Victor Sonkin. Sell ​​for scrap

Sell ​​for scrap
Stanislav Lem. Terminus. Translated by E. Weissbrot

Victor Sonkin

Publication date: November 10, 2000

It happened by accident. I didn’t have any parallels with current events in mind, I just decided to re-read a story that once made a strong impression on me as a child. I wanted to check what attracted me then - and whether it will attract me now.

Yes. Firstly, I have a weakness for production topics, which I have admitted more than once; in the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, the best fragment, in my opinion, is the feverish attempts to save the statue of Perseus, when tin plates and everything that comes to hand are used; in Suskind's "Perfume" - the perfume production itself, and not at all the twists of the sick soul of the protagonist. There are a lot of technical details in the stories about the pilot Pirx, and it’s interesting to follow them. You think with horror how he will fly on such a vessel; You watch with intense interest that you did fly and at every step come up with various tricks so that the ship does not fall apart. Of course, in a science fiction story, the production component is easier - no one will check, no one will grab your hand, no one will say that in 2069 synchroblasters of this model had not yet been produced. But how much more difficult it is to make such a story convincing. Lem makes it easy.

Secondly, the main character is real, which is rare in science fiction. He has character, he has weaknesses, he has psychological dynamics. It is not difficult to identify with him because he is not superhuman. “He pushed off from the ceiling and floated uncertainly to the opposite wall. Damn it! He wanted to walk, walk with quick steps, feel his weight, hit the table with his fist as hard as he could!” Not many of us have experienced a state of weightlessness, but the feelings that Pirx experiences are familiar to everyone.

Thirdly, strange, unrelated details like mice and a cat on a spaceship and the mysterious attachment to them of the robot Terminus, after whom the story is named. What are these mice for? Why a cat? They have nothing to do with the plot; they only add mystery, volume, and depth to the text.

Fourthly, the plot itself. It cannot be said that Lem constantly keeps the reader in suspense - on the contrary, he allows him to relax; the key elements of the story take up barely more than five percent of the total text. The stronger their impact. Pirx gets the ship that once experienced one of the largest space disasters; the team died - either immediately, or gradually, using up precious oxygen drop by drop. (I’ll tell you the plot now, so if the joy of first reading is dear to anyone, follow the link to the text first .) And it turns out that the souls (thoughts, virtual doubles) of the team members seem to have moved into an on-board robot, a meaningless machine that patches ship, protecting it from cosmic radiation. All these years they lived in it, talking in Morse code to the rhythm of the beats of robotic hands. Always about the same thing - about what happened to them during the hours of the disaster. Who is still alive, who is not, how many hours will the oxygen last? And if you tap the pipe in Morse code, as Pirx discovers with horror, you can enter into a dialogue with these virtual characters - who are just problems in the internal structure of Terminus.

Now evaluate the actions of Pirx. The reasons and details of the death of the ship have not been fully clarified. And Terminus is a unique opportunity to enter into a conversation with the dead, who have been dead witnesses for many years. But these ghostly voices cannot be explained that they are dead, that they are just switches and contacts in the body of a stupid robot. They will ask for help, beg for salvation, conjure, beg, and be perplexed.

“One by one [Pirx] began to fill out the printed columns:

Model: AST-PM-105/0044
Type: Universal, repair
Title: Terminus
Type of damage: Disintegration of functions
Conclusions:

Pirx thought about it. He brought the pen closer to the paper and took it away again. He reflected on the innocence of machines, which man had endowed with the ability to think and thereby made them accomplices in his extravagances. That the legend about the Golem, a machine that rebelled and rebelled against man, is a lie, invented so that the people who are responsible for everything can throw off this responsibility.

Conclusions: Sell for scrap.

And at the bottom of the page, without moving a single muscle of his face, he signed: First Pilot Pirx"

.

Right?

Web presence

- Text of the story in the Moshkov library
- Other texts by Lem there
- Rich, interestingly structured, informative (although not updated for a long time) “ Unofficial page of Stanislaw Lem ”. For those who read Polish.
- Oleksandr Lysenko, " Fantasy and Realism of Stanislav Lem " (in Ukrainian). The author begins with the fact that " as a literary genre, fiction can be considered a kind of product of human arrogance ."