Fiasco

by Stanisław Lem

  Nothing remained but to watch Quinta from behind Sexta via the clouds of holographic eyes. The operation was synchronized so that the two landers, sinking slowly toward the horizon, would reach Quinta just as the Hermes entered the shadow of Sexta. Everyone gathered in the control room and waited for the critical moment. The planet, white with clouds, filled the main screen; clearly visible were the swarms of combat satellites that crossed its featureless face as black dots. To be able to observe the entry of both rockets into the atmosphere, sodium and technetium had been added to their hypergolic fuel: the first colored the exhaust flame a bright yellow, the second tagged it with a spectral line not found in the spectra of the local sun or the Quintan orbiters. When the rockets plunged into the clouds, the threads of fire from the air friction and the retros began to diffuse. Then the billions of eyes, spread in an unseen tail a million miles in the wake of the Hermes, focused along the tangent on the point of the planned landing—and not in vain. Settling on hard ground in the space of several seconds, both vessels announced the conclusion of their flight with a double blaze of sodium, intentionally modulated, which immediately faded out.

  With this the operation entered the next stage. The bottom armor of the Hermes split in half, into two giant arched gates, and from that Open Sesame crane arms pushed out into space an enormous metal cylinder that was to be the laboratory quarantine for the probes. Harrach seemed especially pleased with the stratagem. The others approved of Steergard's tactic and willingly pitched in, but they did so without enthusiasm: there was nothing to rejoice about. The first pilot, on the other hand, did not bother to conceal his evil glee—that they were going to take that war-loving bastard of a planet by the throat. He could hardly wait for the return of the plague-carrying landers, as if the whole point of the expedition was a brutal clash. Listening to the man go on and on, Tempe made little comment, thinking about the psychological changes in Harrach that DEUS must be taking note of, and felt ashamed of his colleague—even though at times he, too, was unable to say which he would have preferred: for the deep anger that had been building in the crew to turn out to be without foundation, or for them to force upon the crew the worst of all possible decisions. Yes, he himself now saw this civilization as an enemy, whose absolute evil justified the steps the men were taking. Nothing, now, was cloaked in secrecy. The solaser—extinguished and masked before—was being charged with solar energy. Not for signaling but to deal laser blows.

  After forty-eight hours the holographic cloud announced that the envoys were returning. The two landers were supposed to signal—in the ultrashortwave band—when they were outside the orbit of the drifting fragments of the Moon, but only one did clearly: the other sent a gibberish of codes. Steergard divided his people into three groups. To the pilots he entrusted the launching of the fake Hermes into a solar trajectory; to the physicists, the receiving of the landers in the cylindrical chamber, which was some fifty miles away from the Hermes; and he put the physicians and Kirsting in charge of the biological examination of those landers, provided that the second group gave the go-ahead. Though thus divided, the crew kept abreast of the total situation. Harrach and Tempe—tracking the hollow giant, which set off unhurriedly on its way, with the fires from the robot welding still flickering across its hull—spoke by intercom with Nakamura's group, which was waiting for the landers. Polassar did not rule out the possibility of an ordinary malfunction in the babbling transmitter—but Harrach was positive, would bet his right arm, that it was the work of the Quintans. The fact was, Harrach wanted the treachery of the Quintans to come to light as soon as possible and to be—for everyone—the last straw. Tempe said nothing, wondering how a man so obsessed could still function in the responsible position of first pilot. Apparently, he could—seeing as DEUS had not yet informed the captain of Harrach's condition. Unless they had all of them fallen into a collective madness…

  The quarantine cylinder, in the glare of floodlights surrounding it, received the landers with an open maw. At their control center, the physicists, after automata performed the preliminary examination, could not decide whether the damaged lander had been damaged by an accident or by design. This infuriated Harrach, who knew better: it was foul play, it was the Quintans! After an hour, however, it turned out that the probe had lost part of an antenna and its prow radiator in a collision with some small meteorite fragment or piece of metal. Such a collision, in that system, was not unlikely.

  On the empty twin of the Hermes, moving away, the final welds still glowed in the darkness. The pilots could start the drive as soon as the captain gave the order, but he did not call them. He was waiting for the report of the experts. In what condition had the landers returned? And, most important, what information had they brought?

  The information turned out to be extremely interesting, and the landers—if one did not count that minor mishap—untouched and wholly uncontaminated. Hearing this, Harrach could not help exclaiming:

  "Snakes!"

  "But even in Sodom there was a Lot," Tempe pointed out. He was dying to know the new discoveries about Quinta, which somehow were taking forever to reach the control room. Finally Nakamura took pity on the pilots and showed them, on a projector, the result of the lander reconnaissance as transmitted from the quarantine cylinder.

  He began with the cartoons that the solaser had beamed to the planet. Then followed a long sequence of landscapes: nature preserves, possibly, untouched by civilization. Seashores, waves breaking on sand, red sunsets in low clouds, mountain forests a much darker green than the foliage on Earth. The enormous crowns of the trees were almost navy-blue.

  Against this continually changing background shone letters.

  ACCEPTANCE OF YOUR ROCKET MISSILE OF MASS LIMIT THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND TONS METRIC AGREED UPON WITH GUARANTEE OF YOUR PASSIVITY YOUR GOODWILL THIS IS SPACEPORT

  Out of a heavy green mist emerged a vast surface, seen from a great height. It gleamed dully, like frozen mercury. Incredibly slender needles stood upon it at regular intervals, like pieces on a chessboard: stalagmites immaculately white, sharply pointed, and growing. Or, rather, they issued upward, wrapped at their bases in golden spiderwebs, until that motion ceased. On the far horizon, completely cloudless, birds flew, each bird having four independently moving wings. They must have been huge. They flew like cranes migrating from northern climes. Below, at the stalagmites—now recognizable, to human eyes, as rockets—tiny things shimmered, dark and multicolored; they swarmed up wide ramps into the white ships. Everyone leaned forward, straining his eyes to see, finally, what the Quintans looked like—but with no more success than a visitor from Neptune would have had, trying to make out the human form by scrutinizing a packed Olympic stadium from a mile away. The variegated, churning crowd continued to gather at the bottom of the ramps and to disappear, in rivers, inside the ships as bright as snow. On the hulls were perpendicular rows of hieroglyphics: shining, illegible inscriptions. The crowd now thinned, and everyone waited for the inevitable takeoff of that white flotilla. But—slowly, majestically—it began instead to sink.

  The gold-bronze spiderwebs fell away from the hulls as if rotted through, making irregular circles on the ground. Now only the white prows jutted above the lake of flat mercury, and then they, too, entered dark-red wells, and no trapdoors or hatches closed over them—only that same matte mercury. The plain was featureless. From the edge of the screen slowly crawled a centipede—clearly mechanical, not a living creature—with a flat, truncated snout. From the snout poured a fountain of bright, yellowish fluid, which spread and at the same time bubbled as if boiling; when the stuff had all boiled away, the mercury turned black as tar. The centipede bent back, arching, so that its middle legs hung in midair; it turned directly toward the watching men and opened four eyes. Or were they windows? Or spotlights? But they looked like the large eyes of a fish: round, surprised, with thin-band, metallic irises and black, glittering pupils. This robot vehicle seemed to regard them thoughtfully, with concern, out of t
hose four pupils, which were now no longer round but had narrowed like a cat's. At the same time something flickered—weak, blue—in their centers. Then the centipede fell, resuming its position on the black ground, and, swaying from side to side like a real centipede, trotted off out of the field of vision. There were no more birds in the sky, only the caption:

  OUR SPACEPORT WE ACCEPT YOUR ARRIVAL CONTINUATION FOLLOWS

  The continuation indeed followed, first with a thunderstorm. The downpour lashed a row of buildings with slanting rain—buildings connected by a multitude of overhead viaducts. A peculiar city in a cloudburst. The water coursed down oval roofs, poured from spouts at the bases of bridges—yet those were not bridges, they were tunnels with elliptic windows, and in their centers rushed streaks of fluttering light. An elevated railroad? Not a soul anywhere, the length of the streets … but because the buildings were in a cascade arrangement, like Toltecan pyramids cast in metal, there really were no streets. It was impossible to determine the ground level of the city, if this was in fact a city. The rain, whipped by the wind, drove in sheets of silver across gigantic structures; lightning struck without a sound; and from the pyramids the water streamed in a curious way. The gutters that collected it were raised at the ends, so that great torrents flew into the air and merged with the ever-pouring rain. But then one of the lightning bolts split up and froze into words of fire:

  STORMS ARE ON OUR PLANET FREQUENT PHENOMENON

  The image dimmed and went out. In a dingy grayness appeared outlines, broken silhouettes. Somewhere in the depths, a shuddering amalgamation of fire and clouds, or smoke. Layer upon layer of the rubble of enormous structures. In the foreground lay whitish blotches, as of the naked bodies of creatures torn apart, smeared with mud, in even rows. Above this vast cemetery, the color of iron, flashed the words:

  THIS CITY WAS DESTROYED BY YOUR SELENOCLASM

  The inscription vanished, and the picture wandered among the ruins, showing close-ups of incomprehensible mechanisms. One of these, reinforced all around with unusually thick metal, had been cracked open, and inside—here a telephoto lens zooming in—were, again, mangled remains, providing no clue as to the shape of what had lived, like human corpses pulled from mass graves, half rags and clay. Then—the camera retreating suddenly—again a great expanse of rubble, with deep excavations. In them, like beetles, squat bulldozers streaked with red gnawed at the debris, their mandibles working. The bulldozers pushed stubbornly, with difficulty, ramming the center of a split façade, white as alabaster, as milk, but singed by flame, until the wall crumbled and dust lifted in a rust-red cloud, blocking out the scene. For a few moments all that could be heard in the control room was rapid breathing and the tick of a second hand. The screen brightened. A strange diadem appeared, of crystal as transparent as a tear, with a hollow not made for any human skull, and corymbs sparkling like diamonds. Set in it, compact, a dodecahedron, a pale-pink spinel. Above this, the inscription:

  CROWNING CONCLUSION

  But it was not the conclusion. Against a harsh halogen light there were dark, headless crustaceans on the gentle slope of a mountainside, like a herd of cattle grazing in an alpine pasture. In vain did the eye try to identify them. Were they large tortoises? Giant coleoptera? The picture lifted, went along an increasingly steep wall of rock with black recesses, grottoes, caves; it was not water that flowed from them, but perhaps a slurry, a brown-yellow vomitus. Then, on a purple, gently undulating background, words began to march.

  WE ACCEPT YOUR ARRIVAL SHIP OF REST MASS LIMIT THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND TONS METRIC AT SPACEPORT AAO35 AS SHOWN GIVE TIME WE GUARANTEE YOU PEACE FORGETTING BY YOUR CYLINDRICAL PROJECTION OF MERCATOR MERIDIAN 135 PARALLEL 48 WE AWAIT YOUR SIGNAL ANNOUNCEMENT ARRIVAL

  The monitor went blank. Daylight flooded the control room. The second pilot, very pale, his hands unconsciously pressed to his chest, still stared at the empty screen. Harrach struggled with himself. Large beads of sweat trickled down the man's forehead and rested on his thick blond brows.

  "It's blackmail," he blurted. "They … to put the blame on us for that…"

  Tempe started, as if suddenly awakened.

  "But, you know," he said quietly, "it's true. Did anyone invite us here? We landed smack in the middle of their misfortune … to increase it."

  "Enough of that!" Harrach snapped. "If you must do penance, go to that priest of yours, don't try converting me. It's not only blackmail, it's more cunning… Yes, I can see how they'd love to get us on their hook. Use your head, Mark. That wasn't our fault. It was they who—"

  "Use your head." Tempe got up, unable to sit still. "No matter how the game ends, what we did, we did. Contact between intelligences—my God. If you have to curse someone, then curse SETI, curse CETI, curse the day you decided to become a 'psychozoic discoverer.' Better yet, keep your mouth shut. That's the smartest thing that you can do."

  That afternoon, the Open Sesame containing the landers was pulled on board. Arago asked Steergard for a general meeting to discuss future courses of action. Steergard refused point-blank. There would be no meetings, no councils, until the final phase of the program was completed. Adorned with a gamma laser, the fake Hermes disappeared behind the curve of Sexta and made full speed for Quinta, exchanging with it the prearranged sign and countersign.

  As soon as he was off duty, Tempe tried to see the captain. The captain refused: alone in his cabin, he was seeing no one. The pilot rode down to the middle level—he hadn't the nerve to go to the monk—but turned back halfway and asked on the intercom for Gerbert, who was not in his room. Gerbert was in the mess hall, with Kirsting and Nakamura. The ship maneuvered to provide a little thrust; they remained in shadow and had weak gravitation. At the sight of people eating, Tempe realized that he had not put a thing into his mouth since dawn. He joined them, silent, with a plate of roast beef and rice, but when he touched the meat with his fork he became—for the first time in his life—nauseous because of the meat's grayish fibers. He had to eat, however, so he scraped his plate into the kitchen vac and took from the automat an instant-heated vitamin porridge. To fill the stomach with something. No one spoke to him. It was only when he had tossed his plate and spoon into the washer that Nakamura, with a faint smile, called him over. Tempe sat down opposite the Japanese, who wiped his lips with a paper napkin. When Kirsting left, when the two of them were alone with Gerbert, Nakamura cocked his head in the way he had, his black hair combed flat, and looked expectantly at the pilot. The pilot shrugged, which meant that he had nothing to say. Nothing.

  "When we turn our backs on the world, the world does not go away," said the physicist suddenly. "Where there is mind, there is also cruelty. They go together. One should accept this, since it cannot be changed."

  "And why is the captain seeing no one?" the pilot said.

  "He is entitled," the Japanese replied, unruffled. "The captain, like all of us, must save face. When he is alone, too. Dr. Gerbert suffers, our pilot Tempe suffers, but I do not suffer. As for Father Arago—I don't even want to think about Father Arago…"

  "How is it … that you don't suffer?" Tempe didn't understand.

  "I don't have the right," Nakamura calmly explained. "Modern physics demands an imagination that shrinks from nothing. It is no credit to me; it is a gift of my predecessors. I am not a prophet, not a clairvoyant. I am merely objective when it is necessary to be objective. Otherwise I, too, would be unable to eat meat. Who was it that said Nemo me impune lacessit? Does he now regret his words?"

  The pilot paled.

  "No."

  "Good. Your buddy Harrach is putting on quite a show, the mask of fury fixed on his face, like a demon in our Kabuki theater. One should be neither angry nor despairing, neither feel pity nor seek revenge. And you yourself now know why. Or am I mistaken?"

  "No," said Tempe. "It's that we don't have the right."

  "Exactly. The conversation is concluded. In thirty"—he consulted his watch—"in thirty-seven hours the 'Hermes' will be landing. Wh
o is on duty then?"

  "Both of us. Orders."

  "You won't be alone."

  Nakamura rose, nodded to them, and left. In the empty mess hall the washer hissed softly, and there was a light breeze from the air conditioning. The pilot glanced at the physician, who continued to sit motionless, his head in his hands, staring into space. Tempe left the man there without exchanging a word with him. There was nothing, really, to say.

  The landing of the "Hermes" turned out to be spectacular. Descending toward the designated point on the planet, it belched such fire from its stern that the burn, transmitted by the myriads of tiny eyes dispersed in space, entered the milky fullness of the clouds like an incandescent needle, tearing it apart, beneath, into a whirl of pinkening scuds. Into this window, this hole cleared by flame, the ship sank, then disappeared. Wisps of feathery cirrocumuli, spiraling inward, began to close the breach in Quinta's cloud cover, but they had not yet filled it when a yellow light burst up through them. After nine minutes—the time required for a signal to travel the distance separating the observers from the planet—the transmitter of the fake Hermes, aimed at Sexta, beamed for the first and last time. The clouds once again parted in that place, but more gradually, gently. In the control room full of people there was a sound like a short, stifled sigh.

  Steergard, the unblemished, white face of Quinta at his back, called DEUS.

  "Give me an analysis of the explosion."

  "I have only the emission spectrum."

  "Give the cause of the explosion, based on that spectrum."

  "It will be uncertain."