More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

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