Stanislaw Lem: Terminus

It was still quite a hike from the stop, all the more so for someone carrying a suitcase. A predawn fog hugged the ground, spectral white in the half-light. Diesel trucks, announced by silvered columns of exhaust, tore along the asphalt highway with their tires humming, their taillights flashing bright red as they rounded the bend. Pirx shifted his suitcase to the other hand and gazed skyward. A low-lying fog, he thought, seeing stars overhead. Routinely he scouted the sky for the Mars reference star. Just then the gray dawn quivered and the fog was shot through with a searing green. Instinctively he lowered his jaw. There was a low rumble, a hot blast. Ground tremors. Seconds later a green sun rose above the land. The snow glared sinisterly all the way to the horizon, the shadows of the road posts skipped on ahead, and those things not already tinted a brilliant green were suffused with ember-red. Pirx set his suitcase down and, rubbing his hands, watched as one of the spiring minarets—eerily luminous, towering above the basin’s hilly skyline as though obeying some strange architectural whim—wrenched itself loose from Earth and began its majestic ascent atop a pinnacle of fire. The thunderous roar soon became something palpable, filling the atmosphere; through his fingers he saw in the distance a cluster of towers, buildings, and reservoirs bathed in a brilliant aureole. The windows of the control tower were ablaze, much as if a fire were raging inside; contours buckled and broke in the incandescent air as the instigator of this spectacle vanished into the heavens with a triumphant roar, leaving behind an enormous black ring of smoking earth. Before long a thick, warm shower of condensation descended from the star-studded sky.

Pirx picked up his bag and trudged on. It was as if the blast-off had breached the night; daylight came with a rush now, brightening everything around him: the melting snow lying in the ditches, the valley floor emerging from its misty cover.

Skirting the shiny, wet ships were long, grass-covered bunkers, the place where the ground crews took cover. The dead, water-soaked grass was slippery, hard to get a foothold on; but Pirx was in too much of a hurry to bother hunting for the nearest crossing. He took the grassy slope in one leaping charge—and feasted his eyes on her.

She stood alone, tall as a steeple, surpassing all others in height. An obsolete giant. He picked his way among the puddles on the concrete, the puddles soon tapering off where the water had been instantly evaporated by the thermal blast, until the rectangular slabs rang out hard and crisp under his feet as after a summer dry spell. The closer he got, the farther back went his head. The ship’s armored hull looked as if it had been plastered with glue, then buffed with mud-caked rags. An attempt had obviously been made to reinforce the tungsten shield with carbide asbestos fiber. And with good reason. Ships of that mass could have their hulls ripped to shreds—literally skinned—by the heat of air friction during atmospheric reentry. And stripping it did no good, either; the process just repeated itself, so horrendous was its aerodynamic drag. As for its stability, its maneuverability… it was downright criminal, a matter for the Cosmic Tribunal.

The suitcase was getting heavier, but Pirx took his sweet time, the itch to inspect the ship carefully from the outside being much too powerful to resist. The gantry stood etched against the sky like Jacob’s ladder; everything was coated the same dull gray: the hull, the empty crates strewn about on the concrete, the metal cylinders, the rusty scrap iron, the coils of metal hose… The random chaos testified to an expeditious loading. When he was within twenty paces of the gantry, he put down his suitcase and surveyed the launchpad. Hm, cargo already aboard, he thought, seeing the huge mobile loading ramp standing less than two meters from the ship’s hull, its grappling hooks dangling in midair. He circled the steel hold-down clamp being used to anchor the ship—now a soaring black tower against the crimson dawn—and stepped under the skirt. The concrete around the base of the clamp sagged under the tremendous weight, with cracklike fissures radiating in all directions.

Ouch! They’ll pay a pretty penny for that, he thought, referring to the shipowners, and he stepped into the pool of shadow under the tail section. When he stood directly beneath the main thrust chamber, he tilted back his head. Its gaping flange, too high for him to reach, was caked with soot. He sniffed the air suspiciously. The engines were cold, but the acrid and familiar stench of ionized gas was still in the air.

“Over here!” someone shouted in back of him. He spun around but saw no one. The same voice again, coming from what seemed like no more than three steps away.

“Hey, anyone home?” he yelled, his voice rebounding under the black, domelike tail bristling with nozzles.

Silence.

He cut across to the other side. Three hundred meters away, some men, strung out in a line, were in the process of hauling a fuel hose across the ground. The pad was otherwise deserted. He kept his ears open; then he again heard voices—distorted and unintelligible—this time coming from higher up. The exhaust ducts, he thought—they’re acting like dish reflectors… He trotted back, picked up his bag, and headed for the gantry.

He climbed the six-story flight unthinkingly, his mind on matters he would have been hard put to name. The gantry ended in a platform surrounded by an aluminum guardrail, but Pirx did not so much as pause for a glimpse of the scenery. No farewell glances, no fond good-byes. Before flipping open the hatch, he ran his fingers along the armor plating. Rough as a rasp, as a badly corroded rock.

“Just my luck,” he muttered. The hatch gave grudgingly, as if blocked by a boulder. A pressure chamber like the inside of a wine barrel. He ran his hand along the pipes and rubbed the dust between his fingers. Rust.

As he was squeezing through the inner hatch, he had a chance to observe that the gasket was a patch job. Passage-ways lined with flush-mounted lamps ran up and down like vertical tunnels, the light coalescing at the far end into a bluish blur. In the background the steady hum of electric fans, the nasal clucking of an invisible pump. He pulled himself up straight. He was surrounded by such a solid mass of deck and armor plate that it nearly felt a part of him, a prolongation of his own body. Nineteen thousand tons… Goddam!

On his way to the cockpit, he met no one, saw no one. A dead, vacuumlike silence reigned in the passageway, as if the ship were already spaceborne. The padded walls were stained, the guide lines slack and decayed. He saw sleeve joints that had been spliced and welded so many times they looked more like charred bulbs left over from a fire. He crossed one ramp, then another, and came out in a hexagonal compartment with rounded metal doors set in each of the walls. Cord-wrapped copper handles instead of pneumatic releases.

The displays stared vacantly, like glass cataracts. He punched the keyboard; the relay clicked and the metal console hummed. The screen remained dark.

“Now what?” he sighed. “Run and complain to the SSA?”

He opened the hatch. It looked more like a throne room than a cockpit. He saw himself mirrored in the blank screens; in his rain-crumpled hat, light overcoat, and with his suitcase at his side, he made the impression of some errant, law-abiding citizen. The contoured pilot seats, rather imposing in size, their backrests still preserving the deep imprint of a man’s body, stood on a dais. Setting his suitcase down on the floor, he went up to the nearest one, its shadowy projection looming like the last navigator’s ghost. He slapped the backrest until the dust tickled his nose, broke out in a fit of sneezing, then anger, and wound up laughing. The foam-rubber padding on the armrest was shot, the computers like nothing he’d ever seen before. Their designer must have modeled them on a Wurlitzer, he mused. The consoles were peppered with dials; no man could have monitored them all at the same time, not with a hundred eyes. He made a slow about-face and let his eyes roam from wall to wall surveying the tangle of soldered cables, corroded isolation plates, emergency manual hatches polished smooth from handling, the faded red finish of the fire extinguishers… Everything about this ship was so old and decrepit and dingy…