More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  He put down the dictionary, agitated, flushed, but also a little disillusioned. Ananke—compulsion—compulsive neurosis, probably. An obsessive compulsive? Even as a boy—there must have been something in the family history—he’d hunted for definitions, and now his memory—nobody could accuse him of not having a good memory—though not without resistance, began to yield those medical descriptions. Phrases from the medical encyclopedia flashed before him, revelatory, casting Cornelius in a totally new light.

  It was a spectacle as mean as it was pitiable. So that’s why the compulsion to wash his hands by the hour, to comb the ship for flies; why he flew into a rage when he lost a bookmark, why he kept his towel under lock and key and wouldn’t occupy anyone else’s chair. One compulsion compounded by another, a whole complex, overwhelming him, exposing him to ridicule. Sooner or later, the doctors had to notice. Finally he was relieved of his command. Straining his memory, Pirx thought he could recall the phrase underlined in the lower margin: Disqualified for duty. And since the psychiatrist knew nothing of computers, he gave Cornelius clearance to work at Syntronics. He probably thought it an ideal place for a pedant like him. What better way to show off his meticulousness! It could only do him good. A responsible position and—most important of all—one closely allied with astronautical science…

  Pirx lay back, his eyes glued to the ceiling. He could imagine Cornelius at Syntronics effortlessly. What was his job? He ran the load-test simulators. In other words, he put the computers through their paces, something that came naturally to him. The man probably lived in constant dread of being taken for a madman, which he wasn’t. He never panicked in a real crisis. He was brave, but his bravery was gradually eroded by his obsessions. Torn between his crew and his own twisted insides, he must have felt caught between the hammer and the anvil. He looked like a sufferer, not because he surrendered to his obsessions, not because he was deranged, but because he resisted them, constantly seeking pretexts, a means of justification. He needed those regulations; he used them to vindicate himself, to show it was not his fault, that he was not to blame for that eternal drilling. He wasn’t a sergeant at heart; otherwise, he would not have read Poe’s eerie, macabre stories. Was he searching for his own private hell in those tales? What must it be like to harbor a tangle of barbed wire, to be always on the defensive, ready to suppress, time and again … and underneath it all, the terror of the unpredictable, of that something against which he had always to be on guard. Hence the drilling and the exercising, the test alerts, the inspections, the musters, the surveillance, the all-night prowling fore and aft—good God, he knew how they all laughed on the sly, possibly even saw himself how senseless it was. Was he now taking it out on those computers? If so, then unconsciously. A case of transference. He excused himself on the grounds of necessity.

  How uncanny the degree to which another language, that of medical science, could throw what was previously known, personally and second-hand, into a new perspective. With the master key of psychiatry, Pirx was able to plumb the depths, to have a man’s personality laid bare, distilled, reduced to a handful of reflexes, as pitiful as they were inescapable. To be a doctor accustomed to viewing people as case studies, even for the sake of helping them, struck him as unspeakably obscene. And yet only now did the thin aura of buffoonery edging the memory of Cornelius begin to dissolve. In this new and unexpected version there was no room for that maliciously schoolboyish, shipboard, barracks kind of humor. There was nothing funny about Cornelius.

  One would have thought his post at Syntronics the right job for the right man: a chance to prod, pressure, and challenge to the utmost of endurance, a place to vent all his frustrations. To the uninitiated, it must have seemed a perfect marriage. An old pro, an ex-rocket jockey, transmitting all he knew to the computers—what could be more ideal? He, on the other hand, was freed from all restraints: he was dealing with slaves, not people. A computer fresh off the assembly line was like a newborn babe: full of potential, but helpless.

  Learning requires the ability to filter the relevant from an undifferentiated mass. At the test bench, the computer plays the part of the brain, whereas the simulator imitates the body. The brain fed by the body: an apt analogy.

  Just as the brain oversees the state of every muscle, a computer monitors a ship’s systems. It transmits a barrage of questions to all parts of the ship, and the computer, that metal colossus, translates the responses into a visual display. Intruding on the infallible was a man debilitated by a fear of the unknown and combatting it with his obsessive rituals. The simulator became a tool of his compulsiveness, the embodiment of his anxieties. Cornelius was governed by the law of maximum safety. How laudable! How hard he must have tried! A routine flow was quickly judged to be substandard. And the greater the challenge, the faster the feedback.

  Cornelius must have decided that the retrieval speed of the sub-routines had to be correlated with the importance of the procedure. And since the landing maneuver was the most critical… Did he reprogram it? It was just like someone who spends hours inspecting his car motor and ends up trying to rewrite the operator’s manual. The program couldn’t disobey him. He was pushing into areas where the program was defenseless. Whenever an overloaded computer broke down, Cornelius sent it back to the engineering department. Did he realize that he was infecting them with his obsessions? Probably not. He was a man of practice, not theory—a perfectionist, whether in regard to machines or men. He overloaded his computers, but, then, his computers were hardly able to protest. The latest models were designed to operate like chess players and were programmed to beat any operator, provided their trainer wasn’t a Cornelius. They could anticipate two or three moves in advance, but they overloaded when the number of variables increased exponentially. In the case of ten consecutive chess moves, a trillion operations would not have sufficed. In a tournament, a player handicapped by such self-paralysis would be disqualified in the first round. Aboard ship, it took longer: a computer’s input/output can be monitored, but not its insides. Inside, a massive traffic jam; outside, a routine procedure. For a while, anyway.

  Such was the brain, so overburdened with spurious tasks as to be rendered incapable of dealing with real ones, that stood at the helm of a hundred-thousand-tonner. Each of Cornelius’s computers was afflicted with the “anankastic syndrome”: a compulsion to repeat, to complicate simple tasks; a formality of gestures, a pattern of ritualized behavior. They simulated not the anxiety, of course, but its systemic reactions. Paradoxically, the fact that they were new, advanced models, equipped with a greater memory, facilitated their undoing: they could continue to function, even with their circuits overloaded.

  Still, something in the Agathodaemon’s zenith must have precipitated the end—the approach of a strong head wind, perhaps, calling for instantaneous reactions, with the computer mired in its own avalanche, lacking any overriding function. It had ceased to be a real-time computer; it could no longer model real events; it could only founder in a sea of illusions… When it found itself confronted by a huge mass, a planetary shield, its program refused to let it abort the procedure, which, at the same time, it could no longer continue. So it interpreted the planet as a meteorite on a collision course, this being the last gate, the only possibility acceptable to the program. Since it couldn’t communicate that to the cockpit—it wasn’t a reasoning human being, after all—it went on computing, calculating to the bitter end: a collision meant a 100 percent chance of annihilation, an escape maneuver, a 90-95 percent chance, so it chose the latter: emergency thrust!

  It all made sense. Logical—but without the slightest shred of evidence. It was something unprecedented. How could he confirm his suspicions? The psychiatrist who had treated Cornelius, helped him, given him job clearance? The Hippocratic oath would seal his lips, and the seal of secrecy could be broken only by a court order. Meanwhile, six days from now, the Ares…

  That left Cornelius himself. Was he aware by now? After all that had happened, did he susp
ect anything, have any inkling? There was no second-guessing the veteran commander. He was untouchable, as if insulated by a glass wall. Even if gnawed by doubts, he would not admit to them. He would suppress them, that was clear enough.

  But it was bound to come out anyway, after the next shipwreck. Assuming the Anabis soft-landed, a routine statistical analysis would point the finger of suspicion at Cornelius’s computers. Every component would be microscopically analyzed, every clue traced…

  But Pirx couldn’t just sit around and twiddle his thumbs. What to do? He knew: erase the Ares’s memory, transmit the original program, and the computer would be reprogrammed in a matter of hours.

  Still, he needed hard evidence. A shred, at least. Or even some circumstantial evidence. But he had zilch. One fleeting recollection, from years past, of a medical chart read upside down, a nickname, a handful of gossip, anecdotes, a catalogue of the man’s quirks… To stand before the panel and cite this as proof of the man’s mental instability, as the cause of the shipwreck, would have been lunacy. Even if he impugned the old man’s sanity, there was still the Ares. During the entire reprogramming operation, the ship would be, as it were, blind and deaf. The wildest ideas came to him: if he couldn’t do it officially, why not lift off and warn the Ares from on board the Cuivier, and to hell with the consequences. But it was too risky. He didn’t know the chief navigator. Besides, would he have taken the advice of a stranger? Advice based on mere hypotheses? Without any hard facts? Hm…

  So it was Cornelius or nothing. Pirx knew his address: Syntronics Corp., Boston. But how to ask someone so distrustful, pedantic, and fastidious to confess to the very thing he’d spent a lifetime trying to prevent? If he could have taken him aside, worked on him a little, alerted him to the plight of the Ares, maybe then Cornelius would have consented, would have gone along with it—he was, after all, a man of scruple. But how, on that remote Mars-Earth hookup, riddled with eight-minute pauses, talking not man to man but screen to screen, could he accuse a pathetic old man of such a thing, and urge him to confess to having murdered—however unintentionally—some thirty people? Impossible.

  He sat on the cot, hands clasped, as if praying. He felt profound incredulity, disbelief: to be so sure of something—and so powerless! His eyes roamed the books on the shelf. They had helped him—with their failed vision. They had been more concerned with those canals, with some distant and hypothetical thing, telescopically viewed, than with themselves. They had argued about a Mars they couldn’t see, the product only of the heroic and fatal visions hatched by their own minds. They had projected their fantasies two hundred million kilometers into space—instead of probing themselves. And those who sought the causes of the calamity in the wilds of computer theory were sadly off target. The computers were as innocent and neutral as Mars, against which he, Pirx, bore an insane grudge, as if the world were to blame for the illusions fostered about it. These antiquated books had done their best. He saw no way out.

  On the very bottom shelf, in a row of garishly bound fiction, stood a faded blue volume of Edgar Allan Poe. So Romani was a Poe fan. Not Pirx; he disliked Poe for the artificiality of his language, for the exquisiteness of vision that refused to admit to its dreamlike derivation. For Cornelius, too, Poe was the Bible. Instinctively, Pirx reached for the volume, which flipped open on its own to the table of contents. One of the titles jogged his memory. Cornelius had recommended it to him once, after the watch—a fantastically rigged story of a murderer uncovered. At the time, Pirx had been obliged to sing its praises—a CO, after all, never erred…

  At first, he merely toyed with the idea. A schoolboy’s prank, or a blow below the belt? Crude, lowdown, mean—yes, but, who knew, maybe the best solution. A telegram consisting of just four words. But what if he was all wrong? Maybe the medical file referred to another Cornelius; maybe Cornelius ran standard computer tests and had a clear conscience. In that case he’d slough it off as a dumb and exceedingly tasteless joke. But if the shipwreck had piqued his conscience, aroused the vaguest suspicion; if he was gradually being awakened to, but still resisting, his own complicity, then those four words would land like a thunderbolt. Then would come the shock of exposure—for something only partially grasped—and the guilt. Then he couldn’t avoid thinking of the Ares’s impending fate; even if he tried to repress it, the telegram would fester inside him. No more thumb-twiddling, no more sitting back in idle anticipation; the message would get under his skin, gnaw at his conscience, and—then what? Pirx knew the old man well enough to know that he wouldn’t turn himself in, wouldn’t confess, any more than he would start inventing alibis. Once convinced of his guilt, he would do what he thought proper, without a whimper, in silence.

  Pirx knew it wasn’t really right. Again he ticked off the alternatives, ready to approach the devil himself—Van der Voyt—if it would do any good. But no one could stop it now. No one. Oh, if it weren’t for the Ares and the race against time… Getting the psychiatrist to break his oath, reviewing Cornelius’s testing methods, tearing down the Ares’s computer—all that would take weeks. So what was left? Soften him up first with a message? One that read… But that would be a tip-off, a dead give-away. Cornelius, with his twisted mind, was sure to plead some excuse, to cite some pretext—not even the most moral person can stifle the instinct for self-preservation. He would go on the defensive, or withdraw into a disdainful silence, and meanwhile the Ares…

  Pirx was overcome by a sinking sensation, a feeling of losing ground, like the character in another Poe story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” defenseless against the force that kept pushing him, millimeter by millimeter, toward the abyss. For what could be more defenseless than to suffer, and because of this suffering to be dealt a dirty blow? What could be meaner?

  Scuttle the idea? Nothing would have been cozier than to keep a tight lip. No one would ever be the wiser. They wouldn’t figure it out until the next shipwreck, and after they picked up the scent…

  But if it was just a matter of time, if his silence really couldn’t save the old commander, then wasn’t he duty-bound…? Suddenly, as if he had shed all qualms, Pirx went into action.

  The ground floor was deserted. Only one operator on duty in the laser-communications cabin: Haroun. The message read as follows: “Syntronics Corp., Boston, Mass., U.S.A., Earth. Warren Cornelius: THOU ART THE MAN.” And below Pirx’s signature, “Member of the board of inquiry investigating the causes of the Ariel’s shipwreck. Address of sender: Agathodaemon, Mars.” That was all. He went back and shut himself up in his room. Later there was a knock at the door, and voices, but he played deaf. He had to be alone now—alone with the mortification that he knew was bound to come. Nothing to do but ride it out.

  Later that same night he read Schiaparelli—to keep himself from conjuring up, in a hundred different versions, how Cornelius, cocking his gray, bristling eyebrows, would pick up the telegram bearing a Mars address, unfold the crinkly paper, and hold it up to his farsighted eyes. He didn’t digest a word of Schiaparelli; each time he turned the page, he was suddenly overwhelmed by shocked dismay mixed with an almost childlike pity. Me? Pirx? How could I have done such a thing?

  Pirx had guessed right: Cornelius felt trapped. Cornered. The very nature of the situation, dictated by the natural sequence of events, left him no way out, not the slightest elbow room. Taking a sheet of paper, he jotted down, in his neat and legible hand, a few lines of explanation—that he had acted in good faith, that he accepted full responsibility—signed it, and, at 1530 hours, four hours after having received Pirx’s telegram, shot himself in the mouth. No reference to any illness, no attempt at self-vindication. Nothing.

  It was as if he acknowledged only that part of the message dealing with the Ares, and had decided to cooperate in the rescue attempt—but nothing else. His response seemed to convey sober approval of Pirx’s action, but also profound disgust with his methods.

  Maybe Pirx had been wrong. Ironically, he was bothered by the theatricality of what
he had done, a gesture inspired by Poe. He had trapped Cornelius by using his favorite author, whose manner he himself had always found contrived, irritating, whose fake corpses returning from the grave to point a blood-stained finger at the murderer failed to persuade him of life’s horror, which, as Pirx knew from experience, was more mocking than precious. This same discrepancy held for Mars, as viewed by two succeeding generations, during which it went from an unreachable red spot in the night sky, displaying semi-intelligible signs of an alien intelligence, to a quotidian terrain of grinding labor, political machination, and intrigue; a world of enervating windstorms, clutter, shipwrecks; a place from which to behold Earth’s poetic blue sparkle, but also one that could inflict a killing. The immaculate—because imperfectly perceived—Mars of early astrography had faded, leaving only those Greek and Latin names having the ring of an alchemist’s incantations; the actual terrain by now bore the imprints of heavy boots. The epoch of high-minded theoretical debate had set below the horizon and, in perishing, had revealed its true face: a dream nourished by its own futility of fulfillment. All that remained was the Mars of tedious travail, of budgeting, and of such grimy, dun-gray dawns as the one in which Pirx now went, proof in hand, to the final session.

  ALSO BY STANISLAW LEM

  The Chain of Chance

  The Cyberiad

  The Futurological Congress

  The Investigation

  The Invincible

  Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

  Memoirs of a Space Traveler

  Mortal Engines

  A Perfect Vacuum

  Return from the Stars

  Solaris

  The Star Diaries

  Tales of Pirx the Pilot

  Copyright