A Look Inside The Tales of Pirx the Pilot

Page 1 of 4 Terminus The string of night-lights burned with a serene calm, inundating the decks with a watery blue shimmer. He swam up to a rope dangling from the ceiling; the moment he let go of the end, it coiled itself up lazily, snakelike, as if suddenly animated by his touch. His head snapped back. A clunking noise, similar to a hammering on metal, sounded nearby. He swam in the direction of the echoes, their volume now rising, now falling; along the way spotted a set of rusty tracks embedded in the deck-once used for wheeling dollies to and from the holds, he guessed - and soon was sailing along so fast he could feel the air buffeting his face. The clanging kept getting louder. He sighted a pipe angling around the corner from the next passageway and running along the ceiling. A section of old, one-inch pipeline. He touched it with his hand; it jiggled. The resonances now came in clusters of twos and threes. That's when it hit him. The banging was in Morse. "A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n . . ." The series came again: "A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n . . ." And again: "A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n . . ." Then the pipe chimed, "A-m-b-e-h-i-n-d-b-u-l-k-h-e-a-d." By force of habit, he spliced the letters together, syllable by syllable. "I-c-e-e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e . . ." Ice? he wondered, caught completely off guard. What in . . . ? Ice? What ice? "R-e-a-c-t-o-r-v-e-s-s-e-l-c-r-a-c-k-e-d," the pipe resonated. He wrapped his hand around it. Who was signaling? And where was it coming from? He tried to figure out which way the pipe ran - from the bow or back aft. It looked like one of those emergency pipelines, obsolete, with branches on every deck. Maybe someone was practicing his Morse ... ? That's crazy. The pilot up in the control room, maybe? "C-o-m-e-i-n-p-r-a-t-t-c-o-m-e-i-n . . ." A pause. Pirx was breathless. The mention of that name was like a blow to the gut. For a second he stared wide-eyed at the pipe, then suddenly lurched forward. That's it - the name of that second pilot, he thought as he hit the bend, bounced off, and made for the control room, gathering speed as he went, the pipe all the while reverberating overhead. "W-a-y-n-e-h-e-r-e-s-i-m-o-n . . ." The echoes receded. Pirx momentarily lost sight of the pipe, picked it up again where it swerved into the next passageway, lunged after it, was bounced off the wall by his own momentum, and saw something through the dust cloud: a gnarled stump of metal, fixed with a rusty cap. A pipe bend. Severed. So it came from the tail section, not the cockpit ... Huh? There was nobody back aft ... "P-r-a-t-t-i-n-s-i-x-t-h-t-o-l-a-s-t-h-o-1-d . . . ," the pipe chimed. << Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 Next > End >>