Stanislaw Lem: Terminus

Pirx glanced up at the reactor wall, its surface scarred and fossillike, riddled all around with the dark stains of cement patches, then back at Terminus. He must have been as old as the ship itself, maybe older. His right shoulder didn’t match his left, there were welding scars on his hips and thighs, and the treated metal around the seams had taken on a gray-blue luster.

“Terminus!” He hollered as loudly as if he were addressing a deaf man. “Report to your station!”

“I hear and obey. Terminus.”

The robot retreated, crablike, to his sanctuary and began squeezing inside to the sound of crushing metal. Pirx’s gaze swept the room in search of the cat; it was nowhere to be seen. He climbed back up the stairs, sealed the airtight door behind him, and rode the elevator up to the navigation room on the fourth deck.

A squat and spacious room, with reddish oak paneling, a low beamed ceiling, and brass-ringed portholes that let in the daylight, it had more the feel of a ship’s cabin. Forty years ago such nautical decor had been the rage, even the vinyl wall coverings were a deliberate imitation of the old-style wainscoting. He opened one of the portholes and nearly rammed his head into a blank wall: the daylight was fake, artificially simulated by means of camouflaged lighting. He slammed the window shut and turned around. Star maps, colored a pale marine-blue, like the sea illustrations in a world atlas, draped from the chart tables clear down to the floor; the corners were littered with reams of carbon paper decorated with course diagrams; a plotting board, its surface embossed with circular depressions, stood under a small spotlamp; there was a desk in the corner, next to it a swivel oak desk chair, bolted to the floor and flanked by a hefty recessed bookshelf.

A real Noah’s Ark.

Is that why the agent had commented, after the signing of the contract, “You’re getting a historic ship”?

But “old” was not quite the same as “historic.”

He began pulling out the desk drawers, one by one, until he found what he was looking for: the log—a big, glossy, leather-bound book with tarnished clasps. He examined it standing up, not yet having mustered the courage to sit down in the sprawling, worn-out desk chair. He turned back the cover. The first page bore the date of the ship’s trial run, along with a photocopy insert of its technical specs. He glanced at the date again and batted his eyes; he wasn’t even born then! He turned to the last, and most crucial, entry. It confirmed what the agent had told him: for the past week the ship had been taking on machine equipment and general cargo for Mars. Lift-off, originally scheduled for the twenty-eighth, had been several times postponed, making this the third demurrage day. That explained the rush; the demurrage fees in a terrestrial spaceport were steep enough to bust a millionaire.

He thumbed through the book slowly, his eye occasionally lingering over a bit of navigational lingo, course data, or computer figures—but only in passing, as if on the lookout for something else. Only one page stood out from all the others, the one headed:

Ship consigned to Ampers-Hart Shipyard for class A repairs.

The entry was three years old.

Let’s see what repairs were made. Out of idle curiosity he scanned the itemized list of part replacements, his incredulity growing from one item to the next: ablation shield, sixteen deck sections, shielding braces, airtight bulkheads…

New bulkheads and shielding braces?!

Okay, the agent had said something about an accident in the past. But accident, hell! Disaster would be more like it!

He flipped back a page to see what he could dig out of the entries that came before:

Port of destination: Mars. Payload: General cargo. Crew: Pratt—engineer and first officer. Wayne—second officer. Potter and Nolan - — pilots. Simon—mechanic…

Hm. No mention of the skipper.

He turned back another page and winced.

The date of the ship’s first command was—nineteen years ago! The signature of the ship’s first commanding officer read Momssen, first navigator.

Momssen!

A dry heat engulfed him.

It can’t be! Not the Momssen! But… that was on another ship!

The date squared, though; it was exactly nineteen years ago that… Whoa, there! Easy does it…

He went back to the log. A strong and legible hand, in faded ink. First day out. Second day, third day… Moderate reactor leakage: 0.42 roentgen per hour. All leaks sealed. Course coordinates such-and-such… Stellar fix…

Come on, come on!

He was no longer reading, just skimming over the hand-written lines.

There it was!

The date he had been forced to memorize as a schoolkid, and underneath it:

1640 hours. Rec’d. Deimos’s met. warning re: cloud headed our way from Jupiter perturbation of the Leonids. Cloud approaching on a collision course at vel. 40 km/sec. MW confirmed. PM alert sounded for crew. Despite persistent reactor leakage of 0.42 roentgen per hour, full-thrust escape maneuver on a course approximating Orion delta.

New paragraph:

1651. Im—

The rest of the page was blank.

No marks, no scribbling, no ink stains—nothing except for the final vertical stroke of the letter m, dipping down in willful defiance of the rules of good penmanship.

This wobbly, several-millimeters-long extension, breaking off the text to wander aimlessly across the white expanse of paper, told the whole story: the crash on impact, the exploding decompression, the shrieks of men at the moment their throats and eyeballs burst…

But Momssen’s ship had a different name. What was it called?

It was unreal. A ship almost as famous as Columbus’s, and he couldn’t remember the name of it!

What was the name of that ship, Momssen’s last ship?

He hopped over to the bookshelf. The fat volume of Lloyd’s Shipping Register seemed to plunk down right into his hands. A word that began with C. Cosmonaut? No. Condor? Not it, either. A longer name… the title of a play… a hero, a knight…

He flung the book down on the desk and squinted at the walls. Hanging between the chart cabinet and the bookshelf were some instruments: a hygrometer, a radiation counter, a carbon-dioxide gauge…

He scrutinized each of them, turning them this way and that. Not one inscription. They looked brand new, in fact.

Over in the corner!

Screwed into the oak paneling was a chronometer, plainly visible because of its shiny dial. A rather quaint-looking model, an antique, with cute little brass doodads around the dial… Wasting no time, he undid the screws, carefully slipped the chassis out with his fingertips, and cradled it in his palm. The glossy, brass-plated bottom bore the engraving CORIOLANUS.

That was it—the name of Momssen’s ship.

His eyes swept the cabin. So it was in this room and in this very same chair that Momssen had sat during the final moments!

He opened Lloyd’s Shipping Register to the C’s.

CONDOR, CORINTHIAN, CORSAIR, CORIOLANUS: Registered with the company of… rest mass 19,000 tons… launched in the year… uranium-hydrogen reactor, type… cooling system… maximum thrust… introduced on the Terra-Mars line; listed as missing following a collision with the Leonids; located sixteen years later by a patrolship in the aphelion of its orbit… underwent class A repairs at Ampers-Hart… reintroduced by the Southern Company on the Terra-Mars line… licensed as general cargo transport… insurance premium … Ho hum… Ha, here it is:… under the name THE BLUE STAR.

He shut his eyes… Gosh, it’s quiet in here. So that’s it—they changed the name. To make it easier to hire a crew, I bet. Maybe that’s what the agent had meant when he said…