Stanislaw Lem - More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

“Gentlemen, I am Achanian. I have been temporarily delegated by the joint heads of Luna Base 1 and Luna Base 2 for the purpose of neutralizing the Setaur.”

Among the listeners there was a faint stir, but Pirx still understood nothing; he didn’t even know what the Setaur was.

“Those of you who heard the radio are aware that here”—he pointed a ruler at the regions Hypatia and Alfraganus—“a swarm of meteors fell yesterday. We will not go into the effects of the impact of the others, but one—it may well have been the largest—shattered the protective shield over storage units B-7 and R-7. In R-7 was located a consignment of Setaurs, received from Earth barely four days ago. In the bulletins it was reported that all of these met with destruction. That, gentlemen, is not the truth.”

The cadet sitting next to Pirx listened with red ears; even his mouth hung open, as if to take in every word. Meanwhile Achanian went on:

“Five of the robots were crushed beneath the falling roof, but the sixth survived. More precisely—it suffered damage. We think so for the reason that as soon as it extricated itself from the ruins of the storage unit, it began to behave in a manner … to behave like a…”

Achanian couldn’t find the right word, so without finishing his sentence he continued:

“The storage units are situated near the siding of a narrow-gauge track eight kilometers from the provisional landing field. Immediately after the disaster, a rescue operation was initiated, and the first order of business was to check out all personnel, to see if anyone had been buried beneath the devastated buildings. This action lasted about an hour; in the meantime, however, it developed that from the concussion the central administration buildings had lost their full seal, so the work dragged on till midnight. Around one o’clock it was discovered that the breakdown in the main grid supplying the entire construction site, as well as the interruption of telephone communication, had not been caused by the meteors. The cables had been cut—by laser beam.”

Pirx blinked. He couldn’t help feeling that he was participating in some sort of play, a masquerade. Such things didn’t happen. A laser! Sure! And why not throw in a Martian spy while you were at it? Yet this commodore-engineer hardly looked like the type who would get hotel guests up at the crack of dawn in order to play some stupid joke on them.

“The telephone lines were repaired first,” said Achanian. “But at that same time a small transporter from the emergency party, having reached the place where the cables were broken, lost radio contact with Luna Base. After three in the morning we learned that this transporter had been attacked by laser and, as a result of several hits, now stood in flames. The driver and his assistant perished, but two of the crew—fortunately they were in suits, having got themselves ready to go out and repair the line—managed to jump free in time and hide in the desert, that is, the Mare Tranquilitatis, roughly here…” Achanian indicated with his ruler a point on the Sea of Tranquillity, some four hundred kilometers from the little crater of Arago.

“Neither of them, as far as I know, saw the assailant. At a particular moment they simply felt a very strong thermal blast, and the transporter caught fire. They jumped before the tanks of compressed gas went off; the lack of an atmosphere saved them, since only that portion of the fuel which was able to combine with the oxygen inside the transporter exploded. One of these people later died, in as yet undetermined circumstances. The other succeeded in returning to the construction site, crossing a stretch of about one hundred forty kilometers, but he ran and exhausted his suit’s air supply and went into anoxia. Fortunately he was discovered and is now in the hospital. Our knowledge of what happened is based entirely on his account and needs further verification.”

There was a dead silence. Pirx could see where all of this was leading, but he still didn’t believe it; he didn’t want to…

“No doubt you have guessed, gentlemen,” continued the dark-haired man in an even voice—his profile stood out black as coal against the blazing mercury landscapes of the moon—“that the one who cut the telephone cables and high-tension line, and also attacked the transporter, is our sole surviving Setaur. This is a unit about which we know little; it was put into mass production only last month. Engineer Klarner, one of Setaur’s designers, was supposed to have come here with me, to give you gentlemen a full explanation not only of the capabilities of this model, but also of the measures that now must be taken to neutralize or destroy the object.” The cadet next to Pirx gave a soft moan. It was a moan of pure excitement, uttered without even the pretense of sounding horrified. The young man was not aware of the navigator’s disapproving look. But, then, no one noticed or heard anything but the voice of the commodore-engineer.

“I’m no expert in intellectronics and therefore cannot tell you much about the Setaur. But among those present, I believe, is a Dr. McCork. Is he here?”

A slender man wearing glasses stood up. “Yes. I didn’t take part in the designing of the Setaurs; I’m only acquainted with our English model, similar to the American one but not identical. Still, the differences are not so very great. I can be of help.”

“Excellent. Doctor, if you would come up here. I’ll just present, first, the current situation. The Setaur is located somewhere over here”—Achanian made a circle with the end of his ruler around an edge of the Sea of Tranquillity—“which means it is at a distance of thirty to eighty kilometers from the construction site. It was designed, as the Setaurs in general were designed, to perform mining tasks under extremely difficult conditions, at high temperatures, with a considerable chance of cave-ins; hence these models possess a massive frame and thick armor… But Dr. McCork will be filling you gentlemen in on this aspect. As for the means at our disposal to neutralize it: the headquarters of all the lunar bases have given us, first of all, a certain quantity of explosives, dynamite and oxyliquites, plus line-of-sight hand lasers and mining lasers—of course, neither the explosives nor the lasers were made for use in combat. For conveyance, the groups operating to destroy the Setaur will have transporters of small and medium range, two of which possess light anti-meteorite armor. Only such armor can take the blow of a laser from a distance of one kilometer. True, that applies to Earth, where the energy absorption coefficient of the atmosphere is an important factor. Here we have no atmosphere; therefore those two transporters will be only a little less vulnerable than the others. We are also receiving a considerable number of suits, oxygen—and that, I’m afraid, is all. Around noon there will arrive from the Soviet sector a ‘flea’ with a three-man crew; in a pinch it can hold four on short flights, to deliver them inside the area where the Setaur is located. I’ll stop here for the moment. Now, gentlemen, I would like to pass around a sheet of paper, on which I will ask you to write clearly your names and fields of competence. Meanwhile, if Dr. McCork would kindly tell us a few words about the Setaur… The most important thing, I believe, would be an indication of its Achilles’ heel…”

McCork was now standing by Achanian. He was even thinner than Pirx had thought; his ears stuck out, his head was slightly triangular, he had almost invisible eyebrows, a shock of hair of indeterminate color, and all in all seemed strangely likable.

Before he spoke, he took off his steel-rimmed glasses, as if they were in the way, and put them on the desk.

“I’d be lying if I said we had allowed for the possibility of the kind of thing that’s happened here. But besides the mathematics, a cyberneticist has to have in his head some grain of intuition. It was precisely for this reason that we decided not to put our model into mass production just yet. According to the laboratory tests, Mephisto works perfectly—that’s the name of our model. And Setaur is supposed to have better stabilization for braking and activating. Or so I thought, going by the literature—now I’m not so sure,