Stanislaw Lem: Terminus

He began thinking back to when he was still a cadet. One of their patrolships from the Base had discovered the wreckage… Those were the days when meteorite warnings always came too late… Then there was the Commission’s report, brief and to the point: “Conditions beyond control. No one at fault.”… What about the crew? The evidence indicated that not all of them had been killed instantly… that among the survivors was the skipper, and that, thanks to him, the crew—though cut off from one another by the collapsing bulkheads and with no hope of being rescued—had held out to the end, down to the last oxygen bottle… But there was something else, some morbid detail that the press had played up for weeks, until some new sensation had put it out of the public’s mind… What in the world was it?

Suddenly he saw the Institute’s huge lecture auditorium… his pal Smiga, caked with chalk, plodding his way through a blackboard full of math equations… and him-self, his head bent over an open desk drawer, reading on the sly the newspaper spread out flat on the bottom: “ Only the Dead Survive” … Of course! There was only one who could have survived, who was not in need of any oxygen or food… The robot! Sixteen years, and all that time it was lying there, buried under the rubble!

Pirx rose to his feet. Terminus! The lone surviver had to be Terminus! And to think that he had him right here on board his ship… Now was his chance, his golden opportunity…

To what? Pump a mechanical moron, a machine programmed for sealing leaks, by now so old it was almost deaf and blind? What a laugh. It was the press’s fault, the press in its eternal effort to sensationalize the hell out of everything, whose glaring headlines had made him a “mysterious witness” of the tragedy, even had him being interviewed by the Commission behind closed doors. He thought of Terminus’s imbecilic patter. What a put-on!

He slammed the log shut, tossed it back into the drawer, and checked the time.

0800 hours. No time to lose. He started rounding up the shipping papers. Everything was set for lift-off: hatches closed, health and port inspection out of the way, flight clearance, customs declarations… He skimmed through the bill of lading and was surprised not to find any cargo manifest. Machines, okay—but what kind of machines? What about the tare weight? And why no loading chart specifying the ballast? Nothing except for the gross tonnage and a rough plan showing the freight distribution in the holds. Why only 300,000 tons back aft? Was it to lighten the maximum load for takeoff? Say, why wasn’t this brought to his attention earlier? While he was rummaging through the files in search of something, he became so distracted that he completely forgot about the ship’s past history; the moment he laid eyes on the dismantled chronometer, however, he winced in recollection. A second later he found what he was after: a little slip of paper on which it was noted that the last hold—the one abutting on the reactor chamber—was stocked with forty-eight crates of what was generally described as “food perishables.” Why in the hold with the worst ventilation? he wondered. Didn’t they care about the spoilage?

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” he hollered, hurriedly gathering up the papers scattered on the desktop and stuffing them back into their folders. Two men entered but ventured no farther than the doorway.

“Boman, nuclear engineer.”

“Sims, engineer-electrician.”

Pirx got up from his desk. Sims was a young, lean man with squirrelish features, a nervous cough, and flickering eyes. One glance at Boman was enough for Pirx to know that he was dealing with a space veteran. His sunburned face had that peculiar orangish tint that comes from prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation. He barely came up to Pirx’s shoulder (ever since he had begun flying, Pirx had been accustomed to counting every kilo aboard ship). His face, in contrast to his scrawny build, was puffy, bloated, and there were dark bags under his eyes—the mark of a man who’s been tested many times over the years. He had a drooping lower lip.

“You’ll be looking like that yourself, one day”—it crossed Pirx’s mind as he went to greet them with outstretched hand.

Hell began at 0900 hours. The launch site was the scene of the usual bedlam: ships lining up for takeoff; loudspeakers blaring away every six minutes; warning rockets being fired; the screeching, rumbling, deafening roar of test-firing engines; the dust cascading down out of the sky after every blast-off, which no sooner would settle than the tower was already giving the go-ahead to the next ship; the constant hustling to gain a few extra minutes’ time—a familiar enough scene at any shipping port during the peak hours. Most of the ships were bound for Mars, now desperate for machines and fresh produce. People there hadn’t seen a piece of fruit or a vegetable in months, construction on the hydroponic solariums having barely got under way.

Meanwhile, last-minute deliveries continued right up until countdown: cranes, girders, bales of fiberglass, cement vats, crude oil, medical supplies… At the sound of a warning buzzer, the ground crews would take cover wherever they could—in the antiradiation bunkers, in special armored crawlers—and were back at their jobs before the pads had had time to cool. By ten o’clock a smoky, crimson, bloated sun hung over the horizon, the concrete safety barriers dividing the stands were already cracked, blackened with soot, and eaten away by exhaust. The deeper fissures were immediately doused with quick-drying cement, which shot up out of the hoses in a fountainlike spray, while antiradiation crews in helmeted suits piled out of transport vehicles and sandblasted the residue of radioactive fallout. Black-and-red-checkered patrol Jeeps careened in and out, their sirens wailing. Someone in the control tower was yelling himself hoarse over a megaphone. Huge, boomerang-shaped radar dishes combed the skies from the tops of gaunt towers… In a word, a routine workday.

Pirx was all over the place—taking aboard a last-minute shipment of meat, tanking up on drinking water, having his cooling system inspected (when the best it could do was -5, the SSA inspector shook his head but mercifully relented in the end), attending to the compressors, which, though just recently overhauled, began sweating around the valves… Pirx’s voice was beginning to sound more and more like the trumpet of Jericho. At one point it was discovered that the water ballast was off because some idiot had switched off the valve before the lower tanks had been properly filled. There were papers, up to a half-dozen at a time, that had to be signed—more often than not, blindly. It was 1100 hours, with one hour to go before lift-off, when the bombshell came.

The control tower was denying them clearance. The Star ’s jet system was too old, they said, the radioactive fallout too risky; they should have had an auxiliary borohydride propulsion system like the one on the Giant, the freighter that took off at six… Pirx, now hoarse from shouting, took the news calmly. Did the traffic controller realize what he was saying? Had he just now noticed the Star ? Another delay was bound to mean trouble—big trouble. Beg your pardon? Additional safeguards? What sorts of safeguards? Sandbags? How many? Three thousand? No sweat. You bet your sweet ass—lift-off as scheduled. Bill the Company? Be my guest.

He was dripping with perspiration. Everything was conspiring to make an already chaotic situation even more hopeless. The electrician was chewing out the mechanic for not checking out the emergency system; the second pilot had taken off on a “five-minute break”—to say farewell to his fiancée—and was still not back on board; the medical orderly was missing; the ship was besieged by an army of forty armored crawlers, and by men in dark overalls who, urged on by frantic semaphore signals from the tower, went about the job of piling sandbags; a radiogram came, was taken not by the pilot but by the electrician, who forgot to record it (“Sorry, not my department”)… Pirx went about in a daze, only pretending to be in control of things. At T minus twenty minutes he made a dramatic decision: he ordered all the water pumped from the nose tanks to the tail section. What the heck, in the worst case it might boil up a bit… but anything to get greater stability!