Stanislaw Lem: More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

The controller would then do exactly what I would have done in his place: he would tell me to get off the air and would inquire of all ships in my sector whether anyone had sighted anything suspicious. None had, of course, because none could have observed the galactic intruder. The only reason I could was that I was flying within the plane of the ecliptic, strictly off limits because of circulating dust and the remnants of meteoroids and comet tails. But I had violated that ban to have enough fuel for the maneuvers that were to make Le Mans the richer by one hundred forty thousand tons of scrap iron. Luna’s coordinator would have to be told, naturally, in which case word was bound to reach the Tribunal’s Disciplinary Board. True, my having discovered the ship might outweigh an official reprimand, and possibly even a fine, but only on condition that the ship was actually tracked down. In short, it was a lost cause, because a pursuit would have meant dispatching an entire fleet into the zone of the ecliptic, twice as hazardous as usual because of the hyperbolic swarm. Even if he wanted to, the Luna coordinator lacked the authority to do it. And even if I did handstands and called COSNAV, the International Committee for Space Research, and the devil only knows who else, there would still be the conferences and meetings and powwow sessions, and then maybe, if they moved with lightning speed, they might reach a decision in three weeks’ time. By then—my mind, exceptionally quick that night, had already done its homework in the elevator—the ship would be a hundred ninety million kilometers away, beyond the sun, which it would skirt closely enough to have its trajectory altered, so that in the end the search area would amount to more than ten million cubic kilometers. Maybe twenty.

Such were my prospects as I reached the radio room. I sat down and estimated the probability of a sighting through Luna’s giant radiotelescope, the most powerful radioastronomical unit in the system. Powerful, yes, but not powerful enough to pick up a target of that magnitude at a distance of four hundred million kilometers. Case closed. I tore up my computations, got up, and quietly retired to my cabin, feeling as though I had committed a crime. We’d been visited by an intruder from the cosmos, a visit that occurs, who knows, maybe once in a million years—no, once in hundreds of millions of years. And because of a case of the mumps, because of a man named Le Mans and his convoy of scrap, and a drunken halfbreed, and an engineer and his brother-in-law, and my negligence—it had slipped through our fingers, to merge like a phantom with the infinity of space. For the next twelve weeks, I lived in a strange state of tension, because it was during that time that the dead ship returned to the realm of the great planets and became lost to us forever. I was at the radio room every chance I got, nurturing a gradually diminishing hope that someone else might sight it, someone more collected than I, or just plain luckier, but it wasn’t meant to be. Naturally, I never breathed a word to anyone. Mankind is not often blessed with such an opportunity. I feel guilty, and not only toward our race; nor will I be granted the fame of Herostratus, since fortunately nobody would believe me any more. I must admit that even I have my doubts at times: maybe there never was any encounter—except with that can of cold, indigestible corned beef.

When Aniel wasn’t back by four, no one thought much of it. Around five it started to get dark, and Pirx, more puzzled than alarmed, had an impulse to ask Krull what could be keeping him. But he didn’t; he was not the team leader, and anyhow, such a question, harmless and even legitimate in itself, was bound to set off a chain reaction of mutual needling. He knew the symptoms, all the more predictable when, as in their case, the team was a randomly selected one. Three people of widely divergent specialization, stuck in the mountains of an utterly worthless planet, on a mission that all, Pirx included, considered a waste of time.

They had come—their transport, a mini-gravistat so old it was good only for scrap iron, was to be junked afterward—equipped with a collapsible aluminum Quonset hut, a smattering of hardware, and a radio terminal so fatigued that it gave more trouble than service. A seven-week “general recon” mission—what a laugh! Pirx would have turned it down had he spotted it for what it was—a mop-up detail, designed to follow up on probes initiated by the Base Exploration Department, to add one more digit to the raw data fed their memory banks for programming next year’s manpower and resource allocation. And for the sake of that perforated figure, they had sat nearly fifty days in a wilderness that, in other circumstances, might have had its attractions—say, for mountain-climbing. But mountain-climbing, understandably, was strictly against regs, and the best Pirx could do was to contemplate the first pitches while he was out doing his seismic and triangulation surveys.

For want of another, the planet bore the name Iota-116-47, Proxima Aquarius. With its small yellow sun, its salt-water oceans shaded violet-green with oxygen-producing algae, and its sprawling, three-shelved, flora-crusted continent, it was the most Earthlike planet Pirx had ever seen. If not for its G-type sun, a recently discovered subspecies of G VIII—hence, one suspected, of unstable emission—it would have been ideal for colonization; but once vetoed by the astrophysicists, all plans for settling this Promised Land had to be scrubbed, even if it took another hundred billion years before going supernova.

Pirx’s regret at having been buffaloed into the expedition was not altogether genuine. Faced with being grounded during the three-month suspension of traffic in the solar system, with hanging around the Base’s air-conditioned subterranean gardens, glued to a TV and its mesmerizing programs (the shows were like canned preserves, oldies of at least ten years’ vintage), he had fairly jumped at the chief’s offer. The chief, for his part, was only too glad to be able to oblige Krull, two-man flights being against regs and Pirx being the only one on furlough. Pirx thus came as a godsend.

But if Krull was thrilled, he gave no sign of it, not then or later. At first Pirx thought he might have taken his joining the team as the magnanimous gesture of a chief navigator stooping to the level of a routine surveyor. But what looked to be a personal grudge was merely the bitterness—the kind nourished by wormwood—of a man in the throes of middle age (he had just turned forty). Still, there’s nothing like prolonged isolation to bring out a person’s foibles and virtues, and Pirx soon understood the source of Krull’s character flaw, of this man who was the toughened veteran of more than ten years of extraterrestrial duty. Krull was a case of frustrated ambition, a man unfit for his dream profession, which was to be an intellectronics engineer, not a cosmographer. What tipped Pirx off was Krull’s bullheadedness with Massena every time conversation turned to intellectronic—or, in professional parlance, “intellectral”—matters.

Massena was either too insensitive or just plain unmoved, because whenever the cosmographer insisted on some fallacious proof, he was not content merely to refute him, but had to take him to the mat; pencil in hand, he meticulously built his mathematical model and polished Krull off with a glee that seemed motivated less by self-vindication than by a desire to prove the cosmographer an arrogant ass. But Krull wasn’t arrogant, only touchy, no more and no less so than anyone whose ambition and abilities were not evenly matched.

Pirx, who was a captive audience for such scenes—unavoidable since they shared a living space measuring forty meters square, divided by partitions with next to no sound insulation—knew he would be made a scapegoat. And he was right. Not daring to show Massena he was a sore loser, Krull made Pirx bear the brunt of his frustration, and in a way that was typical of him: except when circumstances demanded otherwise, Pirx was given the silent treatment.