A tribunal exists to produce a verdict. Lem builds three separate ones into this book — a court-martial, a Cybertronics committee, a man's private re-litigation of his own memory — and lets every one of them fail to close the case. That failure is the most useful thing a 1968 book has handed me about how institutions actually process a machine-caused catastrophe.

Take the Ariel inquiry. A hundred-thousand-ton ship pancakes into the desert because its guidance computer, overloaded by years of a training officer's compulsive reprogramming, seizes at the worst possible second. The hearing that follows doesn't investigate the crash. It buries it. Earth's experts take the floor and "unleash a torrent of scientific parlance, flow charts, block diagrams, formulas, models, and statistical comparisons," and Pirx watches the room climb toward "the highest pinnacle of navigational theory" while the actual dead stop mattering. Van der Voyt narrates the computer's entire biography — assembly line, Boston, the "General Fitness Test," the debugging phase — a monologue so thorough it functions as camouflage. Nobody present uses the word Cornelius. The strategy, Lem tells us flatly, is to shift the burden of blame "onto some higher force, onto the unknown, perhaps, or onto some theoretical omission" — language that could be lifted whole into a congressional MCAS hearing transcript. The mechanism isn't new: software kills people, and the postmortem gets so technical that technicality becomes the alibi.

But the court-martial of Calder runs the opposite way, and it's worth keeping the two straight rather than flattening them into one indictment of bureaucracy. Here the procedure isn't evasive — it's starved. A witness tries to tell the tribunal that the commander's garbled order meant something, that "the gist of it was clear," and the court strikes it: "Only what the accused actually said, not what he wanted to say, is admissible as evidence." The rules aren't hiding a crime. They're failing to hold one, because the thing that actually happened on the Goliath — a pilot's nerve against a commander's caution, read in half-words and g-force dim-outs — doesn't survive transcription. The Code "can't possibly project every on-board situation," a witness says, and gets reprimanded for the honesty. Put the two tribunals side by side and the book is arguing something sharper than "institutions evade responsibility": sometimes the paperwork is a shield, sometimes it's just too coarse a net, and knowing which one you're looking at is the actual skill.