alert of the eighth degree—a duster, very low density, the percentage of large-sized particles negligible—although the front was, well … formidable. One glance at the map and I realized we’d been riding in it for a good hour, maybe two. The screens were blank. A routine shower, I thought. But the noon bulletin was far from routine: Luna’s long-range trackers had traced the swarm to another system!

It was the second such swarm in astronautical history. Meteoroids travel along elliptical paths gravitationally tied to the sun like yo-yos; an alien swarm from outside the solar system, from somewhere in the galaxy at large, is regarded as a sensation, although more by astrophysicists than by pilots. For us, the difference is one of speed. Swarms in our own system travel in circum-terrestrial space at speeds no greater than the parabolic or the elliptical; those from outside may—and, as a rule, do—move at a hyperbolic velocity. Such things may send meteoritologists and astroballisticians into ecstasy, but not us.

The radiotelegraph operator was fazed neither by the news nor by my lunchtime lecture. An engine burn (to low thrust, naturally) plus a course adjustment had given us just enough gravity to make life bearable: no more sucking soup through straws or squeezing meatloaf puree out of toothpaste tubes. I’ve always been a fan of plain, ordinary meals.

The engineer, on the other hand, was scared stiff. My talking about the swarm as casually as if it were a summer shower he took as a sure sign of my insanity. I gently reassured him that it was a dust cloud, moreover a very sparse one; that the odds of meeting up with a meteoroid large enough to do any damage were lower than those of being crowned by a falling theater chandelier; that we couldn’t do anything, anyway, because we were in no position to execute any evasion maneuvers; and that, as it happened, our course in good measure coincided with the swarm’s, thus significantly reducing the chances of a collision.

He seemed somehow unconsoled. By now, I’d had it with psychotherapy and preferred to work on the operator instead—that is, to cut him off from his liquor supply for at least a couple of hours, which the alert now made more urgent than ever. We were well inside Venus’s perimeter, a heavily traveled zone; traffic, and not only of the cargo variety, was fierce. I kept a four-hour watch by the transmitter, the radiotelegraph operator at my side, until 0600 hours—fortunately, without picking up a single distress call. The swarm was so low in density it took literally hours of squinting to detect it: a mass of microscopically small greenish phantomlike dots that might easily have been an illusion caused by eyestrain. Meanwhile, tracking stations on Luna and on Earth were projecting that the hyperbolic swarm, already christened Canopus after the radiant’s brightest star, would bypass Earth’s orbit and abandon the system for the same galactic void whence it had come, never to menace us again.

The civil engineer, more anxious than ever, kept nosing around the radio room. “Go back and man the controls!” I would bark. A purely cosmetic command, of course, first because we had no thrust, and without thrust there’s no navigating, and second because he couldn’t have executed the most rudimentary maneuver, and I wouldn’t have let him try. I just wanted to keep him busy and out of my hair. Had I ever been caught in a swarm before? How many times? Had there been any accidents? Were they serious? What were the odds of surviving a collision? He kept up a steady stream. Instead of answering, I handed him Krafft’s Basic Astronautics and Astronavigation, which he took but I’m sure never opened: the man craved first-hand revelations, not facts. And all this, I repeat, on a ship minus any gravity, weightless, when even the soberest of men moved in burlesque fashion—when, for example, the pressure exerted in writing with a pencil could land a man on the ceiling, head first. The radiotelegraph operator, however, coped not by belting up but by jettisoning things: trapped in the space between ceiling, deck, and walls, he would reach into his pants pockets, throw out the first item at hand—his pockets were a storage bin of miscellaneous weights, key chains, metal clips—and allow the thrust to propel him gently in the opposite direction. An infallible method, unerring confirmation of Newton’s second law, but something of an inconvenience to his shipmates, because, once discarded, the stuff would ricochet off the walls, and the resulting whirligig of hard and potentially damaging objects might last a good while. This is just to add a few background touches to that idyllic voyage.

The airwaves, meanwhile, were jumping, as passenger ships began switching to alternate routes. Luna Base had its hands full. The ground stations that relayed the orbital data and course corrections were firing away signals at a clip too fast for the human ear to detect. The relays were also jammed with the voices of passengers who, for a hefty fee, were cabling reassuring messages to loved ones. Luna’s astrophysics station kept transmitting updates