More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  “Hello, Agathodaemon, this is Ariel, Klyne speaking; we’re on video, altitude six hundred, switching to automatic landing in twenty secs; over.”

  “Agathodaemon to Ariel,” Seyn, having just put out his cigarette, replied eagerly, his beaklike profile up close to the mesh of the microphone. “We have you on all screens; lie down and let her roost; over.”

  They’re goofing around, thought Pirx, who, superstitious as he was, didn’t like it, though they obviously had the landing procedure down pat.

  “Ariel to Agathodaemon: we have three hundred, switching to automatic, descending with no lateral drift, zero on zero, what’s the wind force? Over.”

  “Agathodaemon to Ariel: wind at a hundred eighty per hour, north-northwest, won’t bother you; over.”

  “Ariel to everybody: descending in the axis, stern first, on automatic; over and out.”

  Silence fell; only the transmitters were mincing away as a flaming white speck, swelling as fast as a bubble being blown out of fiery glass, appeared on the screens. It was the ship’s gaping tail section, descending as if on an invisible plumb line, without the slightest jerking or tilting or gyrating. Pirx thrilled to see it. Altitude at about a hundred kilometers, he guessed; no sense watching until it was down around fifty; besides, the observation windows were too crowded with craning heads as it was.

  Ground control was in constant radio contact with the ship, but there was nothing to radio, leaving the crew to sit back in their antigravitational chairs and trust to the computers commanded by the ship’s primary computer, which had just ordered a shift from atomic to boron drive at an altitude of sixty kilometers, or at the point of atmospheric entry. Pirx now walked up to the middle window, the largest, and immediately sighted through the sky’s pale blur a bright green sparkle, microscopic but vibrating with uncommon radiance—as if the Martian horizon were being drilled from above with a burning emerald. From this incandescent speck, pale filaments fanned in all directions—cloud wisps, or, rather, those aborted clouds-to-be which in the local atmosphere served as surrogates for the real thing. Sucked up into the orbit of the ship’s rocket flare, they ignited and exploded like fireworks. The ship’s circular flange swelled. The air was visibly palpitating from the exhaust, which a novice might have mistaken for a slight vacillation, but Pirx was too experienced to be fooled. Things were going so smoothly, so routinely, that he was reminded of the ease with which the first human step on the Moon had been taken. By now the fuselage was a burning green disk ringed with a scintillating halo. He glanced at the main altimeter above the control terminals—the altitude of such a supership was easy to misjudge; eleven, no, twelve kilometers separated the Ariel, decelerating in response to the reverse thrust, from Mars.

  Then several things happened at once.

  The Ariel’s stern nozzles, in a nimbus crowned with green rays, began to vibrate in a different way. Over the loudspeaker came a tumult, a muffled cry, something like “Manual!” or maybe “Many!”—one inscrutable word shouted by a human voice, too altered to have been Klyne’s. A second later, the green blaze spewing from the Ariel’s stem paled, then ballooned into an awesome blue-white incandescence—and Pirx understood at once, in a shudder of dread that shook him from head to toe, so that the hollow voice booming from the loudspeaker surprised him not at all.

  “ARIEL”—rasped the husky voice—“COURSE ALTERATION. AWAY FROM METEORITE. FULL POWER AHEAD IN THE AXIS! ATTENTION! FULL THRUST!”

  It was the computer’s voice. Then another—this one human—yelled something in the background. Pirx had correctly diagnosed the change in exhaust: the reactor’s full thrust had taken over from the boron, and the giant spaceship, as if arrested by the powerful blow of an invisible fist, vibrating in all its joints, stopped—or so it seemed to those looking on—in the thin air, a mere four or five kilometers above the cosmodrome’s shield. To arrest a hundred-thousand-ton mass before reversing, without decelerating first, was unheard of, a maneuver in violation of every rule and regulation, defying all the basics of astronavigation. Pirx saw the giant cylinder’s hull in foreshortened perspective. The ship was losing its vertical trim; it was listing. Ever so slowly, it began to right itself, then tilted the other way, like a giant pendulum, resulting in an even steeper inclination of the quarter-mile-long hull. At such low velocity, a loss of stability of this amplitude was beyond correction. Only in those seconds did Pirx hear the chief controller scream:

  “Ariel, Ariel! What are you doing? What’s happening up there?!”

  Pirx, standing by a parallel, vacant terminal, shouted into the mike:

  “KLYNE! SWITCH TO MANUAL OVERRIDE!!! TO MANUAL FOR LANDING!!! MANUAL!!!”

  Just then they were jolted by a thunderous roar—the Ariel’s delayed sound wave, unremitting, prolonged. How fast it had all happened! A concerted cry went up from the windows. The controllers jumped up from their consoles.

  The Ariel plummeted like a stone, recklessly strewing the atmosphere with swirls of exhaust flare, rotating slowly, corpselike, an enormous iron tower flung from the sky onto dirty desert dunes. All stood nailed to the floor in a hollow, horrific silence fraught with impotence; the loudspeaker grated, crackled, rumbled with the distant clamor—like the roar of the sea—while a refulgent, white, incredibly long cylinder shot down with accelerated speed, seemingly aimed at the control tower. Pirx’s neighbor let out a groan. Instinctively everyone ducked.

  The hull slammed into one of the shield’s low outer walls, halved, and, breaking up with an eerie slowness in a shower of fragments, buried itself in the sand; a ten-story cloud shot up, boomed, and rained stitches of fire. Above the curtain of ejected sand loomed the still blindingly white nose section, which, truncated from the rest, traversed the air a few hundred meters; then one, two, three powerful thuds with the force of earthquake tremors. The whole building heaved, rose and fell like a skiff on a wave. Then, in a hellish racket of cracking iron, everything was blotted out by a brownish-black wall of smoke and dust. Even as they raced downstairs to the airlock, Pirx, one of the first to suit up, had no doubts: in such a collision, there could be no survivors.

  Soon they were running, buffeted by the gale winds; from far off, from the direction of the “bell,” the first of the caterpillar vehicles and hovercrafts were already on the move. But there was no reason to hurry. Pirx didn’t know how or when he returned to the control tower—the image of the crater and the crushed hull still in his dazed eyes—and only at the sight of his own suddenly grayed, somewhat shrunken face in a wall mirror did he come to.

  By afternoon, a committee of experts had been set up to investigate the causes of the crash. Work crews with excavators and cranes were still clearing away the wreckage of the giant vehicle, and had yet to reach the deeply buried cockpit containing the automatic controls, when a team of specialists was bused over from Syrtis Major—in one of those quaint little helicopters with huge propellers, custom-designed for flight in the Martian air. Pirx kept out of the way and didn’t ask questions, knowing only too well that the case bordered on the unsolvable. During a routine landing, with all its hallowed sequences and clockwork programming, for no apparent reason the Ariel’s primary computer had shut down the boron power, signaled a residual meteorite alarm, and initiated an escape maneuver at full thrust; the ship’s stability, once lost during this neck-breaking action, was never regained. It was an event unprecedented in the history of astronavigation, and every plausible hypothesis—a computer failure, a glitch, a short in one of the circuits—appeared highly improbable, because there was not one but two programs for lift-off and landing, safeguarded by so many back-up systems as to make sabotage a more likely cause.

  He puzzled over the incident in the little cubicle that Seyn had put at his disposal the night before, deliberately laying low so as not to intrude, especially since he was scheduled to lift off within the next twenty-four hours; but he couldn’t come up with anything, or at least not with anything he could report to the committee. He
wasn’t forgotten, though; a few minutes before one in the afternoon, Seyn paid him a visit. Waiting in the corridor was Romani; Pirx, on his way out, didn’t recognize him at first. The coordinator of the Agathodaemon complex could have passed for one of the mechanics: he wore a pair of sooty, grease-stained overalls, his face was drawn, the left corner of his mouth twitched, and only his voice had a familiar ring. On behalf of the committee, of which he was a member, he asked Pirx to postpone the Cuivier’s lift-off.

  “Sure thing.” Pirx, a trifle stunned, tried to regain his composure. “I just need clearance from Base.”

  “Leave that to us.”

  Nothing more was said, and the three of them marched over to the main “bubble,” where, inside the long, squat command HQ, sat some twenty or more experts—a few of whom were based locally, the majority having flown over from Syrtis Major. It was lunchtime, but since every second was precious, they were served a cold meal from the cafeteria. Over tea and paper plates, which lent the proceedings a strangely casual, even festive air, the session got under way. The chairman, Engineer Hoyster, called first on Pirx to describe the abortive landing, and Pirx could easily guess why. Belonging neither to the ground-control team nor to Agathodaemon’s crew, he was the only unbiased witness present. When he reached the point of his own personal intervention, Hoyster interrupted him.

  “So you wanted Klyne to shift from automatic to manual override?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, may I ask?”

  “I figured it was his only chance,” Pirx answered without hesitation.

  “Right. And you didn’t foresee that the shift to manual would mean a loss of stability?”

  “It was already lost. This can be checked; we do have the tapes.”

  “Naturally. We just wanted to get a general picture. What’s your own guess?”

  “As to the cause?”

  “Yes. For the moment we’re just piecing together the facts. Nothing you say will be binding; any hypothesis, however shaky, may prove valuable.”

  “I see. My guess is that something went haywire with the computer. What, or even how, I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes and ears. The computer aborted the maneuver and signaled a meteorite alert. It sounded like ‘Meteorites—attention, full power ahead in the axis.’ But with no meteorites around…” Pirx shrugged.

  “The Ariel was an advanced AIBM 09,” observed Boulder, an electronics engineer with whom Pirx had rubbed elbows at Syrtis Major.

  Pirx nodded.

  “I know. That’s why I said I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. But it did happen.”

  “Why did Klyne hold back, in your opinion, Commander?” asked Hoyster.

  Pirx felt his insides go cold; before answering, he cast a glance around the table. It was a question that had to be asked, though he didn’t relish being the first to face it.

  “I don’t know the answer to that.”

  “Of course not. But you’re an old-timer; put yourself in his place…”

  “I did. I would have done what I tried to make him do.”

  “And?”

  “No response. A madhouse. Yelling, maybe. The tapes will have to be checked and rechecked, though I’m afraid it won’t do much good.”

  “Commander,” said Hoyster, in a soft but painstaking voice, as if struggling to choose his words, “you realize the situation, don’t you? As we’re speaking, there are two more superfreighters, equipped with the exact same guidance system, on the Aresterra line. The Anabis isn’t due for another three weeks, but the Ares is nine days away. No matter what our obligations to the dead, we owe more to the living. I’m sure in the past five hours you’ve given some thought to the case. I can’t force you, but I’m asking you to speak your mind.”

  Pirx blanched. He’d read Hoyster’s mind from his opening words, and a sensation, opaque, born of his nightmare, gripped him: an intense, desperate silence, a faceless enemy, and a double killing—of himself and the other. It came and went. He collected himself and looked Hoyster in the eye.

  “I see,” he said. “Klyne and I belong to two different generations. When I was getting my wings, servo-mechanisms were more error-prone. Distrust becomes second nature. My guess is … he trusted in them to the end.”

  “He thought the computer was in control, had a better command of the situation?”

  “Not so much in control. More like, if the computer couldn’t handle it, a man would be even less likely to do so.”

  He sighed. He’d spoken his mind without casting a shadow on his younger, now deceased, colleague.

  “Was there any chance of saving that ship, Commander?”

  “Hard to say. There was so little time. The Ariel dropped to zero velocity.”

  “Have you ever soft-landed under such conditions?”

  “Yes. But in a ship with a smaller mass, and it was on the Moon. The longer and heavier the ship, the harder it is to regain stability when you’re losing speed, especially if it goes into a list.”

  “Did Klyne hear you?”

  “I don’t know. He should have.”

  “Did he ever override the controls?”

  Pirx was about to defer to the tapes, but answered instead:

  “No.”

  “How do you know?” It was Romani.

  “The monitor showed ‘automatic landing’ the whole time. It went off only on impact.”

  “Could it not be, sir, that Klyne didn’t have time?” asked Seyn. Why was he “sirring” him when they were buddies? Hm. Keeping his distance, maybe. Out to get him?

  “The chances of survival can be mathematically deduced.” Pirx was aiming for objectivity. “I just don’t know offhand.”

  “But once the list exceeded forty-five degrees, stability was irretrievably lost,” insisted Seyn. “Right?”

  “Not on the Cuivier it wouldn’t be. One can increase the thrust beyond the accepted limits.”

  “An acceleration over twenty g’s can be fatal.”

  “It can be. But a fall from five kilometers up has to be.”

  That ended their brief exchange. Tobacco smoke hung under the lights, which had been switched on despite the daylight.

  “Do you mean that Klyne could have manned the controls but didn’t?” This was the chairman, Hoyster, picking up the thread.

  “It looks that way.”

  “Do you think you might have rattled him when you butted in?” asked Seyn’s assistant, a man from Agathodaemon, a stranger to Pirx. Was the home team against him? He could understand it if they were.

  “It’s a possibility. There was a lot of shouting in the cockpit. Or at least that’s what it sounded like.”

  “Panic?” asked Hoyster.

  “No comment.”

  “Why?”

  “You can listen to the tape. The voices were too garbled to be hard data. Too easy to misinterpret.”

  “In your opinion, could ground control have lent further assistance?” asked a poker-faced Hoyster. The committee was obviously divided; Hoyster was from Syrtis Major.

  “No. None.”

  “Your own reaction would seem to contradict you.”

  “Not really. Control has no right to countermand a skipper in such a situation. Things can look a lot different in the cockpit.”

  “So you admit you acted contrary to the rules?” Seyn’s assistant again.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” asked Hoyster.

  “The rules aren’t sacred. I always do what I think right. I’ve had to answer for it in the past.”

  “To whom?”

  “The Cosmic Tribunal.”

  “But you were cleared of all charges,” intruded Boulder. Syrtis Major versus Agathodaemon: it was blatantly obvious.

  Pirx paused.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He sat down in an adjacent chair. Seyn was the next to testify, followed by his assistant. They were still at it when th
e first ground recordings arrived. Telephone reports from the wreckage site confirmed the absence of any survivors, though they had yet to reach the Ariel’s cockpit, buried eleven meters below ground. The committee proceeded to audit the tapes and continued taking depositions without a break until seven, then recessed for an hour. Seyn and the Syrtisians drove out to the site of the shipwreck. Romani stopped Pirx in the passageway.

  “Commander Pirx…”

  “Yes?”

  “You haven’t any—uh—”

  “Don’t. The stakes are too high,” interrupted Pirx.

  Romani nodded. “You have seventy-two hours’ furlough. We’ve worked it out with Base.”

  “Earthside?” asked Pirx, astonished. “I don’t see how I can be—”

  “Hoyster, Rahaman, and Boulder want to co-opt you onto the committee. You’re not going to let us down, are you?”

  All three were Syrtisians.

  “I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” he replied, and they let it go at that.

  They reconvened at nine. The replay of the tapes was dramatic, but not nearly as much as the film, which recorded each stage of the calamity, from the moment the Ariel loomed as a green star in the zenith. Afterward, Hoyster gave a recap of the post-mortem.

  “All the evidence points to a computer breakdown. If it didn’t signal a meteorite alarm, it must have projected the Ariel on a collision course with something. The tapes show that it was three percent over the limit. Why, we don’t know. Maybe the cockpit will provide a clue.” He was referring to the Ariel’s on-board tapes, though Pirx did not share his optimism. “We’ll never know the exact sequence of events during those final moments in the cockpit. We do know that the computer’s Baud rate was perfect: even at the peak of the crisis, it was fully operative. The sub-routines performed flawlessly till the end, too. That much has been established. We’ve uncovered nothing to indicate any external or internal interference with the prescribed landing procedure. From 0703 to 0708 hours, all systems were go. The computer’s decision to abort the landing cannot, at present, be explained. Mr. Boulder?”

  “I don’t get it,”