Stanislaw Lem - Terminus

“Terminus! Stop it!” He made a stab for the robot’s oily wrists, but they slipped out of his grasp. Terminus suddenly went stiff; not a sound was heard except for the whining, whimpering pumps behind the concrete containment wall. Before him loomed a metal hulk, bathed in the oil that oozed down his stiltlike legs. He stepped back.

“Terminus…” he said, his voice lowering to a whisper. “What are you…?”

He broke off at the sound of metal grinding against metal; the robot was rubbing his claws together, trying to peel away the leftover scabs of dry cement. Instead of dropping to the floor, the flakes spiraled up and scattered like wisps of smoke.

“What… have you been up to?” asked Pirx.

“Repair leak. Four tenths of roentgen per hour. May I proceed?”

“What were you signaling in Morse?”

“In Morse,” the robot repeated after him, mimicking his exact tone, and then added, “Not understand. May I proceed?”

“You may,” muttered Pirx, watching as the powerful arms straightened. “Yes, you may…”

Pirx waited. Terminus, seemingly unmindful of him now, ladled up some cement with his left hand, slung it against the shielding, and in three brisk strokes packed it, flattened it, smoothed it. Then the right hand came up and the pipe responded with a rat-a-tat-tat:

“P-r-a-t-t-t-r-a-p-p-e-d-i-n-s-i-x-t-h… m-o-m-s-s-e-n… c-o-m-e-i-n-m-o-m-s-s-e-n…”

“Where is Pratt?” Pirx burst out in a shrill voice.

Terminus, his arms converted by the light into luminous bolts, replied at once, “Don’t know,” at the same time thumping away with such speed that Pirx had trouble deciphering the Morse.

“P-r-a-t-t-d-o-e-s-n-t-a-n-s-w-e-r…”

Then an amazing thing occurred. The first series, produced by the right hand, was joined by a second set, much weaker in intensity, this one coming from the fingers of the left hand; the signals overlapped, and for a while the pipe reverberated with the percussions of a double hammering, incomprehensible except for one gradually dissolving sequence:—“F-r-z-i-g-h-a-n-d-s-i-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e-t-o…”

“Terminus,” Pirx said with his lips only, slowly retreating in the direction of the metal staircase. The robot was too distracted to pay him any heed; his torso, glistening with oil, went on rocking to the rhythm of his work. Pirx didn’t need to listen to the pounding signals anymore; he could read them in the back and forth movement of his arms, in the play of light on the metal plating:

“C-o-m-e-i-n-m-o-m-s-s-e-n…”

He lay on his back, wide awake. The darkness teemed with a proliferation of flickering images. Let’s see, Pratt must have wandered back aft, then run out of oxygen. Wayne and Simon knew where he was but couldn’t get to him. Why didn’t Momssen return their signals? Maybe he was already a goner. Impossible—Simon said he heard him. In which case he must have been quite close by—next door, even. Next door? That would mean there was air in Momssen’s compartent. Otherwise, Simon wouldn’t have heard anything. What did he hear, I wonder? Footsteps? Why were they calling him in the first place? And why no answer?

The voices of a life-and-death struggle, reduced to a lot of dashes and dots… Terminus. But how? Hold it. Wasn’t he found in the wreckage? Hm. I’ll bet I know where, too—in the spot where the piping runs outside. From there he could have picked up all the signaling back and forth… I wonder how long they were able to keep it up. With a good oxygen supply, they could have held out for months. Food supply, ditto. Okay, so he was trapped in the wreckage… Wait a minute. If there was zero gravity, what immobilized him? The cold temperature, probably. Robots can’t function at extremely low temperatures. The oil congeals in the joints. The hydraulic fluid freezes up, busts the lines. All that’s left then is the electronic brain. Terminus’s computerized brain must have picked up and recorded the signals, preserved them in the electronic coils of his memory. And he doesn’t know… He doesn’t realize that those signals are regulating the rhythm of his work. Or was he lying? Nah, robots don’t lie.

Fatigue overran his senses like a black liquid. Maybe it was wrong of him to eavesdrop. There was something obscene about it, about being a spectator to someone else’s death throes, witnessing it in all its gruesome detail and later analyzing every signal, every plea for oxygen, every shriek… It was immoral—if you could do nothing to help…

He was fading fast, now so far gone he could no longer keep track of his thoughts, though his lips kept repeating, inaudibly, as if in protest:

“No… no… no…”

Then nothing—a total blank.

He woke up with a start, circumscribed by darkness. He tried to sit up but was held back by the restraining blanket, fumbled blindly with the straps, then switched on the light.

The engines were running. Wrapping a coat around his shoulders, he did a few knee bends to gauge the rate of acceleration. His body must have weighed a good 100 kilos. He pegged the acceleration at about l.5 g . The ship was turning; he could feel the vibrations. The wall cabinets rattled ominously, one of the cabinet doors flew open with an angry bang; everything that wasn’t secured—shoes, clothes—started sliding, imperceptibly and in unison, aft, as if animated by some conspiratorial plot.

He walked over to the intercom box, flipped open a little door, and spoke into a gadget reminiscent of the old-style telephone receiver.

“Control room!” he barked, wincing at the sound of his own voice. He had a headache. “First navigator speaking. What in hell is going on up there?”

“Course correction, sir,” came the pilot’s distant reply. “We strayed off course a little, that’s all.”

“How much off course?”

“Six… maybe seven seconds.”

“Reactor temperature?” he demanded in a slow, deliberate voice.

“Six hundred twenty in the shielding.”

“How about the holds?”

“Fifty-two in the port holds, forty-seven in the bow, twenty-nine and fifty in the stern.”

“Give me the yaw correction again, Munro.”

“Seven.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he said, and he slammed the receiver down. The pilot was lying through his teeth. You didn’t need that much acceleration to make a seven-second correction. He guessed the deviation to be more in the neighborhood of several degrees.

Those holds were getting too damned hot. What did they have stored back aft, anyway? Food? He sat down at the desk.

Blue Star Terra-Mars to Compo Earth. Skipper to shipping agent. Reactor causing overheating in holds stop cargo in jeopardy stop no manifest available for cargo aft stop guidance requested navigator Pirx out.

He was still writing when the engines shut down, eliminating the last vestige of gravity, with the result that when he pressed down on the pencil he was catapulted up out of his seat. He bounced impatiently off the ceiling, settled back down in his chair, and ran through the radiogram message again.

On second thought, he tore up the radiogram and stuffed the scraps into a drawer. He decided not to get dressed—always a rather tricky affair during weightlessness, involving a lot of awkward gymnastics and a fair amount of wrestling—and so, dressed as he was, with a coat draped over his pajamas, he left the cabin.

The bluish ambience made the dismal state of the wall padding less conspicuous. The nearby fresh-air vents—recessed, gaping, black—were sucking up the particles of dirt eddying in the corners. The whole ship was blanketed by silence, deep and unbroken. Hanging almost immobile above his own shadow, whose oblique extension could be seen climbing the wall, he shut his eyes in silent concentration. It happened that people sometimes fell asleep in this position, which was a hazardous thing to do, since the slightest burst in acceleration—in preparation, say, for a maneuver—could slam a person smack against the deck or ceiling.