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Authors: Stanislaw Lem
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slight bow to the assembly and said without preface:
“Gentlemen! About sixty years ago a Galactic Company freighter, the Jonathan II, set off from the planetary port at Yokohama. This vessel, under the command of one Astrocenty Peapo, a seasoned spacer, was carrying lumber to Areclandria, a planet of the gamma Orion. It was last sighted by a stellar beacon in the vicinity of Cerberon. Then it disappeared without a trace. A year passed, and the insurance people of Securitas Cosmica, SECOS for short, paid over full damages for the loss of the ship. Some two weeks after that a certain amateur radio operator from New Guinea received a telegram with the following text.”
The speaker lifted a card from the table and read:
KEMPOOTAR GUN BZIRCK
ASS HO ASS JUNYJANTU
“At this point, gentlemen, I must make mention of certain facts which are indispensable for a further understanding of the matter. The radio operator in question was practically illiterate and in addition had a speech impediment. By force of habit and due, one may assume, to his total lack of experience, he distorted the message, which, according to the reconstruction made by our experts at Universal Codes, originally read: ‘Computer gone berserk S. O. S. Jonathan II.’ The experts maintained, on the basis of this text, that the rare event of a mutiny in deep space had in fact taken place—we are speaking of the mutiny of the ship’s computer. Now because the insurance payment had been made to the owners and they were therefore no longer in any position to lay claim to the lost ship, for all the property rights to it (including the cargo) had been assumed by SECOS, it was SECOS who engaged the Pinkerton Agency, in the persons of Abstrahazy and Mnemonius Pinkerton, to conduct the appropriate inquiries. The investigation undertaken by these competent professionals revealed that the computer of the Jonathan, a luxury model in its day, but which, by the time of its final voyage, was well along in years, had recently been filing complaints against one of the crew. This was a rocket engineer named Symileon Gitterton, who was supposed to have tormented it in a variety of ways—lowering its output potential, flicking its tubes, taunting it, and even heaping upon the Computer such offensive epithets and slurs as, for example, ‘old screw-loose solderhead’ and ‘uncle frammus.’ Gitterton denied everything, claiming that the Computer was simply hallucinating—which does indeed on occasion happen to our senior automata. At any rate Professor Gargarragh will shortly fill you gentlemen in on this particular aspect of the case.
“All efforts to locate the ship during the next ten years failed. Soon after that time, however, the Pinkerton agents, still tirelessly working on the mysterious disappearance of the Jonathan, learned that there was a half-crazed, sickly beggar who would sit in front of the restaurant of the Hotel Galax and sing the most wondrous tales, professing to be Astrocenty Peapo the former starship commander. This old man, bedraggled and tattered beyond description, did indeed answer to the name of Astrocenty Peapo, yet not only was his reason dimmed, but he had lost the power of speech—and could only sing. When questioned patiently by the Pinkerton men, he chanted an incredible tale: how something terrible had taken place on deck, as a result of which he was thrown overboard with only the spacesuit on his back, and how with a handful of loyal rocketeers he had to return to Earth on foot from the murky regions of Andromeda, which took a good two hundred years. He wandered, so he sang, sometimes on meteors heading in the right direction, or sometimes hopped a passing barge—it was only a small part of the journey that he spent on the Lumeon, an unmanned cosmic probe which happened to be flying towards Earth at a velocity just under the velocity of light. This ride astraddle the back of the Lumeon he paid for (as he put it) with the loss of speech,
“Gentlemen! About sixty years ago a Galactic Company freighter, the Jonathan II, set off from the planetary port at Yokohama. This vessel, under the command of one Astrocenty Peapo, a seasoned spacer, was carrying lumber to Areclandria, a planet of the gamma Orion. It was last sighted by a stellar beacon in the vicinity of Cerberon. Then it disappeared without a trace. A year passed, and the insurance people of Securitas Cosmica, SECOS for short, paid over full damages for the loss of the ship. Some two weeks after that a certain amateur radio operator from New Guinea received a telegram with the following text.”
The speaker lifted a card from the table and read:
KEMPOOTAR GUN BZIRCK
ASS HO ASS JUNYJANTU
“At this point, gentlemen, I must make mention of certain facts which are indispensable for a further understanding of the matter. The radio operator in question was practically illiterate and in addition had a speech impediment. By force of habit and due, one may assume, to his total lack of experience, he distorted the message, which, according to the reconstruction made by our experts at Universal Codes, originally read: ‘Computer gone berserk S. O. S. Jonathan II.’ The experts maintained, on the basis of this text, that the rare event of a mutiny in deep space had in fact taken place—we are speaking of the mutiny of the ship’s computer. Now because the insurance payment had been made to the owners and they were therefore no longer in any position to lay claim to the lost ship, for all the property rights to it (including the cargo) had been assumed by SECOS, it was SECOS who engaged the Pinkerton Agency, in the persons of Abstrahazy and Mnemonius Pinkerton, to conduct the appropriate inquiries. The investigation undertaken by these competent professionals revealed that the computer of the Jonathan, a luxury model in its day, but which, by the time of its final voyage, was well along in years, had recently been filing complaints against one of the crew. This was a rocket engineer named Symileon Gitterton, who was supposed to have tormented it in a variety of ways—lowering its output potential, flicking its tubes, taunting it, and even heaping upon the Computer such offensive epithets and slurs as, for example, ‘old screw-loose solderhead’ and ‘uncle frammus.’ Gitterton denied everything, claiming that the Computer was simply hallucinating—which does indeed on occasion happen to our senior automata. At any rate Professor Gargarragh will shortly fill you gentlemen in on this particular aspect of the case.
“All efforts to locate the ship during the next ten years failed. Soon after that time, however, the Pinkerton agents, still tirelessly working on the mysterious disappearance of the Jonathan, learned that there was a half-crazed, sickly beggar who would sit in front of the restaurant of the Hotel Galax and sing the most wondrous tales, professing to be Astrocenty Peapo the former starship commander. This old man, bedraggled and tattered beyond description, did indeed answer to the name of Astrocenty Peapo, yet not only was his reason dimmed, but he had lost the power of speech—and could only sing. When questioned patiently by the Pinkerton men, he chanted an incredible tale: how something terrible had taken place on deck, as a result of which he was thrown overboard with only the spacesuit on his back, and how with a handful of loyal rocketeers he had to return to Earth on foot from the murky regions of Andromeda, which took a good two hundred years. He wandered, so he sang, sometimes on meteors heading in the right direction, or sometimes hopped a passing barge—it was only a small part of the journey that he spent on the Lumeon, an unmanned cosmic probe which happened to be flying towards Earth at a velocity just under the velocity of light. This ride astraddle the back of the Lumeon he paid for (as he put it) with the loss of speech,
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