Stanislaw Lem - Terminus

Soon he couldn’t hear a sound—not the fans, not even his own heartbeat. The nocturnal silence aboard ship was unlike any he had ever experienced. Earthly silence has limits; one senses its finite, transitory quality. Even when you’re out among the lunar dunes, you’re always accompanied by your own private little silence; trapped by your space suit, it magnifies every squeak of your shoulder straps, every crack of your bone joints, every beat of your pulse—even the act of breathing itself. Only on a ship at night can you be truly immersed in a black and glacial silence.

He brought his watch up to eye level: it was going on 3:00 A.M.

If this keeps up, I’ll collapse, he thought. He caromed off a convex partition wall and, stretching out his arms like a bird braking its speed, landed on the cabin doorstep. It was then he heard it—a faintly audible sound that seemed to resonate from an iron interior:

Bong - bong - bong.

Three times.

He uttered a profanity, slammed the hatch door shut, and recklessly flung his coat into space, where it swelled and ascended upward like some grotesque phantom. He turned off the light, climbed under the covers, and buried his head in the pillow.

“Idiot! Goddamned metal-plated idiot!” He kept muttering with his eyelids closed, shaking with a rage that even he found hard to justify. But fatigue got the better of him, and he was out before he knew what hit him.

It was going on seven when he opened his eyes. Still half-asleep, he lifted his arm up high; it didn’t want to come back down. Zero g , he thought. He got dressed, went out. On his way to the control room, he instinctively kept his ears open. A hush. He paused in front of the hatch. The cabin’s twilight interior was suffused with the greenish, almost aqueous luminescence given off by the low-luster radar screens. The pilot was reclining in his contour couch, smoking a cigarette; the flat wreaths of smoke hung in front of the screens, refracting the sea-green light. From somewhere came the subdued tinkling of Earthly music, punctuated by cosmic static. Pirx lowered himself into the contour couch directly behind the pilot; he didn’t even feel like checking the gravimeter readings.

“How long till the next burn?” he asked.

The pilot saw through his question. “Not till eight. But I can fire ’em up now, skipper, if you feel like a bath.”

“Nah… We’d better stick to our timetable,” mumbled Pirx.

The ensuing silence was marred only by the persistent buzz of the loudspeaker music, monotonous in its endless repetition of the same mindless melody. Pirx felt himself getting sleepy. Several times he would manage to shake it off, be wide awake, then slowly surrender to a drowsy stupor. Or he would have visions of cats’ eyes in the dark—big green cats’ eyes—which, the moment he blinked, turned into luminous instrument dials. He went on like this, treading that thin line between sleep and reality, until the loudspeaker began to crackle.

“This is Deimos on the air. The time is exactly 0730. Stay tuned for the daily meteorite report for the inner zone. A frontal disturbance influenced by the gravitational field of Mars has been reported in the Draconids, last seen leaving the Van Allen Belt. In the next twenty-four hours the storm is expected to hit sectors eighty-three, eighty-four, and eighty-seven. The meteorite station on Mars estimates the cloud to be in the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer range. Sectors eighty-three, eighty-four, and eighty-seven are hereby declared closed to all traffic until further notice. Stand by for the cloud’s composition, as relayed by Phobos’s ballistic probes. According to the latest report, the cloud is made up of micrometeorites of the X, XY, and Z type…”

“Whew! Am I glad we’re not affected,” sighed the pilot. “I just ate breakfast, and I’d sorely hate to have to rev up the engines.”

“Present velocity?”

“Over fifty.”

“Really? Not bad,” mumbled Pirx. Before heading off to the mess hall, he took a course reading, consulted the uranograph readings, and checked the radiation count—it was holding steady. The other two officers were already in the mess. Pirx kept waiting for someone to squawk about all the nocturnal clamor, but, to his surprise, the conversation never once left the subject of the next lottery draw. Sims, visibly the more excited of the two, kept up a steady recital of friends and acquaintances who, at one time or another, had hit the jackpot.

After breakfast Pirx stopped by the navigation room to plot the distances already traveled. Suddenly, in the middle of it, he dug his compass into the plotting board, tore open the desk drawer, pulled out the logbook, and scanned the Coriolanus ’s last crew list:

Officers: Pratt and Wayne. Pilots: Nolan and Potter. Mechanic: Simon…

He pondered long and hard the commander’s vigorous handwriting. Finally he tossed the book back into the drawer, finished plotting the ship’s course, and rode down to the control room, taking the carbons with him. It took him a half hour to compute their exact time of arrival on Mars. On his way back, he peeked through the window in the mess-hall door. The officers were playing chess; the orderly sat slouched in front of the TV, with a heating pad on his stomach.

Pirx shut himself up in his cabin, browsed through the radiograms handed him by the pilot, and, before he knew it, was lulled into a light snooze. Once or twice he thought he heard the engines running, tried to rouse himself, and dreamed instead of having gone down to an empty cockpit and of having combed the pitch-dark passageways back aft in search of one of the crew… When he awoke he was seated at his desk, drenched with sweat-peeved at the prospect of a sleepless night brought on by such a long afternoon nap.

When, toward evening, the pilot reignited the engines, Pirx took advantage of the gravity to indulge in a hot bath. Feeling greatly revived, he then stopped by the mess, poured some coffee into himself, and phoned upstairs for a temperature reading. The reactor was up around the 1,000-degree mark, demurring, for some reason, at crossing the danger point. Around 2100 hours he was summoned to the control room: a passing ship was requesting medical assistance—to help out with an acute appendicitis on board. Pirx was debating whether to dispatch his orderly when a nearby passenger liner radioed that it was willing to stop and offer assistance.

Thus began a fairly routine and uneventful day. At 2300 hours sharp, the white lights on all the decks—except for those in the control room and reactor chamber—were switched off, and the blue night-lights came on. Only one light was left on in the mess hall—the one over the chessboard, where Sims, the electrician, stayed up until around midnight playing chess by himself.

Pirx went below to check the temperature in the cargo holds. On the way down, he ran into Boman, just returning from an inspection of the reactor. The ship’s engineer was in good spirits; the leakage was stable and the cooling system checked out okay.

The engineer said good night and retired to his cabin, leaving Pirx alone in the dark and deserted passageway. A draft was blowing in the direction of the bow, gently ruffling the remains of spiderwebs clinging to the air vents.

The passageway between the main holds rose up tall and cavernous, like a church nave. Pirx meandered back and forth for a while, until a few minutes after midnight when the engines shut down.

At once a variety of sounds, muted and high-pitched, assailed him from all sides. Liberated by the drop in acceleration, objects not secured began shifting and colliding with walls, ceilings, decks; the reverberations, diverse and multitudinous, bestowed on the ship a strange animation. They hung in the air for a while before giving way to silence, a silence made even more extreme by the monotonous hum of the fans.