More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  “The name suggests mythology, but it’s only an acronym, from Self-programming Electronic Ternary Automaton Racemic, racemic since in the construction of its brain we use both dextro- and levorotatory monopolymer pseudo crystals. But I guess that’s not important here. It is an automaton equipped with a laser for mining operations, a violet laser; the energy to emit the impulses is supplied it by a micropile, working on the principle of a cold chain reaction, so that the Setaur—if I remember correctly—can put out impulses of up to forty-five thousand kilowatts.”

  “For how long?” someone asked.

  “From our point of view, forever,” immediately replied the thin scientist. “In any case for many years. What exactly happened to this Setaur? In plain language, I think it got hit over the head. The blow must have been unusually strong, but, then, even here a falling building could damage a chromium-nickel skull. So what took place? We’ve never conducted experiments of this kind; the cost would be too great”—McCork gave an unexpected smile, showing small, even teeth—“but it is generally known that any sharply localized damage to a small, that is, relatively simple, brain or ordinary computer results in a complete breakdown in function. However, the more we approximate the human brain by imitating its processes, then the greater the degree to which such a complex brain will be able to function despite the partial damage it has suffered. The animal brain—a cat’s brain, for example—contains certain centers, the stimulation of which produces an attack response, manifested as an outburst of aggressive rage. The brain of the Setaur is built differently, yet does possess a certain general drive, a potentiality for action, which can be directed and channeled in various ways. Now, some sort of short circuit occurred between that motive center and an already initiated program for destruction. Of course I am speaking in grossly oversimplified terms.”

  “But why destruction?” asked the same voice as before.

  “It is an automaton designed for mining operations,” Dr. McCork explained. “Its task was to have been to dig levels or drifts, to bore through rock, to crush particularly hard minerals—broadly speaking, to destroy cohesive matter, obviously not everywhere and not everything, but as a result of its injury such a generalization came about. Anyway, my hypothesis could be completely wrong. That side of the question, the purely theoretical, will be worth considering later, after we have made a carpet of the thing. At present it is more important for us to know what the Setaur can do. It can move at a speed of about fifty kilometers an hour, over almost any terrain. It has no lubricating points; all the friction-joint surfaces work on teflon. Its suspensions are magnetic, its armor cannot be penetrated by any revolver or rifle bullet. Such tests have not actually been made, but I think that possibly an antitank gun… Of course, we don’t have any of those, do we?”

  Achanian shook his head. He picked up the list that had been returned to him and read it, making little marks beside the names.

  “Obviously, the explosion of a fair-sized charge would pull it apart,” McCork went on calmly, as if he were talking about the most ordinary things. “But first you would have to bring the charge near it, and that, I am afraid, will not be easy.”

  “Where exactly does it have its laser? In the head?” asked someone from the audience.

  “Actually it has no head, only a sort of bulge, a swelling between the shoulders. That was to increase its resistance to falling rock. The Setaur measures two hundred twenty centimeters in height, so it fires from a point about two meters above the ground; the muzzle of the laser is protected by a sliding visor; when the body is stationary it can fire through an angle of thirty degrees, and a greater field of aim is obtained when the entire body turns. The laser, as I said, has a maximum power of forty-five thousand kilowatts. Any expert will realize that this is considerable; it can easily cut through a steel plate several centimeters thick…”

  “At what range?”

  “It’s a violet laser, therefore with a very small angle of divergence from the line of incidence. So the range will be, for all practical purposes, limited to the field of vision; since the horizon here on a level plane is at a distance of two kilometers, two kilometers at the very least will be the range of fire.”

  “We will be receiving special mining lasers of six times that power,” Achanian put in.

  “But that is only what the Americans call overkill,” McCork replied with a smile. “Such power will provide no advantage in a duel with the Setaur’s laser.”

  Someone asked whether it wouldn’t be possible to destroy the automaton from aboard some cosmic vessel. McCork declared himself not qualified to answer; Achanian meanwhile glanced at the sign-up sheet and said:

  “We have here a navigator first class. Pirx … would you care to comment on this?”

  Pirx got up.

  “Well, in theory, a vessel of medium tonnage like my Cuivier, which has a sixteen-thousand-ton rest mass, could certainly destroy such a Setaur, if it got it in its line of thrust. The temperature of the exhaust gases exceeds six thousand degrees for a distance of nine hundred meters. That would be sufficient, I think…?”

  McCork nodded.

  “But this is sheer speculation,” Pirx continued. “The vessel would have to be somehow brought into position, and a small target like the Setaur, which really isn’t any larger than a man, could always have time to move out of the way, unless it were immobilized. The lateral velocity of a vessel maneuvering near the surface of a planet, within its field of gravity, is quite small; sudden pursuit maneuvers are completely out of the question. The only remaining possibility, then, would be to use small units, say, the Moon’s own fleet. Except that the thrust here would be weak and of not very high temperature, so perhaps if you used one of those crafts as a bomber instead… But for precision bombing you need special instruments, sights, range-finders, which Luna Base doesn’t have. No, we can rule that out. Of course it will be necessary, even imperative, to employ such small machines, but only for reconnaissance purposes—that is, to pinpoint the automaton.”

  He was about to sit down when suddenly a new idea hit him.

  “Oh, yes!” he said. “Jump holsters. Those you could use. I mean—you would have to have people who knew how to use them.”

  “Are they the small, individual rockets one straps on over the shoulders?” asked McCork.

  “Yes. With them you can execute jumps or even sail along without moving; depending on the model and type, you get from one to several minutes aloft and reach an altitude of fifty to four hundred meters.”

  Achanian stood.

  “This may be important. Who here has been trained in the use of such devices?”

  Two hands went up. Then another.

  “Only three?” said Achanian, “Ah; you, too?” he added, seeing that Pirx, who now saw what was coming, had also raised his hand. “That makes four. Not very many… Well ask among the ground crew. Gentlemen! This is—it goes without saying—strictly a voluntary mission. I really ought to have begun with that. Who wants to take part in the operation?”

  A slight clatter ensued, for everyone present was standing up.

  “On behalf of Control, I thank you,” said Achanian. “This is fine… And so we have seventeen volunteers. We will be supported by three units from the lunar fleet, and in addition will have at our disposal ten drivers and radio operators to help man the transporters. I will ask you all to remain here, and you”—he turned to McCork and Pirx—“please come with me, to Control.”

  Around four in the afternoon Pirx was sitting in the turret of a large caterpillar transporter, jolted by its violent motions. He was wearing a full suit, with the helmet on his knees, ready to put it on at the first sound of the alarm, and across his chest hung a heavy laser, the butt of which poked him unmercifully; in his left hand he had a map, and he used the right to turn a periscope, observing the long, spread-out line of the other transporters, which pitched and tossed like boats across the debris-strewn tracts of the Sea of Tranquillity. That desert “sea
” was all ablaze with sunlight and empty from one black horizon to the other. Pirx received reports and passed them on, spoke with Luna Base 1, with the officers of the other machines, with the pilots of the reconnaissance modules, whose microscopic exhaust flames every so often appeared among the stars in the black sky; yet with all of this he still couldn’t help feeling at times that he was having some kind of highly elaborate and silly dream.

  Things had happened with increasing frenzy. He wasn’t the only one to whom it seemed that Construction had succumbed to something like panic. For, really, what could one halfwit automaton do, even armed with a light-thrower? So when at the second “summit meeting,” right at noon, there began to be talk of turning to the UN, at least to the Security Council, for “special sanction,” namely permission to bring in heavy artillery (rocket launchers would be best), and possibly even atomic missiles—Pirx objected, along with others, that in that way, before they got anywhere, they would be making complete asses of themselves in front of all Earth. Besides, it was obvious that for such a decision from the international body they would have to wait days if not weeks, and meanwhile the “mad robot” could wander off God knows where. Once it was hidden in the inaccessible rifts of the lunar crust, you wouldn’t be able to get at it with all the cannons in the world; it was essential to act decisively and without delay.

  It became clear then that the biggest problem would be communications, which had always been a sore point in lunar undertakings. Supposedly, there existed about three thousand different patents for inventions designed to facilitate communications, ranging from a seismic telegraph (using microexplosions as signals) to “Trojans,” stationary satellites. Such satellites had been placed in orbit last year, but they didn’t improve the situation one bit. In practice the problem was solved by systems of ultrashortwave relays set on poles, a lot like the old pre-Sputnik television transmission lines on Earth. This was actually more reliable than communication by satellite, because the engineers were still racking their brains over how to make their orbiting stations unsusceptible to solar storms. Every single jump in the activity of the sun, and the resultant “hurricanes” of electrically charged high-energy particles that tore through the ether, immediately produced a static that made it difficult to maintain contact—sometimes for several days.

  One of those solar “twisters” was going on right now, so messages between Luna Base 1 and Construction went by way of the ground relays, and the success of Operation Setaur depended—to a large degree, at least—on the “rebel’s” not taking it into its head to destroy the girdered poles that stood, forty-five of them, on the desert separating Luna City from the cosmodrome near the construction site. Assuming, of course, that the automaton would continue to prowl in that vicinity. It had, after all, complete freedom of movement, requiring neither fuel nor oxygen, neither sleep nor rest; in all, it was so self-sufficient that many of the engineers for the first time fully realized how perfect was this machine of their own making—a machine whose next step no one could foresee.

  The direct Moon-Earth discussions which had begun at dawn between Control and the firm Cybertronics, including the staff of Setaur’s designers, went on and on; but not a thing was learned from them that hadn’t already been said by little Dr. McCork. It was only the laymen who were still trying to talk the specialists into using some great calculator to predict the automaton’s tactics. Was the Setaur intelligent? Well, yes, in its own fashion. That “unnecessary”—and at the present moment highly dangerous—“wisdom” of the machine angered many participants in the action; they couldn’t see why in hell the engineers had bestowed such freedom and autonomy on a machine made strictly for mining tasks. McCork calmly explained that this “intellectronic redundancy” was, in the current phase of technological development, the same thing as the excess of power generally found in all conventional machines and engines: it was an emergency reserve, put there in order to increase safety and dependability of function. There was no way of knowing in advance all the situations in which a machine, be it mechanical or informational, might find itself. And therefore no one really had the foggiest notion of what the Setaur would do. Of course the experts, including those on Earth, had telegraphed their opinions; the only problem was that these opinions were diametrically opposed. Some believed the Setaur would attempt to destroy objects of an “artificial” nature, precisely like the relay poles or high-tension lines; others thought, on the contrary, that it would expend its energy by firing at whatever stood in its path, whether a lunar rock or a transporter filled with people. The former were in favor of an immediate attack for the purpose of destroying it; the latter recommended a wait-and-see strategy. Both were in agreement on one thing only, that it was absolutely vital to keep track of the machine’s movements.

  Since early morning the lunar fleet, numbering twelve small units, had patrolled the Sea of Tranquillity and sent continual reports to the group defending the construction site, which in turn was in constant contact with headquarters at the cosmodrome. It was no easy thing to detect the Setaur, a tiny piece of metal in a giant wilderness of rock filled with fields of detritus, cracks, and half-buried crevices, and covered besides with the pockmarks of miniature craters.

  If only those reports had at least been negative! But the patrolling crews had alarmed ground personnel several times already with the information that the “mad machine” was sighted. So far it had turned out that the object was some unusual rock formation or a fragment of lava sparkling in the rays of the sun; even the use of radar along with ferroinduction sensors proved to be of little help—in the wake of the first stages of lunar exploration and colonization, there remained upon the Moon’s rocky wastes a whole multitude of metal containers, heat-fused shells from rocket cartridges, and all possible sorts of tin junk, which every now and then became the source of fresh alarms. So much so that operation headquarters began to wish the Setaur would finally attack something and show itself. However, the last time it had revealed its presence was with the attack on the small transporter belonging to the electrical repair team. Since then it seemed as if the lunar soil had opened up and swallowed the thing. But everyone felt that sitting and waiting was out of the question, particularly when Construction had to regain its energy supply.

  The mission—covering about ten thousand square kilometers—consisted in combing that area with two waves of vehicles approaching each other from opposite directions, from the north and the south. From Construction came one extended line under the command of their head technologist, Strzibor, and from the Luna Base cosmodrome came the second, in which the role of operations coordinator of both sides, working closely with the chief (Commodore-Navigator Pleydar), fell to Pirx. He understood perfectly that at any moment they could pass right by the Setaur; it might, for example, be hidden in one of those deep tectonic trenches, or even be camouflaged by nothing but the dazzling lunar sand, and they would never notice it; McCork, who rode with him as “intellectronician-consultant,” was of the same opinion.

  The transporter lurched dreadfully, moving along at a speed that, as the driver quietly informed them, “after a while makes your eyes pop out.” They were now in the eastern sector of the Sea of Tranquillity and less than an hour away from the region where the automaton was most likely to be located. After crossing that previously determined border, they were all to don their helmets, so that in case of an unexpected hit and loss of seal, or in case of fire, they could leave the vehicle immediately.

  The transporter had been changed into a fighting machine; the mechanics had mounted on its domelike turret a mining laser of great power, though pretty poor as far as accuracy went. Pirx considered it altogether useless against the Setaur. The Setaur possessed an automatic sighter, since its photoelectric eyes were hooked up directly to the laser and it could instantly fire at whatever lay in the center of its field of vision. Theirs, on the other hand, was a quaint sort of sighter, probably from an old cosmonautical range-finder; the only testing it had
received was when, before leaving Luna Base, they took a few shots at some rocks on the horizon. The rocks had been large, the distance less than two kilometers, and even so they hit the mark only on the fourth try. And here, to make matters worse, you had lunar conditions to cope with, because a laser beam was visible as a brilliant streak only in a diffusing medium, such as an Earthlike atmosphere; but in empty space a beam of light, regardless of how powerful, was invisible until it hit some material obstacle. Therefore, on Earth you could shoot a laser much the way you shot tracer bullets, guided by their observable line of flight. Without a sighter, a laser on the Moon was of no practical value. Pirx didn’t keep this from McCork; he told him when only a couple of minutes separated them from the hypothetical danger zone.

  “I didn’t think of that,” said the engineer, then added, with a smile, “Why did you tell me?”

  “To free you of illusions,” replied Pirx, not looking up from the double eyepiece of his periscope. It had foam-rubber cushions, but he felt sure that he would be going around with black eyes for the longest time (assuming, of course, he came out of this alive). “And also to explain why we’re carrying that stuff in the back.”

  “The cylinders?” asked McCork. “I saw you taking them from the storeroom. What’s in them?”

  “Ammonia, chlorine, and some hydrocarbons or other,” said Pirx. “I though they might come in handy.”

  “A gas smoke-screen?” ventured the engineer.

  “No, what I had in mind was some way of aiming. If there’s no atmosphere, we create one, at least temporarily…”

  “I’m afraid there won’t be time for that.”

  “Perhaps not, but I brought it along just in case. Against something insane, insane measures are often best.”

  They fell silent, for the transporter had begun to lurch like a drunk; the stabilizers whined and squealed, sounding as if at any minute the oil in them would begin to boil. They hurtled down an incline strewn with sharp boulders. The opposite slope gleamed, all white with pumice.