Invincible: a novel

"Invincible" is a science fiction novel by Stanislav Lem.

On the desert and uninhabited planet Regis-III landed the second class cruiser "Invincible". Shortly before that, another terrestrial ship, the Condor, disappeared from this planet, having sent only two messages before that. The first was about a successful landing on the surface of the planet Regis-III, and the second - about some "flies". The biologist Lauda speculates that the planet is evolving mechanisms left over from an extraterrestrial civilization that came from somewhere in the constellation Lyra.

Judging by the few traces preserved from the first colonies of robots, their types there were several. "Mobile" - mobile work, complex, intelligent, armed, powered by nuclear energy. The "simplest" are capable of limited adaptation, but they did not depend on the availability of spare parts and radioactive fuel. Their evolution has led to the survival of the fittest. And such were the simplest works. With their distant descendants, which look like "flies", and faced the expeditions of the earthlings…

Translated from Polish by Ivan Svarnik

Illustrations by Rostislav Kramar

BLACK RAIN

"Invincible", a second-class cruiser, the largest unit at the disposal of the Base in the constellation Lyra, went on photon traction through the extreme quadrant of the star cluster. Eighty-three crew members slept in the tunnel governor's central deck. Because the flight was relatively short, instead of complete hibernation, deep sleep was used, in which the body temperature did not fall below ten degrees. Only vending machines worked in the control cabin. In their field of vision, at the crossroads of sight, lay a disk of the sun, slightly hotter than the usual red dwarf. When his circle occupied half the plane of the screen, the annihilation reaction was stopped. For some time there was a dead silence throughout the ship. Air conditioners and calculators worked silently. Even the most delicate vibration subsided, which accompanied the emission of a light pole, which had previously fired from the hull and, like a sword of infinite length, plunged into darkness, pushed the ship with its inertia. "Invincible" walked at the same speed, close to light, powerless, deaf and seemingly empty. Ferromagnetic tapes came to life, programs slowly slid into the middle of newer and newer cars, switches sparked, and currents flowed through wires with a noise no one heard. Electric motors, overcoming the resistance of long-frozen oil, began to rotate, moving from bass to high howls. Matt cadmium headquarters protruded from auxiliary reactors, magnetic pumps pumped liquid sodium into the cooling coil, metal deck structures trembled, and at the same time a faint creaking inside the walls seemed to be raging flocks of animals tapping their claws on metal. This showed that the mobile self-repairing devices have already set off on a multi-kilometer journey to control each connection of the beams, the integrity of the body, the inviolability of metal joints. The whole ship was filled with rustling, moving, waking up, and only its garrison was still asleep. Awakening gas was added to the cold air. Warm air fought between the rows of beds from the bars on the floor. However, people did not seem to want to wake up for a long time. Some involuntarily moved their hands; the wasteland of their cold sleep was filled with delusions and nightmares. Finally, someone was the first to open his eyes. The ship was ready for this. For several minutes now, the darkness of long ship corridors, engine shafts, cabins, cockpit, control posts, pressure chambers has been illuminated by artificial daylight. And while the hibernator was filled with the noise of sighs and cries of the unconscious, the ship, as if unable to wait impatiently for the awakening of the garrison, began a maneuver of pre-braking. Stripes of nasal lights appeared on the central screen. A shock intervened in the hitherto dead light movement, and a powerful force exerted by the nose engines tried to crush eighteen thousand tons of the static mass of the Invincible, now multiplied by its enormous speed. Tightly packed maps shook restlessly in scrolls in cartographic cabins. Here and there, as if coming to life, objects were not too firmly fixed; the utensils thundered in the galleys, the backs of empty foam armchairs trembled, and the wall belts and lintels of the decks began to sway. Knocks, mixed sounds of glass, plates, plastic wave flashed across the ship from nose to stern. Meanwhile, a roar of voices was already coming from the governor; people from non-existence, in which they were for seven months, after a short sleep, returned to reality.

The ship slowed down. The planet, all covered with red wool of clouds, obscured the stars. The convex chandelier of the ocean with the reflection of the sun moved more and more slowly. A brown, crater-ridden continent came into view. People on board did not see anything. Beneath them, in the titanic depths of the engine compartments, a muffled roar grew, a terrible overload pushed his fingers from the handle. The cloud, which fell into the emission stream, split with an explosion of mercury, disintegrated and disappeared. The roar of the engines intensified for a moment. The reddish disk flattened: so the planet turned to the surface. The sickle-shaped dunes were already visible; strips of lava, diverging like the spokes of a wheel from the nearest crater, flashed with the imprint of a rocket nozzle fire stronger than the sunshine.

Static traction.

The arrows moved lazily to the next sector of the sensor. The maneuver went smoothly. The ship, like an overturned volcano breathing with flames, hung half a mile from a jagged plain bordered by sandy rocky ridges.

- All power on the axis. Reduce static thrust. There arose a red storm of sand. Purple lightning bolts fired from the bottom, seemingly soundless as the thunder absorbed the louder roar of the gases. The potential difference leveled off, the commander remarked, nodding to the engineer: resonance. It should be eliminated. But no one answered, the engines roared, the ship sank, now without any jerks, like a steel mountain suspended on invisible lines.

- Half the power on the axle. There was little static thrust.

In concentric circles, like the sight of a real sea, waves of desert dust flew in all directions like smoke. The epicenter, where the emission flame survived from a short distance, no longer smoked. The sand disappeared, turned into a mirror of red bubbles, into a boiling lake of molten silicon, into a pillar of continuous explosions, until it evaporated. Naked as a bone, the old basalt of the planet began to soften.

- Stack at idle. Cold draft.

The blue of atomic fire has gone out. The oblique rays of the drillers struck the nozzles, and in a moment the desert, the walls of the rocky craters, and the clouds above them were flooded with ghostly greenery. The basalt base, on which the broad bottom of the Invincible was to rest, was no longer threatened with melting.

- Stacks zero. Cold longing for landing.

All hearts beat faster, eyes bent over the tools, handles sweating in clenched fingers. The sacramental words meant that there would be no turning, that the feet would be on real ground, even on the sand of the desert ball, but there would also be sunrise and sunset, horizon and clouds and wind.

The ship filled with a long howl of turbines, through which the combustion material fell down. A green pillar of fire spreading like a fan combined it with smoke from a burning rock. Clouds of sand rose on all sides, blinding the periscope of the middle decks, only in the control cabin on the radar screens invariably appeared and extinguished the longitudinal rays that painted the outlines of the landscape, drowning in the chaos of a typhoon. .

The fire revolted beneath the bottom, decreasing millimeter by millimeter from the pressure of the huge rocket approaching it, the green hell shooting long splashes into the depths of the moving sand clouds. The gap between the bottom and the burnt basalt became an ever narrower line of green flame.

- Zero and zero. All engines stop.

Bell. One single blow, like a huge cracked heart. The rocket stopped. The chief engineer froze with his hands on the two handles of the emergency release: the rock could not stand. They were waiting. The hands of the stopwatches moved on with their ant-like steps. The commander stared at the vertical for a moment; its silver light did not deviate at all from the red zero. They were silent. Hot to red nozzles were already beginning to narrow, making a series of characteristic sounds, similar to a hoarse knock. The reddish cloud, which rose hundreds of meters, fell. The blunt top of the Invincible emerged from it, its sides scorched by atmospheric friction and therefore resembling the color of an old rock, a ragged double shell. and now it circled with its surface in a lazy movement that lasted for centuries, under a purple sky, in which the strongest stars could be seen, extinguished only in the immediate vicinity of the red sun.