Fiasco

by Stanisław Lem

  "Has any … change taken place?" he asked at last.

  His younger colleague returned the room to its original austerity and, growing serious, muttered, not that distinctly:

  "No, nothing's different. It's just that Arago asked me if we would drop in on him before the council."

  Gerbert winced, as at an unpleasant surprise.

  "And what did you say?"

  "That we'd come. Why are you making a face? You don't like paying him a visit?"

  "I'm not thrilled. You couldn't refuse, that's clear. But even without adding theology to this, we have a hell of a problem on our hands. What does he want from us? Did he say anything?"

  "Nothing. The man's decent, and wise, too. And discreet."

  "Discreetly he'll tell us that we're cannibals."

  "Nonsense. It's not as if we're on trial. We took them on board to revive them. He knows that."

  "And about the blood, too?"

  "I have no idea. What's so awful about the blood? They've been doing transfusions for hundreds of years."

  "In his eyes, it won't be a transfusion but a profanation of mortal remains—at the very least. Body snatching."

  "Bodies that nothing can help now. Transplanting, too, is as old as the hills. The religions—I'm no expert on the subject, but in any case his church hasn't opposed it. Why these sudden pangs of conscience before a priest, a monk? The Commander agrees, and the majority, if not everyone. Arago doesn't even have a vote. He's with us as some kind of Vatican observer or apostolic delegate. A passenger-spectator."

  "Fine, Victor. But the slides were a nasty surprise. We shouldn't have taken the bodies on board the Eurydice. I was against it. Why weren't they shipped to Earth?"

  "You know why—it worked out that way. Besides, as I pointed out, if anyone had a right to our voyage, they did."

  "A lot of good it will do them, since at best we can restore only one—at the cost of the others."

  Victor Davis regarded Gerbert with large eyes.

  "What's eating you? Is this our fault? The conditions on Titan wouldn't allow diagnoses. True or false? Well? Speak. I'd like to know just who I'm going to that Dominican with. Have you returned to the faith of your forefathers? In the thing we have to do—what we have to request—you see something evil? A sin?"

  Dr. Gerbert, calm until now, fought down a burst of anger.

  "You know perfectly well that I will request the same thing as you and the Head Physician. You know my views. Resurrection is no evil. The evil lies in the fact that out of two men fit for reanimation we can bring only one back to life. And that no one will make the choice for us… But we're wasting time. Let's go. I want to get this over with."

  "I have to change. Will you wait?"

  "No, I'll go myself. Come when you're ready. Which deck?"

  "The third, in the middle section. I'll be there in five minutes."

  They left together but got into different elevators. Gerbert touched the appropriate numbers and sped off in an oval, silver interior. When the egg-shaped vehicle came to a gentle stop, the curved wall opened in a spiral, like a camera iris. Facing him, in light that had no source, ran rows of concave doors with high thresholds, as on an old-fashioned ship. He found the door with the number 84 and a small nameplate: "R. P. Arago, D.A." While he was wondering—stupidly—what the "D.A." stood for (Doctor Angelicus? District Attorney?), the door parted.

  He entered a spacious cabin lined on all sides with glass-covered shelves of books. On two opposite walls were paintings in bright frames, reaching from ceiling to floor. On the right was Cranach's Tree of Knowledge, with Adam, the snake, and Eve; on the left, the Temptation of Saint Anthony by Bosch. Before he got a good look at the monsters floating in the sky of the Temptation, the Cranach was sucked in behind a bookcase, leaving an opening in which Arago appeared, in a white frock. Before the painting returned to its place as a door behind the Dominican, the physician got a glimpse of a black cross on a field of white. They greeted each other with a handshake and sat down at a low table piled chaotically with papers, graphs, and a multitude of open volumes that had colored ribbon bookmarks. Arago's face was lean, dusky, with gray, piercing eyes beneath brows that were almost white. The frock seemed too big for him. With the sinewy hands of a pianist he held an ordinary wooden yardstick. Gerbert found himself running his eyes over the backs of the old books. He did not want to be the first to speak.

  The questions that he expected did not come.

  "Dr. Gerbert, I am not your equal in knowledge. I can, however, converse with you in the language of Aesculapius. I was a psychiatrist before I chose this garb. The Head Physician made accessible to me the data concerning the … procedure. It speaks for itself. Due to the incompatibility of the blood groups, of the tissues, two people are at stake, but only one can be awakened."

  "Not awakened," Gerbert said, almost against his will—because the monk had avoided the more direct words: "resurrected from the dead." The Dominican caught this at once.

  "Distinctions important to me, of course, you cannot take into account. Any dispute on eschatology would be pointless. Someone like me, in my position, would say that true death means disintegration when irreversible changes have taken place in the body. And that we have seven such on the ship. I know that their remains must be disturbed and understand the necessity, though I am not permitted to sanction it. From you, Doctor, and from your friend—who will be here any moment—I would like an answer to one question only. You can refuse, of course."

  "Go ahead," said Gerbert, feeling a shiver.

  "You must have guessed. It concerns the criteria for the selection."

  "Davis will say the same thing. We possess no objective criteria. And you, too, having seen the data, know this … Father Arago."

  "I do. The calculation of the chances is beyond human ability. The medicoms, performing their x billion operations, give two out of the nine men a ninety-nine-percent chance, with a deviation within the bounds of theoretical error. For either alternative. There are no objective criteria, and for that very reason I take the liberty of asking you what yours will be."

  "There are two matters before us," replied Gerbert with a kind of relief. "As physicians, along with the Head Physician, we will be asking the Commander for certain navigational changes. May we assume, Father, that in this you will be on our side?"

  "I cannot participate in the voting."

  "True, but a position taken by you may have influence—"

  "On what the council decides? But it has already decided. I cannot imagine that there would be any opposition. The majority has declared itself 'pro.' The Commander has the resolution in hand, and I would be surprised if the doctors did not know what it was."

  "We are asking for more changes than were first agreed upon. Ninety-nine percent is not enough for us. Even the tenth decimal place is important. The energy cost, along with the delay in the expedition, will be enormous."

  "This is news to me. And the second matter?"

  "The selection of the corpse. We are at a complete loss as to identities, since gross negligence—to which the radio technicians have given the more elegant designation of 'communication-channel overload'—has made it impossible for us to determine the names, functions, or histories of these people. In reality, something more than negligence was going on. When we took these containers on board, we were not aware that the memory not only of the old units of that mine—Grail—but of the digital machines at Roembden, too, had suffered considerable destruction in the course of the dismantling operations. The persons responsible for the fate of those that our Commander, with our consent, took on board said that the facts could be obtained from Earth. But it is not known who gave the orders for information storage, or when, or to whom. It's evident that everyone, so to speak, washed his hands."

  "That happens whenever the jurisdictions of people overlap. Which is no justification…"

  The monk stopped, looked Gerbert in the eye, and said softly:

&nbs
p; "You were opposed to having the victims on the ship?"

  Gerbert nodded reluctantly.

  "In the excitement before takeoff no single voice—let alone that of a doctor, not an expert astronaut—could carry any weight. If I was opposed and entertained certain fears, I am not any easier in my mind, now.

  "But, then, what do you intend to go by? A flip of a coin?"

  Gerbert stiffened.

  "The choice will not depend on anyone but us. After the council, if our requests are met in the purely technological area—of navigation—we will conduct a new autopsy and go through the entire contents of the vitrifaxes, down to the last hair."

  "What influence on your choice of the one to be reanimated could his identification have?"

  "Probably none. It would not be, in any case, a quality, a factor, of any significance in the domain of medicine."

  "These people," the monk weighed his words carefully, speaking slowly, as if venturing out on thinner and thinner ice, "perished in tragic circumstances. Some while performing their ordinary duties, as employees of the mines there, or of the companies. Others when attempting to rescue the former. Would you accept such a distinction—if it could be discovered—as a criterion?"

  "No."

  The answer was immediate and categorical.

  The wall of books facing them parted, and Davis entered, with an apology for being late.

  The monk rose. So did Gerbert.

  "I have learned everything that it was possible to learn," said Arago. He stood taller than both physicians. Behind his back, Eve turned to Adam, and the serpent crawled up the tree of Eden. "I thank you, gentlemen. I have confirmed what I should have known anyway. Our fields touch. We do not pass judgment on a man according to his virtues and vices, just as you do not consider these when you save his life. I won't detain you: it's time now. See you at the council."

  They left. In a few words, Gerbert gave to Davis the gist of his conversation with the apostolic observer. At a perfectly circular intersection of corridors they got into an egg-shaped, dull-silver vehicle. The appropriate well opened up and swallowed the wheelless car with a long sigh. In the circular windows, lights from the passing decks flashed by. Sitting opposite each other, they said nothing. Both, without knowing why, were offended by the statement with which the monk had summed up their meeting. The feeling, however, was too undefined to merit examination—in the face of what awaited them.

  The conference hall was located in the fifth section of the Eurydice. The ship, seen in flight from a distance, resembled a long, white grub with spherically bulging segments—and it was a winged grub, since flat fins protruded from its sides, ending in the hulls of the hydroturbines. The head of the Eurydice, flattened out, was encircled by a multitude of antenna spines like feelers or stingers. The spherical sections, joined by short cylinders having a diameter of thirty meters, were also locked together and reinforced by a double inner keel whenever the cosmic vessel accelerated, went full speed, or braked. The engines, called hydroturbines, were actually thermonuclear reactors of the flowstream type, and hydrogen in high vacuum served as their fuel.

  This drive proved even better than the photon drive. The performance of nuclear fuels at near-light speeds fell, because the lion's share of the kinetic energy was expended in the propelling flame that beat uselessly into space and only a small fraction of the liberated power was transmitted to the rocket. A photon drive, also, required the ship to be loaded with millions of tons of matter and antimatter as its annihilative fuel. The flowstream engines, on the other hand, used interstellar hydrogen. Hydrogen atoms, though ubiquitous, were so dispersed in galactic space that the engines of this type began to work effectively only at speeds above 30,000 kilometers a second, and reached full capacity only when approaching the speed of light. A ship with such a drive could therefore neither take off from a planet itself, being too massive, nor by itself achieve the velocity at which the atoms falling into the intakes of the reactors condensed sufficiently for ignition. The gaping intake funnels then hurtled forward, so that even the greatest cosmic vacuum, thus rammed, packed enough hydrogen into their throats to kindle artificial spouts of sun in the firing chambers. The efficiency factor increased, and the ship, not laden with its own supply of fuel, could maintain a constant acceleration. After less than a year of an acceleration corresponding to Earth's gravity, the ship attained nearly 99 percent of the speed of light, and while minutes went by on board, decades passed on Earth.

  The Eurydice had been built in orbit around Titan, for Titan was to serve as her starting platform. Many trillions of tons of the mass of that moon were converted, by conventional thermonuclear piles, into energy for the transformers, and they in turn as laser throwers sent columns of coherent light to the gigantic stern of the Eurydice—like packing gunpowder into the bottom of a cannon beneath an artillery shell. The moon first had to be stripped, by astroengineering, of its thick atmosphere. Radiochemical plants and hydronuclear power stations were built on the plateau of the equatorial continent, after all the mountains were melted down by combined heat blasts from disposable satellites. Their salvos turned the great formations into lava, and cryo-ballistic bombs hastened the freezing, to make the red-hot, flowing sea a hard, smooth plain: the artificial Mare Herculaneum. On the twelve thousand square miles of that plain grew a forest of laser throwers, the true Hercules of the expedition. At the critical hour it fired, to push the Eurydice from her stationary orbit. The long column of coherent light drove the ship, hitting the mirrors at her stern, beyond the solar system. As the driving beam weakened, the ship increasingly resorted to her own boosters, jettisoning their burnt-out casings beyond Pluto. It was only then that the wide-gaping hydros came into play.

  Because they would be running throughout the journey, the ship accelerated steadily, maintaining on board a pull equal to Earth's gravitation. The pull acted only along the ship's longitudinal axis. For this reason each spherical section of the Eurydice was a separate unit. Her decks went transversely in the hull, from side to side; up meant toward the bow, and down was astern. When the whole vessel braked or changed course, the vector of the force diverged from the axes of the individual sections. Therefore, to avoid having ceilings turn into walls and decks become upended, each segment of the hull contained within itself a sphere capable of rotating inside the armored shell, much like a ball-and-socket joint. The gyrostats saw to it that on the decks of each sphere of the hull—there were eight in all, for living quarters—the force of the thrust would always come vertically. Although during maneuvers of this type the decks of the separate spheres diverged from the main axis of the ship's keel, one could still pass from section to section. There was a tunnel system of additional locks called "worms." It was only in these flexible tunnels that one experienced a change or lack of gravity, since the elevator ran through the cylinders between the sections.

  At the time of this general council, the first after takeoff, the Eurydice had almost a year of continuous acceleration before her, thus there was nothing to interfere with her steady thrust.

  The fifth section, called the Parliament, served for the meetings of the entire crew. Beneath a curved ceiling lay an amphitheater, not too high, a room surrounded by four tiers of seats that were divided at regular intervals by ramps. By the only flat wall was a long table, actually a line of connected consoles with screens. Behind this, facing the assembly, sat the navigators and their subordinate specialists.

  The uniqueness of the expedition called for the unusual makeup of the command. Ter Horab was in charge of flight; the coordinator Yusupov, power; the radiophysicist De Witt, communications; and at the head of the corps of scientists, both of those needed in the journey itself and those who would be going into action only at its destination, stood the polystorian Jenkins.

  When Gerbert and Davis entered the upper gallery, the deliberations had already begun. Ter Horab was reading aloud the requests of the physicians. No one turned to look at the latecomers. Only the Head
Physician, Vahradian, seated between the Commander and the coordinator, indicated his reproof with a knitted brow. But they had not missed much. In the silence the impassive voice of Ter Horab came from all sides.

  "…they are asking for a reduction in thrust to one-tenth. They consider this necessary for the reanimation of the remains that are in cold storage. It means throttling the drive down to the lower limit. I can do this. But then the whole flight program, with all its prepared computations, will be canceled. It is possible to make a new program. The old one was the product of five independent groups in the project on Earth, to rule out the possibility of errors. Five is beyond our means. We can make a new program with two teams—but it will not be as dependable as the first. The risk is small but real. So I ask you: shall we vote now on the physicians' request, without further discussion, or instead put questions to them?"

  The majority were in favor of discussion. Vahradian did not take the floor himself, but called on Gerbert.

  "Behind the words of our Commander lies a criticism," said Gerbert, not rising from his place in the highest row of chairs. "The criticism is directed at those who handed over to us, with no concern for their condition, the bodies found on Titan. One could conduct an investigation into this matter, to learn who the culprits were. Whether or not they are among us, however, does not change the situation. The task facing us is the complete resurrection of a man preserved little better than the mummies of the pharaohs. Here I must go into the history of medicine. Attempts at vitrifaction date back to the twentieth century. Doddering old millionaires had themselves interred in liquid nitrogren, in the hope that someday they would be restored to life. Complete nonsense: heating a frozen corpse only serves to make it rot. Then scientists learned how to freeze alive minute bits of tissue, egg cells, sperm, and microorganisms. The larger the body, the more difficult its vitrifaction. Vitrifaction involves the instantaneous congealing of all the organism's fluids into ice—skipping the phase of crystallization, since crystal formation causes irreversible damage to the subtle structure of the cell. The body and brain must be turned to glass in a split second. It is easy to heat an object to a high temperature in a split second; to chill it that rapidly to nearly zero Kelvin is incomparably more difficult. The bell vitrifaxes of the victims on Titan were primitive and worked brutally. When we accepted the containers on board, we were unaware of their make. That is why the condition of the bodies was such a surprise."