Tales of Pirx the Pilot Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nah, not a chance…
    What were the flies up to? He followed them with his gaze as they zoomed and buzzed and circled and chased each other around the outside of the blister before landing on the back of the fuse panel. That’s when he lost track of them.
    He took a reading of the two JO ships on the radarscope: both were on course. The face of the Moon now loomed so large on the front screen that it took up half of it. He recalled how during a series of selenographic exercises in the Tycho Crater, Boerst, with the help of a portable theodolite… Dammit, what a pro that guy was! Pirx kept an eye out for Luna Base on the outer slope of Archimedes. It was camouflaged so well among the rocks that it was almost invisible from high altitude, all except for the smooth surface of the landing strip with its approach lights—when in the night zone, that is, and not, as presently, when it was illuminated by the Sun. At the moment the Base was straddling the crater’s shadow line, the contrast with the blinding lunar surface being so intense that it overpowered the weaker approach lights.
    The Moon looked as if untrodden by human foot. Long shadows stretched all the way from the Lunar Alps to the Sea of Rains. He recalled, too, how on his first trip there—they were just passengers then—Bullpen had called on him to verify whether stars of the seventh magnitude were visible from the Moon, and how, dumb as he was, he had tackled the problem with the greatest of enthusiasm. He had clean forgotten, the dope, that no stars were visible from the Moon by day because of the solar glare reflected by the lunar surface. It was a long time before Bullpen stopped ribbing him on account of those stars.
    The Moon’s disk continued to swell, gradually crowding out the remaining darkened portion of the screen.
    “That’s funny—I don’t hear any more buzzing.” He glanced sideways and flinched.
    One of the flies was sitting and cleaning its wings on the exposed side of the panel, while the other fly was busy courting it. A few millimeters away, its copper terminal gleaming below the spot where the insulation ended, was the nearest cable. All four cables were exposed, about as thick in diameter as a pencil, and all in the 1,000-volt range, with a contact clearance of 7 millimeters. It was just by accident that he knew it was 7. Once, as an exercise, they had tom down the entire circuitry system, and when he, Pirx, couldn’t come up with the exact clearance, his instructor had read him off the riot act.
    In the meantime, the one fly took time off from its wooing and started venturing out along the live terminal. A harmless enough thing to do—unless, of course, it suddenly got an urge to hop over to the next one, and, judging by the way it sat there, humming, at the very end of the terminal, that’s precisely what it intended to do. As if it didn’t have room enough in the cabin! Now, thought Pirx, what would happen if it put its front paws on the one wire and kept its hind feet on the other…? Well, so what if it did. In the worst case it might cause a short circuit. But then—a fly?! Would a fly be big enough to do that? But even if it were, nothing much could happen; there would be a momentary blowout, the circuit breaker would switch off the current, the fly would be electrocuted, and the power would be restored—and good-bye fly! As if in a trance, he kept his eyes fixed on the high-tension box, secretly cherishing the hope that the fly would think better of it. A short circuit was nothing serious, a glitch, but who knows what else might happen…
    Only eight more minutes of gradual deceleration until touchdown. He was still staring at the dial when there was a flash—and the lights went out. It was a momentary blackout, lasting no more than a fraction of a second. The fly! he thought, and waited with bated breath for the circuit breaker to flip the power back on. It did.
    The lights stayed on for a while—dimmer and more