More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

“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