More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

PIRX’S TALE ^{Translated by Louis Iribarne with the assistance of Magdalena Majcherczyk}

Sci-fi? Sure, I like it, but only the trashy stuff. Not so much trashy as phony The kind I can dip into between shifts, read a few pages at a time, and then drop. Oh, I read good books, too, but only Earthside. Why that is, I don’t really know. Never stopped to analyze it. Good books tell the truth, even when they’re about things that never have been and never will be. They’re truthful in a different way. When they talk about outer space, they make you feel the silence, so unlike the Earthly kind—and the lifelessness. Whatever the adventures, the message is always the same: humans will never feel at home out there. Earth has something random, fickle about it—here a tree, there a wall or garden, over the horizon another horizon, beyond the mountain a valley … but not out there.

People on Earth can’t imagine what a pain the stars are—what a drag it is to cruise the cosmos, even for a year at full thrust, with never a change of scenery! We fly, sail around the world, and think: So that’s what outer space is like! But there’s just no comparison.

Once, on my way back from a patrol, I was tuned in to a pilots’ argument somewhere up around the Arbiter—the usual scuffle over who had landing priority—when I happened to sight another homeward-bound ship. The guy must have thought he was alone, because he was tooling around as if in an epileptic fit. All pilots know the feeling: you’re spaceborne only a few days, when, wham, it hits you—that goofy urge to pull something, anything, to rev to full, hang a U-turn, and let your tongue stick out.

I used to think it was bad business to get so freaked out. But you’re driven to it—by the despair, by the urge to stick out that old tongue at the cosmos. The cosmos is not a tree; maybe that’s what makes it so mind-boggling. The good books talk about that. And we don’t care to hear the truth about the stars when we’re out there, any more than a dying man likes to read about death. What we want then is something to distract us; as for me, I’ll take sci-fi, the corny, easy-to-read stuff, where everything, the cosmos included, is so tame. But it’s an adult tameness, full of calamities, murders, and other juicy horrors, yet all quite harmless, because it’s bull, from A to Z: scariness to make you smile.

The story I’m about to tell is just such a spook tale. Only this one actually happened. Never mind that, though. It was during the Year of the Quiet Sun, during a routine circumsolar round-up of the scrap revolving parallel to Mercury’s orbit—space hulks junked during the six-year construction of a giant space station at the perihelion, to be recycled for scaffolding, according to the Le Mans System, instead of being sent to the scrap yard. Le Mans was a better economist than an engineer; a station constructed of recycled scrap may have been three times as economical, but Operation Mercury had caused such tribulation that eventually nobody gave a damn what the cost savings would be. Then Le Mans had another stroke of genius: why not move this morgue back down to Earth; why let it wheel around till doomsday when it could be melted down? But to keep it profitable, the job of towing went to ships not much healthier than the hulks.

I was a rookie pilot at the time, meaning a pilot only on paper and once a month on payday. I was itching to fly so badly that I’d have flown a kiln if it had some thrust, so no sooner had I read the want ad than I was making application at Le Mans’s Brazilian office. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to call those crews hired by Le Mans—or, rather, by his agents—a kind of cosmic foreign legion. The days of space adventurers were over, because for the most part there weren’t any more adventures to be had. Men were driven to work in space either by a fluke or by some personal hang-up—not the best qualifications for a profession that demanded more on-board grit and stamina than the merchant marine.

I’m not trying to play psychologist but to explain how I came to lose half of my crew on the first trip out. The technicians were the first to go, after they were turned into boozers by the radiotelegraph operator, a shrimp of a mestizo who knew every trick of the bootlegger’s trade—sealed plastic pouches hidden inside canisters, that sort of thing. The early space pioneers would have been shocked. Beats me how they could have believed that any man placed in orbit automatically became an angel. Or was it just a subconscious effect of that brief, blue, paradisical sky that faded so abruptly during blast-off? But why quarrel with the dead. The Mexican, who was in fact Bolivian-born, peddled marijuana on the side and loved to bait me. A mean customer, all right, but I’ve flown with worse.

Le Mans was a big man; he didn’t fuss over details, simply handed his agents a budget, and that was that. So not only did I wind up with a skeleton crew, I also had to sweat every kilowatt of thrust and to scrimp on every maneuver, because the uranographs were audited after every trip to see whether—God forbid!—ten dollars had gone up in neutrons. Never had I commanded such a ship, nor, I venture to say, had there been one quite like mine since old tramps plied the seas between Glasgow and India. But I wasn’t about to complain, and I even look back on my Pearl of the Night, I’m ashamed to say, with some nostalgia. What a name! A ship so weather-beaten that more time was spent tracking down leaks and shorts than at the helm. Every lift-off or landing was a violation of the laws of physics. And not just physics. Le Mans’s agent must have had a lot of pull in the Mercurean port, because any self-respecting controller would have padlocked the Pearl right away, from controls to pile.

As soon as we got within range of the perihelion, we’d start radar-stalking, round up the hulks, and form a train. What a time I had then: hassling with the technicians, jettisoning liquor overboard—thereby putting gallons of London dry gin into perennial orbit—and agonizing over the mathematical hell of finding approximate solutions for the problem of too many bodies. But worst of all was the idleness. Of time and space.

That’s when I would hole up in my cabin and read. Don’t remember the author’s name (it was an American) or the title (something with the word Stardust in it). Don’t remember the beginning, either, because I started it somewhere in the middle—where the hero is in the reactor chamber, talking to the pilot on the phone, and suddenly hears, “Meteoroids astern!” All this time they’re in free fall; suddenly he notices that the reactor, a huge colossus with dials like yellow eyes, is coming at him—the engine burn had caught him in zero-g. Luckily, he meets it feet first, but the acceleration yanks the receiver out of his hand; for a second he hangs on to the wire, then falls, flattened to the deck, with the receiver swinging overhead; he makes a superhuman effort to grab it, but, weighing a ton, he can’t budge a finger; finally he gets it between his teeth, just in time to give the saving command.

A memorable scene, but even better was the part describing their passage through a swarm. A dust cloud, lo and behold, big enough to blanket a third of the sky, and so thick that only the brightest stars could pierce it. And the best is yet to come, because suddenly our hero spots something on the scanners: from out of this yellowish typhoon there looms a blinding swirl with a black core. God only knows what it was, but I almost died laughing. What a perfect set-up! All that cloud business, the typhoon, the receiver—because, need I say it, at the time that guy was dangling on the telephone wire, a woman was waiting for him in his cabin. A stunner, of course. The secret agent of some cosmic tyranny—or was she one of the freedom fighters? A looker, in any case.

But why the long preamble? Because that book was my salvation. Meteoroids? In all the weeks I spent hunting down hulks in the twenty-to-thirty-thousand-ton range, I must have missed at least half of the meteoroids on the radar. Oh, yes. Once, while we were in free fall, I had to grab my halfbreed friend by the neck—which was a lot trickier than grabbing that receiver must have been, and a damned sight less glamorous. I’m rambling again, I know. But the whole thing began in just such an unglamorous way.

When the two-month round-up was over, I had between a hundred twenty and a hundred forty thousand tons of scrap in tow, and was Earthbound along the ecliptic plane. Was that against regs? You bet. Like I said, I had to scrimp on fuel, which meant I had to coast for over two months without thrust. Then doomsday struck. Not meteoroids—this wasn’t a novel, after all—but the mumps. First my nucleonics engineer, then both pilots at once, and so on down the line. The whole bit—swollen pusses, slits for eyes, high fever. Soon everybody was on the sick list. Ngey, a black, the Pearl’s cook, steward, and chief something-or-other, had brought the wicked virus aboard ship. He was sick, too, of course! Say, don’t kids in South America ever get the mumps?

So there I was, commander of a ghost ship, or almost: I still had a radiotelegraph operator and a second engineer. Never mind that the operator was stinko from breakfast on. Not altogether gone: whether he was a sipper or he had a cast-iron stomach, the fact is he never stopped bustling, especially when we were weightless (which was most of the time, not counting a few minor course corrections). But the stuff was in his eyes, in his brain, so that every order, every errand, had to be checked and rechecked. I had fantasies of getting even the moment we touched down—because how could I cripple him up there? Sober, he was a typical rat, gray, sneaky, always unwashed, with a charming habit of calling certain people by the worse obscenities during mess. In Morse. That’s right, in Morse, tapping it out on the table with his finger and almost triggering a few fistfights in the process (naturally, all were fluent in Morse), claiming it was a nervous tic the moment he was cornered. When I told him to keep his elbows at his sides, he’d tap with his foot or his fork—the guy was a real artist.

The only really able-bodied man was the engineer—who turned out to be a civil engineer. No fooling. Signed on at half pay, no questions asked, and it never crossed my mind to quiz him when he came aboard. The agent had asked him whether he knew his way around construction sites and machines, and of course he said yes. He neglected to mention what kind of machines. I told him to stand watch, though he couldn’t tell the difference between a planet and a star. Now you know why Le Mans made such huge profits. For all his agents knew, I might have been a submarine navigator. Oh, sure, I could have deserted them for my cabin. I could have, but I didn’t. That agent wasn’t so dumb. He was counting, if not on my loyalty, then on my instinct for self-preservation. On my desire to get back in one piece. And since the scrap, more than a hundred thousand tons’ worth, was weightless, uncoupling it wouldn’t have boosted our speed by a millisecond. Besides, I wasn’t a bastard. Not that I didn’t flirt with the idea as I made my morning rounds with the cotton, baby oil, bandages, rubbing alcohol, aspirin…

No, that book about cosmic romance and meteoroid typhoons was really my only escape. I even reread passages, some of them a dozen times. The book fairly brimmed with space hijinks—a rebellion of electrobrains, pirates’ agents with microtransmitters planted in their skulls, not to mention that beauty from an alien solar system—but not a single word about the mumps. Which was fine by me, obviously. I was sick of the mumps. Of astronautics in general.

During off hours I hunted high and low for the radiotelegraph operator’s liquor stock. Though I may be giving him too much credit, I suspect he deliberately left a trail just so I wouldn’t waver and give up the crusade. I never did locate his supply. Maybe he was a sponge and kept it stored inside. And I searched, my nose to the deck the way a fly hugs the ceiling, sailing around back aft and midships the way you do in dreams. I was all by my lonesome, too—my swollen-jawed crew quarantined in their cabins, my engineer up in the cockpit learning French from tapes, the ship like a funeral parlor except for the occasional wail or aria traveling through the air-conditioning ducts. The latter came from the Bolivian-Mexican, who every evening routinely suffered an attack of Weltschmerz. What did I care about the stars, not counting those in my book, of course, the juicier parts of which I knew by heart (mercifully forgotten by now). I was waiting for the mumps epidemic to end, because my Robinson Crusoe existence was beginning to tell.

I was even ducking the civil engineer. He was an OK sort of guy in his own way, but he swore he would never have signed on if his wife and brother-in-law hadn’t got him in debt. In short, he belonged to that species of man I can’t stand: the excessively confiding type. I don’t know whether he was gushy only with me. Probably not. Most people are guided by a sense of discretion, but this guy would confess anything, to the point of making my insides crawl. Fortunately, the Pearl’s twenty-eight-thousand-ton rest mass offered plenty of room to hide.

As you might have guessed, it was my first and last trip for Le Mans. Ever since, I’ve been much the wiser, which doesn’t mean I haven’t had my share of adventures. And I wouldn’t be telling you about this one—perhaps the most embarrassing of my career—if it weren’t for that other, fairytale, side of astronautics. Remember, I warned you this story would sound like a sci-fi tale.

The alert came when we were about even with Venus’s orbit. But either our operator was napping on the job or he forgot to record it, because it wasn’t until the next morning that I heard the news on Luna’s daily meteoroid forecast. At first, frankly, I thought it was a false alarm. The Draconids were far behind us and things were quiet except for the usual swarms, nor was it Jupiter up to its perturbational pranks, because this was on a different radiant. Besides, it was only an alert of the eighth degree—a duster, very low density, the percentage of large-sized particles negligible—although the front was, well … formidable. One glance at the map and I realized we’d been riding in it for a good hour, maybe two. The screens were blank. A routine shower, I thought. But the noon bulletin was far from routine: Luna’s long-range trackers had traced the swarm to another system!

It was the second such swarm in astronautical history. Meteoroids travel along elliptical paths gravitationally tied to the sun like yo-yos; an alien swarm from outside the solar system, from somewhere in the galaxy at large, is regarded as a sensation, although more by astrophysicists than by pilots. For us, the difference is one of speed. Swarms in our own system travel in circum-terrestrial space at speeds no greater than the parabolic or the elliptical; those from outside may—and, as a rule, do—move at a hyperbolic velocity. Such things may send meteoritologists and astroballisticians into ecstasy, but not us.

The radiotelegraph operator was fazed neither by the news nor by my lunchtime lecture. An engine burn (to low thrust, naturally) plus a course adjustment had given us just enough gravity to make life bearable: no more sucking soup through straws or squeezing meatloaf puree out of toothpaste tubes. I’ve always been a fan of plain, ordinary meals.

The engineer, on the other hand, was scared stiff. My talking about the swarm as casually as if it were a summer shower he took as a sure sign of my insanity. I gently reassured him that it was a dust cloud, moreover a very sparse one; that the odds of meeting up with a meteoroid large enough to do any damage were lower than those of being crowned by a falling theater chandelier; that we couldn’t do anything, anyway, because we were in no position to execute any evasion maneuvers; and that, as it happened, our course in good measure coincided with the swarm’s, thus significantly reducing the chances of a collision.

He seemed somehow unconsoled. By now, I’d had it with psychotherapy and preferred to work on the operator instead—that is, to cut him off from his liquor supply for at least a couple of hours, which the alert now made more urgent than ever. We were well inside Venus’s perimeter, a heavily traveled zone; traffic, and not only of the cargo variety, was fierce. I kept a four-hour watch by the transmitter, the radiotelegraph operator at my side, until 0600 hours—fortunately, without picking up a single distress call. The swarm was so low in density it took literally hours of squinting to detect it: a mass of microscopically small greenish phantomlike dots that might easily have been an illusion caused by eyestrain. Meanwhile, tracking stations on Luna and on Earth were projecting that the hyperbolic swarm, already christened Canopus after the radiant’s brightest star, would bypass Earth’s orbit and abandon the system for the same galactic void whence it had come, never to menace us again.

The civil engineer, more anxious than ever, kept nosing around the radio room. “Go back and man the controls!” I would bark. A purely cosmetic command, of course, first because we had no thrust, and without thrust there’s no navigating, and second because he couldn’t have executed the most rudimentary maneuver, and I wouldn’t have let him try. I just wanted to keep him busy and out of my hair. Had I ever been caught in a swarm before? How many times? Had there been any accidents? Were they serious? What were the odds of surviving a collision? He kept up a steady stream. Instead of answering, I handed him Krafft’s Basic Astronautics and Astronavigation, which he took but I’m sure never opened: the man craved first-hand revelations, not facts. And all this, I repeat, on a ship minus any gravity, weightless, when even the soberest of men moved in burlesque fashion—when, for example, the pressure exerted in writing with a pencil could land a man on the ceiling, head first. The radiotelegraph operator, however, coped not by belting up but by jettisoning things: trapped in the space between ceiling, deck, and walls, he would reach into his pants pockets, throw out the first item at hand—his pockets were a storage bin of miscellaneous weights, key chains, metal clips—and allow the thrust to propel him gently in the opposite direction. An infallible method, unerring confirmation of Newton’s second law, but something of an inconvenience to his shipmates, because, once discarded, the stuff would ricochet off the walls, and the resulting whirligig of hard and potentially damaging objects might last a good while. This is just to add a few background touches to that idyllic voyage.

The airwaves, meanwhile, were jumping, as passenger ships began switching to alternate routes. Luna Base had its hands full. The ground stations that relayed the orbital data and course corrections were firing away signals at a clip too fast for the human ear to detect. The relays were also jammed with the voices of passengers who, for a hefty fee, were cabling reassuring messages to loved ones. Luna’s astrophysics station kept transmitting updates on the swarm’s more concentrated areas, along with spectroanalyses of its composition—in a word, a regular variety show.

My mumps-stricken crew, already informed about the hyperbolic cloud, kept phoning in to the radio room—until I switched off the intercom system. I announced they would recognize any danger—a blowout, say—by the sudden loss of pressure.

Around 2300 hours, I went below for a bite to eat. The radiotelegraph operator, who must have given up waiting for me, had vanished meanwhile, and I was too tired to hunt him down, much less think about him. The engineer returned from his watch, calmer and more visibly troubled by his brother-in-law than by the swarm. On his way out of the mess, when he wasn’t yawning like a whale, he mentioned that the radar’s left screen must have shorted, because it was showing a sort of green flicker. With these words he made his exit, while I, who was in the process of polishing off a can of corned beef, my fork stuck in an unappetizing gob of solid fat, fairly froze.

The engineer knew radar about as well as I knew asphalt. A radar screen “shorted”…!

A moment later, I was streaking to the cockpit (in a manner of speaking, of course, because I could accelerate only by shinnying with my hands and by bouncing, feet first, off the walls and overhead deck). The cockpit—when I finally reached it—was dead, its dashlights extinguished, its reactor controls like fireflies, and only the radar screens were still going, pulsating with every sweep of the scope. My eye was already on the left-hand one before I was inside the hatch.

The lower-right quadrant showed a bright, immobile dot, which, when I came closer, became a coin-sized splotch, somewhat flat and spindle-shaped, perfectly symmetrical and fluorescent-green in color: a tiny, deceptively motionless fish in an otherwise empty ocean. If an officer of the watch had spotted it—not now, but a half hour earlier—he would have flipped the automatic tracking relay, alerted his CO, and requested the other ship’s course and destination. But I was without any watch officers, a half hour too late, and alone. I did everything at once: sent out the identification call, switched on the tracker, and fired up the reactor (it was as cold as a very old corpse) in order to have instant thrust ready at hand. I even managed to get the navigational computer going, only to discover that the other ship’s course was almost parallel to ours, with only a marginal difference between them, so that the chance of a collision, extremely low to begin with, was pushing zero.

But the other ship played deaf. I shifted to another chair and began flashing Morse from my deck laser. It was too close for comfort, about nine hundred kilometers astern, and I could see myself being hauled before the Tribunal for violation of Paragraph VIII: “HA = Hazardous Approach.” But only a blind man could have missed my signal lights, I told myself. Meanwhile, that ship sat stubbornly on my radar, and not only did it not alter course, but it was actually starting to lap us—we were moving, as I said, on almost parallel tracks—along the quadrant’s outer perimeter. I visually clocked its speed at roughly hyperbolic, or ninety kilometers per second, which was confirmed by two readings taken within a ten-second interval; whereas we were lucky if we were doing forty-five.

Still no response; it was gaining, and it looked splendid, even elegant. A pale-green, incandescent lens, which we viewed sideways; a smoothly tapered spindle. Suspicious about its size, I glanced at the radar range-finder: we were four hundred kilometers away. I blinked. Normally a ship looked no bigger than a comma from that distance. Damn—I thought—nothing works aboard this ship! I transferred the image to a small auxiliary radar with a directional antenna. The same effect. My mind went blank. Then a sudden brainstorm: another of Le Mans’s convoys, a string of some forty-odd hulks in tow… But why the spindle shape?

The scopes went on sweeping, the range-finder kept clicking away. Three hundred, two hundred sixty, two hundred…

I checked the course margin on the Harrelsberg because I smelled a near-collision in the making. When radar was first introduced at sea, everyone felt a lot safer, but ships went on sinking just the same. The data confirmed my suspicions: the other ship would clear our bow by some thirty to forty kilometers. I tested the radio and laser relays. Both functional, but still no response. Until now, I had been feeling a trifle guilty—for leaving the ship on automatic while I sat below and listened to the engineer bellyache about his brother-in-law, snacking on a can of corned beef because I was without a crew and had to do everything myself—but no more. Now it was as though the scales had fallen. Filled with righteous indignation, I knew who the guilty party was: this deaf-mute of a ship, too hell-bent across the sector to respond to another pilot’s emergency signals!

I switched on the radiophone and demanded that the other ship display its navigational lights and send up flares, that it report its call numbers, name, destination, owner—all in the standard code, of course—but it kept cruising leisurely, silently along, altering neither course nor speed by so much as a fraction of a degree or a second. It now lay eighty kilometers astern.

So far, it had been situated a little to the port side; now I could see it was lapping me. The angular correction meant that the clearance would be even tighter than the one projected by the computer. Under thirty kilometers, in any case, perhaps as low as twenty. The rules sad I should have been braking, but I couldn’t. I had a necropolis of over a hundred thousand tons behind me; I would have had to unhook all those dead hulks first. But alone, without a crew? Oh, no, braking was out of the question. Friend, I told myself, what you need now is not astronautical savvy but philosophy—starting with a little fatalism and, in case the computer’s projection was high, even a dabbling in eschatology.

At exactly twenty-two kilometers, the other ship began to outstrip the Pearl. From now on the values would increase, which meant we were in the clear. All this time my eyes had been glued to the range-finder. I shifted my gaze back to the radar screen.

What I saw was not a ship but a flying island. From twenty kilometers away, it now measured about two fingers in width. The perfectly symmetrical spindle had become a disk—better, a ring!

I know what you’re probably thinking: an alien encounter. I mean, a ship measuring twenty kilometers in length…? An alien encounter. A catchy phrase, but who believes in it? My first impulse was to tail the thing. Really! I even grabbed the stick—then held back. Fat chance I’d have with all that scrap in tow. I heaved out of my seat and climbed a narrow shaft to the small, hull-mounted astrodome atop the cockpit. It was conveniently stocked with telescope and flares. I fired three in quick succession, aiming for the ship’s general radius, and tried to get a sighting in the glare. An island, yes, but still hard to locate right away. The flash blinded me for a few seconds, until my eyes adjusted to the brightness. The second flare landed wide, too far away to do any good; the third, just above it. In that immobilizing white light, I saw it.

Only a glimpse, really, lasting no more than five or she seconds, because I was using one of those exceptionally bright flares that fade very fast. But in the space of those few seconds, I saw, looking down at an angle through my night glasses, whose eighty-power lenses brought it to within a few hundred meters, an eerily but sharply illuminated mass of metal. So massive, in fact, it barely fit into my field of vision. Stars showed in the center. A sort of hollow, cast-iron, spaceborne tunnel, but—as I noticed in the last glimmerings of light—somewhat squashed, more tire-shaped than cylindrical. I could see straight through the core, even though it wasn’t on the same axis; the monster stood at an angle to my line of vision, like a slightly tipped glass of water.

There was no time for idle contemplation. I fired more flares; two failed to ignite, the third fell short, the fourth and fifth made it stand out—for the last time. Having crossed the Pearl’s tangent, it sheered off and quickly widened the gap—one hundred kilometers, two hundred, three hundred—until it was completely out of eye range.

I immediately hustled back to the control room to plot its trajectory, because afterward I intended to sound a general alarm, in all sectors, such as had never been heard. I already had visions of a cosmic chase after the alien intruder—a chase using my trajectory—although secretly I was sure it belonged to the hyperbolic swarm.

There are times when the human eye can behave like a camera lens, when a momentarily but brilliantly cast image can be not merely recalled but meticulously reconstructed as vividly as if viewed in the present. Minutes later, I could still visualize the surface of that colossus in the flare’s afterglow, its kilometers-long sides not smooth but pocked, almost lunar in texture; the way the light had spilled over its corrugated rills, bumps, and craterlike cavities—scars of its interminable wandering, dark and dead as it had entered the nebulae, from which it had emerged centuries later, dust-eaten and ravaged by the myriad bombardments of cosmic erosion. I can’t explain my certainty, but I was sure that it sheltered no living soul, that it was a billion-year-old carcass, no more alive than the civilization that gave birth to it.

With my mind still astir with such images, I computed, for the fourth, fifth and sixth time, the elements of its trajectory, and, with each punch of the key, entered the data on the recording machine. Every second was precious; by now, the ship was a mere phosphorescent green comma, a mute firefly hugging the edge of the screen on the right, receding to a distance of two, then three, then six thousand kilometers.

Then it was gone. Why did that bother me? It was dead, had no maneuvering ability, couldn’t run or hide. OK, it was flying at hyperbolic, but any ship with a high-power reactor and the target’s exact trajectory could easily outrun it.

I opened the cassette recorder to remove the tape and take it down to the radio room—and froze. The metal sprocket was empty; the tape had run out hours, maybe even days ago, and nobody had bothered to refill it. I had been entering the data on nothing. All lost. No ship, no trace, nothing.

I lunged for the screens. That goddamned baggage train! Oh, how I wanted to dump Le Mans’s treasures and take off. Where to? I wasn’t sure myself. Direction Aquarius, I think—but I couldn’t just aim for a constellation! Still? If I radioed the sector, gave the approximate speed and course data…?

It was my duty as a pilot, my first and foremost duty, if I could still do anything at all.

I took the elevator to midships, to the radio room. I foresaw everything: the call to Luna Central, requesting priority for future transmissions of the utmost urgency, which were sure to be taken by the controller on duty, not by one of their computers. Then my report about having sighted an alien craft intersecting my course at a hyperbolic velocity and conjectured to be part of a galactic swarm. When the controller asked for its trajectory, I would have to say that I had computed it but was missing the data, because, due to an oversight, the recorder’s tape cartridge had been empty. He’d then ask me to relay the fix of the pilot who was first to sight the ship. Sorry, no fix, either: the watch officer was a civil engineer. Next—provided he hadn’t begun to smell a rat—why hadn’t I instructed my radiotelegraph operator to relay the data while I was doing my computations? I’d have to tell him the truth: because the operator had been too drunk to stand watch. If he was then still in the mood to pursue this conversation, taking place across more than three hundred sixty-eight million kilometers, he would inquire why one of the pilots hadn’t filled in for the missing operator, to which I’d reply that the whole crew had been bedridden with the mumps. Whereupon, if he still harbored any doubts, he would safely conclude that I either had flipped or was myself drank. Had I tried to record the ship’s presence in any way—by photographing it in the light of the flares, for example, by transcribing the radar data on ferrotape, or at least by recording all my subsequent calls? But I had nothing, no evidence. I had been too rushed; and why bother with photographs—I recalled thinking—when Earth’s ships were bound to catch up with the target, anyway? Besides, all the recording equipment had been off.

The controller would then do exactly what I would have done in his place: he would tell me to get off the air and would inquire of all ships in my sector whether anyone had sighted anything suspicious. None had, of course, because none could have observed the galactic intruder. The only reason I could was that I was flying within the plane of the ecliptic, strictly off limits because of circulating dust and the remnants of meteoroids and comet tails. But I had violated that ban to have enough fuel for the maneuvers that were to make Le Mans the richer by one hundred forty thousand tons of scrap iron. Luna’s coordinator would have to be told, naturally, in which case word was bound to reach the Tribunal’s Disciplinary Board. True, my having discovered the ship might outweigh an official reprimand, and possibly even a fine, but only on condition that the ship was actually tracked down. In short, it was a lost cause, because a pursuit would have meant dispatching an entire fleet into the zone of the ecliptic, twice as hazardous as usual because of the hyperbolic swarm. Even if he wanted to, the Luna coordinator lacked the authority to do it. And even if I did handstands and called COSNAV, the International Committee for Space Research, and the devil only knows who else, there would still be the conferences and meetings and powwow sessions, and then maybe, if they moved with lightning speed, they might reach a decision in three weeks’ time. By then—my mind, exceptionally quick that night, had already done its homework in the elevator—the ship would be a hundred ninety million kilometers away, beyond the sun, which it would skirt closely enough to have its trajectory altered, so that in the end the search area would amount to more than ten million cubic kilometers. Maybe twenty.

Such were my prospects as I reached the radio room. I sat down and estimated the probability of a sighting through Luna’s giant radiotelescope, the most powerful radioastronomical unit in the system. Powerful, yes, but not powerful enough to pick up a target of that magnitude at a distance of four hundred million kilometers. Case closed. I tore up my computations, got up, and quietly retired to my cabin, feeling as though I had committed a crime. We’d been visited by an intruder from the cosmos, a visit that occurs, who knows, maybe once in a million years—no, once in hundreds of millions of years. And because of a case of the mumps, because of a man named Le Mans and his convoy of scrap, and a drunken halfbreed, and an engineer and his brother-in-law, and my negligence—it had slipped through our fingers, to merge like a phantom with the infinity of space. For the next twelve weeks, I lived in a strange state of tension, because it was during that time that the dead ship returned to the realm of the great planets and became lost to us forever. I was at the radio room every chance I got, nurturing a gradually diminishing hope that someone else might sight it, someone more collected than I, or just plain luckier, but it wasn’t meant to be. Naturally, I never breathed a word to anyone. Mankind is not often blessed with such an opportunity. I feel guilty, and not only toward our race; nor will I be granted the fame of Herostratus, since fortunately nobody would believe me any more. I must admit that even I have my doubts at times: maybe there never was any encounter—except with that can of cold, indigestible corned beef.