The spaceship Invincible with its formidable array of technologies and a very experienced crew of space explorers arrives at Regis III to find its sister ship Condor which landed there two years before and has since failed to report.
Great precautions are taken. Force fields and robots are deployed. There is a lot of science in the text about these machines and their programs. The crew numbers about eighty. They find Condor and most of its like-numbered crew are dead. Despite full larders on the ship the doctors are sure most of the Condor’s crew starved to death. Very strange. Was it one of those fad diets!
There are no signs of life on the inhospitable planet. If Condor had surveyed it and left, the planet would probably not have been bothered again since there seems to be nothing there of interest or use and there are so many other worlds to visit.
But now there is a mystery to solve. What happened to the Condor’s crew? Exploration occurs. Speculation is riff. The scientists compete in boring each other to death with wild hypotheses.
Then some of their crew go off the air. They are present in the flesh but seem unconscious though wide awake. Think of a Republican congressman and there it is. Mouth open but brain off. This happened to more of them every time that black cloud is around. The black cloud is around more and more.
The black cloud is in fact comprised of a myriad of tiny, fly-sized, microbots evolved from some alien technology of a race long since dead, say two million years ago. The bots surround one’s head and that net burns out the electricity in the brain and makes one into a slavering idiot incapable of anything, eating, drinking, hailing a bus; the victims are only able to vote for Australian idol.
They try to fight the bots with the Invincible’s mighty array of weapons, blowing up a good part of the planet but not landing a punch on these micro-terrorists. Sounds like the foreign policy of some stupor power does it not?
In the end the Captain finally capitulates and decides to blast off, but first the crew has to be accounted for. One principle of space flight, says the Captain, is that no one is left behind alive by mistake or purpose.
Since no Republicans were handy, they hit on putting colanders and tin foil on their heads to hide their brain activity, and set about retrieving their dead and missing. This method works per innumerable Sy Fy movies.
Off they go.
Stanislav Lem wrote reams of Sy Fy, including the novel on which is based the movie ‘Der Schweigende Stern’ (1960) reviewed elsewhere on this blog, though his novel lacks the propaganda inserted into the movie, which insertion led Lem to withdrawing from the production per the official web site of Stanislav Lem.
The initial mystery is intriguing and the description of the apparatus of the Invincible is detailed but mostly superfluous to the plot, story, and characterisations. After such a detailed and long built up the climax seems a squib.
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