More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (14 page)

“Like I said, even if the order was never given in full, the gist of it was clear. He wanted to nix Calder’s plan of entering the Cassini.”

“Objection. Only what the accused actually said, not what he
wanted
to say, is admissible as evidence.”

“Sustained. The witness will restrict himself to what was actually said in the control room.”

“Enough was said to make any professional astronaut know that the CO was denying the pilot clearance.”

“The witness will cite his exact words and let the Tribunal form its own opinion as to their actual meaning.”

“That’s just it, Your Honor. I can’t remember the exact words, only their sense. It sounded like ‘Not through—’ or ‘Don’t thread the rings.’”

“Earlier the witness claimed the commander couldn’t manage a full sentence, whereas the words just quoted—‘Don’t thread the rings’—constitute a complete sentence.”

“If a fire broke out in this room and I yelled ‘Fire!’ it wouldn’t be a full sentence, it wouldn’t say what was on fire or where, but it would sure give fair warning.”

“Objection! The Tribunal will call the witness to order!”

“The witness is reprimanded. You are not here to edify the Tribunal with parables and anecdotes. Please confine yourself to a factual account of what transpired on board.”

“Yes, Your Honor. What happened on board was that the CO denied the pilot clearance into the Cassini.”

“Objection! The witness is twisting the facts to suit his purpose!”

“The Tribunal wishes to be obliging. Try to understand that the purpose of this inquiry is to establish the material facts in the case. Can you or can you not reproduce the commander’s exact words?”

“We were running at peak, I was having a dim-out—no, I didn’t catch the words, but their message was clear enough. The pilot was seated closer to the commander; if anyone should have heard, he should have.”

“Defense requests a re-examination of the control-room tapes, of the segment in question.”

“Permission denied. The tapes have already been examined; the distortion was such as to permit voice identification only. The Tribunal will rule separately on its admissibility as evidence. Will the witness describe what occurred next?”

“By the time I regained my eyesight, we were on a collision course with the ring. The accelerometer now read two g’s, our velocity at parabolic. The CO yelled, ‘Calder! You disobeyed orders! I told you not to enter the Cassini!’ and Calder immediately said, ‘Didn’t hear you, Commander.’”

“And yet the commander still didn’t give the order to brake or reverse course?”

“It was too late, Your Honor. We were hitting a hyperbolic of about eighty kilometers per second. There was no chance of our braking now, not without crossing the gravitational barrier.”

“What do you mean by ‘gravitational barrier’?”

“A constant positive or negative acceleration in excess of twenty to twenty-two g’s. The longer you’re on a collision course, the greater the amount of reverse thrust needed for braking. Maybe fifty g’s at first, later a hundred. That would have been lethal—for the humans on board, anyway.”

“Technically, did the ship have such an acceleration capacity?”

“Yes, sir, it did—once the interlocks were off, but only then. The
Goliath
had a pile with a ten-thousand-ton maximal thrust output.”

“You may resume.”

“‘Are you fixing to break up the ship?’ the CO asked, sort of casually. ‘We’ll thread the Cassini and I’ll brake on the other side,’ said Calder, just as casually. During this exchange, we went into a lateral spin. The sudden boost in acceleration, when Calder put her on course for the Division, must have realigned the probe, lessening the deflection but causing a gas flow—the reason for the longitudinal spin—along the ship’s tangent. The rotations got faster by the second. It was the beginning of the end. Calder had accidentally triggered it by making the huge jump in acceleration.”

“Please elaborate on why, in your opinion, Calder increased acceleration.”

“Objection, Your Honor. Being biased, the witness will claim, as before, that Calder was trying to silence the commander.”

“Not at all. Calder didn’t have to rev so fast, with such a burst; he could have built up speed gradually. But if it was entry he wanted, then full was necessary. We were in a tough maneuvering space, a mathematically unsolvable multibodied gravitational field. With all the rings and moons around Saturn, plus the planetary pull, there’s no way to figure all the perturbations. And don’t forget we had a side deflection. Our trajectory was the product of many forces—including the ship’s own thrust, relative to the gravitational pull of the masses orbiting in space. So the greater our thrust rate, the smaller the influence of the interfering bodies, whose values were constant. By increasing our velocity, Calder made our course less sensitive to outside interference. I’m willing to bet that, if not for the sudden lateral spin, he would have cleared the Division.”

“Are you implying that the Division is navigable in a fully flightworthy ship?”

“I’m saying it
is
possible, sir, despite what you read in the textbooks. The Division is roughly three or four thousand kilometers wide, walled with meteorite and ice particles invisible to the eye, but dense enough to burn up a ship moving at hyperbolic. The amount of clearance—of clean, navigable space—is about five or six hundred kilometers in width. Entry is fairly easy at low velocities; at higher, you risk a gravitational drift; that’s why Calder first aligned the bow and then throttled to full. If the probe hadn’t shifted, it would have worked, in my judgment, anyway, except there was always the chance—about thirty to one—of our hitting the odd particle. But then came that longitudinal roll. Calder tried to control it, but couldn’t. He put up a good fight, I’ll say that.”

“What prevented Calder from correcting the rotations?”

“From previous observation, I knew him to be a whiz of a mathematician. He trusted a lot in his ability to do fast computations, without the help of a calculator. Clearing the Cassini at a hyperbolic speed, handicapped as we were, was like threading the eye of a needle. The thrust gauges gave readings for the
Goliath,
but not for the probe. Calder navigated entirely by the gravimeters. It was a real mathematical race—between himself and the increasing flight variables. I could barely keep up with the digital displays, and there was Calder constructing four-part differential equations in his head! Much as I disliked his disobeying orders, I have to admit I admired the guy.”

“You haven’t really answered the question.”

“I was just getting around to it, sir. Calder’s estimations could never have been more than approximate, not even if he were the world’s fastest computer. No, sir, not with the increasing margin of error and the ship in a roll… For a minute there, I thought he might swing it, but then he saw—even before I did—that the game was up, and he hit the kill switch, dropping us down to zero-
g
.”

“Why did he shut off the thrust?”

“He wanted a straight trajectory through the Division, but couldn’t stop the ship’s longitudinal spin. Like a spinning top, the
Goliath
repelled the force trying to right it. We wound up in a precession: the higher our velocity, the greater the torque. The result was a prolonged spin, accompanied by simultaneous listing, with each spiral measuring about a hundred kilometers in diameter. With such a roll, we could have sideswiped a ring. Now Calder was stuck. He was caught in a funnel.”

“A ‘funnel’?”

“Slang for a dead-end situation, Your Honor: easy to enter, but no way out. By now our flight was unchartable. When Calder hit the kill switch, I thought he was betting on his luck. The digital displays were jumping, but there was nothing to compute. The rings were blinding, full of ice chunks whirling around in the Division’s black crevasse. Time dragged, the chronometers seemed to be at a standstill. All of a sudden, Calder unbuckled his seatbelt. So did I: I could read his mind. Flip the main overload fuse on the dash! With full power, he could still brake and pull out once he got her up to a hundred
g
’s. We’d all pop our guts, but he’d save the ship—and his own skin. I should have guessed beforehand that he wasn’t human, because no human could process the way he did… I wanted to stop him before he reached the dash, but he was too fast. He had to be. ‘Keep buckled up!’ the CO barked at me; and to Calder, ‘Hands off the fuse!’ Calder ignored him; he was already on his feet. ‘Full blast ahead!’ the CO yelled, and I obeyed orders. I revved to five—I didn’t want to kill him, just make him back-pedal—but he stayed on his feet. It was a gruesome sight, gentlemen—no human can keep upright at five
g
’s! But he did. When he grabbed hold of the dash, he ripped the skin from both palms; he held on, though, because his hands were now bared to the metal. Then I juiced her to full. At fourteen, a metal hulk blitzed between our couches and slammed so hard against the rear wall it shattered. I heard some ungodly voice; I could hear him writhing around back there, flattening bulkheads, mangling everything he grabbed, but then I lost track; we were careening into the Division. I dropped her down to four
g
’s and trusted to old lady luck. The CO yelled, ‘Shoot!’ and I began firing the meteorite deflectors, one after another, to keep the bow space clear of any small debris: not much protection, but better than nothing. The Cassini was pitch-black, a gaping gullet; I saw a fire up ahead, off the bow; the shields deployed and ignited on impact; silver clouds rose and
—poof
!—it was too beautiful for words. The ship shook, the starboard thermocouples registered the shock, we sideswiped something, no telling what, and then we were in the clear again…”

“Commander Pirx?”

“Pirx reporting. You wanted to see me?”

“Thank you for coming. Have a seat.”

The man behind the desk touched a button on a black intercom and said, “I’ll be tied up for the next twenty minutes. I’m not here—for anyone.”

He switched off the intercom and stared at the man seated opposite him.

“Commander, I have a—hm—special proposition for you. A sort of”—he was again searching for the right word—“experiment. But you’re to keep it strictly confidential. Even if you turn it down. Agreed?”

A silence lasting several seconds.

“Nothing doing,” said Pirx, and then added: “Not unless you give me more details.”

“Nothing sight unseen, is that it? That figures. I should have known from what I’ve heard about you. Cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

“It’s a test flight.”

“New model?”

“New type of crew.”

“Crew? And my job?”

“The usual—a fitness test. That’s all I can tell you. It’s up to you.”

“When I think an answer is possible, I’ll answer.”

“Possible?”

“Advisable.”

“By what criteria?”

“By what is known as a conscience, sir.”

Another pause. The spacious office, glass-walled on one side, was so hushed it seemed isolated from the two thousand others packed into this high-rise, which was sprawling enough to accommodate three helicopter pads. Silhouetted against the blinding cloud vapor that shrouded the upper sixteen stories, the man interviewing Pirx was featureless. From time to time the vapor behind the transparent wall swelled into milk-white billows, making the whole room seem mysteriously afloat, cloud-borne.

“As you see, I’m an accommodating man. It’s a Terra-Terra run.”

“A loop?”

“With a circum-Saturn pass, and from there an injection of some brand-new, fully automated satellites into stationary.”

“The Jupiter project?”

“The satellite end of it. The ship is one of COMSEC’s, so the whole thing has UNESCO sponsorship. Why you and not one of our own pilots or navigators? We picked you because of the crew angle I mentioned.”

The UNESCO space director fell silent again. Pirx waited, strained his ears; but not a sound was to be heard, not for kilometers around, it seemed, even though they were in the heart of a great city.

“Surely you’re aware of the advances made in the manufacture of automata, in robotics. The most sophisticated androids, because of their weight and size, have been stationary until now. But solid-state physics, in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., has opened a new chapter in micro-miniaturization—the molecular. Prototypical brain systems, crystal-based, are now in the experimental stage. Their size—they’re still about one and a half times the size of our brain—is unimportant. Many American firms have already patented the molecular design and are ready to go into production. The new androids—or ‘finite nonlinears,’ as they’re called—are primarily designed for unmanned space exploration.”

“I’ve heard reports. But I thought the unions had come out against them. It would mean, I take it, overhauling the existing legislation.”

“Reports, you say? Rumors, yes, but otherwise the media—”

“Among the rank and file there were leaks of some hush-hush negotiations, of high-level talks. You can understand our concern,” Pirx said.

“Very much so. All to the good, actually… Although… What’s your own opinion?”

“On this subject? Negative. Damned negative, in fact. But opinions don’t count here, I’m afraid. Scientific breakthroughs will have their way, no matter what. At best, one can play a stalling game.”

“In short, you regard it as a necessary evil.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. I just don’t think mankind is ready for an invasion of androids. But the real question is: are they human equivalents? If so, then I’ve never met any. I’m no expert, but the experts I know think full equivalence, real interchangeability, is wishful thinking.”

“You wouldn’t be biased, would you?” the space director asked. “True, a lot of trained experts share your opinion, or at least they used to. But, well, these companies are in it for economic reasons, as a business venture…”

“For the money, you mean.”

“You see, the design specifications were developed by government-financed institutes—U.S. mainly, but also British and French—and not all the specs have been released to the commercial market. Still, the private firms have their own research labs and—”