More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

ANANKE ^{Translated by Louis Iribarne with the assistance of Magdalena Majcherczyk}

Something jarred him out of his sleep, into the dark. Left behind—where?—was a reddish, smoky wreath—a city? a fire?—and an enemy, a chase, an outcropping—the other man? Though resigned to failure, he kept dogging the receding recollection, consoling himself with the customary explanation that a dream can be stronger, more compelling than reality itself, purged of words but, for all its whimsicality, governed by a law that only there, in the nightmare, takes on the force of the real. He didn’t know where he was, could recall nothing. One probe of the hand would tell him, but he rankled at his memory’s inertia, coaxed it, cajoled it to bear witness. He cheated; lying perfectly still, he tried to get his bearings from the consistency of the bedding. Not a bunk, that was for sure. Flash: a landing, sparks on a desert floor, the disk of a seemingly bogus, aggrandized Moon; craters, but caught in a dust storm, the currents of a dirty, rusty gale; the square of the cosmodrome’s towers.

Mars.

Still flat on his back, he pondered, this time objectively, the reason for his awakening. He trusted his own body; it wouldn’t have been roused for nothing. OK, the landing had been a tough one, and he was all in after two round-the-clock watches—after Terman broke his arm when the automatic sequencer fired and smacked him against a bulkhead. After eleven years of flying, to bounce off the ceiling during a burn—what a wimp! That’d mean visits to the hospital. Was that the reason? No.

One by one he started recalling yesterday’s events. Starting with the landing. Set down in a windstorm. Atmosphere as good as nil—but with a wind at two hundred sixty kilometers, per hour, try staying on your feet in that miserable gravity. No friction under your soles; to walk, you have to dig your shoes into the sand, sink in it up to your ankles. And that dust, scraping your g-suit with an icy hiss, seeping into every fold, not exactly red, not rust-colored, either; just ordinary sand, only fine-grained, the product of a few billion years of grinding. There was no Port Control office here, because there was no port in the normal sense. Now in its second year, the Mars project was still in a provisional state; anything they erected was immediately inundated with dust—hotels, hostels, whatever. Huge oxygen domes, each the size of ten hangars, squatted under an umbrella of radial steel cables anchored to concrete blocks barely visible from beyond the dunes. Quonset huts, corrugated sheet metal, piles and piles of crates, containers, tanks, bottles, cases, sacks: a city of cargo dumped from a conveyor belt.

The only sealed, halfway decently furnished place was flight control, situated beyond the “bell,” three kilometers away from the cosmodrome where he was now lying in the dark, on a bed belonging to Seyn, the controller on duty.

He sat up and groped for his slippers with his bare foot. He always packed them, just as he always changed before going to bed and felt lousy if he didn’t shave and wash. He couldn’t remember the layout of the room, so, to play it safe, he got up cautiously; too easy to bash your skull, what with the present shortage of materials (the project was all abuzz with the new austerity drive). It upset him that he couldn’t remember where the light switches were. A blind rat. He fumbled around; instead of the switch he touched a cold knob, pulled it. Something clicked and an iris shutter opened with a faint crunch. A dirty, hollow dawn. Standing before the window, which resembled more a ship’s porthole, Pirx felt the stubble on his cheek, scowled, sighed: everything seemed out of whack, and for no apparent reason. If he’d thought about it, he might have acknowledged the reason: he hated Mars.

It was a purely personal thing; nobody knew his true feelings, and nobody cared. Mars, the embodiment of spent illusions—scoffed, ridiculed, but precious. Any other run would have been better. All that past glamorizing of the project was sheer hokum; the chances for colonization a fiction. Oh, Mars had fooled them all; besides, it had been fooling people for a hundred-odd years. The canals. One of the most beautiful, most uncanny episodes in the whole of astronomy. The rusty planet—a desert. The whitecaps of polar snows, last reservoirs of water. A perfectly geometric net as if diamond-etched in glass, running from the poles to the equator: evidence of a contest between reason and nullity, a powerful irrigation system watering millions of desert acres. But of course: come spring, and the coloring of the deserts changed, darkening with the budding vegetation, and in orderly fashion, from the equator to the pole.

What bull! Not a trace of any canals. Vegetation? Those mysterious mosses, lichens protected against frost and windstorms? Polymerized compound carbon monoxides, covering the crust and evaporating when the nightmarish frost turned merely mean. Snow caps? Ordinary solidified C0₂. No water, no oxygen, no life—only rugged craters, dust-eaten rock buttes, tedious plains, a lifeless, flat, and grizzly landscape under a pale, rusty-dun sky. No real clouds, only a blurry haze, a pall, the gloom of a severe thunderstorm. Yet enough atmospheric electricity to last a lifetime, and then some.

What was that humming sound? A signal? No, just the vibrations of the steel cables over the nearest “bubble.” In the dirty light (even the toughest windowpane soon succumbed to the wind-borne sand, which left the plastic dwelling domes looking as if blinded by cataracts), he switched on the bulb above the washbasin and began to shave. As he stretched his cheek muscles taut, he had a sudden silly intuition: Mars was a fraud.

Yes, fraud: all those hopes dashed! It was part of the lore. Whose, may one ask? Who started it? No one individual. Nobody had invented it single-handedly, just as certain legends and beliefs have no known authors. On the contrary, it was a collective fantasy (of astronomers? the myths of observational astronomy?), like the one that gave rise to the vision of a white Venus, the morning and evening star, mysteriously obscured by a cloud mass, a young planet teeming with jungles and reptiles and volcanic oceans; in short, Earth’s past. And Mars—atrophying, rusty, rampant with dust storms and riddles (canals splitting lengthwise in two, twinning overnight—how many respectable astronomers had borne witness to such a phenomenon!); a Mars heroically pitting civilization against the twilight of life—such was Earth’s future: simple, unequivocally clear, intelligible. Only dead wrong, from A to Z.

Under his ear were three little hairs that eluded the electric razor; without his safety razor—it stayed aboard ship—he tried every which way. No dice.

Mars. The astronomers had a rich imagination, all right. Take Schiaparelli. What names he and his archenemy, Antoniadi, had coined to christen what he couldn’t even see, what was just a figment of his imagination. Like the project’s environs: Agathodaemon. Daemon we all know; Agatho—from agate, most likely, because it’s black. Or was it from agathon—wisdom? Too bad astronauts weren’t taught Greek.

Pirx had a weakness for old astronomy textbooks, their touching self-assurance. In 1913 they proclaimed that Earth, seen from outer space, looked red, because the Earth’s atmosphere absorbed the blue component of the spectrum, leaving a residual reddish-pink as the only shade possible. What a gaffe! Yet when one browsed through Schiaparelli’s sumptuously decorated maps, it boggled the mind how he could have seen the nonexistent. Odder still, those who came after him saw it, too. It was a curious psychological phenomenon, one that later went unnoticed. The first four-fifths of any Mars study was devoted to topography and a topology of the canals. In the second half of the twentieth century, one astronomer even subjected the canal grid to a statistical analysis and discovered a topological resemblance to a railway or communications network—as distinct from a natural pattern formed by faults and rivers. And then poof! An optical illusion, pure and simple.

Pirx cleaned his shaver by the window and stowed it back in its case, then cast another glance, now with undisguised antipathy, at the fabled Agathodaemon—at the mysterious “canal,” which turned out to be a boring, flat terrain framed by a blurry, rubble-strewn horizon. Compared with Mars, the Moon was positively homey. To someone who’s never left Earth, that might sound preposterous, but it’s the gospel truth. For one thing, the sun looked from the Moon just as it did from Earth—which can be appreciated only by someone not so much surprised as shocked to see it in the shape of a congealed, shriveled-up, faded fireball. And the lunar view of Earth—majestic, blue, lamplike, symbol of safe refuge, sign of domesticity, lighting the nights. Whereas the combined radiance of Phobos and Deimos was less than the Moon’s in its first quarter. And that lunar silence, the hush of deep space—no wonder it was easier to televise the first human step of the Apollo project than to transmit a similar spectacle from the Himalayas. The effects of an unremitting wind can be appreciated only on Mars.

He checked his watch. Brand new, with five concentric dials, it gave the standard Earth time, ship’s time, and planetary time. Planetary time now read a few minutes past 0600 hours.

“By this time tomorrow I’ll be four million kilometers away,” he thought, not without pleasure. He belonged to the Truckers’ Club, the project’s lifeline, though his days on it were now numbered: the new freighters, giants with a hundred-thousand-ton rest mass, were already in service on the Ares-Terra line. The Ariel, Ares, and Anabis had been Mars-bound for several weeks, and the Ariel was due to land in two hours. He’d never seen a hundred-thousand-tonner land before (since Earth was off limits to them, they were loaded on the Moon; economists said it paid). Ten-to-twenty-thousand-tonners like his Cuìvìer were definitely being retired from service, to be used occasionally for hauling package cargo.

It was 0620 hours—breakfast time for any sensible person. He was tempted by the thought of coffee. But where to get a bite to eat around here? This was his first stopover at Agathodaemon. Till now, he’d been servicing the main “beachhead” at Syrtis. Why did they have to storm Mars on two fronts separated by thousands of kilometers? He knew the scientific reason, but he had some ideas of his own, which he kept to himself. Syrtis Major was planned as a thermonuclear-intellectronic testing ground. It was a different kind of operation there. Some people called Agathodaemon the Cinderella of the project, and several times it was said to be on the verge of folding. But they were still banking on hitting frozen water, deep icebergs thought to be buried beneath the Martian crust… Sure, if the project could tap some local water, that would be a real feat, a breakthrough, seeing as up till now every drop had to be shipped from Earth and construction of the atmospheric steam condensers was now in its second year, with the date of operation constantly being postponed.

No, Mars definitely didn’t send him.

He wasn’t in the mood for going out yet—the building was so very quiet. He was becoming more and more used to the solitude. A ship’s commander can always have his privacy on board; after a long flight (with Earth and Mars no longer in conjunction, the Mars trip took over three months), he practically had to force himself to mix with strangers. And except for the controller on duty, he knew no one here. Look in on him upstairs? That wouldn’t be too nice. Mustn’t hassle people on the job. He was judging by himself: he didn’t like intruders.

In his grip was a thermos with some leftover coffee, and a package of cookies. He ate, trying not to spill the crumbs, sipped his coffee, and stared out through the sand-scored port at the old, flat-bottomed, apathetic floor of Agathodaemon. That was the impression Mars made on him—that it didn’t care any more—which explained the haphazard accumulation of craters, so different from the Moon’s, looking more like washouts (“They look fake, doctored,” he once blurted out while browsing through some detailed blow-ups). The whimsicality of those wild formations that went by the name of “chaos” make them the pet sites of areologists: there was nothing like them on Earth. Mars seemed to have quit, not caring whether it kept its word, unconcerned with appearances. The closer one got to it, the more it lost its solid red exterior, the more it ceased to be the emblem of a war god, the more it revealed its drabness, spots, stains, its lack of any lunar or Earthlike contour: a gray-brown blight, rocked by eternal wind.

He felt a barely palpable vibration underfoot—a converter or a transformer. Otherwise, the same silence as before, penetrated, as if from another world, by the distant howl of a gale wind playing on the cosmodrome’s cables. That diabolical sand could eat through high-grade, five-centimeter steel cables. On the Moon you could leave anything, stow it in the rubble, and come back a hundred, a million years hence, secure in the knowledge that it would still be there. On Mars you couldn’t afford to drop anything, lest it sink forever. Mars had no manners.

At 0640 hours, the horizon reddened with the sunrise, and this splotch of brightness, this bogus dawn—or, rather, its reddish tint—brought back his dream. Jarred by the sudden recall, he slowly put his thermos down. It was coming back to him. Somebody was out to get him … no, it was he who killed someone else. The dead man came after him, chasing him through the ember-red dark; a death blow, then another, but to no effect. Crazy, yes, but there was something else: in the dream, he could have sworn he knew the other man; now he had no idea whom he’d fought to the finish. Granted, this feeling of familiarity could have been a dream illusion, too. He kept dogging it, but his self-willed memory balked, and everything retreated like a snail into its shell, so that he stood by the window, one hand on the metal doorframe, a trifle rattled, as if on the brink of something unnamable. Death. As space technology advanced, it was inevitable that people would start dying on planets. The Moon was loyal to the dead. It let them fossilize, turned them into ice sculpture, mummies, whose lightness and near-weightlessness seemed to diminish the reality, the seriousness of the tragedy. But on Mars, the dead had to be disposed of immediately, because the sand storms would eat through a spacesuit in a matter of days; and before the corpse had been mummified by the severe aridity, bones would sprout from the torn fabric—shiny, polished to perfection, until the whole skeleton was laid bare. Littered in this strange sand, under this strange sky, the bones of the dead were almost a reproach, an offense, as though by bringing along their mortality, people had done something improper, something to be ashamed of, that had to be removed from sight, buried… Screwy as they were, those were his thoughts at the moment.

The night crew went off at 0700, and visitors were allowed into the control tower between shifts. He packed away his few toilet articles and, thinking he’d better make sure the unloading of the Cuivier was going according to schedule, went out. All his package cargo had to be off by 1200 hours, and there were still a few things worth testing—such as the servo-reactor’s cooling system—all the more so since he was going back a man short (getting a substitute for Terman was wishful thinking). He mounted a spiral, polyfoam-padded staircase, his hand on the astonishingly warm (heated?) banister, and when he reached the upper level and opened the swinging glass door with frosted panes, he entered a world so different that he felt like someone else.

It could have been the interior of a giant head, with six enormous, bulging glass eyes fixed in three directions at once. The fourth wall was mounted with antennas, and the whole room rotated on its axis like a revolving stage. In a sense, it was a stage, where the same performance, that of lift-off and landing, clearly visible a kilometer away from behind the rounded control consoles that blended perfectly with the silver-gray walls, was played and replayed. The atmosphere was reminiscent both of an airport control tower and an operating room.

Along the wall of antennas, under a sloping hood, reigned the main space-traffic computer, always in direct contact, always blinking and ticking, continually carrying out its mute monologues and spewing reams of perforated tape. Near it were stationed three back-up terminals, with mikes, spotlights, swivel chairs, and the controllers’ hydrant-shaped hand calculators; and finally, a cute, contoured little bar with a softly humming espresso machine. So here was the coffee trough.

Pirx couldn’t see the Cuivier from the tower; he had parked it, in compliance with the controller’s instructions, five kilometers away, beyond all the clutter, to make way for the project’s first supership landing—as if it wasn’t equipped with the latest space- and astrolocational computers which, according to the bragging of the shipyard builders (nearly all personal acquaintances of Pirx), could plant that Goliath of a quarter-miler, that iron mountain, on a site no bigger than a kitchen garden. All three shifts were mustered for the occasion, which, for all its festivity, was not an official celebration: the Ariel, like every other prototype, had posted dozens of experimental flights and lunar landings, though, to be sure, never with a full cargo.

With a half hour to go before touchdown, Pirx greeted those who were off duty and shook hands with Seyn. The monitors were already activated, blurry smudges ran from top to bottom on the cathode-ray tubes, but the lights on the landing terminal were uniformly green, meaning they still had time to kill. Romani, the Base coordinator, offered him a glass of brandy with his coffee. Pirx hesitated—he wasn’t used to tippling at such an early hour—but, then, he was there as a private guest and was sensitive enough to see they were only trying to lend the event a touch of class. They’d waited months for the superfreighters, whose arrival was calculated to save Port Control untold headaches, since until now it had been a perpetual contest between the voracious appetite of the construction site, never satisfied by the project’s cargo fleet, and the efforts of transport pilots like Pirx to ply the Mars-Earth run as quickly and efficiently as possible. With the conjunction now over, both planets were beginning to move farther apart, the distances between them to increase yearly until reaching an alarming maximum of hundreds of millions of kilometers. It was in this, the project’s hour of greatest travail, that relief was at hand.

The talking was subdued, and when the green lights faded and the buzzers sounded, there was dead silence. A typical Martian day was breaking: not cloudy, not clear, no distinguishable horizon, no well-defined sky, as if devoid of any definable, measurable time. Despite the daylight, the perimeters of the concrete squares hugging the Agathodaemon floor were fringed with glowing lines—automatic laser markings—and the rim of the concrete circular shield, almost black, was edged with sparkling, starlike beads. The controllers, idled, made themselves comfortable in their armchairs, while the central computer flashed its diodes, as if to proclaim its indispensability, and the transmitters had begun to drone ever so softly when a clear bass came over the loudspeaker:

“Hello, Agathodaemon, this is Ariel, Klyne speaking; we’re on video, altitude six hundred, switching to automatic landing in twenty secs; over.”

“Agathodaemon to Ariel,” Seyn, having just put out his cigarette, replied eagerly, his beaklike profile up close to the mesh of the microphone. “We have you on all screens; lie down and let her roost; over.”

They’re goofing around, thought Pirx, who, superstitious as he was, didn’t like it, though they obviously had the landing procedure down pat.

“Ariel to Agathodaemon: we have three hundred, switching to automatic, descending with no lateral drift, zero on zero, what’s the wind force? Over.”

“Agathodaemon to Ariel: wind at a hundred eighty per hour, north-northwest, won’t bother you; over.”

“Ariel to everybody: descending in the axis, stern first, on automatic; over and out.”

Silence fell; only the transmitters were mincing away as a flaming white speck, swelling as fast as a bubble being blown out of fiery glass, appeared on the screens. It was the ship’s gaping tail section, descending as if on an invisible plumb line, without the slightest jerking or tilting or gyrating. Pirx thrilled to see it. Altitude at about a hundred kilometers, he guessed; no sense watching until it was down around fifty; besides, the observation windows were too crowded with craning heads as it was.

Ground control was in constant radio contact with the ship, but there was nothing to radio, leaving the crew to sit back in their antigravitational chairs and trust to the computers commanded by the ship’s primary computer, which had just ordered a shift from atomic to boron drive at an altitude of sixty kilometers, or at the point of atmospheric entry. Pirx now walked up to the middle window, the largest, and immediately sighted through the sky’s pale blur a bright green sparkle, microscopic but vibrating with uncommon radiance—as if the Martian horizon were being drilled from above with a burning emerald. From this incandescent speck, pale filaments fanned in all directions—cloud wisps, or, rather, those aborted clouds-to-be which in the local atmosphere served as surrogates for the real thing. Sucked up into the orbit of the ship’s rocket flare, they ignited and exploded like fireworks. The ship’s circular flange swelled. The air was visibly palpitating from the exhaust, which a novice might have mistaken for a slight vacillation, but Pirx was too experienced to be fooled. Things were going so smoothly, so routinely, that he was reminded of the ease with which the first human step on the Moon had been taken. By now the fuselage was a burning green disk ringed with a scintillating halo. He glanced at the main altimeter above the control terminals—the altitude of such a supership was easy to misjudge; eleven, no, twelve kilometers separated the Ariel, decelerating in response to the reverse thrust, from Mars.

Then several things happened at once.

The Ariel’s stern nozzles, in a nimbus crowned with green rays, began to vibrate in a different way. Over the loudspeaker came a tumult, a muffled cry, something like “Manual!” or maybe “Many!”—one inscrutable word shouted by a human voice, too altered to have been Klyne’s. A second later, the green blaze spewing from the Ariel’s stem paled, then ballooned into an awesome blue-white incandescence—and Pirx understood at once, in a shudder of dread that shook him from head to toe, so that the hollow voice booming from the loudspeaker surprised him not at all.

“ARIEL”—rasped the husky voice—“COURSE ALTERATION. AWAY FROM METEORITE. FULL POWER AHEAD IN THE AXIS! ATTENTION! FULL THRUST!”

It was the computer’s voice. Then another—this one human—yelled something in the background. Pirx had correctly diagnosed the change in exhaust: the reactor’s full thrust had taken over from the boron, and the giant spaceship, as if arrested by the powerful blow of an invisible fist, vibrating in all its joints, stopped—or so it seemed to those looking on—in the thin air, a mere four or five kilometers above the cosmodrome’s shield. To arrest a hundred-thousand-ton mass before reversing, without decelerating first, was unheard of, a maneuver in violation of every rule and regulation, defying all the basics of astronavigation. Pirx saw the giant cylinder’s hull in foreshortened perspective. The ship was losing its vertical trim; it was listing. Ever so slowly, it began to right itself, then tilted the other way, like a giant pendulum, resulting in an even steeper inclination of the quarter-mile-long hull. At such low velocity, a loss of stability of this amplitude was beyond correction. Only in those seconds did Pirx hear the chief controller scream:

“Ariel, Ariel! What are you doing? What’s happening up there?!”

Pirx, standing by a parallel, vacant terminal, shouted into the mike:

“KLYNE! SWITCH TO MANUAL OVERRIDE!!! TO MANUAL FOR LANDING!!! MANUAL!!!”

Just then they were jolted by a thunderous roar—the Ariel’s delayed sound wave, unremitting, prolonged. How fast it had all happened! A concerted cry went up from the windows. The controllers jumped up from their consoles.

The Ariel plummeted like a stone, recklessly strewing the atmosphere with swirls of exhaust flare, rotating slowly, corpselike, an enormous iron tower flung from the sky onto dirty desert dunes. All stood nailed to the floor in a hollow, horrific silence fraught with impotence; the loudspeaker grated, crackled, rumbled with the distant clamor—like the roar of the sea—while a refulgent, white, incredibly long cylinder shot down with accelerated speed, seemingly aimed at the control tower. Pirx’s neighbor let out a groan. Instinctively everyone ducked.

The hull slammed into one of the shield’s low outer walls, halved, and, breaking up with an eerie slowness in a shower of fragments, buried itself in the sand; a ten-story cloud shot up, boomed, and rained stitches of fire. Above the curtain of ejected sand loomed the still blindingly white nose section, which, truncated from the rest, traversed the air a few hundred meters; then one, two, three powerful thuds with the force of earthquake tremors. The whole building heaved, rose and fell like a skiff on a wave. Then, in a hellish racket of cracking iron, everything was blotted out by a brownish-black wall of smoke and dust. Even as they raced downstairs to the airlock, Pirx, one of the first to suit up, had no doubts: in such a collision, there could be no survivors.

Soon they were running, buffeted by the gale winds; from far off, from the direction of the “bell,” the first of the caterpillar vehicles and hovercrafts were already on the move. But there was no reason to hurry. Pirx didn’t know how or when he returned to the control tower—the image of the crater and the crushed hull still in his dazed eyes—and only at the sight of his own suddenly grayed, somewhat shrunken face in a wall mirror did he come to.

By afternoon, a committee of experts had been set up to investigate the causes of the crash. Work crews with excavators and cranes were still clearing away the wreckage of the giant vehicle, and had yet to reach the deeply buried cockpit containing the automatic controls, when a team of specialists was bused over from Syrtis Major—in one of those quaint little helicopters with huge propellers, custom-designed for flight in the Martian air. Pirx kept out of the way and didn’t ask questions, knowing only too well that the case bordered on the unsolvable. During a routine landing, with all its hallowed sequences and clockwork programming, for no apparent reason the Ariel’s primary computer had shut down the boron power, signaled a residual meteorite alarm, and initiated an escape maneuver at full thrust; the ship’s stability, once lost during this neck-breaking action, was never regained. It was an event unprecedented in the history of astronavigation, and every plausible hypothesis—a computer failure, a glitch, a short in one of the circuits—appeared highly improbable, because there was not one but two programs for lift-off and landing, safeguarded by so many back-up systems as to make sabotage a more likely cause.

He puzzled over the incident in the little cubicle that Seyn had put at his disposal the night before, deliberately laying low so as not to intrude, especially since he was scheduled to lift off within the next twenty-four hours; but he couldn’t come up with anything, or at least not with anything he could report to the committee. He wasn’t forgotten, though; a few minutes before one in the afternoon, Seyn paid him a visit. Waiting in the corridor was Romani; Pirx, on his way out, didn’t recognize him at first. The coordinator of the Agathodaemon complex could have passed for one of the mechanics: he wore a pair of sooty, grease-stained overalls, his face was drawn, the left corner of his mouth twitched, and only his voice had a familiar ring. On behalf of the committee, of which he was a member, he asked Pirx to postpone the Cuivier’s lift-off.

“Sure thing.” Pirx, a trifle stunned, tried to regain his composure. “I just need clearance from Base.”

“Leave that to us.”

Nothing more was said, and the three of them marched over to the main “bubble,” where, inside the long, squat command HQ, sat some twenty or more experts—a few of whom were based locally, the majority having flown over from Syrtis Major. It was lunchtime, but since every second was precious, they were served a cold meal from the cafeteria. Over tea and paper plates, which lent the proceedings a strangely casual, even festive air, the session got under way. The chairman, Engineer Hoyster, called first on Pirx to describe the abortive landing, and Pirx could easily guess why. Belonging neither to the ground-control team nor to Agathodaemon’s crew, he was the only unbiased witness present. When he reached the point of his own personal intervention, Hoyster interrupted him.

“So you wanted Klyne to shift from automatic to manual override?”

“Yes.”

“Why, may I ask?”

“I figured it was his only chance,” Pirx answered without hesitation.

“Right. And you didn’t foresee that the shift to manual would mean a loss of stability?”

“It was already lost. This can be checked; we do have the tapes.”

“Naturally. We just wanted to get a general picture. What’s your own guess?”

“As to the cause?”

“Yes. For the moment we’re just piecing together the facts. Nothing you say will be binding; any hypothesis, however shaky, may prove valuable.”

“I see. My guess is that something went haywire with the computer. What, or even how, I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes and ears. The computer aborted the maneuver and signaled a meteorite alert. It sounded like ‘Meteorites—attention, full power ahead in the axis.’ But with no meteorites around…” Pirx shrugged.

“The Ariel was an advanced AIBM 09,” observed Boulder, an electronics engineer with whom Pirx had rubbed elbows at Syrtis Major.

Pirx nodded.

“I know. That’s why I said I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. But it did happen.”

“Why did Klyne hold back, in your opinion, Commander?” asked Hoyster.

Pirx felt his insides go cold; before answering, he cast a glance around the table. It was a question that had to be asked, though he didn’t relish being the first to face it.

“I don’t know the answer to that.”

“Of course not. But you’re an old-timer; put yourself in his place…”

“I did. I would have done what I tried to make him do.”

“And?”

“No response. A madhouse. Yelling, maybe. The tapes will have to be checked and rechecked, though I’m afraid it won’t do much good.”

“Commander,” said Hoyster, in a soft but painstaking voice, as if struggling to choose his words, “you realize the situation, don’t you? As we’re speaking, there are two more superfreighters, equipped with the exact same guidance system, on the Aresterra line. The Anabis isn’t due for another three weeks, but the Ares is nine days away. No matter what our obligations to the dead, we owe more to the living. I’m sure in the past five hours you’ve given some thought to the case. I can’t force you, but I’m asking you to speak your mind.”

Pirx blanched. He’d read Hoyster’s mind from his opening words, and a sensation, opaque, born of his nightmare, gripped him: an intense, desperate silence, a faceless enemy, and a double killing—of himself and the other. It came and went. He collected himself and looked Hoyster in the eye.

“I see,” he said. “Klyne and I belong to two different generations. When I was getting my wings, servo-mechanisms were more error-prone. Distrust becomes second nature. My guess is … he trusted in them to the end.”

“He thought the computer was in control, had a better command of the situation?”

“Not so much in control. More like, if the computer couldn’t handle it, a man would be even less likely to do so.”

He sighed. He’d spoken his mind without casting a shadow on his younger, now deceased, colleague.

“Was there any chance of saving that ship, Commander?”

“Hard to say. There was so little time. The Ariel dropped to zero velocity.”

“Have you ever soft-landed under such conditions?”

“Yes. But in a ship with a smaller mass, and it was on the Moon. The longer and heavier the ship, the harder it is to regain stability when you’re losing speed, especially if it goes into a list.”

“Did Klyne hear you?”

“I don’t know. He should have.”

“Did he ever override the controls?”

Pirx was about to defer to the tapes, but answered instead:

“No.”

“How do you know?” It was Romani.

“The monitor showed ‘automatic landing’ the whole time. It went off only on impact.”

“Could it not be, sir, that Klyne didn’t have time?” asked Seyn. Why was he “sirring” him when they were buddies? Hm. Keeping his distance, maybe. Out to get him?

“The chances of survival can be mathematically deduced.” Pirx was aiming for objectivity. “I just don’t know offhand.”

“But once the list exceeded forty-five degrees, stability was irretrievably lost,” insisted Seyn. “Right?”

“Not on the Cuivier it wouldn’t be. One can increase the thrust beyond the accepted limits.”

“An acceleration over twenty g’s can be fatal.”

“It can be. But a fall from five kilometers up has to be.”

That ended their brief exchange. Tobacco smoke hung under the lights, which had been switched on despite the daylight.

“Do you mean that Klyne could have manned the controls but didn’t?” This was the chairman, Hoyster, picking up the thread.

“It looks that way.”

“Do you think you might have rattled him when you butted in?” asked Seyn’s assistant, a man from Agathodaemon, a stranger to Pirx. Was the home team against him? He could understand it if they were.

“It’s a possibility. There was a lot of shouting in the cockpit. Or at least that’s what it sounded like.”

“Panic?” asked Hoyster.

“No comment.”

“Why?”

“You can listen to the tape. The voices were too garbled to be hard data. Too easy to misinterpret.”

“In your opinion, could ground control have lent further assistance?” asked a poker-faced Hoyster. The committee was obviously divided; Hoyster was from Syrtis Major.

“No. None.”

“Your own reaction would seem to contradict you.”

“Not really. Control has no right to countermand a skipper in such a situation. Things can look a lot different in the cockpit.”

“So you admit you acted contrary to the rules?” Seyn’s assistant again.

“Yes.”

“Why?” asked Hoyster.

“The rules aren’t sacred. I always do what I think right. I’ve had to answer for it in the past.”

“To whom?”

“The Cosmic Tribunal.”

“But you were cleared of all charges,” intruded Boulder. Syrtis Major versus Agathodaemon: it was blatantly obvious.

Pirx paused.

“Thank you, sir.”

He sat down in an adjacent chair. Seyn was the next to testify, followed by his assistant. They were still at it when the first ground recordings arrived. Telephone reports from the wreckage site confirmed the absence of any survivors, though they had yet to reach the Ariel’s cockpit, buried eleven meters below ground. The committee proceeded to audit the tapes and continued taking depositions without a break until seven, then recessed for an hour. Seyn and the Syrtisians drove out to the site of the shipwreck. Romani stopped Pirx in the passageway.

“Commander Pirx…”

“Yes?”

“You haven’t any—uh—”

“Don’t. The stakes are too high,” interrupted Pirx.

Romani nodded. “You have seventy-two hours’ furlough. We’ve worked it out with Base.”

“Earthside?” asked Pirx, astonished. “I don’t see how I can be—”

“Hoyster, Rahaman, and Boulder want to co-opt you onto the committee. You’re not going to let us down, are you?”

All three were Syrtisians.

“I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” he replied, and they let it go at that.

They reconvened at nine. The replay of the tapes was dramatic, but not nearly as much as the film, which recorded each stage of the calamity, from the moment the Ariel loomed as a green star in the zenith. Afterward, Hoyster gave a recap of the post-mortem.

“All the evidence points to a computer breakdown. If it didn’t signal a meteorite alarm, it must have projected the Ariel on a collision course with something. The tapes show that it was three percent over the limit. Why, we don’t know. Maybe the cockpit will provide a clue.” He was referring to the Ariel’s on-board tapes, though Pirx did not share his optimism. “We’ll never know the exact sequence of events during those final moments in the cockpit. We do know that the computer’s Baud rate was perfect: even at the peak of the crisis, it was fully operative. The sub-routines performed flawlessly till the end, too. That much has been established. We’ve uncovered nothing to indicate any external or internal interference with the prescribed landing procedure. From 0703 to 0708 hours, all systems were go. The computer’s decision to abort the landing cannot, at present, be explained. Mr. Boulder?”

“I don’t get it,”

“A programming error?” asked someone.

“Impossible. The Ariel had made landing after landing with the very same program—axially, and at every possible angle.”

“But that was on the Moon, under conditions of lesser gravity.”

“Of possible consequence for the thrust modulators, but not for the informational systems. Besides, the power didn’t quit.”

“Mr. Rahaman?”

“I’m not very up-to-date on this program.”

“But you’re familiar with the model?”

“I am.”

“Failing any external cause, what could have interrupted the landing procedure?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“A bomb planted under the computer, maybe…” said Rahaman.

Out in the open at last; Pirx was all ears now. The exhaust fans whirred as smoke clustered around the ceiling vents.

“Sabotage?”

“The computer functioned till the end, though erratically,” observed Kerhoven, the only locally stationed intellectronics engineer on the committee.

“Well, I only mentioned it for what it may be worth,” said Rahaman, backing off. “In the case of a normally functioning computer, the landing and lift-off maneuver can be aborted only by something out of the ordinary. A power failure…”

“Power there was.”

“But, theoretically, can’t a computer abort the procedure?”

The chairman knew well enough that it could. Pirx understood that his question was not addressed to them, but was for the benefit of Earth.

“In theory, yes. In practice, no. Not once in the history of astronautics has a meterorite alarm been sounded during a landing. When a meteorite is sighted, the landing is simply postponed.”

“But none was sighted.”

“No.”

A dead end. There were a few moments of silence. The fans purred. Darkness showed through the round ports. A Martian night.

“What we need are the people who constructed that model, the ones who test-loaded it,” Rahaman said at last.

Hoyster nodded. He was distracted by a message handed him by the telegraph operator. “They’ll be reaching the cockpit in an hour or so,” he said. Then, looking up, he added: “Macross and Van der Voyt will take part in tomorrow’s session.”

There was some commotion. Macross was the chief engineer and Van der Voyt the managing director of the shipyard whence the hundred-thousand-tonners came.

“Tomorrow?” Pirx couldn’t believe his ears.

“Not live, of course—but by video, thanks to a direct relay. Here’s the cable.” He waved the telegram.

“Hold on—what’s the time lag?” asked someone.

“Eight minutes.”

“What’s the big idea? We’ll have to wait a lifetime for every answer,” someone asked, in a clamor of several voices at once.

Hoyster shrugged.

“We’ll have to comply. Granted, it’ll be a nuisance, but we’ll work out something…”

“Does that mean we’re adjourning till tomorrow?” asked Romani.

“Right. We’ll reconvene at 0600 hours. By then we should have the on-board tapes.”

Pirx gladly accepted Romani’s offer to put him up for the night. He wanted no part of Seyn. Though he understood the man’s behavior, he couldn’t condone it. Accommodations were found for the Syrtisians—not without some difficulty—and by midnight Pirx was left all alone in the tiny cubicle that served as the coordinator’s reference library and private study. He lay down, fully dressed, on a cot set up between several theodolites, and, with his arms under his head, stared up at the ceiling, eyes fixed, barely breathing.

It was odd, but, being among strangers, he had been viewing the accident as an outsider, as one of the many witnesses not really involved, even when he had detected the hostility, the irritation in their questions—an unspoken accusation directed at the intruder out to show up the local boys—and when Seyn had turned against him. This was another realm, fixed in the natural dimension of the inevitable: under the circumstances it had had to happen. He would defend what he’d done, on rational grounds; he held himself in no way responsible for the disaster. True, he’d been shaken, but he’d kept his head, always the observer, never entirely overwhelmed by events because of the way they lent themselves to systematic analysis: for all their inexplicability, they could be sifted, categorized, posited according to the method dictated by the solemnity of the investigation.

Now all that was giving way. His mind was a blank, he evoked nothing, the images reasserted themselves on their own, from the beginning: the monitors, the ship’s entry into the Martian atmosphere, the deceleration from a cosmic velocity, the shifts in thrust; he was everywhere at once—in the control tower, in the cockpit; he knew the muffled strokes, the rumbling along the keel and ribs when the atomic drive gave way to the pulsating boron hydrides; the deep, reassuring bass of the turbo-pumps; the reverse thrust, the axial descent, stem first, majestically slow; the slight lateral corrections, and then ignition, the thunderous roar accompanying the sudden shift in thrust when full power was restored to the nozzles; the vibrations, the destabilization, the frantic effort to keep on an even keel, swinging pendulously, teetering like a drunken tower, before going into a dive, inert, rudderless, blind, a stone, disintegrating on impact—and he was everywhere. He might have been the struggling ship itself, and, though painfully aware of the hopeless inaccessibility, the finality of what had happened, he returned to those fragmentary seconds with a silent, unremitting question in search of the cause.

Whether or not Klyne had tried to man the controls didn’t matter any more. Ground control? Clean. Only someone very superstitious or trained in soberer times could have begrudged them their fun. Reason told him there was nothing sinful about it. He lay there, flat on his back, but at the same time he was standing by the window pitched toward the zenith, watching as the flickering green boron star was consumed by that awesome solar blaze—with its pulsation so typical of atomic power—in the nozzles, which had already begun to cool (hence the restrictions against sudden shifts to full throttle); still watching as the ship swung like the tongue of a bell rocked by a madman’s hands, listing with the entire length of its behemoth body, its very dimensions, the very force of its magnitude making it seem immune to danger—a century ago, the passengers of the Titanic must have felt similarly comforted.

Suddenly it receded; he was awake. He got up, washed his face and hands, opened his grip, got out his pajamas, slippers, toothbrush, and for the third time that day eyed himself in the washbasin mirror. He saw a stranger.

In his late thirties, pushing forty: the shadow line. Time to accept the terms of the unsigned contract, there without the asking; the knowledge that what binds others applies to you, too, that there are no exceptions to the rule: though it was contrary to nature, one had to grow old. So far, only the body was secretly obeying, but that wasn’t enough any more. Now one had to assent to it. Youth made its own unalterability the rule, the basic premise: I was childish, immature, but now I am my true self, and that’s the way I’ll stay. This was the joke at the very heart of existence, whose discovery was more a cause of amazement than of alarm—a sense of outrage born of the realization that the game we’ve been forced to play is a hoax. The contest was to have been different; after the initial shock, the anger, the resistance, came the slow negotiations with one’s self, with one’s body: no matter how smooth and imperceptible the aging process, we can never reconcile ourselves to it rationally. We brace ourselves for thirty-five, then forty, as if it were to last, and with the next revision, the shattering of illusion is greeted with such resistance that the momentum makes us overstep the bounds.

That’s when a forty-year-old begins to adopt the mannerisms of an old man. Resigned to the inevitability of it, we carry on the game with grim determination, as if perversely bent on upping the ante: all right, if it’s to be dirty, if this cynical, cruel promissory note, this IOU, has to be honored, if I really have to pay, then even though I never agreed to it, never asked for it, never knew, there’s your debt, and more! Comical as it sounds, we try to outbluff our opponent: I’ll grow old so damned fast you’ll be sorry. Stuck at the shadow line, or almost across it, in the phase of abandoning and surrendering positions, we keep up the fight, keep on defying reality, and because of the constant scrimmaging we grow old psychically by leaps and bounds. Either we exaggerate or we underrate, until one day we see, too late as usual, that this fencing match, all these suicidal thrusts, retreats, and sallies, were also a joke. We are like children, withholding our approval of something for which our assent was never required, where there can never be any protest or struggle—a struggle, moreover, rooted in self-deception. The shadow line is not a memento mori but is in many respects worse, a vantage point from which to see our prospects diminished. That is, the present is neither a promise nor a waiting room, neither a preface nor a springboard for great hopes, because the terms have been imperceptibly reversed. The so-called training period was an irrevocable reality; the preface—the story proper; the hopes—fantasies; the optional, the provisional, the momentary, and the whimsical—the true stuff of life. What hasn’t been achieved by now will never be; and one has to reconcile oneself to this fact, quietly, fearlessly, and, if possible, without despair.

This was an awkward age in an astronaut’s career—for him more so than for anybody else, since in the space profession anyone less than perfectly fit was automatically expendable. As the physiologists attested, the demands made by astrocology were too severe, even for the physically and spiritually fittest; to be demoted from the front ranks was to forfeit all. The medical boards were ruthless, devastatingly so, but necessary: no one could be allowed to collapse or die of a heart attack at the controls. People in their prime went ashore and suddenly found themselves near retirement—the examining doctors were so used to their subterfuges and desperate simulations that they waived disciplinary action. And rare was the pilot who could have his eligibility extended past fifty.

Fatigue is the brain’s toughest enemy; a hundred or a thousand years hence, this may change, but for now it is an agonizing prospect for anyone during prolonged space flight—anyone at the shadow line.

Klyne belonged to a new generation of astronauts; Pirx, on the other hand, to those called “anti-computer”—thus he was a “reactionary” and a “fossil.” Some of his contemporaries had already retired; depending on their talents and effectiveness, they became lecturers or members of the Cosmic Tribunal, took cushy jobs in the shipyards, joined administrative boards, tended their gardens. On the whole, they held their own; they simulated acceptance of the inevitable; but how it cost some of them!

There were also aberrations born of protest, of obstinacy, of pride and fury, of the sense of a wrong unjustly incurred. Although it was a profession that did not allow for madmen, certain individuals came dangerously close to madness, only to stop short of crossing the line. Under the mounting pressure of the inevitable, people did the wackiest things—bizarre things. Oh, he knew all about those quirks, aberrations, superstitions, to which both strangers and long-time shipmates—whose stability he would have personally sworn by—were susceptible. Sweet ignorance was hardly a privilege in a line of work demanding such sure-fire know-how; every day neurons perished in the brain by the thousands, so that by thirty a person was already in the midst of it, that peculiar, imperceptible, but incessant race, that contest between the slackening of reflexes undermined by atrophy, and their perfection achieved through experience; from which arose that shaky equilibrium, that acrobatic tightrope act with which one had to live, to fly.

And to dream. Whom was he out to kill the night before? The dream obviously signified something, but what? Reclining on the cot, which squeaked under his weight, he sensed a sleepless night on the way—though he had never lost a night’s sleep, the insomnia, too, was inevitable. That alarmed him. Not the prospect of a sleepless night so much as his body’s recalcitrance, signaling a vulnerability, a break in what was hitherto infallible, the mere thought of which, at this moment, connoted defeat. He was not content to lie there wide-eyed against his will, and so, even though it was silly, he sat up, stared vacantly at his pajamas, then shifted his gaze to the bookshelves.

Not expecting to find anything of interest, he was all the more startled to discover a row of thick-bound volumes above the compass-pocked plotting board. There, neatly arrayed, stood practically the entire history of areology, most of the titles being familiar to him from his reference library on Earth. He got up and ran his fingers along their solid spines. Herschel, the father of astronomy, was there; so was Kepler’s Astronomia Nova de Motibus Stellae Martis ex Observationìbus Tychonis Brahe, in a 1784 edition. Then came Flammarion, Backhuysen, Kaiser, and the great dreamer, Schiaparelli—a dark-brown Latin edition of his Memoria terza—and Arrhenius, Antoniadi, Kuiper, Lowell, Pickering, Saheko, Struve, Vaucouleurs, all the way up to Wernher von Braun and his Exploration of Mars. And maps, rolls of them, inscribed with all the canals—Margaritifer Sinus, Lacus Solis, even Agathodaemon… He stood before the familiar, not really having to open any of these books with their burnished, plywood-thick covers. The musty effluvium of old linen bindings and yellowed pages, bespeaking both dignity and decrepitude, revived memories of long hours spent in contemplation of the mystery that had been attacked, besieged for two centuries by a horde of hypotheses, only to have their authors die, one by one, unrequited. Antoniadi went a lifetime without observing any canals, and only in the twilight of old age did he grudgingly acknowledge “some lines bearing a likeness to same.” The “canalists,” meanwhile, charted their observations at night, whiling away hours at the eyeglass for one of those fleeting moments of stationary atmosphere, at which time, they averred, a hair-thin geometric grid emerged on the fuzzy gray surface. Lowell made it dense, Pickering less so, but he was in luck with his “gemination,” as the incredible duplication of canals was called. An illusion? Why, then, did some canals never double?

He used to pore over these books as a cadet—in the reading room, of course, since they were too rare to be circulated. Pirx—need it be said?—sided with the “canalists.” Their arguments rang infallibly. Graff, Antoniadi, Hall—those incurable doubting Thomases—had their observatories in the air-polluted cities of the North, whereas Schiaparelli worked in Milan, and Pickering on his mountain overlooking the Arizona desert. The “anti-canalists” conducted the most ingenious experiments: they would chart a disk with randomly inscribed dots and blotches that, viewed from a distance, took on a gridlike pattern, and then ask: How could they escape the most powerful instruments? Why were the lunar canals visible with the naked eye? How could the earlier observers have missed them, and everyone after Schiaparelli take them as self-evident? And the “canalists” would counter: The lunar canals went undetected in the pretelescopic age. Earth’s atmosphere wasn’t stable enough to permit detection with high-powered telescopes; the drawing experiments only sidestepped the issue. The “canalists” had an answer for everything: Mars was a giant frozen ocean, the canals were rifts in its meteor-impacted ice mass or, rather, wide fluvial valleys watered by the spring thaws and graced with vernal efflorescence. When spectroscopy revealed an insufficient water content, they decided the canals were enormous troughs, long valleys covered with cloud masses borne by convex currents adrift from the pole to the equator. Schiaparelli never publicly acknowledged these as figments of a foreign imagination, playing on the ambiguity of the term “canal.” This reticence on the part of the Milanese astronomer was shared by many others, who never named, only charted and displayed, but in his papers Schiaparelli left behind drawings explaining the origin of the doubling phenomenon, the famous gemination process: when the parallel, hitherto arid rills were inundated, the water suddenly caused the helices to darken, like wood grooves filled with ink. The “anti-canalists,” meanwhile, did not just deny the existence of the canals and amass a body of counterargument, but over time became increasingly vindictive.

In his hundred-page pamphlet, Wallace, after Darwin the second architect of the theory of natural evolution, hence not even an astronomer by profession, a man who probably never even glimpsed Mars through the lenses, demolished the canal hypothesis, and any thought of life on Mars as well: Mars, he wrote, was not only not inhabited by sentient beings, as Lowell claimed, but was actually uninhabitable. None remained neutral; all had to proclaim their credos. The next generation of canalists began to speak of a Martian civilization, thus deepening the split: a realm bearing traces of sentient activity, some said; a corpselike desert, countered others. Then Saheko observed those mysterious flashes—volatile, extinguished by cloud formations, too fleeting to be volcanic eruptions, arising during the period of planetary conjunction, thus ruling out a solar reflection on the planet’s high glacial range.

Not until the unleashing of atomic energy was the possibility of nuclear tests on Mars broached. One side had to be right. By the mid-twentieth century, it was unanimously agreed that, although Schiaparelli’s geometrical canals were chimerical, there was something up there to suggest the presence of canals. The eye may embellish, but not hallucinate; the canals were observed by too many people, in too many places on Earth, to be an allusion. So: no glacial water, no cloud streams borne along the valleys, and most likely no zones of vegetation, either; yet something was up there—who knew, perhaps even more mind-boggling, more enigmatic—that only awaited the human eye, the camera lens, and unmanned space probes.

Pirx knew better than to divulge the thoughts inspired by these readings, but Boerst, bright and ruthless as befitted the class brain, soon discovered his true sympathies, and for a few weeks made him the laughingstock of the school, dubbing him “Pirx the canalist,” promotor of the doctrine “Credo, quia non est.” Pirx knew full well the canals were a fiction; worse, that there was nothing even faintly suggestive of them. How could he not have known, what with Mars having been colonized for years, and his having passed his qualifying exams, when he was obliged to orient detailed photographic maps under the vigilant eye of his TA, and even, in his mock-ups, to soft-land in the simulator on the same Agathodaemon floor where he now stood, under the project’s dome, by a bookshelf containing two centuries of astronomical discoveries and antique museum pieces. Yes, he knew, but it was a knowledge of a different order, remote, distanced, not to be verified by tests, by those exercises seemingly based on a hoax. It was as if there existed yet another, inaccessible, geometrically patterned, and mysterious Mars.

There is a stretch on the Ares-Terra line, a zone from which one can really see—continually, for hours on end—with the naked eye what Schiaparelli, Lowell, and Pickering were able to observe only during brief interludes of atmospheric stability. Through the ports one can see the canals, for up to twenty-four, sometimes forty-eight hours, vaguely outlined against the drab, inhospitable shield. Then, as the globe begins to swell on approach, they commence to fade, to dissolve, blurring one by one into a blank nothingness, leaving only the planet’s disk, purged of any sharp contours, to mock with its tedious gray nullity the hopes and expectations it had aroused. True, weeks later, certain surface details, fixed and well defined, begin to re-emerge, but these turn out to be the serrated rims of the largest craters, the wild accretions of weather-beaten rocks, a riot of rock scree buried under deep layers of drab sand, in no way evocative of that pristine, impeccable geometry. At close range, the planet yields its chaos, meekly and irrevocably, incapable of shedding that glaring image of a billion-year erosion; of a chaos not to be reconciled with that memorably lucid design, whose symmetry connoted something compelling, moving, which bespoke a rational order, an unintelligible but manifest logic, that required just a trifle more exertion to be grasped.

Where was that order, and whence came this mocking illusion? Was it a projection of the retina, of human optical processes? A figment of the cerebral cortex? The questions remained unanswered as the problem went the way of all hypotheses phased out and crushed by technological progress: It was swept into the trash. Since there were no canals—not even any topographical features to foster the illusion—the case was closed. A good thing that neither the “canalists” nor the “anti-canalists” lived to hear these sobering revelations, because the riddle was never really solved, merely phased out. Other planets had nebulous shields, and not a single canal was ever sighted on them. Unseen, uncharted. Why? Anyone’s guess.

Here, too, hypotheses could be advanced to explain this chapter of astronomy: the combination of distance and optical enlargement, of objective chaos and a subjective craving for order; the residual traces of something that, emerging from the blurred patch in the lens, just beyond the border of perceptibility, momentarily came within the eye’s grasp; the faintest visual suggestion combined with subconscious wishful thinking.

Requiring all to choose sides, entrenched in their respective positions, forever joined in noble conflict, generation after generation of astrophysicists had gone to the grave firmly believing that the issue would one day be resolved by the appropriate tribunals, fairly and irrevocably. Pirx was sure that all—each in his own way, each for a different reason—would have felt cheated, disillusioned, if they, like he, had been made privy to the truth. For in this refutation of both pro and con, in the total impropriety of any concept vis-à-vis the enigma, was contained a bitter but dire, cruel but salutary lesson which—it suddenly dawned on him—bore directly on the present, on this brain-teaser of a calamity.

A link between the old astrography and the crack-up of the Ariel? But how? And what to make of this intuition, so vague and yet so compelling? A teaser, all right. But whatever the missing link between them, however distant and tenuous the connection, he knew it would no more be revealed now, in the middle of the night, than it would be forgotten. He would have to sleep on it.

As he switched off the light, it occurred to him that Romani was a man of much broader intellectual horizons than he had given him credit for. These books were his own private possession, and one had to fight for every kilo of personal gear shipped to Mars—special notices, appealing to the work crew’s loyalty and warning against the dangers of overloading, were plastered all over the Base, Earthside. Everywhere they were crying for expediency, and here was Romani, coordinator of the Agathodaemon project, who, in flagrant violation of the rules, had imported dozens of kilos of utterly useless books—and for what? Surely not for bedtime reading.

In the dark, already half asleep, he smiled as he realized the motive that justified the presence of these bibliophilic antiquities under the project’s dome. Granted, these books, these passé gospels, these discredited prophecies, had no business being there. But it seemed only fair—necessary, even—that these minds, which had once been the bitterest of enemies, which had given their best to the mystery of the red planet, should find themselves, now fully reconciled, here on Mars. They deserved it, and Romani, who understood, was a man worthy of his trust.

At 0500 hours, he woke from a deep sleep, as alert as if braced by a cold shower. Savoring a few minutes’ leisure—exactly five; it was becoming something of a habit—he thought of the commander of the shipwrecked Ariel. He wasn’t sure whether Klyne could have saved the ship with its thirty-man crew, or whether the man had even tried. Klyne belonged to a generation of rationalists, men trained to keep pace with their impeccably logical allies, the computers, which became more demanding as one made greater efforts to control them; in a sense, blind obedience was the wiser course. But Pirx was incapable of blind obedience. Distrust was in his bones. He flipped on the radio.

The furor had started. Pirx had been expecting it, but he’d underestimated the extent of it. The press kept hammering away at three themes: the suspicion of sabotage, the risk to the other Mars-bound ships, and, of course, the political fallout. The big papers tiptoed around the sabotage hypothesis, but the tabloids wallowed in it. The hundred-thousand-tonners also took flak: they weren’t flightworthy, they couldn’t lift off from Earth, and worse, they could neither abort a mission (their fuel supply was inadequate) nor be junked in circum-Martian orbits. It was true: they had to land on Mars. But three years before, unbeknownst to these self-styled experts, a test prototype equipped with a different computer model had successfully soft-landed on Mars, not once but several times. The political promotors of the Mars project were also subjected to a campaign of vilification, their critics badmouthing it as sheer lunacy. There were exposures of work-safety violations on both bases, of the project’s rubber-stamping and bench-testing methods, of bureaucratic bumbling among high-ranking administrators—in short, a Cassandralike outcry.

When he reported at 0600 hours, he found himself a member of a nonexistent committee, their self-appointed panel having just been abolished by Earth; it was to start all over again, now officially and legally reconstituted as an adjunct to Earth’s board of inquiry. Thus dissolved, the body reaped certain advantages. It was relieved of any decision-making, and so felt freer to make recommendations to its Earthly superior.

Logistically, the situation at Syrtis Major was ticklish but not critical, whereas a suspension of deliveries would sink Agathodaemon before the month was out. Any effective help from Syrtis was out of the question. Not only were building materials in short supply, but water as well. The situation called for the most stringent economizing.

Pirx listened to the update with one ear only, because meanwhile the, Ariel’s cockpit recorder had been rescued. The human remains were being stored in containers: no decision as yet on whether they would be buried on Mars. The tapes had to be processed before they could be analyzed, which explained why matters not directly related to the causes of the shipwreck were under discussion—such as whether a mobilization of smaller freighters could save the project from extinction, guaranteeing delivery of at least minimal bio-support cargo. While Pirx saw the wisdom of such deliberations, he couldn’t help thinking of the two Mars-bound hundred-thousand-tonners, whose existence had somehow been overlooked, almost as if it was taken for granted they would have to abort. But they had to land. By now, all were keenly aware of the reaction of the American press, and radiograms kept them up-to-date on the latest political diatribes. It didn’t look good: spokesmen for the project had yet to issue a public statement, and already the administration found itself caught in a firestorm of accusation, including insinuations of “criminal negligence.” Pirx, wanting no part of it, slipped out of the smoke-filled hall around ten, and, thanks to ground maintenance, drove out in a jeep to the site of the shipwreck.

By Martian standards, it was a warm, almost cloudy day, the sky more coral-hued than rust-gray. At such times Mars seemed possessed of its own, un-Earthly, raw, slightly veiled, even soiled beauty, the sort we expected to see fully revealed, crowned with a solar radiance, from the vortex of dust and haze, though this expectation went unfulfilled—Mars’s ephemeral beauty was not a promise but the very best the planet’s landscape could muster.

Having left the squat, bunkerlike ground control a few kilometers back, they reached the end of the launch-pad area, then got hopelessly mired just beyond it. Pirx wore a lightweight partial, which they were all using up here, bright blue, much more comfortable than the full, with a backpack made lighter by an open respirator. Even so, something was wrong with the air conditioning, because the moment he started sweating from the exertion of wading through the sand drifts, his helmet visor began to fog up. Fortunately, hanging like turkey wattles between his neck-ring disconnect and his breastplate were several hand pouches that he could use to dry the glass from the inside—crude but effective.

An immense crater, teeming with caterpillars: the excavation, lined on three sides with sheets of corrugated aluminum acting as sand barriers, resembled the mouth of a mine shaft. The Ariel’s midship—huge, like a trans-Atlantic liner storm-battered and shipwrecked against the rocks—took up half of the funnel; some fifty people bustled below her, both they and their dredging machines looking like ants on a giant’s carcass. The ship’s eighteen-meter nose section, almost intact, lay elsewhere, hurled a few hundred meters away in the crash. The force of impact had been awesome, to judge by the lumps of melted quartz: the kinetic energy had been immediately converted to thermal, producing a shock similar to that of a meteorite landing, despite a velocity less than the speed of sound. In Pirx’s mind, the disparity between Agathodaemon’s physical capacities and the enormity of the wreckage was not enough to justify the slipshod excavation; one had to improvise, of course, but the almost willful bedlam bespoke a resignation in face of the inconceivable. Even the ship’s water was wasted: with every on-board cistern ruptured, the sand had absorbed thousands of hectaliters before the remainder was turned to ice. This ice made a singularly macabre sight, gushing from the forty-meter gash in the ship’s fuselage in dirty, dazzling cascades, resting on the dunes like bizarre festoons, as if the exploding ship had spewed a frozen Niagara Falls—temperatures here reached eighteen below zero Celsius, dropping at night to sixty below. The Ariel’s ice-packed, ice-glazed hull made the wreckage look positively ancient, prehistoric.

Access to the ship’s interior was either through the ice, by drilling and jackhammering, or through the shaft. Through the latter they reached the salvageable boxes, piles of which littered the funnel’s slopes, yet the whole operation bordered on sloppy. The tail section was off limits; red pennons, strung on ropes and marking the area of radioactive contamination, fluttered furiously in the wind.

Pirx made a tour of the site, circling the lip of the embankment, and counted two thousand steps before he stood above the ship’s soot-blackened nozzles, rankling as he watched how the salvage crew, their chains slipping each time, tried futilely to pull out the one surviving fuel tank. He was there only a short while, or so it seemed to him, when someone tapped his shoulder and pointed to his respirator gauge. The pressure had fallen; since he didn’t have a spare, he had to go back. By his watch, a new chronometer, he’d spent almost two hours at the wreckage site.

The conference hall, meanwhile, had been rearranged: the locals were seated on one side of the long table, opposite six large, flat, freshly installed TV monitors. As usual, there was a glitch in the relay, so the session was postponed until 1300 hours. Haroun, the telegraph operator, whom Pirx had come across at Syrtis Major, and who, for some reason, treated him with great respect, gave him the first dubs of the tapes—the ones bearing the decisions of the power regulator—rescued from the Ariel’s shatterproof chamber. Haroun had no right to leak them, so Pirx could well appreciate the gesture. He shut himself up in his cubicle and, standing under a tensor lamp, took to examining the still-sticky snake of magnetic tape. The picture was as clear as it was incomprehensible. In the 317th second of the landing sequence, flawless until then, the control circuits showed the presence of parasitic currents, which seconds later turned up as a wiggle of beats. Twice extinguished once the load had been shifted to the grid’s parallel, back-up components, they came back intensified, and from then on, the “sensors” functioned at a rate of three times the norm. What he held in his hands was not the computer’s register, but that of its “spinal cord,” which, obeying the commands of the servo-system, coordinated the received instructions with the condition of the power routines. This system sometimes went by the name of the “cerebellum,” by analogy with the human cerebellum, which, acting as the control station between the cortex and the body, governed the correlation of movements.

He studied the “cerebellum’s” load chart with the utmost attention. The computer seemed to have been hard pressed, as if, without disturbing the operation in any way, it had demanded from the subsystems increasingly greater input per time unit. This created an informational glut and the appearance of reverberating currents; in an animal this would have been equivalent to a radically intensified tonus, a susceptibility to the motor disorders termed clonic spasms. A blind alley. True, he was missing the most important tapes, those with the computer decisions. There was a knock at the door. Pirx stashed the tapes in his grip and met Romani at the door.

“The new brass would like you involved in the work of the committee.”

Romani looked less drained than the day before, more upbeat. Simple logic told Pirx that even the mutually antagonistic “Martians” of Agathodaemon and Syrtis would close ranks if the “new brass” tried to railroad the proceedings.

The new committee had eleven members. Hoyster stayed on as chairman, if only because the committee couldn’t be chaired on Earth. A board of inquiry whose members were separated by eighty million kilometers was a risky venture; the authorities’ agreement to undertake it could only have been made under pressure. The disaster had revived a controversy of political dimensions, one in which the project had been embroiled from the start.

They began with a general recap for the benefit of the Earthlings. Among the latter, Pirx knew only the shipyard director, Van der Voyt. The color screen, for all its fidelity, lent his features a certain monumentally—the bust of a colossus, with a face both flaccid and bloated, full of imperious energy and shrouded by smoke rings from an invisible cigar (his hands were off screen) like some burnt offering. Anything said in the hall reached him after a four-minute delay, followed by another four-minute interval for the reply. Pirx took an immediate dislike to the man, or, rather, to his pompous presence, as if the other experts, whose faces flickered occasionally on the other monitors, were merely dummies.

After Hoyster came an eight-minute interval, but Earth momentarily demurred. Van der Voyt asked to see the Ariel’s tapes, a set of which lay by Hoyster’s microphone. By now, each member of the committee had received a dubbed set. Not that they were much help, since the tapes covered only the last five minutes of the landing sequence. While the camera crew relayed Earth’s set, Pirx fussed with his own, skipping the tapes with which, thanks to Haroun, he was already familiar.

The computer had reversed the landing procedure in the 339th second, shifting not to ordinary lift-off, but to an escape maneuver, as if in response to a meteorite alert, though it looked more like frantic improvisation. Whatever the sequence of events, Pirx attached little importance to the wild curve jumps on the tapes, which proved only that the computer had gagged on its own concoction. Of far greater relevance than a post-mortem of the ship’s macabre end was the cause of a decision that, in retrospect, was synonymous with suicide.

From the 170th second onward, the computer had functioned under enormous stress, showing signs of extreme informational overload, a piece of wisdom gained easily in hindsight, now that the final results were in. Not until the 201st second of the maneuver had the computer relayed the overload to the cockpit—to the human crew of the Ariel. By then, the computer was glutted with data—and kept demanding more. The tapes, in short, raised more questions than they solved. Hoyster allowed a ten-minute break for perusal of the tapes, then opened up the floor to questions. Pirx raised his hand, classroom-style. But before he could open his mouth, Engineer Stotik, the shipyard supervisor in charge of offloading the hundred-thousand-tonners, said that Earth should take the floor first. Hoyster wavered. It was a nasty ploy, beautifully timed. Romani asked for a point of order, declaring that if they were going to disrupt the proceedings by insisting on equal rights, then neither he nor anyone else from Agathodaemon planned to stay on the committee. Stotik yielded the floor to Pirx.

“The model in question is an updated version of the AIBM 09,” he began. “I’ve logged about a thousand hours with the AIBM 09, so I can speak from experience. I’m not up on the theory, only on what I’ve needed to know. We’re dealing here with a real-time data processor. This newer model, I’ve heard, has a thirty-six percent larger memory than the AIBM 09. That’s quite a bit. On the evidence, here’s what I think happened. The computer guided the ship into a normal landing sequence, then started overloading, demanding from the sub-routines more and more data per time unit. Like a company commander who keeps turning his combat soldiers into couriers: by the battle’s end, he might be extremely well informed, but he won’t have any soldiers.

“The computer wasn’t glutted; it glutted itself. It overloaded through the escalation—it had to, even with ten times the storage capacity. In mathematical terms, it reduced its capacity exponentially, as a result of which the ‘cerebellum’—the narrower channel—was the first to malfunction. Delays were registered by the ‘cerebellum,’ then jumped to the computer. As it entered a state of input overload, when it ceased to be a real-time machine, the computer jammed and had to make a critical decision. It decided to abort the landing; that is, it interpreted the interference as a sign of imminent disaster.”

“A meteorite alert, then. How do you explain that?” asked Seyn.

“How it switched from a primary to a secondary procedure, I don’t know. I’m not sufficiently at home with the computer’s circuitry to say. Why a meteorite alert? Search me. But this much I do know: it was to blame.”

Now it was Earth’s turn. Pirx was sure Van der Voyt would attack him, and he was right. The flabby, fleshy face, simultaneously distant and close up, viewed him through the cigar haze. Van der Voyt spoke in a polite bass, his eyes smiling, benignly, with the all-knowing indulgence of a professor addressing a promising student.

“So, Commander Pirx rules out sabotage, does he? But on what grounds? What do you mean, ‘it was to blame’? Who is it? The computer? But the computer, as Commander Pirx said himself, remained fully functional. The software? But this is the very same program that has seen Commander Pirx through hundreds of landings. Do you suspect someone of having monkeyed with the program?”

“I’ll withhold comment on the sabotage theory,” said Pirx. “It doesn’t interest me right now. If the computer and the software had worked, the Ariel would still be in one piece, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. What I’m saying is that, going by the tapes, the computer was executing the proper procedure, but in the manner of a perfectionist. It kept demanding, at a faster and faster clip, input on the reactor’s status, ignoring both its own limitations and the capacity of the output channels. Why it did this, I couldn’t say. But that’s what it did. I have nothing more to add.”

Not a word came from the “Martians.” Pirx, poker-faced, registered the gleam of satisfaction in Seyn’s eye and the mute contentment with which Romani straightened himself in his chair. After an eight-minute interval, Van der Voyt’s voice came on. This time his remarks were addressed neither to Pirx nor to the committee. He was eloquence personified. He traced the life history of every computer—from the assembly line to the cockpit. Its systems, he said, were the combined product of eight different companies, based in Japan, France, and the U.S. Still unequipped with a memory, still unprogrammed, as “ignorant” as newborn babies, computers traveled to Boston, where, at Syntronics Corp., they underwent programming. Each computer was then immersed in a “curriculum,” divided evenly between “experiments” and “exams.” This was the so-called General Fitness Test, followed by the “specialization phase,” when the computer evolved from a calculator to a guidance system of the type deployed by the Ariel. Last of all came the “debugging phase,” when it was hooked up to a simulator capable of imitating an infinite number of in-flight emergencies: mechanical breakdowns, systems malfunctions, emergency flight maneuvers, thrust deficiencies, near collisions… Each of these crisis situations was simulated in myriad variations—some with a full load, some without; some in deep space, some during reentry—increasing in complexity and eventually culminating in the most difficult of all: safely programming a ship’s course through a multibodied gravitational field.

The simulator, itself a computer, also played the role of “examiner,” and a perfidious one at that, subjecting the already programmed “pupil” to further endurance and efficiency tests, so that, although in actuality the electronic navigator had never piloted a ship, by the time it was finally installed aboard ship, it was more experienced, more flightworthy than the sum total of professional navigators. That is, the problems simulated during the bench-testing phase were too complex ever to occur in reality. And just to safeguard against the slightest imperfection, the pilot-simulator’s performance was monitored by a human, an experienced programmer with years of flight training behind him; Syntronics didn’t bother with pilots, only with astronauts at the rank of navigator or better, only with those, in other words, who had already logged a minimum of a thousand hours. With them rested the final decision as to which test, out of an inexhaustible range, the computer would be made to undergo next. The systems analyst specified the testing level and, by manipulating the simulator, further complicated the “exams” by simulating sudden—and potentially lethal—power blowouts, flare-outs, collision alerts, skin ruptures, communication breakdowns with ground telemetry … until the minimum standard of a hundred bench-testing hours had been achieved. Any model showing the slightest fallibility was sent back to the shop, like a flunked student who has to repeat a year.

Having in effect placed the shipyards beyond reproach, Van der Voyt, probably to counteract the impression of partiality, made an eloquent plea for an impartial inquiry. Next, a team of experts from Earth took the floor, thereupon unleashing a torrent of scientific parlance, flow charts, block diagrams, formulas, models, and statistical comparisons; and Pirx was chagrined to see that they were well on their way to turning the whole affair into an abstruse theoretical case study. The senior computer scientist was followed by Schmidt, the project’s systems engineer. Pirx very soon switched off, not bothering to stay alert for another round with Van der Voyt, which seemed progressively less likely. Not one reference was made to his own pronouncements, as if he had committed a faux pas—and the sooner it was forgotten, the better. By now they had reached the highest pinnacle of navigational theory. Pirx did not suspect them of malice; prudence dictated that they stay close to home. Throughout, Van der Voyt sat and listened indulgently. The strategy had worked: Earth was dominating the hearing. The “Martians” had been reduced to passive spectators; they had no surprise revelations up their sleeves. The Ariel’s computer was now electronic scrap, totally worthless as a source of clues. The tapes may have conveyed the what, more or less, but not the why. Not everything inside a computer can be monitored: one would need another, more powerful, computer, which, to be made foolproof, would again have to be monitored by yet another, and so on ad infinitum.

Thus were they cast adrift on a sea of abstraction. The profundity of the disquisitions only obscured the fact that the tragedy extended far beyond the shipwreck of the Ariel. Automatic sequencers had been around for so long that they had become the basis, indeed, the inviolable premise, of all landing operations, and now this was on the verge of being snatched away. If none of the simpler, less foolproof computers had ever malfunctioned, why should a perfected, more sophisticated one fail? If that was possible, anything was possible. If the computer’s fallibility was open to doubt, there was no stopping the erosion of faith; then everything became mired in skepticism.

Meanwhile, the Ares and Anabis were Mars-bound. Pirx felt alone, on the brink of despair. The inquest into the Ariel had given way to a classic argument between theoreticians, and it was leading them further and further afield. As he looked up at Van der Voyt’s bloated, overblown face benevolently patronizing the committee, Pirx was suddenly struck by its resemblance to Churchill’s: the same look of apparent distraction, belied by a slight twitching of the mouth, betraying an inner smile provoked by a thought lurking behind heavy eyelids. What yesterday seemed unthinkable was now a foregone conclusion: a move to shift the burden of blame onto some higher force, onto the unknown, perhaps, or onto some theoretical omission, one that would require more extensive, long-term research. Pirx knew of similar, though less sensational cases, and knew the sort of passions such a disaster could arouse. Intensive efforts were already under way to reach a face-saving compromise, especially since the project, with its very existence now at stake, was ready to make concessions in exchange for support of the sort the shipyards could provide, if only by supplying a fleet of smaller cargo ships on favorable terms. In view of the high stakes—namely, the project’s survival—the Ariel calamity was an obstacle to be removed, if it couldn’t be immediately solved. After all, bigger scandals had been hushed up. But Pirx had one trump card. Earth had consented to his being on the committee because, as a veteran pilot, he was more at home with astronautical crews than anyone else present. He had no illusions: they were moved neither by his reputation nor by his credentials. Quite simply, the committee had need of an astronaut, an active one, a professional, all the better if that astronaut had just stepped ashore.

Van der Voyt smoked his cigar in a silence that, because it was dictated by prudence, lent him an air of omniscience. He might have preferred someone else to Pirx, but they had no excuse to bump him. If they now brought in an inconclusive verdict, and Pirx were to cast a dissenting vote, the result would be a lot of bad publicity: the press, having a nose for scandals, would pounce on it. The Riots’ Union and the Truckers’ Club wielded little power, but pilots made credible witnesses—they were, after all, people who put their lives on the line. So Pirx wasn’t at all surprised to hear, during the break, that Van der Voyt wanted a word with him. This friend of powerful politicians led off with a joke, calling their meeting a summit conference—at the summit of two planets. Pirx at times was subject to impulses that took even him by surprise. While Van der Voyt puffed on his cigar and lubricated his throat with beer, Pirx ordered a few sandwiches from the snack bar. What better way to get on an equal footing than by munching on a snack as he listened to the shipyard director in the communications room.

Van der Voyt made as if there had never been a sparring match between them. He shared Pirx’s concern for the crews of the Anabis and Ares, and even cried on his shoulder. He was outraged by the press, by all the hype. He suggested that Pirx draft a short memo on future landings, on ways to increase their safety. He exuded such confidence that Pirx briefly excused himself, stuck his head out the door, and ordered some more potato salad. Van der Voyt was still playing the role of father, even fawning on him, when Pirx suddenly asked:

“You mentioned the people in charge of simulation. Their names?”

Eight minutes later, Van der Voyt’s face winced, but only slightly, for perhaps a fraction of a second.

“The names of the examiners?” he said, grinning broadly. “All colleagues of yours, Commander. Mint, Stoernhein, and Cornelius. Gentlemen of the old school. We recruited only the finest for Syntronics.”

They had to interrupt; the conference was back in session. Pirx jotted something down and handed the paper to Hoyster, saying, “A matter of the utmost urgency.” The chairman read it aloud: “Three questions for the shipyard staff: One, what are the shifts of the simulation supervisors Cornelius, Stoernhein, and Mint? Two, to what extent are the supervisors held responsible in the event of a malfunction or other defect in a computer? Three, which of the supervisors was in charge of bench-testing the systems aboard the Ariel, Anabis, and Ares?”

There was a commotion in the hall: Pirx was going after some of the most respected—hallowed—names in astronautics! The managing director acknowledged receipt of the questions and promised a reply within a few minutes.

Pirx felt a twinge of remorse. Making such official inquiries was a bad business. Hot only did he risk his colleagues’ enmity, but he also cast doubt on his own credibility in the final round—in case of a dissenting vote. His attempt to widen the investigation beyond the technical, to introduce the human factor, could be interpreted as bowing to pressure from Van der Voyt. The moment he deemed it in the shipyard’s interest, the director would immediately move to squelch him by dropping a few veiled hints to the press. He would toss them Pirx as a bumbling comrade-in-arms. It was a long shot, but it was the only thing he had left. There was no time to make discreet, indirect inquiries. Not that he entertained any actual suspicions. A hunch, maybe. Some vague notions about the dangers arising not from men or machines so much as from their collision, because the reasoning of men and computers was so awfully different. And something else, something he had sensed as he stood before the bookshelf, but which he couldn’t even begin to express in words.

Earth’s reply was immediate: The simulation supervisors monitored their computers from start to finish, and were held responsible for any malfunctions the moment they signed their “diplomas.” The Anabis’s computer had been tested by Stoernhein, the others by Cornelius. Pirx couldn’t wait to leave the room. Tension was already running high; he could feel it.

The session ended at eleven. Romani signaled to get Pirx’s attention, but he pretended not to notice and made a speedy getaway. Shutting himself up in his cubicle, he collapsed on the cot and took to staring up at the ceiling. Mint and Stoernhein didn’t count, only Cornelius. A rational, scientific mind would have started with the question: was there anything a supervisor might have overlooked? A negative answer would have barred any further inquiry. But Pirx wasn’t blessed with a scientific mind, so the question never occurred to him. Nor did he bother to analyze the testing procedure, as if intuiting the futility of such efforts. No, his thoughts were of Cornelius, of the man he once knew, fairly well in fact, though they had long since gone their separate ways. Their relationship had not been the merriest, which was hardly surprising, given that Cornelius had commanded the Gulliver when Pirx was still a rookie. On board, Cornelius was a Bastard of exactitude. He was called a brute, a nitpicker, a skinflint, and a fly-swatter (he had been known to mobilize half the crew to hunt down a stowaway fly).

Pirx smiled in recollection of the eighteen months he had spent under the stickler Cornelius. Now he could afford to smile; at the time, Cornelius had driven him nuts. What a by-the-book man! Even so, he was listed in the encyclopedia for his work on planetary exploration, especially Neptune. Short, pasty-looking, always mean-tempered, he suspected everybody of wanting to con him. When he threatened periodic body searches—to prevent flies from being smuggled aboard—nobody took him seriously, but Pirx knew it was not just an idle threat: Cornelius kept a big box of DDT in his desk drawer. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, he would stiffen, raise his finger (God help those who didn’t freeze), and strain his ears to pick up what sounded like a buzzing. A plumb line and a steel measuring tape always in his pocket, he made a cargo inspection more like an inquest at the site of an accident that, though not yet materialized, was imminent. Pirx could still hear them yelling, “Here comes Old Sliderule—everybody scram!,” thereby evacuating the mess hall while Cornelius’s eyes, seemingly blank, scoured the place for any irregularities.

Tics are quite common among veteran rocket jockeys, but Cornelius broke all records. He was allergic to having anyone stand behind his back; if he inadvertently sat down in a chair just vacated, he would jump up in mortal terror the moment he came into contact with the warm seat. He belonged to that species of man impossible to imagine as ever having been young. Visibly frustrated by the imperfection of everyone around him, he anguished over his inability to convert them to his own pedantry. He would tick off one column after another, and he wasn’t satisfied unless everything was checked and rechecked at least twenty—Pirx suddenly went numb and then sat down as if he were made of glass. His thoughts, stumbling through a maze of memories, had tripped an alarm.

Couldn’t stand anybody behind his back. Hassled the crew. So? But somehow… He felt like a little boy with his hand clasped around a bug, who holds his clenched fist up close, afraid to open it. Easy does it.

Cornelius was notorious for his rituals. (Was that it? he wondered.) At the slightest change in regulations, however minor, he would shut himself up in his cabin until the revised rule had been committed to memory. (It was becoming a game of hide-and-seek; let’s see, it was nine, no, ten years since they’d last seen each other.) Cornelius had somehow vanished from the public eye, at the height of his Neptune fame. There were rumors that the lecturing was only temporary, that he was going back aboard ship, but he never did. (Another dead end.) An anonymous letter. (Where the hell…?) What anonymous letter? About his being sick and covering up? That he was a heart-attack risk? No. That was another Cornelius—Cornelius Craig—one, a first name; the other, a surname. (A simple mix-up of names.) But that anonymous letter wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t stop hounding him. The more emphatically he tried to dismiss it, the more adamantly it returned. He sat hunched over, his head in a muddle. An anonymous letter… He was almost sure of it now—a play on words, one of those cases of word substitution, a wrong signal, a stand-in for something else, impossible to shake loose or to fathom … ANONYMOUS.

He got up. On the bookshelf, he recalled, among all the books devoted to Mars, was a huge dictionary. He opened it at random to An. Ana. Anachronism. Anaclastic. Anaconda. Anacreontic. Anacrusis. Analects. (There were so many words he didn’t know…) Analysis. Ananke (Gk.): goddess of destiny (Was that the…? But what did a goddess have to do…?); also: compulsion.

The scales fell from his eyes. He could see the office, the doctor with his back to him, talking on the phone; an open window, sheets of paper on the desk, furling and unfurling in the breeze. A routine check-up. He hadn’t meant to read the typed document, but his eyes couldn’t resist the printed word—as a boy he had rigorously trained himself to read upside down. Warren Cornelius. Diagnosis: anankastic syndrome. He recalled how the psychiatrist, spotting the forms scattered haphazardly on the desk, had bunched them together and stuffed them into his briefcase. Pirx had often wondered about that diagnosis, but he sensed the impropriety of prying, and then he forgot about it. Let’s see, how many years ago was that? At least six.

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 suspect 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.