Stanislaw Lem: Terminus

He kicked the seat’s shock absorbers, and immediately the hydraulics sprang a leak.

Oh well, he thought, if others can get her up, so can I; went back out into the passageway, came out through another hatch into the outboard passage, and kept on going. Just past the elevator shaft he noticed that the wall bulged a little and was a shade darker in one spot. One touch of the hand, palm down, bore out his suspicions: a cement patch. He scoured the passageway for signs of other ruptures but couldn’t find any; the rest of the walls and the ceiling were like new. His eyes meandered back to the patch. The cement was bumpy in places; Pirx thought he could make out the vague outline of handprints, proof of a job executed in terrific haste. He got into the elevator and rode down to the reactor, the different deck levels indicated by lighted numerals flashing through the window: 7… 6… 5…

It was cold down below. The passageway curved before joining up with others to become a long and narrow corridor, at the end of which he sighted the door to the reactor chamber. The closer he came, the lower the temperature dropped, turning his breath to silver vapor in the light of the dusty lamps. He shook his head in consternation. The freezers, he thought. They must be somewhere close by. He paused to listen. The metal bulkheads pulsated with a weak but steady vibration. As he passed under the ceiling—a steeply inclined ceiling, echoing his every footstep—he couldn’t rid himself of the impression that he was descending underground. The door was hermetically sealed. He exerted all his weight on the handle; it wouldn’t budge. He was just about to force it with his foot when he realized that the safety bolt needed pulling out first.

A double door, as sturdy as a bank vault door, followed. At eye level, in places where the enamel finish hadn’t completely flaked away, a few letters painted in red were still legible: NG R.

The door opened onto an even narrower passage, this one almost pitch-black. The moment he set foot inside the door, something clicked, his face was struck by a blinding light, and a warning sign flashed a skull and crossbones.

They weren’t taking any chances in those days, were they? he thought. The metal stairway reverberated with a loud clanging as he went down into the chamber. Down below, he had the sensation of standing at the bottom of a dry moat; opposite him, rising up like the battlement of some medieval fortress, was the reactor’s gray, two-story shielding, its surface pitted with yellowish-green, pockmarklike indentations: scars of old radiation leaks. He started to do a quick count but gave up as soon as he walked out onto the catwalk and examined the reactor from above; in some places the concrete wall was totally obliterated by the sealed leaks.

Supported by metal uprights, the catwalk was insulated from the rest of the chamber by glass panels wrapping all the way around: a huge transparent cube. Lead glass, probably—to cut down the radiation. A relic of atomic architecture. How quaint.

The gamma-ray counters were clustered under a small canopy, fanlike, each one aimed straight at the reactor’s belly. He found the gauges housed in a separate compartment, all of them on zero except for one: the reactor’s idling gauge.

Pirx worked his way down, knelt, and peered into the observation well. The periscope mirrors were discolored with age. Too much radiation exposure, he thought. So what? This was a trip to Mars, not Jupiter—with a ten-day turnaround. Fuel supply okay, enough for several runs. He activated the cadmium rods. The needle quivered and grudgingly shifted to the other end of the scale. He checked the delay: it was close enough to squeak by the SSA, but just barely.

Something stirred in the corner. A pair of luminous green dots. He kept an eye on them, flinching as they slowly slinked away. He closed in on it. It was a cat. A black and bony cat. Meowing softly, it rubbed its spine against his shin. Pirx smiled, canvassed the room until his eye landed on something high up on a metal shelf: a row of cages. Now and then something white flickered inside, a glittering black bead would show through the netting. Mice. They were still in use on some of the older ships—as live radiation gauges. He stooped down to stroke the cat, but it slipped away from him, stopped dead in its tracks, and turned in the direction of the room’s darkest, narrowest corner. Arching its back, meowing softly, it crept on outstretched paws toward a concrete buttress, beyond which the mouth of a passage gaped rectangularly. Wiggling the end of its tail, now stiffly perpendicular, it advanced slowly, so black as to be almost indistinguishable in the dark. Pirx, intrigued, crouched down for a better look. A small door, halfway open, was set in a sloping wall; something glinted inside, which at first he took to be a coil of metal hose. The cat stood transfixed and immobile, its hair on end, its stiffened tail describing little curls in the air.

“Aw hell, there’s nothing in there,” he grumbled, at the same time squatting down for a closer view inside the dark compartment. Someone was sitting inside, the upper half of its body giving off a dull, metallic sheen. The cat, meowing all the while, started for the chute. Pirx’s eyes gradually got accustomed to the dark; soon he could make out a pair of pointed knees raised up high, and shinguards, made of a low-luster metal, around which a pair of segmented arms was wrapped. Its head was lost in the shadows.

“Me-o-w-w,” went the cat.

One of the arms creaked, reached out, and laid its metal fingertips down to form a sloping ramp; instantly the cat sprinted up the arm and onto the shoulder of the hunched-over figure.

“Hey, you!” Pirx cried out, not sure himself whether he meant to address the cat or that other creature. The arm had begun to retract slowly, as if having to overcome a powerful resistance, when Pirx’s barking cry paralyzed it, causing its fingers to clank against the concrete.

“Who—is—there?” came a voice that sounded as if it were being filtered through a metal tube.

“What are you doing here?” asked Pirx.

“Terminus… free-freezing in he-here… ca-can’t see…” the robot stuttered in a husky voice.

“Are you in charge of the reactor?” asked Pirx, who was beginning to despair of learning anything from the robot, whose condition seemed as run-down and dilapidated as the ship itself. But something—the green eyes?—urged him on.

“Terminus… re-reactor…” it stammered from its concrete refuge. “Terminus in charge… reactor,” it repeated with something like moronic self-complacency.

“Get up!” Pirx shouted for lack of anything better to say. He heard a crunching of metal, stepped back a little, and watched as two iron gauntlets with splayed fingers came out of the dark, swiveled around, clamped hold of the rim, and began hoisting the rest of its creaking torso. A metal hulk, half doubled up, soon emerged and, with a lot of grinding and screeching in the joints, drew itself up straight. Oil leaks in the couplings had combined with the dust to form a dark sludge. The robot rocked back and forth, more like a knight in armor than an automaton.

“Is this your station?” asked Pirx.

The robot’s glass eyes rotated in opposite directions in 180-degree sweeps, lending the flat metal face a look of even greater vacuity.

“Sealant pre-prepared… two, six, eight pounds… can’t see too well… cold…”

The voice issued not from the head but from the robot’s breastplate.

The cat, curled into a ball, contemplated Pirx from its perch on the robot’s shoulder.

“Seal-ant prepared…” Terminus continued to grunt, accompanying his words now with a scooping and shoveling of the hands—the preliminary gesture of a procedure well known to Pirx: the sealing of radioactive leaks. As the rocking of the oxidized trunk gained momentum, the black cat hissed and clawed the metal plating, then lost its balance and bolted down, brushing Pirx’s leg in flight. The robot appeared not to notice. The words had stopped, but not the hands, whose movement became more and more convulsive, residual, a mute echo of his words, until finally grinding to a halt.