Fiasco

by Stanisław Lem

  "The value of your hypothesis also has a negative sign," said one of the physicists.

  "I don't think so. The reduction of many unknowns to a common unknown denominator represents a gain, not a loss, in information," replied Lauger easily.

  "Please go on," the Commander said to him. Lauger stood.

  "I'll say what I can. An infant, smiling, smiles according to assumptions that it has brought with it into the world. These assumptions, of a statistical nature, are multitudinous: that the pinkish blobs its little eyes perceive are people's faces, that people usually react positively to the smile of a baby, and so on."

  "What is your point?"

  "That everything is based on certain assumptions, though the assumptions, as a rule, are made silently. Our discussion deals with events that appear very improbable as a series of unrelated things—the flashes, the chaotic emission, the changes in Quinta's albedo, the plasma on the moon. What caused them? you ask. The activity of a civilization. Does this clarify anything? On the contrary, it mystifies, because we began with the tacit assumption that we would be able to understand the actions of the Quintans.

  "Mars, as I recall, was once considered old, and Venus young, in comparison with Earth: the great-grandfathers of our astronomers automatically assumed that Earth was the same as Mars and Venus, except younger than the first and older than the second. Hence, the canals of Mars, the wild jungles of Venus, et cetera, which eventually all had to be chucked out as fairy tales. I don't think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence. There may be a mind on Quinta—or minds—inaccessible to us because of a difference in purposes…"

  "War?" The voice came from the back of the hall.

  Lauger, still standing, continued.

  "War is not an absolutely closed set of conflicts with destruction as the resultant. Commander—don't count on being enlightened. Since we know neither the initial states nor the parameters, nothing can turn the unknowns into knowns. All we can tell the Hermes is to proceed with caution. You would prefer more specific advice? I can only offer two possibilities: the actions of those intelligences are unintelligent—or else unintelligible, not fitting in the categories of our thought. But this is only an opinion, nothing more."

  VI

  Quinta

  Before the plunge, the radiolocators tracked the Hermes for the last time, showing how it described a great hyperbola across the firmament, rising higher and higher above the arm of the galactic spiral, in order that in deep vacuum it could travel near the speed of light. Then the radio echoes began to arrive at increasing intervals, a sign that the Hermes was experiencing relativistic effects and that its on-board time was diverging from the time of the Eurydice. All contact between the scout ship and the mother ship terminated when the signals from the automatic transmitter grew in wavelength, spread to bands of many kilometers, and weakened. The last signal was noted, by the most sensitive indicator, in the seventieth hour after the start, just as Hades, hit by the suiciding Orpheus, groaned in gravitational resonance and opened wide its temporal chasms. Whatever might happen to the scout ship and the men locked within it would have to remain unknown for many years (of their time).

  For those who slept the sleep of embryonization, a sleep like death—devoid of dreams or any awareness, through dreams, of the passage of time—the flight had no duration. Over the white sarcophagi in the tunnellike embryonator, through the armored glass of the periscope, shone Alpha Harpyiae, a blue giant that had been deflected from the stars of the constellation by one of its own asymmetric eruptions, as it was young and not yet stabilized after the nuclear ignition of its interior. When the Eurydice vanished, DEUS took over the controls. The Hermes, having climbed above the ecliptic, plummeted like a stone toward Hades, initially retreating from the star of its destination in order to reach it more easily, at the gravitational cost of the collapsar: circling the collapsar, it received from its field a hefty push. Then, at a speed approaching light, the Hermes extended from its sides the intakes of the flowstream reactors. Space was so empty that the collected atoms were insufficient for ignition; DEUS therefore excited the hydrogen with injections of tritium until the synthesis finally started. The throats of the engines, black until now, filled with light that pulsed faster and more intensely. Fiery columns of helium spouted into the darkness. The Eurydice's laser had given the scout ship less help at the takeoff than expected, since one of the hypergolic boosters misfired, which moved the stern mirror off course—and then the Eurydice disappeared, as if swallowed by the void. But DEUS quickly made up for the loss with power borrowed from Hades.

  At 99 percent of the speed of light, the space in the engine intakes grew denser; there was more than enough hydrogen. The constant acceleration increased the mass of the scout ship. DEUS held to 20 g's without the least deviation. The structure, designed to withstand four times such thrust, suffered no damage. But no living organism larger than a flea could have borne its own weight on that flight. Each man weighed over two tons. Under that crush he could not have moved his ribs if he had had to breathe, and his heart would have burst trying to pump a fluid far heavier than liquid lead. But they did not breathe and their hearts now did not beat, though they lived. The crew lay in the same liquid medium that had replaced their blood. Pumps that would have functioned at a hundred times the gravity (though the embryonized could not have endured that) pushed onax through their vessels, and the hearts contracted once or twice a minute, not working but, instead, passively moved by the influx of the life-giving artificial blood.

  At the right moment, DEUS executed a change of course. Heading now straight for the corotating swirl of stars of the galaxy, the Hermes threw out in front of its prow a protective shield. The shield preceded the ship by several miles; seemingly stationary at that distance, it served as a radiation screen. Otherwise, as the speed mounted, cosmic rays would have destroyed too many neurons in the human brains. The blue Alpha now shone astern. Inside the long tunnel-hold of the Hermes, however, it was not completely dark; the insulation around the reactors allowed microscopic leakage of quanta, and the walls glowed with Cherenkov radiation. This pale twilight seemed quiescent, perfectly still, unchanging. Only twice, through the thick window in the barrier that separated the embryonator from the upper deck, were there sharp, sudden flashes.

  The first time, a control monitor of the protective shield, blank until then, blazed a cold white and immediately went out. DEUS, awakened in a terasecond, gave the necessary order. Current turned levers; the prow of the ship opened and spat flame; a new shield, ejected forward, replaced the one destroyed by a handful of cosmic dust. The dust, from the speed of impact, had turned the shielding disk into an incandescent cloud of split atoms. The Hermes flew through this solar firework, which then stretched far in its wake, and pressed on. The auto required a few seconds to stop the unwanted lateral motion of the new shield, whose port and starboard orange lights blinked more and more slowly, as if a sleepy black cat were winking meaningfully at DEUS. Then everything was again still on the ship, until the next striking of grains from a meteorite or comet tail, when the operation of renewing the protective shield was repeated exactly.

  Finally the flickering electrons in the cesium clocks gave the awaited signal. DEUS did not need to look at any indicators: the indicators were its senses and it read their state directly with its brain—which, because of its three-centimeter size, the jokers of the Eurydice had called the "birdbrain." DEUS kept careful track of the lumenal readouts, to maintain the course during the reduction of the drive. The engines, cut and turned around, began to brake the ship. This maneuver, too, was carried out perfectly: the guiding stars did not so much as budge in the sights, so there was no need for any programmed correction of the trajectory.

  The idea was that the reduction of a near-light velocity to a parabolic velocity with respect to Zeta—that is, down to some 80 km/sec per microparsec before reaching Juno, the outermost planet of the system—would require a simple reversal of
the drive, until it went out by itself from lack of hydrogen. Then the hypergolics could be used for braking. But DEUS had received the warning from the Eurydice in time, and before beginning the reanimation procedures it reprogrammed the approach. The technological—artificial—nature of both the light from hydrogen-helium exhaust cones and the flame of self-igniting fuels was easily identified, and DEUS's first rule now was that of "extremely limited trust in our Brothers in Intelligence." It had never studied the Bible, had never analyzed the incident of Cain and Abel, yet it shut off the flowstream engines in the shadow of Juno and used the planet's gravity to reduce speed and change course. The second gas globe of Zeta served it to drop down to a parabolic velocity. Only then did it activate the reanimators.

  At the same time, it sent remote-control robots outside, to place on the nozzles of the stern and prow a camouflaging device, an electromagnetic mixer. From now on the flame of the drive would be blurred, its radiation spectrally dispersed.

  The most delicate stage of the braking occurred at the threshold of the system, behind Juno. DEUS planned and performed it deftly, as befitted a computer of the ultimate generation. It simply had the Hermes cut through the upper layers of the gas giant's atmosphere. A cushion of blazing plasma was created before the ship; losing speed in it, DEUS wrung everything it could out of the Hermes' air-control system to keep the temperature in the embryonator from rising more than two degrees.

  In an instant, the plasma cushion destroyed the protective shield, which in any case was to have been discarded. The shield was replaced by one of another type, for protecting against dust and comet fragments in planetary orbits. The Hermes was blinded in the fiery passage, but cooled while still in Juno's cone of shadow. DEUS made sure that the flaming clouds caused by the braking maneuver, practically prominences, subsided on the heavy planet in accordance with Newton's laws. Thus not only the presence but the trail of the Hermes was effaced. The ship, engines extinguished, drifted in a far aphelion, while in the embryonator all the lights went on and the heads of the medicoms hung over the containers, ready to begin.

  According to the program, Gerbert was to be the first to awaken—to intervene as a doctor, should intervention be necessary. But here the sequence of the procedure was broken. The biological factor, despite everything, remained the weakest link in the chain of these complex operations.

  The embryonator was housed in the middle deck and, compared with the ship, was a microscopic shell surrounded by many layers of armor and by antiradiation insulation. It had two escape hatches that led to living quarters. The center of the Hermes, called the Village, was connected by shafts to the two-level control room. Between the forward bulkheads ran decks with a row of laboratories equipped to function in weightlessness as well as under gravity. The power stores were situated at the stern—in annihilative containers, in the sidereal engine room not accessible to personnel, and in chambers that had a special purpose. Between the outer and inner hulls of the stern were concealed landing-gear units, for the ship was able to set down on planets, standing on extended, jointed girder-legs. But first the strength of the ground would have to be tested, because on each one of the craft's enormous paws would rest 30,000 tons of weight.

  In the ship's midsection, on the starboard side, reconnaissance probes were stored, with their accessories and attachments; on the port side were service robots, and search robots capable of long, independent reconnoitering by flight or on foot, and these included striders.

  When DEUS turned on the reanimation systems, the Hermes was weightless, a favorable condition for the operation. Roused first, Gerbert regained a normal pulse and body temperature, but did not awaken. DEUS examined him carefully and hesitated, faced with a decision. It was compelled to act independently. More precisely, it did not hesitate, but compared various probability distributions of success. The result of this anamnesis was binomial: DEUS could either reanimate the captain—Steergard—or take the physician from the embryonator and transport him to the operating room. It did as a man who, in the face of unknowns, flips a coin. When one does not know which course is better, the best tactic is to make a purely random choice. The random generator indicated the captain, and DEUS obeyed it.

  Two hours later, Steergard, still half conscious, sat up in the open embryonator, tearing through the transparent membrane that clung to his naked body. He looked around but did not see the one who should have been standing over him. The speaker was saying something. He realized that the voice was mechanical, that something had happened to Gerbert, though he had difficulty understanding the words that were repeated over and over. When he tried to get up, he hit his head against the not fully raised lid of the embryonator, which dazed him for a moment. The first sound of human speech in the Zeta system was an obscenity. Beads of sticky white fluid flew from Steergard's hair onto his face and chest. He straightened too quickly and, somersaulting with bent knees, flew down the tunnel, past all the containers of people, to the hatch in the wall. His shoulders pressed against soft padding in the corner between the hatch frame and the ceiling. Wiping from his eyes milky fluid, which stuck to his fingers, he took in the whole cylindrical interior of the embryonator. In the gap between the rows of sarcophagi with their raised lids, the door to the showers was now open, he listened to the machine voice. Gerbert, like the others, was alive, but had not awakened when his umbilical cord was disconnected. It could not be anything serious: the electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms were perfectly normal.

  "Where are we?" he asked.

  "Behind Juno. The flight went smoothly. Should I move Dr. Gerbert to the operating room?"

  Steergard considered.

  "No. I'll look at him myself. What's the condition of the ship?"

  "Fully functioning."

  "Did you receive any radio messages from the Eurydice?"

  "Yes."

  "What level of importance?"

  "First. Should I give the text?"

  "What does it concern?"

  "A change of plans. Should I give the text?"

  "How long is the message?"

  "Three thousand, six hundred and sixty words. Should I give the text?"

  "Summarize it."

  "I cannot summarize unknowns."

  "How many unknowns?"

  "That, too, is an unknown."

  During this exchange, Steergard kicked off from the ceiling. Flying toward the green-and-red light above Gerbert's cryotainer, he was able to get a glimpse of himself in the mirror in the passageway to the showers: a muscular torso glistening with onax, which still trickled in beads from the stump of the tied umbilical cord, as of an enormous newborn.

  "What happened?" he asked. Wedging his bare feet under the doctor's container, he put a hand on his chest. The heart beat steadily. On the slightly parted lips of the sleeper was viscous white onax.

  "Give what's definite," he said. Meanwhile he pressed his thumbs behind the man's jaw, looked into the mouth, felt the warmth of the breath, put a finger between the teeth, and carefully touched the palate. Gerbert started and opened his eyes. They were full of tears, as bright and clear as water. Steergard noted with quiet satisfaction the effectiveness of so primitive a method of reviving. Gerbert had not awakened because the clamp on the umbilical cord was not completely shut. Steergard pinched the catheter, which snapped away, squirting white fluid. The cord closed itself off. With both hands he pressed the man's chest, feeling the skin stick to his palms. Gerbert stared at him wide-eyed, as if astounded.

  "Everything's OK," said Steergard. The one he was massaging did not seem to hear.

  "DEUS!"

  "Yes?"

  "What happened? The Eurydice or Quinta?"

  "There were changes on Quinta."

  "Give the general picture."

  "A picture of unclear things is unclear."

  "Tell what you know."

  "Before the plunge, high-frequency jumps in the albedo took place. Radio emission went to three hundred gigawatts of white noise
. On the moon, a white point moved, recognized as plasma in a magnetic vise."

  "Recommendations?"

  "Caution. Camouflage."

  "Specifically, what are we to do?"

  "To use our best judgment."

  "The distance to Quinta?"

  "One billion, three hundred million miles on a straight line."

  "The camouflage?"

  "I have done it."

  "Mixers?"

  "Yes."

  "Have you changed the program?"

  "Only for the approach. The ship is in the shadow of Juno."

  "And the ship is all right?"

  "Fully functioning. Should I reanimate the crew?"

  "No. Have you observed Quinta?"

  "No. I lost cosmic velocity in the thermosphere of Juno and—"

  "Fine. Now be silent and wait."

  "I will be silent and wait."

  An odd beginning, thought Steergard, still kneading the doctor's chest.

  The doctor sighed and moved.

  "Do you see me?" the naked captain asked him. "Don't speak. Blink."

  Gerbert blinked, then smiled.

  Steergard was covered with sweat, but continued to massage him.

  "Diadochokinesia…?" he suggested.

  The man lying prone closed his eyes and with an unsteady hand touched the tip of his nose.

  Then they looked at each other and grinned. The doctor bent his knees.

  "You want to get up? Don't rush."

  Saying nothing, Gerbert gripped the sides of his bed and lifted himself. But instead of sitting up, he rose into the air.

  "Careful, zero g," Steergard reminded him. "Easy…"

  Now fully conscious, Gerbert looked around the embryonator.