Stanislaw Lem: Terminus

1140 hours. Time to test-fire the engines. The point of no return. As it turned out, not everybody on board was a bumbler. Take Boman, for instance—now there was a man to his liking. You might not see or hear him, but he had everything running like clockwork: engine purge, low thrust, full thrust… At T minus six minutes, by the time they got the signal to prepare for lift-off, they were ready. They were already strapped down when the orderly showed up, followed by the second pilot, who came back from his fiancée looking very down at the mouth. The loudspeaker snarled, bawled, barked until the automatic sequencer hit zero: lift-off.

Pirx knew enough to know that a 19,000-ton vessel wasn’t a patrol skiff where a man barely had room to crack a joke. He also knew that a spaceship wasn’t a flea: it didn’t just hop into the air; it had to build up thrust gradually. But he wasn’t prepared for anything like this ! The gauge showed only half-thrust, the hull was on the verge of a breakup—and they hadn’t even left the pad yet! He was beginning to wonder if they hadn’t snagged on something—freak accidents like that were rare, but they happened—when the needle started fluttering. They went up on the fire column; the Star shook; the gravimeter went wild. Pirx sighed, sank back into his couch, and relaxed his muscles; from now on, it was out of his hands. They were no sooner in the ascent stage than they were reprimanded by radio: the Company was being fined for lifting off at full thrust, prohibited on account of the excess radioactivity. The Company? thought Pirx. Go right ahead. The Company be damned! Pirx brushed it off with a sneer; he didn’t even bother to dispute the charge by pointing out that he had bootstrapped at half-thrust. What was he supposed to do? Land, request a hearing, and demand that the reprimand be withdrawn from his uranographs? Like hell he would.

Besides, he had plenty of other things to worry about at the moment. Like the way they were breaking through the atmosphere. Never had he been aboard a ship that vibrated so much. He now knew how it must have felt to be at the head of a battering ram when storming a castle wall. The whole ship jumped, the men jumped—in their straps, no less!—even the accelerometer was jumping around: 3.8, then 4.9, at one point pushing its way up to 5, only to plummet pusillanimously back down to 3. What were those rockets firing, anyway? Dumplings? With the ship now on full power, Pirx had to squeeze his helmet with both hands to hear the pilot’s voice in his earphones. The noise was tremendous, but it was not a triumphant ballistic roar—more like a life-and-death struggle with Earth’s gravity. There were moments when he had the sensation not of a lift-off but of hanging in midair and repelling the planet by force, so physically palpable was the Star ’s agonizing ordeal. The vibrations blurred the contours of everything—bulkheads, joints… At one point, Pirx thought he heard the seams giving way. But it was only an illusion; in that madhouse he would have been lucky to hear the horn of the Last Judgment.

The nose-cone heat sensor was the only instrument whose needle didn’t waver, didn’t fluctuate wildly, but climbed steadily higher: 2,500, 2,800… There were only a few more scale marks left on the gauge when Pirx happened to check the accelerometer. They weren’t even close to orbital velocity!

Fourteen minutes of flight and the best they could do was 6.6 kilometers per second. Pirx was struck by a horrible thought, one of those nightmarish fantasies with which space pilots are continually haunted: What if those weren’t clouds drifting by on the scanner but vapors escaping from the cooling ducts? Luckily it wasn’t so; they were definitely spaceborne. The orderly lay there pale as a sheet. A lot of help he’ll be in an emergency, thought Pirx. The engineers were holding up better. Boman wasn’t even perspiring; he lay there, a little peaked in the face, relaxed, scrawny—like a kid with its eyes shut. By now the hydraulic fluid was leaking out onto the floor with a vengeance; the pistons were in almost all the way. What happens when they really go? Pirx wondered.

Because he was used to more modern consoles, Pirx’s head kept turning in the wrong direction every time he went to check the thrust performance, cooling, velocity, thermal load, and, most important, their position relative to the synergic curve.

The pilot, who had to scream over the intercom to make himself heard, was having trouble keeping on course. True, they were only fractional deviations, but that was all it took, when escaping Earth’s atmosphere, to make one side heat up more than the other, setting up powerful thermal stresses in the outer structure, often with fatal consequences. Pirx’s only consolation was that the Star had survived plenty of other lift-offs in the past; chances were, it would make this one as well.

The thermocouple was now on maximum: 3,500 degrees. Ten more minutes of this and the hull would come apart at the seams, carbide or no carbide. What gauge was the skin? he wondered. No telling—except that it was, for sure, hot. He felt warmer himself, but it was only his imagination: the temperature in the control room was the same as at lift-off: 27 degrees. They were at the 61-kilometer mark, Earth’s atmosphere practically behind them, flying at a velocity of 7.4 kilometers per second, with less turbulence but still at 3 g . The Star had as much oomph as a block of lead, its rapid acceleration nil. Damned if he could understand why.

A half hour later they were steering a course for the Arbiter; once past the last navigational satellite, they would be veering onto the Earth-Mars ellipsis. The crew was sitting up now; Boman was massaging his face; Pirx, too, felt swollen around the mouth, especially in the region of the lower lip. Everyone had bloodshot, stinging eyes, a dry cough, and a sore throat—all the usual symptoms, normally disappearing with-in an hour.

The reactor was working, but that was about all; if its performance didn’t decrease, neither did it increase, as well it should have in a vacuum. The Star appeared to defy even the laws of physics. They were up to 11 kilometers per second, barely above escape velocity. They would have to bring her up to cruising speed if they didn’t want to take months getting to Mars.

Pirx, like every other navigator, was expecting nothing but hassles from the Arbiter. Like getting reprimanded for having too big an exhaust flare, or getting bumped to make way for some more important mission, or hearing complaints about how his ionization discharge was causing radio interference. A false alarm. The Arbiter let them through without a boo, just a belated radiogram warning of a “high vacuum” ahead. Pirx acknowledged the warning, and thus ended this exchange of cosmic civilities.

As soon as they were locked onto Mars, Pirx ordered an increase in thrust, people got up, stretched, moved about, and the radio mechanic, who also doubled as crew cook, headed off to the galley. Everyone was famished, most of all Pirx, who had flown on an empty stomach and sweated pounds during takeoff.

The temperature in the cockpit was rising, as the heat generated by the shield began to make itself felt inside. There was also a faint odor in the air—the oil that had escaped from the hydraulics and which now formed neat little puddles around the seats.

The nuclear engineer went down to the reactor chamber to check for neutron leakage. Keeping one eye on the stars, Pirx shot the breeze with the ship’s electrician; it turned out they moved in the same crowd. For the first time since coming aboard, Pirx began to unwind, to see the brighter side of things. Whatever else the Star might be, 19,000 tons was nothing to sneeze at. Commanding a clunker that size was a lot tougher than piloting your ordinary freighter. Tougher, yeah, but also more prestigious, a good thing to fatten your dossier with.