Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  As we see, this bears on a paramount question, one that is critical for clarifying the visitors’ relationship to man, and hence a question that all the characters in the fiction must similarly be aware of. One landing in a city could be the work of extraordinary chance, but two such landings certainly could not. We are thus inevitably led to the following reflection: if it were the case that the visitors had also landed in another city apart from Harmont, a roadside picnic would manifestly be a false image. But since Pilman has chosen this analogy, we assume that we are dealing with an isolated fact. That is very important for our further considerations.

  Dr. Pilman details various hypotheses concerning the nature of the landing. He omits only one that commands our attention. This we will introduce after we have gathered (as follows) the conclusive evidence in its favor…

  (1)

  First of all, two characteristics — unrelated to one another — of almost all the objects found in the Zone attract our notice. One is that these objects have retained a measure of functionability: they are not passive, lifeless, deactivated waste or rubbish. The second is that they are commensurable in size (and weight) with the human body. This can be inferred from the fact that one man can lug objects well-nigh intact from the Zone on his back without having to take them apart first. None of the larger units needs to be dismantled or broken up — which is why the equipment of the treasure hunters

  includes no tools. These objects lie loosely strewn about. Now suppose we were to dump a considerable amount of the industrial debris of our civilization (wrecked cars, industrial equipment, scrap metal, old bridges, used machines) here and there on the Samoan Islands: the natives would in that case come upon far more objects incommensurable with their bulk than corresponding to it. If, on the contrary, a number of strange objects found scattered in a given place were of an order of magnitude according with that of the human body, it would be an a priori probable hypothesis that these things had been destined for their discoverers. Naturally one can still claim that pure chance is answerable for the fact that the objects found in the Zone are proportionate to human bulk. But it appears otherwise when many “pure coincidences” begin to come together in a meaningful pattern.

  (2)

  Next, it is notable among the Zone’s numerous characteristics that its boundaries are rigidly and sharply fixed. Neither flying objects such as the “hairy stuff”

  (1:19) nor other Zone phenomena (the “jelly” [2:56], thermal shocks, etc.) ever cross over the demarcation line between the Zone and its environs. One could once more claim that this “self-containment” of the Zone, which sets its own strict limits, is the result of a further “pure coincidence.” However, it is a priori a more probable hypothesis that this is not the case, but that the Zone “holds itself in check” because it contains something that, according to the visitors’ plan and intent, merits such enclosure.

  (3)

  Then again, entire objects lie scattered chaotically in the Zone. It is probably this that has put Dr. Pilman in mind of a roadside picnic, where garbage is left behind. It thus really does appear as if these things were carelessly thrown away. But one can also defend the view that nobody threw them away, that they scattered themselves chaotically when the containers they were brought in burst.

  (4)

  Furthermore, the objects in the Zone frequently have the character of extremely dangerous pitfalls or booby-traps. Compared to dealing with them, defusing bombs or mines is sheer child’s play. Again one cannot exclude the possibility that they were carelessly discarded by visitors indifferent to human welfare, or even the other possibility that the visitors treated people in the way that an assassin treats children when he passes out poisoned candies in a kindergarten. But another explanation is also permissible: that the objects do not function in the way they should because they were damaged during the landing.

  (5)

  Finally, it is worth remarking that among the forces at work in the Zone are those that produce an effect of “resurrection from the grave.” Under their influence, human corpses rise up and begin to move about. This is treated as a resurrection not of the dead, who are thereby returned to their normal state of living, but — to use the term from the story — of “moulages — … dummies” (3: 109), whose newly formed tissue is not identical with normal living tissue. To quote Pilman: “If you cut off some part… [from these living corpses], the part will live on. Separately. Without any physiological solutions to nourish it” (3:109). (Dr. Pilman claims that such a quasi-resurrection would violate the second law of thermodynamics; this is not a necessarily valid conclusion, but we do not want to quarrel with the learned man at this point, because doing so would take us too far off our track.) The “pseudo-resurrection” of the “zombies,” or “moulages” -their reconstruction from a skeletal basis — is an effect that is very important for understanding the nature of the landing. Their “resurrection” seems to be more probable as a consequence of purposive rather than undirected activities; and by the same token, it

  would certainly appear easier to resurrect real, concrete life forms (i.e., terrestrial ones, consisting of albumen) than “omnipossible” (and hypothetical) forms of life in the cosmos. We do not know if that is correct, just as we do not know if the effect was not directed exclusively at the visitors themselves (it might be a “remedy in their first-aid kit”). But whatever is the case, the resurrection effect suggests that the visitors knew a lot about the physiology of terrestrial life forms.

  All of this constitutes the evidence for our hypothesis. We maintain that there has been no landing after all. Our hypothesis, indeed, runs otherwise… A spaceship filled with containers that held samples of the products of a highly developed civilization came into the vicinity of the earth. It was not a manned ship, but an automatically piloted space probe. That is the simplest explanation of why no one manages to observe a single visitor. Every other hypothesis has to assume either that the visitors are invisible to humans or that they deliberately hide from them. In the approach to earth, the vessel sustained damage and broke into six parts, which one after another plunged from their orbit to earth.

  This seems to contradict what is said about the radiants discovered by and named after Dr. Pilman; they ostensibly confirm that Someone fired at earth six times from Alpha Centauri in the Cygnus constellation. Nevertheless, between our interpretation and the radiants there stands no contradiction. In astronomy the term “radiant” refers to a likely place in the heavens from which a meteor swarm is approaching. The determination of a radiant in astronomy is not synonymous with taking a fix on the place from which the meteors actually originate. They may approach on an elliptical or parabolic curve; the radiant is a tangent which a terrestrial observer plots on such a curve, and it extends backward (in the opposite direction from the meteors’ fall) until it reaches the place in the heavens where a specific cluster of stars is located. Thus when one names meteors according to their radiants, this by no means signifies that the meteors are in fact emanating from that star cluster after which astronomers have named them. Consequently, the Pilman Radiant offers us no clue at all as to whether what descended in the Zones was actually sent from the principal star of the Cygnus constellation. As to where the six flying objects or probes came from, the Pilman Radiant can tell us nothing, albeit the story directly encourages the impression that it can. That is a false impression, occasioned by Dr. Pilman’s insufficiently precise manner of expressing himself in responding to journalists’ queries at the outset of the story. That what has arrived here actually flew directly from Alpha Centauri to earth is out of the question. Traversing such a distance on a perfect flight path borders on an astronautical impossibility, since on the way innumerable interferences (above all, those of gravitational forces) must influence the trajectory. In addition, it is mathematically demonstrable that the curve that six shots would produce on the surface of a sphere (while the sphere is rotating, as the earth does) cannot be distinguished from the curv
e resulting from the projection of a segment in the orbital trajectory onto the surface of the sphere. Pilman’s radiant does not altogether exclude the hypothesis of a disintegrated spaceship crashing in six separate sections, one after the other. Once one knows a meteor’s radiant and its final velocity, one can compute the orbital path from which it actually approached, because a meteor, being an inanimate object subject to the laws of celestial mechanics, cannot alter its course at will. From a spaceship’s radiant, on the other hand, one can make out nothing about its place of origin, its course, its travel speed, etc., because a spaceship is a navigable, mechanized body and can execute maneuvers, make course corrections, change its speed, and so forth. In short, from the so-called Pilman Radiant nothing follows in favor of any one of the hypotheses about the landing.

  Of course we cannot know for sure that the spaceship was indeed the victim of a catastrophe. Nonetheless, our hypothesis accounts for everything that happened, and does so in the most economical manner. Why should one not properly assume that the landing has miscarried? To suppose that the unusual nature of the objects found in the Zone demonstrates the high level of the visitors’ ingenuity and thus precludes a calamity’s befalling their ship is a logically false inference. The visitors’ perfection, in consequence of which no harm could come to their ship, is neither a fact nor a rationally defensible hypothesis, but merely an article of faith. Perfection to the point of infallibility is, in our judgment, reserved solely for those entities with which theology concerns itself — which is to say, there is no infallible applied science. We are not asserting that an accident definitely occurred, merely that a breakdown would, in one fell swoop, account for everything that happened by reference to a common single cause.

  Besides, the facts that we mentioned in point (1) above about the characteristics of the objects found in the Zone make plausible the conjecture that someone sent containers of technological specimens in earth’s direction. Our point (2) (concerning the Zone’s “self-containment”) further increases the likelihood of (1), that the senders, unable to be absolutely certain that no catastrophe would befall their spaceship during its landing, must at least have provided for a minimizing of the consequences, and have done so precisely by installing on board a safety device that would not allow the effects of the catastrophe to spread, but would almost hermetically confine them to one place. This must naturally have been a device meant to survive the aftermath of the catastrophe. Somehow it has survived. The fact mentioned above under my third point heightens the probability that an accident has occurred, because nothing is more natural than that the containers’ contents should be chaotically scattered by the force of the impact with earth. Even the fact cited as my fourth point (i.e., the perils the objects present) becomes understandable as a consequence of the same cause. Not only did the containers burst upon impact, but most of their contents were damaged in various ways. The same thing would happen if someone were to drop containers with foodstuffs, medicines, insecticides, etc., down to the Samoan Islands in what turn out to be defective parachutes. These crash to earth and the containers rupture — in consequence of which, the chocolates are full of hexachlorides, the gingerbread full of emetics, and so on. It is possible for the Samoans to conclude that someone has made a very malicious attempt on their lives; yet in the Samoans’ place scientists ought not to jump to the same conclusion. What we are getting at is that the intention of the “Others” does not manifest itself in the pernicious character of the cosmic offerings: it is not the case that they took pleasure in pelting us with deadly debris, but, rather, that an unfortunate accident — the defect in their spaceship — transformed their well-intended consignment into scrap metal. (We do not want to go into further specifics of our hypothesis here; but in general terms, they would run as follows: since the ship left no trace behind, it must certainly not have landed but simply accomplished the dropping off of the containers. The containers, moreover, need not necessarily have taken the form of material vessels; the objects may have been “packaged,” held together, by a type of force field, whose failure at a crucial moment caused the contents of the “packages” to rain down on earth.)

  The Strugatskys might tell us that the hypothesis of “samples” is likewise taken into account in their book. After all, in his conversation with Noonan, Dr. Pilman makes mention of the possibility that “[a] highly rational culture threw containers with artifacts of its civilization onto Earth. They expect us to study the artifacts, make a giant technological leap, and send a signal in response to show we are ready for contact” (3:103). However, this version — which, by the way, does not admit the possibility that the consignments have arrived in a disastrously damaged condition — the story through an ironic undertone utterly discredits. Indeed, how could objects that are more dangerous than explosives and that are dispatched to unknown addressees as gifts be supposed to invite the recipients to make contact? That would be like sending someone an invitation to a ball, but enclosing the invitation in a letter-bomb. In the story’s presentation of it, this hypothesis is therefore the one that is most self-compromised in view of the Zone’s macabre characteristics.

  The hypothesis of an accident, on the other hand, not only explains events quite naturally, but also rehabilitates at once the “Others” as Senders and the human beings as Recipients of a “Danaic gift” from the stars. The senders, far from being guilty of wrongdoing, have even — as was their duty — foreseen the worst possibility and provided the shipment with a safety device, thanks to which all of the Zone’s effects are confined to a particular location. Accordingly, the Zone’s peculiarity is most simply explained by the foresight of the senders, who, unable to eliminate the possibility of an accident, therefore took care that its consequences would be kept within bounds. The hypothesis of an accident likewise exonerates humankind, and especially the learned, whose perplexity about the gift becomes understandable, given the additional difficulties they have to overcome because they do not know which of the properties of the objects in the Zone were intended by the designers and which are the result of the damage incurred during the catastrophe.

  It does not take long to explain why the authors silently passed our version of the landing by. It could not please them because it detracts from the work’s menacing and hence mysterious atmosphere. Still, their error lies in just this silence about the possibility of an accident. We understand quite well why they chose this course. In the meeting of the civilizations, both sides were meant to be discredited. Men agree on using the gift only in base and self-destructive ways because that is human nature; and the Senders prove their murderous indifference to humanity because beings of high intelligence do not give a damn about their intellectual inferiors. So extreme a version of the invasion theme would have deserved literary representation, all the more since it surpasses everything that science fiction has so far accomplished in this direction. But in that case the narrative would have had to rule out our hypothesis about the damaged gift; it would have had to bring it to grief from the outset — that is, it ought to have discredited it. Silence about it, on the other hand, though intended to consign our version to oblivion, constituted a mistaken authorial tactic.

  From what has been said, conclusions of a more general nature arise with regard to the optimal strategy for dealing with the invasion theme.[20] In order to carry out the strategy of preserving the mystery, two requirements have to be rigorously fulfilled. First of all, the author must not arouse the suspicion that certain facts are being hidden from the reader, facts beknown to the fictive heroes (all of Roadside Picnic’s protagonists must know, for example, whether another Zone, aside from the one in Harmont, also lies within a city’s limits). The reader must remain convinced that the information the author imparts is, within the limits of possibility, complete. The mystery then will be kept hidden by the very unfolding and presentation of the depicted events, which create, as it were, an impenetrable mask behind which no one can see. Otherwise this effect can be achie
ved only through a very precise balancing of the facts. They may neither point in one direction too unequivocally, nor overwhelm us by being all too chaotically diffuse. What they attest to must remain undecided, on the divide, as it were, between diverging alternatives, without inclining definitively toward any one side.

  Now our excellent authors have defeated their own purposes by maligning the visitors at the end of their story. That the Golden Ball is supposed to fulfill wishes is, of course, a naïve belief, one of those popular legends that rose up in the wake of the visit. It was clear to the authors that they could not make an infernal machine out of this Ball, since that would have been an exaggeration that would have changed the meaning of their book: it would have transformed the Zone from something ambiguous, albeit dismal, into an unequivocal trap for humankind. Therefore they made the Golden Ball into an almost neutral object and let death stand not in it, but right beside it, as a “transparent emptiness that was lurking in the shadow of the excavator’s bucket” (4:143), a nothingness that throttles Arthur before Redrick’s eyes. Comparing the first expedition into the Zone that Redrick undertakes (together with Panov) with the last (which, in the company of Arthur, leads to the Golden Ball), one recognizes that the latter adventure has the structure of a “black fairy tale.” The fairy-tale quality is not difficult to spot: like a valiant knight-errant seeking the elixir of life or a magic ring, the heroes must overcome dreadful and dangerous obstacles while striving toward a highly valued treasure. Furthermore, Redrick knows that the approach to the Golden Ball is barred by a mysterious “grinder” (4:130), which one must “satiate” by bringing it a human sacrifice. That is why he lets Arthur be the first to approach the sphere — and in fact Arthur dies before his eyes, and his death momentarily breaks the evil spell, so that Redrick in his turn can then reach the Golden Ball. At that point, the authors break off the table and subscribe the word “finis.” This, however, is a way out which merely attenuates the shape of things without altering it.