More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

were out to smear me: my flight report, published in the Nautical Almanac, would have been worthless coming from a man censured by the Tribunal for incompetence. Meanwhile, I have it from a reliable source that the Tribunal was deliberately loaded—frankly, I too found it odd that the jury contained so many legal experts and scholars of cosmic law, but only one certified astronaut. That would explain the legal smoke screen of whether my laxity, my waiving of command, was in violation of the Astronavigational Charter. This same source intimated that, after reading the bill of indictment, I should have brought immediate action against the companies, since they were indirectly to blame for having assured both UNESCO and me that the nonlinears were completely trustworthy, whereas, in fact, Calder almost got us all killed.

Privately I told my source that I had lacked hard evidence. The companies’ attorneys would have argued that Calder had done everything in his power to avert a disaster, that the precessional spin had taken him by surprise as much as it had me, and that his only crime lay in having risked certain death—to the humans on board—instead of gambling on safe passage through the Cassini. Unpardonable, even criminal, yes; but nothing compared to the crime of which I’d begun to suspect him even earlier. Yet how could I charge him on what I knew to be the lesser of two evils? Unable to go public for lack of evidence, I decided to await the Tribunal’s verdict.

In the end I was cleared of all charges. The crucial question of what orders should have been given became immaterial, once the Tribunal ruled that I had acted properly in deferring to the pilot’s professional judgment. That suited me just fine, because if I’d been asked, my response would have sounded cockeyed; I was sure, and still am, that the probe malfunction was not an accident, but that Calder had planned it long before we approached Saturn, both to prove me right and to kill me, along with the rest of the Goliath’s human crew. Why he did it is another story. I can only speculate here.

First, the matter of the second probe. The malfunction was shown to be the work of freak chance, and a thorough shipyard investigation turned up no evidence of sabotage. But the truth was otherwise. If the first probe had malfunctioned, we would have had to abort right away—the other two were auxiliary, without any scientific payload. If the third probe had failed, we could have headed back, mission accomplished, because only one “guardian” was needed—in this case, the second. But it was precisely the second that stalled and left us stranded in the middle of a mission launched but not completed. The cause of the malfunction? A premature cable disconnect that prevented Calder from shutting off the servo-ignition. The post-mortem cited a possible kink in the cable as the cause, a fairly uncommon occurrence. But not four days before the breakdown, I happened to inspect the drum; a neater, smoother-reeling job I’d never seen.

The probe’s flattened nose had kept it from clearing the launch bay. When no explanation was found for the jamming, it was blamed on the booster; it must have fired at an angle and the oblique thrust rammed the probe into the housing, blunting the head. But the probe had jammed before—not after—the booster fired. Though the question was never posed, I was absolutely sure of it. Quine (or “Harry Brown”), obviously, wasn’t so sure, and those without direct access to the controls were not called upon to testify.

There was nothing to jamming the probe. A couple of buckets of water poured into the air-conditioning duct would have done the trick. The water would have worked its way down into the hatch, frozen in the subzero temperature, and cemented the probe to the housing with a ring of ice. So that at the time Calder hit the piston release, the probe hadn’t yet jammed, but he was at the controls and couldn’t be monitored. The probe’s nose cone, jammed by the ice ring, flattened like a rivet on impact. When the booster ignited, the temperature in the launcher immediately rose, the ice melted, and the water evaporated, leaving no trace of any sabotage.

At the time, I didn’t suspect a thing. True, I thought it strange that only the second probe had failed, that the cable could both fire the booster and prevent shutdown of the probe’s engine. But the malfunction caught me by surprise, distracted me. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of that anonymous letter with its promise to help—to prove the other nonlinears unfit for cosmic navigation. Again I have no proof, but I suspect the letter was written by Calder. He was on my side, yes … but he hadn’t counted on a sequence of events that might make him out to be unfit—in the sense of “inferior.” To return to Earth and risk being disqualified was unthinkable. We might have shared a common goal, but only up to a point.

The letter was to convince me of our common cause. Both from the remarks I’d made and from second-hand sources, he must have deduced that I was planning to test the crew by staging an on-board emergency. So he was dead certain I’d try to take advantage of one so conveniently at hand—which, had I done so, would have been suicidal.

What was his motive? A hatred for humans? The thrill of the contest, a contest in which I, officially as his CO but secretly his accomplice, would be acting exactly according to plan—both his and mine? Either way, he was sure I would try to exploit the situation, even if I had my suspicions and smelled sabotage.

What were my alternatives? I could simply have ordered about-ship—or risked another launching of the third back-up probe. But turning us about would have meant passing up a chance to test the crew under extreme conditions; it would have also meant scrubbing the mission. Calder knew I would never do that, and he was right. He was absolutely sure I would keep us on course for Saturn and try to complete the maneuver.

If anyone had asked me before what I would have done in such a situation, I would have said, in all honesty and without hesitation, execute the maneuver. But the unexpected happened: I kept silent. I still don’t know why. I was confused, the breakdown was too perfectly timed, too made-to-order to be authentic. Then there was the way Calder had sat there waiting for my command … so eagerly, so expectantly… To open my mouth would have been to ratify our pact, and I must have sensed that the cards were stacked. By rights, then, I should have ordered the pilot to reverse course, but my suspicions were too vague, too short on proof. Bluntly put—I was stuck.

Calder, meanwhile, couldn’t believe his plan was backfiring. The duel lasted only a few seconds, and there was I, his opponent, totally in the dark! Only in retrospect did certain details, seemingly harmless and unrelated at the time, begin to jell: how he used to sit alone at the ship’s navigational computer, the care he took to erase its memory afterward… I’m now convinced he was already computing different variants of the accident, programming it down to the last digit. Quine was wrong; he didn’t mentally compute our trajectory above the rings. He didn’t have to; he already had his data; all he had to do was to make sure that the gravimeter readings fell within the projected range of values.

By delaying orders, I had spoiled his infallible plan. Everything was riding on those orders. In the heat of the moment, it temporarily slipped my mind that right there in the control room, hermetically sealed but diligently transcribing our every word, was Earth’s ear in the form of a flight recorder—to be used as evidence in the event the Goliath landed with a dead crew. The tapes had to be in perfect condition, untouched. The only voice heard on them would be mine, commanding Calder to reverse course, to approach the rings, and— later—to boost thrust to pull us out of that dangerous precession.

I have yet to explain why his plan was so ingenious. The question is: could I have given orders assuring a safe and successful completion of the maneuver? Well, a few months after my acquittal, I sat down at the computer to estimate the probability of an injection that would jeopardize neither crew nor ship. The result? A zero probability! In other words, Calder, using the elements of mathematical equations, had constructed a flawless system—a kind of murder machine, minus any leeway for navigational jockeying, a safety margin, or an escape hatch. Nothing had taken him by surprise; all was carefully programmed, meticulously plotted in advance: the probe’s thrust, the violent precession, the suicidal run. All that was needed to put us on a direct course for that funnel of destruction was for me to order about-ship for Saturn! Calder could then have risked an act of insubordination by questioning any orders desperately aimed at breaking the ship’s spiral. The tapes would have recorded his final display of loyalty, his last-ditch effort to save us. By then, I would have been in no shape to command anyway—speechless, my eyes clamped shut by the g-force, flattened, like the other humans, by the gravitation, our blood vessels bursting… At which time Calder, the sole survivor, would have risen to his feet, flipped the safety interlocks, and, in a cockpit full of corpses, begun heading home.

But I spoiled his plans—quite unintentionally. He didn’t figure on my reaction; he may have been a master of celestial mechanics, but not the mechanics of human psychology. When I sat back and kept quiet instead of shooting for a repeat of the maneuver, he panicked. At first, he may have been just puzzled, chalking up the delay to human slowness. Then he got rattled, too intimidated by my silence to ask my advice. Incapable of passivity himself, he hadn’t expected it of others, least of all of his CO. If I was silent, I must have a reason. Maybe I suspected him, saw through his game. Maybe I even had the upper hand. The fact that no order had been given, that my voice, dooming the ship to disaster, wouldn’t be heard on the tapes, meant that I had outsmarted him! There’s no telling when he realized it, but his confusion was noticeable, even to the others—Quine mentioned it in his testimony. His erratic instructions to Quine, his sudden turning around—all proof of his consternation. He had to