Stanislaw Lem - Terminus

Pirx suddenly remembered that a desk drawer in the navigation room needed fixing, so he set off in search of a wood chisel. A long, narrow passageway that ran between the port holds and a cable duct took him to the toolroom; a dirty place at any time, the room now fairly swarmed with dust that wouldn’t settle, so that Pirx was almost asphyxiated by the time he groped his way to the exit.

He was almost amidships when footsteps sounded in the passageway. Footsteps? In zero gravity? It could be only one thing, he knew. The clicking of magnetic suction disks gripping the deck was a confirmation! Pirx waited until a dark silhouette appeared in the passageway, its back to the lights at the far end. Terminus advanced with a rocking motion, paddling his arms for balance.

Pirx stepped out of the shadows.

“Hey, Terminus!”

“I hear and obey.”

The ponderous figure halted; the upper half of his body was pitched forward by the force of inertia, then gradually righted itself.

“What are you doing up here?”

“Mice restless.” A voice resonated from behind the armored breastplate, a voice strongly suggestive of a husky-voiced midget. “Mice cannot sleep. Fidgety. Thirsty. When thirsty, must have water. Mice drink much when temperature high…”

“So what are you doing about it?”

The robot swayed on its stiltlike legs.

“High temperature. Must move. Always move when temperature high. Water for mice. When drink and sleep—good. Often errors when temperature high. On duty. Must report back. Water for mice…”

“You bring the mice water?”

“Yes. Terminus.”

“Where do you get the water?”

Twice the robot repeated the words “high temperature”; then, fully as if some human were prompting him from within, he lifted up both hands in a gesture of surprise—a gesture as abrupt as it was pathetic—passed each hand before the lenses rotating in their socketlike orbits, and fixed his gaze on his sheer metallic palms.

“No water… Terminus.”

“Well, where is the water?” Pirx pressed, squinting up at the towering robot. After uttering a few unintelligible sounds, Terminus unexpectedly intoned in a deep bass:

“I… forgot.”

It was pronounced with such helplessness that Pirx almost lost his composure. He studied him for a while, this figure swaying before him, and said:

“Forgot, did you? Go on back to the reactor, y’hear?”

“I hear and obey.”

Terminus made a crunching about-face and walked off in the same stiff, almost senile fashion as before, gradually diminishing in the receding distance. He stumbled on one of the ramps, paddled his arms oarlike, managed to regain his balance, and disappeared around the bend into the adjoining passageway. His marching step rebounded off the walls for a while.

Pirx was already on his way back to his cabin when he suddenly changed his mind; hugging the deck, he glided noiselessly along until he came to the sixth ventilator shaft. Although the shafts were strictly off limits, a rule that applied even during engine shutdown, he shoved off from the guardrail and covered the seven flights separating the mid-ships from the tail section in a matter of seconds. This time, however, instead of entering the reactor chamber, he swam up to a sliding trap set at head level in the wall, slid back the metal plate, and found himself staring through a steel-framed, rectangular window of leaded glass. The back of the mice cages. How convenient—an observation port. The littered cages on the other side of the glass were empty; through the wire netting in front his attention was drawn to the center of the chamber, where, reflecting the light from above, his torso glistening with water, the robot hung almost horizontally in space, twirling his arms in a slow, comatose motion. The panoplied body was crawling with white mice; scurrying over brassards and breastplate, they congregated in the hollows of the robot’s segmented abdomen—where the water had generously gathered into drops—drank, somer-saulted, and flew strange patterns in the air, while Terminus tried hard to retrieve them, only to have them slip through his metal pincers each time, their tails describing weird arabesques as they squirmed their way to freedom… It was a spectacle so bizarre, so comical, that Pirx could hardly contain himself. Once, as Terminus went about corraling the mice, his metal face narrowly missed Pirx’s gaze. The last of the mice finally captured, Terminus shut the cages and vanished from sight, leaving only his behemothian shadow to fall crosslike from the main pipe joint, clear across the reactor’s concrete wall.

Pirx quietly slid the door back into place, returned to his cabin, undressed, and climbed under the covers. Unable to sleep, he opened a volume of Irving’s memoirs—of astronavigator fame—and read until his eyes began to burn. With a groggy head, yet feeling as alert as ever, he contemplated in despair the number of hours still separating him from daylight, then climbed out of bed, threw on his coat, and went out.

He picked up the plodding footsteps at the point where the main passageway merged with the outboard passage. He brought his head up close to the air vent; the noise was coming from below, resonating in the shaft’s iron well. A push of the hands propelled him forward, feet first, toward the nearest vertical shaft, and he dropped down to the tail section. The echoing footsteps grew louder, then fainter. He strained to listen; they started up again, more booming than before. He was coming back. Pirx hovered motionlessly, high up under the ceiling, and waited. The deck reverberated with the clinking, clanking of metal-plated soles. Then silence. Just as he was running out of patience, the measured treading resumed, and a large shadow, with Terminus marching at the rear of it, flooded the passageway. He came toward him, passing so close underneath that Pirx could hear his hydraulic heartbeat. After he had taken a dozen or so steps, he stopped and emitted a high-pitched, hissing sound, tilted several times to the right and left, as if bowing to the iron bulkheads, and moved on. When he came to a side passage, he halted just this side of its gaping mouth, peeked around the corner, and hissed a second time. His fingertips grazing the high ceiling, Pirx trailed after the hulking figure.

“Ssss… Ssss…” The closer Pirx came within range of the robot, the more distinct the hissing became. Terminus interrupted his march again, this time in front of a ventilation shaft, tried—but without success—to squeeze his head through the grate, hissed, then straightened up and wobbled on his way. Pirx had heard and seen enough.

“Terminus!” His yell brought the robot to an abrupt standstill, just as he was in the process of leaning over.

“I hear and obey.”

“What are you up to now?” Pirx demanded, staring at the same time into that misshapen metal mask of his, too expressionless to be a real face.

“Cat… I look for cat,” replied Terminus.

“You what?!”

Terminus drew himself up to his full height, his arms dangling listlessly, almost forgetfully, at his sides. It was a slow, rising movement, accompanied by a faint creaking in the joints, so slow it seemed somehow fraught with menace…

“I look for cat.”

“The cat? What for?”

Terminus, for just a moment, became a mute metal statue.

At last he said, lowering his voice, “I don’t know.” Pirx was momentarily disoriented. With its dead silence, grim lighting, and rusty bed of rails skirting the sealed hatches, the passageway could have been an abandoned mine tunnel.

“Well, this has got to stop,” he said. “Go on back to the reactor—and don’t let me see you up here again.”

“I hear and obey.”