More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  There is a stretch on the Ares-Terra line, a zone from which one can really see—continually, for hours on end—with the naked eye what Schiaparelli, Lowell, and Pickering were able to observe only during brief interludes of atmospheric stability. Through the ports one can see the canals, for up to twenty-four, sometimes forty-eight hours, vaguely outlined against the drab, inhospitable shield. Then, as the globe begins to swell on approach, they commence to fade, to dissolve, blurring one by one into a blank nothingness, leaving only the planet’s disk, purged of any sharp contours, to mock with its tedious gray nullity the hopes and expectations it had aroused. True, weeks later, certain surface details, fixed and well defined, begin to re-emerge, but these turn out to be the serrated rims of the largest craters, the wild accretions of weather-beaten rocks, a riot of rock scree buried under deep layers of drab sand, in no way evocative of that pristine, impeccable geometry. At close range, the planet yields its chaos, meekly and irrevocably, incapable of shedding that glaring image of a billion-year erosion; of a chaos not to be reconciled with that memorably lucid design, whose symmetry connoted something compelling, moving, which bespoke a rational order, an unintelligible but manifest logic, that required just a trifle more exertion to be grasped.

  Where was that order, and whence came this mocking illusion? Was it a projection of the retina, of human optical processes? A figment of the cerebral cortex? The questions remained unanswered as the problem went the way of all hypotheses phased out and crushed by technological progress: It was swept into the trash. Since there were no canals—not even any topographical features to foster the illusion—the case was closed. A good thing that neither the “canalists” nor the “anti-canalists” lived to hear these sobering revelations, because the riddle was never really solved, merely phased out. Other planets had nebulous shields, and not a single canal was ever sighted on them. Unseen, uncharted. Why? Anyone’s guess.

  Here, too, hypotheses could be advanced to explain this chapter of astronomy: the combination of distance and optical enlargement, of objective chaos and a subjective craving for order; the residual traces of something that, emerging from the blurred patch in the lens, just beyond the border of perceptibility, momentarily came within the eye’s grasp; the faintest visual suggestion combined with subconscious wishful thinking.

  Requiring all to choose sides, entrenched in their respective positions, forever joined in noble conflict, generation after generation of astrophysicists had gone to the grave firmly believing that the issue would one day be resolved by the appropriate tribunals, fairly and irrevocably. Pirx was sure that all—each in his own way, each for a different reason—would have felt cheated, disillusioned, if they, like he, had been made privy to the truth. For in this refutation of both pro and con, in the total impropriety of any concept vis-à-vis the enigma, was contained a bitter but dire, cruel but salutary lesson which—it suddenly dawned on him—bore directly on the present, on this brain-teaser of a calamity.

  A link between the old astrography and the crack-up of the Ariel? But how? And what to make of this intuition, so vague and yet so compelling? A teaser, all right. But whatever the missing link between them, however distant and tenuous the connection, he knew it would no more be revealed now, in the middle of the night, than it would be forgotten. He would have to sleep on it.

  As he switched off the light, it occurred to him that Romani was a man of much broader intellectual horizons than he had given him credit for. These books were his own private possession, and one had to fight for every kilo of personal gear shipped to Mars—special notices, appealing to the work crew’s loyalty and warning against the dangers of overloading, were plastered all over the Base, Earthside. Everywhere they were crying for expediency, and here was Romani, coordinator of the Agathodaemon project, who, in flagrant violation of the rules, had imported dozens of kilos of utterly useless books—and for what? Surely not for bedtime reading.

  In the dark, already half asleep, he smiled as he realized the motive that justified the presence of these bibliophilic antiquities under the project’s dome. Granted, these books, these passé gospels, these discredited prophecies, had no business being there. But it seemed only fair—necessary, even—that these minds, which had once been the bitterest of enemies, which had given their best to the mystery of the red planet, should find themselves, now fully reconciled, here on Mars. They deserved it, and Romani, who understood, was a man worthy of his trust.

  At 0500 hours, he woke from a deep sleep, as alert as if braced by a cold shower. Savoring a few minutes’ leisure—exactly five; it was becoming something of a habit—he thought of the commander of the shipwrecked Ariel. He wasn’t sure whether Klyne could have saved the ship with its thirty-man crew, or whether the man had even tried. Klyne belonged to a generation of rationalists, men trained to keep pace with their impeccably logical allies, the computers, which became more demanding as one made greater efforts to control them; in a sense, blind obedience was the wiser course. But Pirx was incapable of blind obedience. Distrust was in his bones. He flipped on the radio.

  The furor had started. Pirx had been expecting it, but he’d underestimated the extent of it. The press kept hammering away at three themes: the suspicion of sabotage, the risk to the other Mars-bound ships, and, of course, the political fallout. The big papers tiptoed around the sabotage hypothesis, but the tabloids wallowed in it. The hundred-thousand-tonners also took flak: they weren’t flightworthy, they couldn’t lift off from Earth, and worse, they could neither abort a mission (their fuel supply was inadequate) nor be junked in circum-Martian orbits. It was true: they had to land on Mars. But three years before, unbeknownst to these self-styled experts, a test prototype equipped with a different computer model had successfully soft-landed on Mars, not once but several times. The political promotors of the Mars project were also subjected to a campaign of vilification, their critics badmouthing it as sheer lunacy. There were exposures of work-safety violations on both bases, of the project’s rubber-stamping and bench-testing methods, of bureaucratic bumbling among high-ranking administrators—in short, a Cassandralike outcry.

  When he reported at 0600 hours, he found himself a member of a nonexistent committee, their self-appointed panel having just been abolished by Earth; it was to start all over again, now officially and legally reconstituted as an adjunct to Earth’s board of inquiry. Thus dissolved, the body reaped certain advantages. It was relieved of any decision-making, and so felt freer to make recommendations to its Earthly superior.

  Logistically, the situation at Syrtis Major was ticklish but not critical, whereas a suspension of deliveries would sink Agathodaemon before the month was out. Any effective help from Syrtis was out of the question. Not only were building materials in short supply, but water as well. The situation called for the most stringent economizing.

  Pirx listened to the update with one ear only, because meanwhile the, Ariel’s cockpit recorder had been rescued. The human remains were being stored in containers: no decision as yet on whether they would be buried on Mars. The tapes had to be processed before they could be analyzed, which explained why matters not directly related to the causes of the shipwreck were under discussion—such as whether a mobilization of smaller freighters could save the project from extinction, guaranteeing delivery of at least minimal bio-support cargo. While Pirx saw the wisdom of such deliberations, he couldn’t help thinking of the two Mars-bound hundred-thousand-tonners, whose existence had somehow been overlooked, almost as if it was taken for granted they would have to abort. But they had to land. By now, all were keenly aware of the reaction of the American press, and radiograms kept them up-to-date on the latest political diatribes. It didn’t look good: spokesmen for the project had yet to issue a public statement, and already the administration found itself caught in a firestorm of accusation, including insinuations of “criminal negligence.” Pirx, wanting no part of it, slipped out of the smoke-filled hall around ten, and, thanks to ground maintenance, drove out
in a jeep to the site of the shipwreck.

  By Martian standards, it was a warm, almost cloudy day, the sky more coral-hued than rust-gray. At such times Mars seemed possessed of its own, un-Earthly, raw, slightly veiled, even soiled beauty, the sort we expected to see fully revealed, crowned with a solar radiance, from the vortex of dust and haze, though this expectation went unfulfilled—Mars’s ephemeral beauty was not a promise but the very best the planet’s landscape could muster.

  Having left the squat, bunkerlike ground control a few kilometers back, they reached the end of the launch-pad area, then got hopelessly mired just beyond it. Pirx wore a lightweight partial, which they were all using up here, bright blue, much more comfortable than the full, with a backpack made lighter by an open respirator. Even so, something was wrong with the air conditioning, because the moment he started sweating from the exertion of wading through the sand drifts, his helmet visor began to fog up. Fortunately, hanging like turkey wattles between his neck-ring disconnect and his breastplate were several hand pouches that he could use to dry the glass from the inside—crude but effective.

  An immense crater, teeming with caterpillars: the excavation, lined on three sides with sheets of corrugated aluminum acting as sand barriers, resembled the mouth of a mine shaft. The Ariel’s midship—huge, like a trans-Atlantic liner storm-battered and shipwrecked against the rocks—took up half of the funnel; some fifty people bustled below her, both they and their dredging machines looking like ants on a giant’s carcass. The ship’s eighteen-meter nose section, almost intact, lay elsewhere, hurled a few hundred meters away in the crash. The force of impact had been awesome, to judge by the lumps of melted quartz: the kinetic energy had been immediately converted to thermal, producing a shock similar to that of a meteorite landing, despite a velocity less than the speed of sound. In Pirx’s mind, the disparity between Agathodaemon’s physical capacities and the enormity of the wreckage was not enough to justify the slipshod excavation; one had to improvise, of course, but the almost willful bedlam bespoke a resignation in face of the inconceivable. Even the ship’s water was wasted: with every on-board cistern ruptured, the sand had absorbed thousands of hectaliters before the remainder was turned to ice. This ice made a singularly macabre sight, gushing from the forty-meter gash in the ship’s fuselage in dirty, dazzling cascades, resting on the dunes like bizarre festoons, as if the exploding ship had spewed a frozen Niagara Falls—temperatures here reached eighteen below zero Celsius, dropping at night to sixty below. The Ariel’s ice-packed, ice-glazed hull made the wreckage look positively ancient, prehistoric.

  Access to the ship’s interior was either through the ice, by drilling and jackhammering, or through the shaft. Through the latter they reached the salvageable boxes, piles of which littered the funnel’s slopes, yet the whole operation bordered on sloppy. The tail section was off limits; red pennons, strung on ropes and marking the area of radioactive contamination, fluttered furiously in the wind.

  Pirx made a tour of the site, circling the lip of the embankment, and counted two thousand steps before he stood above the ship’s soot-blackened nozzles, rankling as he watched how the salvage crew, their chains slipping each time, tried futilely to pull out the one surviving fuel tank. He was there only a short while, or so it seemed to him, when someone tapped his shoulder and pointed to his respirator gauge. The pressure had fallen; since he didn’t have a spare, he had to go back. By his watch, a new chronometer, he’d spent almost two hours at the wreckage site.

  The conference hall, meanwhile, had been rearranged: the locals were seated on one side of the long table, opposite six large, flat, freshly installed TV monitors. As usual, there was a glitch in the relay, so the session was postponed until 1300 hours. Haroun, the telegraph operator, whom Pirx had come across at Syrtis Major, and who, for some reason, treated him with great respect, gave him the first dubs of the tapes—the ones bearing the decisions of the power regulator—rescued from the Ariel’s shatterproof chamber. Haroun had no right to leak them, so Pirx could well appreciate the gesture. He shut himself up in his cubicle and, standing under a tensor lamp, took to examining the still-sticky snake of magnetic tape. The picture was as clear as it was incomprehensible. In the 317th second of the landing sequence, flawless until then, the control circuits showed the presence of parasitic currents, which seconds later turned up as a wiggle of beats. Twice extinguished once the load had been shifted to the grid’s parallel, back-up components, they came back intensified, and from then on, the “sensors” functioned at a rate of three times the norm. What he held in his hands was not the computer’s register, but that of its “spinal cord,” which, obeying the commands of the servo-system, coordinated the received instructions with the condition of the power routines. This system sometimes went by the name of the “cerebellum,” by analogy with the human cerebellum, which, acting as the control station between the cortex and the body, governed the correlation of movements.

  He studied the “cerebellum’s” load chart with the utmost attention. The computer seemed to have been hard pressed, as if, without disturbing the operation in any way, it had demanded from the subsystems increasingly greater input per time unit. This created an informational glut and the appearance of reverberating currents; in an animal this would have been equivalent to a radically intensified tonus, a susceptibility to the motor disorders termed clonic spasms. A blind alley. True, he was missing the most important tapes, those with the computer decisions. There was a knock at the door. Pirx stashed the tapes in his grip and met Romani at the door.

  “The new brass would like you involved in the work of the committee.”

  Romani looked less drained than the day before, more upbeat. Simple logic told Pirx that even the mutually antagonistic “Martians” of Agathodaemon and Syrtis would close ranks if the “new brass” tried to railroad the proceedings.

  The new committee had eleven members. Hoyster stayed on as chairman, if only because the committee couldn’t be chaired on Earth. A board of inquiry whose members were separated by eighty million kilometers was a risky venture; the authorities’ agreement to undertake it could only have been made under pressure. The disaster had revived a controversy of political dimensions, one in which the project had been embroiled from the start.

  They began with a general recap for the benefit of the Earthlings. Among the latter, Pirx knew only the shipyard director, Van der Voyt. The color screen, for all its fidelity, lent his features a certain monumentally—the bust of a colossus, with a face both flaccid and bloated, full of imperious energy and shrouded by smoke rings from an invisible cigar (his hands were off screen) like some burnt offering. Anything said in the hall reached him after a four-minute delay, followed by another four-minute interval for the reply. Pirx took an immediate dislike to the man, or, rather, to his pompous presence, as if the other experts, whose faces flickered occasionally on the other monitors, were merely dummies.

  After Hoyster came an eight-minute interval, but Earth momentarily demurred. Van der Voyt asked to see the Ariel’s tapes, a set of which lay by Hoyster’s microphone. By now, each member of the committee had received a dubbed set. Not that they were much help, since the tapes covered only the last five minutes of the landing sequence. While the camera crew relayed Earth’s set, Pirx fussed with his own, skipping the tapes with which, thanks to Haroun, he was already familiar.

  The computer had reversed the landing procedure in the 339th second, shifting not to ordinary lift-off, but to an escape maneuver, as if in response to a meteorite alert, though it looked more like frantic improvisation. Whatever the sequence of events, Pirx attached little importance to the wild curve jumps on the tapes, which proved only that the computer had gagged on its own concoction. Of far greater relevance than a post-mortem of the ship’s macabre end was the cause of a decision that, in retrospect, was synonymous with suicide.

  From the 170th second onward, the computer had functioned under enormous stress, showing signs of extreme informational
overload, a piece of wisdom gained easily in hindsight, now that the final results were in. Not until the 201st second of the maneuver had the computer relayed the overload to the cockpit—to the human crew of the Ariel. By then, the computer was glutted with data—and kept demanding more. The tapes, in short, raised more questions than they solved. Hoyster allowed a ten-minute break for perusal of the tapes, then opened up the floor to questions. Pirx raised his hand, classroom-style. But before he could open his mouth, Engineer Stotik, the shipyard supervisor in charge of offloading the hundred-thousand-tonners, said that Earth should take the floor first. Hoyster wavered. It was a nasty ploy, beautifully timed. Romani asked for a point of order, declaring that if they were going to disrupt the proceedings by insisting on equal rights, then neither he nor anyone else from Agathodaemon planned to stay on the committee. Stotik yielded the floor to Pirx.

  “The model in question is an updated version of the AIBM 09,” he began. “I’ve logged about a thousand hours with the AIBM 09, so I can speak from experience. I’m not up on the theory, only on what I’ve needed to know. We’re dealing here with a real-time data processor. This newer model, I’ve heard, has a thirty-six percent larger memory than the AIBM 09. That’s quite a bit. On the evidence, here’s what I think happened. The computer guided the ship into a normal landing sequence, then started overloading, demanding from the sub-routines more and more data per time unit. Like a company commander who keeps turning his combat soldiers into couriers: by the battle’s end, he might be extremely well informed, but he won’t have any soldiers.