Stanislaw Lem - Terminus

Terminus turned on his heels and tramped back the same way he had come. Pirx lingered for a while, suspended midway between deck and ceiling, while an air current gently nudged him, centimeter by centimeter, into the direction of a gaping ventilator shaft. Bouncing off the wall with his feet, he veered toward the elevator and made his way topside, passing as he went the yawning chasms of the shafts, still reverberating with the robot’s footfalls, as regular as the swinging of a pendulum in a gigantic clock.

In the course of the next few days, Pirx was consumed by problems of a more mathematical nature. After each burn, the reactor would heat up a little more and put out a little less. Boman speculated that the neutron reflectors were wearing out—a hunch corroborated by the slow but persistent increase in the amount of radioactive leakage. Using a complicated equation, the engineer tried to proportion the periods of propulsion and cooling; during shutdown, he would reroute the freezing liquid coolant from the portside holds to back aft, where the temperature was reaching truly tropical proportions. This balancing of extremes demanded much patience on Boman’s part, and he spent many hours at the computer, searching by trial and error for the right ratio. Thanks to Boman’s mathematical endeavors, they were able to cover 43 million kilometers with only a minimal delay. Finally, on the fifth day of the trip, despite Boman’s pessimistic predictions, they managed to achieve the desired speed level. Pirx ordered the reactor shut down, to allow for cooling prior to landing, and breathed a discreet sigh of relief. Commanding an old freighter like the Star was a full-time job; it left precious little time for stargazing. But then what did Pirx care about the stars, or even the copper-red disk of Mars, when he had the course charts to content him?

On the last day of the flight, late in the evening, when the darkness, only intermittently relieved by the blue-tinted night-lights, seemed to swell the decks, he suddenly remembered that he had neglected to inspect the cargo holds.

He exited from the mess hall, leaving Sims and Boman to finish their nightly game of chess, and rode the elevator down below. Since their last encounter he had neither seen nor heard Terminus. Only one thing served as a reminder—the cat. It had disappeared without leaving a trace, as if it had never been aboard in the first place.

At midship the barely lighted passageway sighed with the continual flow of air. He opened the hatch to the first hold, and the dust-coated lamps filled the interior with a sullied glow. He covered the area, sailing from one end of the hold to the other. A narrow passage divided the crates, some of which were stacked as high as the ceiling. He checked the tension of the steel straps securing the pyramids of cargo to the deck. A draft created by the open hatch started sucking debris out of the dark corners, the sawdust and oakum rocking gently up and down like duckweed on a water swell.

He was already back out in the passageway when he heard a succession of sounds, slow and cadenced:

“A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n…”

Three taps.

Pirx drifted on an air current, which lifted him imperceptibly higher. Willing or not, he had to listen. It was a two-way transmission he heard now. The signals were weak, re-strained, as if the object was to conserve strength. The rhythm varied: now slow, now fast; one of the parties kept making mistakes, as if rusty with the Morse alphabet. At times there would be a prolonged pause; at other times the signals would overlap. The dark, sparsely lit passageway seemed interminable, as if the fanning breeze had its origin in the cosmic void.

“S-i-m-o-n-d-o-y-o-u-h-e-a-r-h-i-m…”

“N-e-g-a-t-i-v-e”—pause—“n-e-g-a-t-i-v-e…”

Pirx recoiled off the wall, tucked in his legs, and torpedoed his way back aft, each passageway a little darker than the one before, the gradual accumulation of powdery red dust around the lamps a sign that he was nearing the stern. The door to the reactor chamber was open. He peeked inside.

He was struck by its coolness. The compressors, already shut down for the night, were quiet. The piping immured inside the concrete wall now and then emitted a strange, almost gurgling sound—gas bubbles impeding the flow of congealing liquid.

Terminus, cement-splattered from the top down, was diligently at work. A fan whirred frantically just above his head, which kept shifting back and forth with a pendulum-like regularity. Holding on to the railing with one hand, Pirx glided down the stairs without touching the steps. The robot’s iron appendages barely echoed, their impact being cushioned by a freshly applied coat of cement.

“N-e-g-a-t-i-v-e… o-v-e-r…”

Whether by accident or by command of the same source dictating the transmissions in Morse, the fact was that the resonances were abating. Pirx stood an arm’s length away from the robot, close enough to see the overlapping segments of its belly, which, every time it doubled up, evoked the image of an insect’s crenulated pouch. The lights, reflected in miniature, swung back and forth in his glass eyes. Their impersonal stare impressed on Pirx the fact that he was alone in that empty chamber with its sheer concrete walls. Terminus was a machine, an insensate machine, capable of transmitting a prerecorded set of sounds—that and nothing more.

“C-o-m-e-i-n-s-i-m-o-n…” He barely managed to decipher it, so faint and erratic were the signals that came now. Above the slaving robot’s head was a half-meter section of pipe; Pirx reached up and grabbed it. As he was adjusting his grip, his knuckles accidentally brushed the metal tubing. Terminus froze momentarily; the tapping broke off in the middle of a series. Seized by a sudden impulse, before he had time to reflect on the folly of his action, on this insane urge to intrude on a conversation from out of the deep past, Pirx rapped out the following quick message:

“W-h-y-d-o-e-s-n-t-m-o-m-s-s-e-n-a-n-s-w-e-r…”

At almost the exact instant his knuckles touched the pipe, Terminus responded with a rapping of his own. The two series ran parallel for a while, when suddenly, as if in recognition of his question, the robot’s hand stopped, remained poised until Pirx was finished hammering, and a few seconds later began packing cement into the fissures:

“B-e-c-a-u-s-e-h-i-s-r-i-g-h-t…”

A pause; Terminus bent over to scoop up another batch of paste. What did he mean by that? Was it the beginning of an answer? Pirx waited with bated breath. The robot straight-ened again and began pelting the shielding with cement, but so hard and so fast that the reverberating blows seemed to flow into a single, drawn-out drone:

“I-s-t-h-a-t-y-o-u-s-i-m-o-n…”

“T-h-i-s-i-s-s-i-m-o-n… w-h-o-i-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g…”

Pirx ducked his head down: it was a regular barrage.

“W-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g-i-d-e-n-t-i-f-y-y-o-u-r-s-e-l-f-w-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g… w-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g… w-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g-w-h-o-w-a-s-s-i-g-n-a-l-i-n-g-t-h-i-s-i-s-s-i-m-o-n-t-h-i-s-i-s-w-a-y-n- e-c-o-m-e-i-n…”

“Terminus!” he suddenly cried out. “Stop it! Stop it!”

The pounding ceased. Terminus stood up straight. His whole body was shaking-arms, shoulders, claws… The robot was convulsed by a fit of metal hiccups, racked by spasmodic jolts that seemed to arrange themselves into a familiar pattern:

“W-h-o-i-s-s-i-g-n-a-l… w-h-o… w-h-o…”

“Stop it!!!” Pirx screamed a second time. He had a profile view of him now: the quaking shoulder blades, the light bouncing off the armored metal in mimicry of the sounds:

“W-h-o…”

The storm spent, the robot suddenly went limp. Hovering above the deck, he scraped loudly against the horizontal piece of pipe and hung there, in the dead calm, like a trapped animal. But even from a distance, Pirx could see that one of the robot’s drooping hands was still twitching in millimeter spasms: