Scuttle the idea? Nothing would have been cozier than to keep a tight lip. No one would ever be the wiser. They wouldn’t figure it out until the next shipwreck, and after they picked up the scent…
But if it was just a matter of time, if his silence really couldn’t save the old commander, then wasn’t he duty-bound…? Suddenly, as if he had shed all qualms, Pirx went into action.
The ground floor was deserted. Only one operator on duty in the laser-communications cabin: Haroun. The message read as follows: “Syntronics Corp., Boston, Mass., U.S.A., Earth. Warren Cornelius: THOU ART THE MAN.” And below Pirx’s signature, “Member of the board of inquiry investigating the causes of the
Later that same night he read Schiaparelli—to keep himself from conjuring up, in a hundred different versions, how Cornelius, cocking his gray, bristling eyebrows, would pick up the telegram bearing a Mars address, unfold the crinkly paper, and hold it up to his farsighted eyes. He didn’t digest a word of Schiaparelli; each time he turned the page, he was suddenly overwhelmed by shocked dismay mixed with an almost childlike pity. Me? Pirx? How could I have done such a thing?
Pirx had guessed right: Cornelius felt trapped. Cornered. The very nature of the situation, dictated by the natural sequence of events, left him no way out, not the slightest elbow room. Taking a sheet of paper, he jotted down, in his neat and legible hand, a few lines of explanation—that he had acted in good faith, that he accepted full responsibility—signed it, and, at 1530 hours, four hours after having received Pirx’s telegram, shot himself in the mouth. No reference to any illness, no attempt at self-vindication. Nothing.
It was as if he acknowledged only that part of the message dealing with the
Maybe Pirx had been wrong. Ironically, he was bothered by the theatricality of what he had done, a gesture inspired by Poe. He had trapped Cornelius by using his favorite author, whose manner he himself had always found contrived, irritating, whose fake corpses returning from the grave to point a blood-stained finger at the murderer failed to persuade him of life’s horror, which, as Pirx knew from experience, was more mocking than precious. This same discrepancy held for Mars, as viewed by two succeeding generations, during which it went from an unreachable red spot in the night sky, displaying semi-intelligible signs of an alien intelligence, to a quotidian terrain of grinding labor, political machination, and intrigue; a world of enervating windstorms, clutter, shipwrecks; a place from which to behold Earth’s poetic blue sparkle, but also one that could inflict a killing. The immaculate—because imperfectly perceived—Mars of early astrography had faded, leaving only those Greek and Latin names having the ring of an alchemist’s incantations; the actual terrain by now bore the imprints of heavy boots. The epoch of high- minded theoretical debate had set below the horizon and, in perishing, had revealed its true face: a dream nourished by its own futility of fulfillment. All that remained was the Mars of tedious travail, of budgeting, and of such grimy, dun-gray dawns as the one in which Pirx now went, proof in hand, to the final session.
ALSO BY STANISLAW LEM
Copyright
English translation copyright © 1982 by Stanislaw Lem
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The translation of “The Hunt” originally appeared in
library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lem, Stanislaw.
More tales of Pirx the pilot.
Translation of: Opowiesci o pilocie Pirxie.
“A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.”
Contents: Pirx's tale—The accident—The hunt—[etc.]
I. Title.
PG7158.L390613 1982 891.8'537 80-8753
ISBN 0-15-162138-1 AACR2
Printed in the United States of America
First edition
B C D E