Fiasco

by Stanisław Lem

  "I know. Go ahead."

  "Very well. Four seconds after the drive was shut off, the reactor core blew up. Should I give the cause variants?"

  "Yes."

  "First: a stream of neutrons, at a high-low frequency designed to penetrate the housing of the pile, struck the stern. The reactor, though shut off, began functioning as an amplifier, and an exponential chain reaction was triggered in the plutonium. The second variant: the armor plate at the stern was pierced by a cumulative charge with a cold anomalon warhead. Should I give the reasoning behind the first variant?"

  "Go ahead."

  "An attack of the ballistic type would demolish the entire ship. A neutron blow, on the other hand, could knock out just the power source, if the assumption is that there are biological creatures on board and that they will be separated, therefore, from the engine area by radiation-proof shielding. Should I show the spectra?"

  "No. Enough."

  Only now did Steergard notice that he was standing in the white light of Quinta as in a halo. Without looking, he turned off the picture and was silent for a moment, seeming to digest the words of the machine.

  "Does anyone wish to take the floor?"

  Nakamura raised his eyebrows and slowly, with great gravity, as if formally offering condolences, said:

  "I stand behind the first hypothesis. The ship was to have lost power while the crew emerged from the attack in one piece. With injuries, but alive. One cannot learn much from corpses."

  "Who disagrees?" asked the captain.

  All were silent—not so much because of what had happened and what had been said as because of the look on Steergard's face. Hardly opening his mouth, as if seized with lockjaw, he said:

  "Come, doves, you champions of peace and mercy, speak up, give us—and give them—a chance to be saved. Convince me that we should go back, bringing Earth the small consolation that there exist worlds worse than ours. And leaving them to their own doom. For the duration of such persuading I cease to be your captain. I am the grandson of a Norwegian fisherman; I am a simple man who has overreached himself. I will listen to any and all arguments—to insults, too, if someone considers that necessary. What I hear will be erased from DEUS's memory. Go ahead."

  "This is not humility, this is sarcasm. The symbolic resignation from your position of captain does not change the fact." Arago, as if wanting to be better heard, stepped forward from the rest. "But if each man is to act according to his conscience to the end, whether he is in a drama or a black comedy—because he did not choose the play himself and does not know his lines by heart, like an actor—then I say this: Killing, we save no one, we save nothing. Deception lay behind the mask of the Hermes, and it lies behind the mask of seeking contact at any price. The thirst is not for knowledge but for vengeance. Whatever you do—if you do not retreat—will result in a fiasco."

  "And retreat would not constitute a fiasco?"

  "No," replied Arago. "You know with certainty that you can bloody them. But you know nothing else with certainty."

  "That is true. Are you finished, Father? Who else wishes to speak?"

  "I do."

  It was Harrach.

  "If you decide to retreat, Captain, I will do everything in my power to prevent it. You'll have to bind me hand and foot. I know that, according to DEUS, I've become abnormal. All right. But we are, every one of us here, abnormal. We did all we possibly could to convince them that we presented no threat. For four months we let ourselves be attacked, lured, betrayed—and if Father Arago represents Rome here, then let him remember what his Saviour said to Matthew: 'I came not to send peace, but a sword.' And if… But I've talked too much. Do we vote?"

  "No. Five hours have passed since their disappointment. We cannot delay. El Salam, you will start up the solaser."

  "Without warnings?"

  "It's a bit late in the day for that. How much time do you need?"

  "Sixteen minutes, back and forth, for the sign and countersign, plus positioning. It can fire in twenty minutes."

  "Fire away."

  "By the program?"

  "Yes, for an hour. Nakamura, let's have the viewer. Whoever doesn't want to watch can leave."

  Well hidden in the mask's dust cloud, whose radiance was induced by Zeta, the solaser opened fire at one in the morning—a three-hour delay, because Steergard wanted perfect collimation. To hit the ring along its tangent, at the exact point where the trap had been set for them, it was necessary to wait for the planet to rotate into position.

  Eighteen terajoules shot out in a sword of light. The jump in the photometers showed that the solar blade, invisible in empty space, had traveled sideways. Brushing the edge of the ring, it peeled off the outer rim. The scene, though it was deaf and dumb and an outstretched palm could easily have covered it, demonstrated the full power taken from the Sun when that power was released in the collision between the light—harder than steel—and the circle of ice spread over thousands of miles. The center of the blow they saw first as a sparkling gap out of which poured a blizzard of swelling white clouds laced with unusual, trembling, arching rainbows. The ice ring boiled, steamed, and—turning to gas—immediately froze and scattered into the void beyond the conflagration, making a long, streaming veil that trailed the planet. It then set behind the disk, since the laser was striking in the direction opposite to the rotation. Steergard had ordered the slanted, gleaming ring to be hit in such a way as to pry it out of its dynamic equilibrium. The power packed inside the solaser was sufficient for seven minutes of terajoule surgery.

  "On target," said DEUS.

  The outer ring was already breaking up. The inner ring, separated from it by a space six hundred miles wide, was alive with turbulence caused by the changes in the angular momentum. When the circle of ice, sweeping toward the darkness, reached with its long-maned clouds beyond the dayside hemisphere and disappeared in the shadow of the nightside, Quinta's horizon shone as though behind it there rose a second, twin sun through pillars of smoke and rainbows—a sun that cast a smooth blood-red glow on the curved sea of clouds. The view of this terrible catastrophe was magnificent. The light caught in trillions of ice crystals from the butchered ring produced a cosmic fireworks that dimmed every constellation in the starry sky. It was breathtaking. The people in the projection room instinctively shifted their eyes from the upper monitor, in which an eccentric laser diamond trembled just above the sun, to the main screen, where a constant, unpulsed beam of power stripped fractured layers, slabs, snow-white floes from the circle of ice.

  Could they have anticipated such a cataclysm? From the planet it must have looked like an uncanny, unending explosion high in the heavens. But they were probably unable to see the rainbows shooting upward like lightning bolts, because billions of ice fragments already were hurtling down on them. Mountains of ice, seething and thundering, fell from tattered clouds, but this was no thrilling sight for the ones who perished beneath that roaring avalanche.

  Seen from the projection room, the atmosphere that encircled the planet was an extremely thin layer. The great magnitude of this astroengineered amputation could be seen safely only by the inhabitants of the tropical regions—until the shock wave reached them, faster than sound. The photon beam, moving millimeter by millimeter at the muzzle of the solaser, crushed planes of ice hundreds of miles across at the target. Only at the planet's southernmost point was there nothing yet to show the fury of the broken disk, which every minute shed hundreds of cubic kilometers of shattered ice. Now, within a cloud thrust high above the atmosphere, the laser beam became visible; it struck in the heart of the cloud like a well of fire. The spectrometers now recorded not churning steam but ionized free oxygen and hydroxyl radicals. In the control room, the minutes became an eternity. The ring, wobbling like a cracked top, lost its clear shine, was riddled by dark holes. The northern hemisphere began to swell, as if the planetary crust itself were being inflated, but it was only that the impact of the ice debris was throwing air, fire, and snow ou
t into space. At the equator, the laser beam, a drill of blue-white heat along the tangent, bored persistently into a mushroom-shaped explosion, until the cloud cover of Quinta darkened to a dull-pearl plain in the west, while the east blazed in jetting eruptions toward the stars.

  No one spoke. Recalling those minutes later, they realized that they had expected a counterattack; had expected that they would at least try somehow to parry the blow falling on the very heart of the war-sphere that had taken a century to build. That the Quintans even now were readying themselves to strike at the source of the cataclysm, visible against the face of the sun—since it was five times as bright. But nothing happened. Above the planet there rose, wider than the planet, a column of smoky white dust; it spread into a many-lobed mushroom covered with continually splitting rainbows, cruelly beautiful. And the cutting beam still stabbed through layers of mist like an incandescent wire of gold taut between the Sun and the planet. The planet itself seemed to veil its face gradually with distended cirrocumuli, as if in self-defense against the incredibly thin and yet so destructive ray, which jabbed at the remaining shards of ice as they sank into the atmosphere. Then it was only at moments, from between the swollen clouds, that there were glints of the remnants of the ring, still orbiting in its death agony.

  Steergard ordered the solaser shut off after the sixth minute: he wanted to keep its remaining power in reserve. The solaser went out as abruptly as it had flashed on, and let them know—in the infrared—that it was changing its position. Locating it was simple, elementary, even when it was extinguished, because of the Planck spectrum typical of stationary bodies forced to radiate by the proximity of the chromosphere. So the girders ejected, from small throwers, a dust that burned in the sun, and the solaser carried out its move behind this screen, folding up into the shape of a closed fan.

  DEUS worked at top capacity. It recorded the results of the blow, the fate of countless satellites that climbed from lower orbits into an atmosphere expanded by explosions and died there in fiery parabolas. At the same time DEUS informed them that the copy of the Hermes could also have been crushed by a magnetodyne attack in field concentrations on the order of a billion gauss. DEUS had a fourth hypothesis as well, involving implosive cryotronic bombs. The captain instructed it to file those data in the archives.

  They were still in stationary orbit in the shadow of Sexta when Steergard summoned Nakamura and Polassar, to present them with a handwritten ultimatum. For its transmission they were to use the holographic eyes; these would be burned out by emitting so strong a signal, but Steergard was willing to pay that price.

  The ultimatum was straightforward.

  YOUR RING WAS DESTROYED IN RESPONSE TO THE ATTACK ON OUR SHIP WE ARE GIVING YOU FORTY-EIGHT HOURS IF YOU ATTACK US OR FAIL TO ANSWER WE WILL ONE SWEEP AWAY YOUR ATMOSPHERE AND TWO INITIATE A PLANETOCLASM OPERATION IF HOWEVER YOU RECEIVE OUR ENVOY AND HE RETURNS UNHARMED TO OUR SHIP WE WILL REFRAIN FROM STEPS ONE AND TWO THAT IS ALL

  The Japanese asked the captain if he was actually prepared to blast the atmosphere. For the cavitation of the planet, he added, they lacked the power.

  "I know. I'm not sweeping away the atmosphere. I'm counting on their belief that I will. As for using the sidereals, I'd like to hear Polassar's opinion. Even behind an empty threat there should stand some real force."

  Polassar's reply came reluctantly.

  "It would put a dangerous overload on the sidereals. We could pierce the mantle. If we disturb the foundation of the continental plates, the biosphere perishes. Bacteria and algae survive. Is this worth discussing?"

  "No, that's enough."

  Both felt it was necessary to learn the scope of the catastrophe, which was extremely difficult. Holes in Quinta's envelope of noise indicated that hundreds of transmitting stations had been knocked out, but without an SG it was impossible to determine, even approximately, the extent of the damage to the technological infrastructure on the large continent. The effects of the cataclysm now began to take their toll in the southern hemisphere and other continents. Seismic activity increased violently: on the sea of clouds appeared dark patches. All the volcanoes must have been belching magma with gases containing cyanide. DEUS estimated the mass of the ice that had reached the surface of the ground and the oceans to be between three and four trillion tons. The northern hemisphere had suffered much greater devastation than the southern, but the ocean had risen everywhere and invaded all coastal regions. DEUS cautioned that it could not determine how many fragments of the ring had fallen to the planet in solid form and how many had been melted, for this depended on the exact size of the ice chunks, which was unknown. If they exceeded a thousand tons, they lost only a small fraction of their mass in the densest layers of air. But DEUS was unable to give a definite denominator.

  Harrach, who was on duty at the controls, was not part of the conversation that went on in the projection room above his head, but he heard it—and unexpectedly broke in.

  "Captain, could I say something?"

  "What now?" Steergard was irritated. "It wasn't enough for you? You'd like to grind them to a pulp?"

  "No. If DEUS is speaking the truth, forty-eight hours won't suffice. They'll need to pull themselves together."

  "You've joined the doves too late," snapped Steergard.

  But the physicists agreed that the pilot had a point. The deadline for answering was moved to seventy hours.

  Shortly afterward Harrach found himself alone. He put the controls on automatic—he had had his fill of looking at Quinta, particularly since the reddish smoke from innumerable volcanic eruptions had spread over the churning white of the planet and darkened to a dirty brown like clotted blood. It was not blood. He knew that, but did not want to watch it. In accordance with Steergard's orders the ship began revolving in place like the outstretched arm of a pivoting crane, which provided them with makeshift gravity, thanks to the centrifugal force, felt most strongly in the control room at the prow. In the mess hall, where the crew now gathered, the rotation enabled one to sit at a table without the acrobatics of weightlessness. The precessional effects, characteristic of a gyroscope, made Harrach sick to his stomach, even though he had sailed often on Earth and the worst pitching and yawing never brought on nausea.

  He could not sit. What he had desired had come to pass. Looking at it rationally, he bore no responsibility for the cataclysm. He was certain that everything would have transpired the same even if he had not flown into a rage or got into those pointless arguments with poor, blameless Arago. No, nothing would have been different had he minded his own business and kept his mouth shut. He jumped up from his seat at the controls, to stretch his legs, but then was driven to pace the navigation area, back and forth. There was no other outlet for his anger, which kept returning to him like an echo, pressing him not to wait, not to sit with folded hands. So he looked at the climatic disturbances (if only they were just climatic!) of the stricken planet. He would gladly have switched off the image, but was not allowed to do that. The ellipsoid interior of the room was ringed by a railed walk that separated the upper level from the lower. Staggering on feet wide apart, like a sailor on a heaving deck, he ran up and jogged around and around the gallery. One might have thought that the man was taking up exercise on an indoor track.

  On girders that came together like the spokes of a great wheel, between cross-braces secured to the ceiling, was the center of operations. Deep, velcroed chairs surrounded a terminal that was a low, truncated cone. At its sides, in front of each chair, flickered an empty green screen. On the cone table lay the discarded draft of the ultimatum, in Steergard's characteristically sharp-angled handwriting. Moving between the chairs, Harrach did a thing that no one ever would have expected of him. He turned the paper over—the written side down—and glanced around to see if anyone was watching. But only the flickering screens mimicked motion. He sank into the chair usually occupied by the captain and looked in both directions. Between the girdered supports, silvery plastic, were wedge-shaped
windows opening downward, through which he could see the navigation area, also flickering with tiny lights—of various colors—and the glare that came steadily from the main screen, the dull light of Quinta. Harrach put his elbows on the slanted console and buried his face in his hands. Had he been able, he would have sobbed for this Sodom and Gomorrah.

  XVI

  The Quintans

  He appeared calm. He did not say good-bye to anyone. None of his comrades got into the elevator with him when it was time. In an ordinary white spacesuit with the helmet tucked under his arm, he watched the sequentially flashing numerals of the passing levels. The door opened by itself. In the high-domed launch chamber stood a surprisingly small rocket, of spotless silver—having not yet traveled through an atmosphere, whose heat would blacken its prow and sides. He approached it, past open-worked metal that gave a muffled echo to his steps, and he felt an increase in weight: a sign that the Hermes was accelerating, to provide him with a good push at takeoff. He looked around. High up, at the intersection of the curved girders, was a ring of strong fluorescent lights. He paused in their shadowless glare to put on his helmet. The cabin hatchway opened above him. The buckles, pulled tight, clicked; automatically he touched the wide rim of the metal collar and inhaled oxygen. He was now cut off from the air that filled the chamber. The pressure was a little high, but it corrected itself immediately. The platform, onto which he stepped, rose. The hatchway, dark a moment before, lit up from within, and the moving platform touched its threshold and stopped. Without haste, lifting his large boots across the threshold, he moved his flexible glove along the tube of the handrail, bent down, and eased himself in feet-first. With both hands he swung from the grips on the transom and lightly dropped inside. The hatchway closed. A growing musical whistling could be heard; it was the gastight hood that had been suspended above the rocket but now fell onto it; hydraulic pistons pressed the hood to the casing of a propulsion funnel, so that the ship would not lose air on takeoff or be poisoned by the flaming exhausts of the engines.