Stanislaw Lem - The Invincible

A dull thud — the book he had once started to read back in the space station had fallen to the floor. He had put a white slip of paper inside to use as a bookmark, but he had not read a single line. Who had time for reading? He stretched out on his bunk, thinking of the scientists who were now sitting together concocting plans to destroy the cloud, and his lips drew up in a scornful smile. What absurdity, he thought. They want to destroy, and so do we. Everyone wants to destroy that certain something, but it won’t save anyone. The planet Regis is uninhabited; man has no business being there. Why be so grimly stubborn? It’s no different than if the men had perished in an earthquake or a thunderstorm. We haven’t been confronted by someone’s conscious, purposeful effort, or some hostile will. Nothing but an inorganic process of self-organization… Is it worth wasting our energy and strength to destroy it, simply because from the start we’ve considered it an enemy lying in wait for us, who ambushed the Condor first and then ourselves? How many weird phenomena alien to human concepts are harbored by the universe? Should we land everywhere with weapons of annihilation aboard, in order to smash to smithereens all that surpasses man’s power of comprehension? What did they call it just now? A necrosphere. Which means necro-evolution as well. Development of inorganic matter. Perhaps the inhabitants of the Lyre system might have put in a word or two about that; Regis III belonged to their realm. Maybe they intended to settle here on this planet; once their astrophysicists announced that their sun would turn into a nova, it might have been their last hope. If we ever found ourselves in such a situation, of course we would fight and try to stamp out the black crystal brood. But under the present circumstances? One parsec away from the space station, and the station removed from Earth by so many light years… For whose sake are we sitting here in this damned spot losing our men? Why must the scientists search all night for the best method of annihilation? How can anyone speak of vengeance here?

If only Horpach stood in front of him now, he would tell him all that. How foolhardy, how ludicrous this “victory at any price,” this “heroic persistence of man,” this obsession with retaliation for the death of their companions, who had perished only because they themselves had sent them to their death… We were simply not cautious enough, we relied too much on our powerful weapons. We made mistakes, and now we must take the consequences. We and no one else are responsible.

These were his thoughts in the dimly lit room as he lay on his cot, his eyes burning as if sand had accumulated under his closed eyelids. Man — he saw in a flash of insight — had not yet reached the true pinnacle; he had not yet appropriated that galactocentric idea, praised since antiquity, whose real meaning could not consist in searching only for similar beings and learning to understand them, but rather in refraining from interfering with alien, non-human affairs. Conquer the void, of course; why not? But don’t attack what already is, that which in the course of millions of years has achieved a balanced existence of its own, independent, not subject to anyone or anything, except the forces of radiation and matter — an active existence, neither better nor worse than the existence of the amino-acid compounds we call animals or human beings.

Rohan reveled in this noble thought, was filled with understanding for any form of existence, when he was suddenly hit by a sound, sharp as an arrow: the unnerving high-pitched howling of the alarm sirens.

All his thoughts vanished instantly, as if blown away by the blatant noise which spread throughout all the level. He jumped up and rushed out into the corridor, running with the other men with warm, human breath in a heavy, tired trot. But even before he reached the elevator, he felt a blow. Not with any particular organ of sense: indeed, not with his own body at all, but rather as if it were with the spaceship’s body of which he was an infinite particle. Though very distant and weak, the blow shook the Invincible’s hull from one end to the other. It was a jolt of immense severity, which — and he felt this too — was received and skilfully warded off by something far bigger than the Invincible.

“It’s the Cyclops! The Cyclops did it!” yelled the men as they raced ahead. One after the other disappeared in the elevator, whose doors shut with a hissing sound. Other members of the crew stormed noisily down the circular stairway, too impatient to wait their turn at the elevator. At this moment, the silent but even more violent detonation of the second blow bored through the babble of voices, the shouts, the whistles of the crewmen, the nonstop howling of the alarm sirens, through the hasty shuffle of feet coming from the upper levels. The little blue lamps on the corridor ceilings began to flicker, then burned brightly again.

Rohan would never have believed that an elevator could be so slow. He did not even notice that he was still pushing the button with all his might. Only one man still stood beside him, Liwin, the cyberneticist. The elevator stopped, and as Rohan got off he heard a whistling sound, so fine that it was almost unbelievable. He knew that the highest frequencies of this sound could not be perceived by the human ear. It was as if all the titanium joints of the spacecruiser were moaning at the same time. Rohan reached the door to the command center and realized that the Invincible had answered fire with fire. That effectively ended the battle.

Before the flaming background of the videoscreen loomed up the tall dark figure of the astrogator. The ceiling lights had been switched off. perhaps on purpose, and through the lines that rippled over the screen from top to bottom, causing the entire visual field to grow hazy, there glistened a gigantic, bulging mushroom, its stem attached to the ground, its huge billowing blisters extending into all four corners of the sky. It seemed motionless. The explosion had annihilated the Cyclops, reduced it to its very atoms, and left a terrible trembling in the air, through which the monotonous voice of the technician could be heard: “Twenty dash six hundred at zero point. Nine dash eight hundred at the circumference. One dash four twenty two in the field.”

1420 Roentgen in the field, pondered Rohan — that means that the radiation has broken through the barrier of the force field. He had not known it was possible. But when he glanced at the dial of the main output meter he saw how powerful a charge the astrogator had applied, enough energy to bring a good-sized inland sea to the boiling point. Well, Horpach hadn’t wanted to risk any further shooting matches. Perhaps he had gone a bit too far here; however, they now had to face only one adversary again.

Meanwhile an extraordinary spectacle unfolded on the picture screens: the ruffled, cauliflower-like mushroom cap was ablaze with all the colors of the rainbow, from the most delicate silvery green to rich orange and carmine red shades. Suddenly Rohan became aware that the desert was no longer visible. It was covered by a dense fog-like bank of sand that had been whirled up to a height of several dozen yards, surging and heaving, as if the desert had become an ocean.

The technician was still calling out the readings on the dial: “Nineteen thousand at zero point. Eight dash six hundred at the circumference. One dash one zero two in the field.”

The victory over the Cyclops was received with a dull silence: to have defeated their own strongest weapon was a hollow triumph. Gradually the men dispersed while the mushroom cloud rose higher and higher into the atmosphere. Suddenly its top flared up in a new color display, as it was hit by the rays of the sun that had not yet risen over the horizon. The peak of the mushroom cap had pierced the upper strata of the icy cirrus clouds and now displayed, high up in the sky, golden lilac, amber yellow and platinum white nuances, whose light was reflected from the videoscreens into the darkness of the command center. The entire room was faintly illuminated by an irridescent glow, as if someone had pulverized colorful terrestrial flowers on the enameled white of the instrument panels.