More Tales of Pirx the Pilot Read Free Page A

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