More Tales of Pirx the Pilot Read Free

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