Krull, knowing when he was licked, wasted no further words. There was silence. As Massena began unloading his gear, Pirx, who had already changed into his climbing boots and assembled line, hooks, and piton hammer, stole a glance at him. Massena was flustered, Pirx could tell. Not just because of his squabble with Krull, but because he had been buffaloed into this against his will. Pirx suspected that, given an out, Massena would have grabbed at it, though you mustn’t underestimate the power of wounded pride. He said nothing, however.
The first few pitches looked easy enough, but there was no telling what they could expect higher up on the wall, up where the overhangs screened a good deal of the flank. Earlier, he hadn’t thought to scout the wall with binoculars, but neither had he counted on this adventure. So why the rope and pitons? Instead of mulling over the contradiction in his own behavior, he waited until Massena was ready; they leisurely shoved off for the base of the cliff.
“I’ll take the lead,” said Pirx, “with line payed out at first; then we’ll play it by ear.”
Massena nodded. Pirx tossed another glance back at Krull, with whom they had parted in silence, and found him standing where they had left him, next to the discarded packs. They were now at high enough altitude to glimpse the distant, olive-green plains emerging from behind the northern ridge. The bottom of the scree was still in shadow, but the peaks blazed with an incandescence that flooded the gaps in the towering skyline like a fractured aureole.
Pirx took a giant stride, found a foothold on the ledge, pulled himself upright, then nimbly ascended. He moved at a gingerly clip, as rock layer after rock layer—rough, uneven, darkly recessed in places—passed before his eyes. He braced, hoisted, heaved himself up, took in the stagnant, ice-cold breath of night radiated by the rock stratum. The higher the altitude, the faster his heartbeat, but his breathing was normal and the straining of muscles suffused him with a pleasing warmth. The rope trailed behind him, the thin air magnifying the scraping sound it made every time it brushed against the cliff, until just before the line was completely payed out, he found a safe belay—with someone else he would have gone without, but he first wanted to be sure of Massena. With his toes wedged in a crack that ran diagonally across the flank, he waited for Massena.
From where he stood he could examine the large, raked chimney they had skirted on the way up. At this point, it flared out into a gray, cirquelike stone-fall; totally jejune, even flat when viewed from below, it now rose up as a rich and stately sculpture. He felt so exquisitely alone that he was startled to find Massena standing beside him.
They progressed steadily upward, repeating the same procedure from one pitch to the next, and at each new stance Pirx used the detector to verify that the robot had been there. Once, when he lost the signal, he had to abandon an easy chimney—Aniel, not being a mountaineer, had simply traversed it. Even so, Pirx had no trouble in second-guessing his moves, for the route he had chosen was invariably the surest, most logical, most expeditious way of gaining the summit. It was obvious, to Pirx at any rate, that Aniel had gone on a climb. Never one to indulge in idle speculation, he did not stop to ponder the whys. The better he came to know his adversary, the more his memory began to revive, yielding those apparently forgotten holds and maneuvers that now prompted him infallibly on each new pitch, even when it came to three-point climbing, which he had to resort to often, in order to free a hand to track the robot’s radioactive trail. Once he glanced down from over the top of a flake sturdy enough to be a wall. At high elevation, despite their painstaking progress, it took Pirx a while to spot Krull standing at the bottom of the air shaft which opened at his feet—or, rather, not Krull but his suit, a tiny splotch of green against the gray.
Then came a nice little traverse. The going was getting tougher, but Pirx was slowly regaining the knack of it, so much so that he made better progress when he trusted to his body’s instincts than when he consciously sought out the best holds. Just how much tougher it would get he discovered when, at one moment, he tried to free his right hand to grab the detector dangling from his belt, and couldn’t. He had a foothold only for his left and something vaguely like a ledge under his right boot tip; leaning out as far as he could from the rock, he scouted at an angle for another foothold, but without any luck. Then he sighted something that portended a little shelf higher up, and decided to skip the detector.
Alas, it was verglassed and steeply pitched. In one place the ice bore a deep bite, evidence of some terrific impact. No booted foot could have made a gash that deep, he thought, and it occurred to him that it might have been an incision left by Aniel’s shoe—the robot weighed roughly a quarter of a ton.
Massena, who until now had been keeping pace, was starting to straggle. They reached the rib’s upper tier. The rock face, as craggy as before, gradually, even deceptively, had begun tilting beyond the perpendicular to become a definite overhang, impossible to negotiate without any decent foot-jams. The rift, well defined until now, closed a few meters higher up. Pirx still had some six meters of free line, but he ordered Massena to take up the slack so he could briefly reconnoiter. The robot had negotiated it without pitons, rope, or belays. If he could, so can I, thought Pirx. He groped overhead; his right ankle, jammed into the apex of the fissure that had brought him this far, ached from the constant straining and twisting, but he didn’t let up. Then his fingertips grazed a ledge barely wide enough for a fingerhold. He might make it with a pull-up, but then what?
It was no longer so much a contest with the cliff as between himself and Aniel. The robot had negotiated it—single-handedly, albeit with metal appendages for fingers… As Pirx began freeing his foot from the crack, his wriggling dislodged a pebble and sent it plummeting. He listened as it cleaved the air, then, after a long pause, landed with a crisp, well-defined click.
“Not on an exposure like that,” he thought, and, abandoning the idea of a pull-up, he looked for a place to hammer in a piton. But the wall was solid, not a single fissure in sight; he leaned out and turned in both directions—blank.
“What’s wrong?” came Massena’s voice from below.
“Nothing—just nosing around,” he replied.
His ankle hurt like hell; he knew he couldn’t maintain this position for very long. Ugh, anything to abandon this route! But the moment he changed direction, the trail was as good as lost on this mammoth of a rock. Again he scoured the terrain. In the extreme foreshortening of vision, the slab seemed to abound in holds, but the recesses were shallower than the palm of his hand. That left only the ledge. He had already freed his foot and was in a pull-up position when it dawned on him: there was no reversing now. Thrust outward, he hung in space with his boot tips some thirty centimeters out from the rock face. Something caught his eye. A rift? But first he had to reach it! Come on, just a little higher!
His next moves were governed by sheer instinct: hanging on with the four fingers of his right hand, he let go with the left and reached up to the fissure of unknown depth. That was dumb—it flashed through his mind, as, gasping, wincing at his own recklessness, he suddenly found himself two meters higher, hugging the rock, his muscles on the verge of snapping. With both feet securely on the ledge, he was able to drive in a piton, even a second for safety’s sake, since the first refused to go in all the way. He listened with pleasure to the hammer’s reverberations—clean and crisp, rising in pitch as the piton sank deeper, then finally tapering off. The rope jiggled in the carabiners, a signal that he had to give Massena some help. Not the slickest job, thought Pirx, but, then, neither were they climbing the Alps, and it would do as a stance.
Above the buttress was a narrow, fairly comfortable chimney. Pirx stuck the detector between his teeth, afraid it would scrape against the rock if he wedged it in his belt. The higher he climbed, the more the rock fringed from a blotchy brownish-black, here and there streaked with gray, to a ruddy, rufous-flecked surface glittering up close with diabase. It was easy going for another dozen or so meters, then the picnic was
over: another overhang, insurmountable without more pitons, and this time shelfless. But Aniel had managed it with nothing. Or had he? Pirx checked with the detector. Wrong, he bypassed the overhang. How? Must have used a traverse.
A quick survey revealed a pitch not especially tricky or treacherous. The buttress, temporarily obscured by the diabase, reasserted itself here. He was standing on a narrow but safe ledge that wrapped around a bulge before vanishing from view; leaning out, he saw its continuation on the other side, across a gap measuring roughly a meter and a half—two at the most. The trick was to wriggle around the jutting projection, then, freeing the right foot, thrust off with the left so that the right could feel its way to safe footing on the other side.
He looked for a place to drive in a piton for what should have been a routine belay. But the wall was maliciously devoid of any cracks. He glanced down; a belay from the stance Massena now occupied would have been purely cosmetic. Even if secured from below, he stood to fall, if he peeled off, a good fifteen meters, enough to jerk loose the most secure pitons. And yet the detector said loud and clear that the robot had negotiated it—alone! What the…! There’s the shelf. One big step. Come on, chicken! He stayed put. Oh, for a place to tie on a rope! He leaned out and swept the shelf—and for a second, no more—before the muscle spasms set in. And if my boot sole doesn’t grab? Aniel’s were steel-soled. What’s that shiny stuff over there? Melting ice? Slippery as all hell, I’ll bet. That’s what I get for not bringing along my Vibrams…
“And for not making out a will,” he muttered under his breath, his eyes squinting, his gaze transfixed. Doubled up, spread-eagled, fingers clutching the rock’s craggy face for support, he bellied his way around the bulge and risked the step that had taken all his courage. Whatever joy he felt as he landed was quickly dissipated. The shelf on the other side was situated lower, which meant that he would have to jump up on the way back. Not to mention that stomach traverse. Climb, my ass! Acrobatics was more like it. Rope down? It was either that or—
A total fiasco, but he kept traversing, nonetheless, for as long as he was able. Suffice it to say that Aniel was the furthest thing from his mind at the moment. The rope, payed out along the length of his traverse, moderately taut and uncannily pristine, inordinately close and tangible against the scree blurred by a bluish haze at the base, shook under him. The shelf came to a dead end, with no way up, down, or back.
Never saw anything so smooth, he thought with a calm that differed appreciably from his previous sangfroid. He reconnoitered. Underfoot was a four-centimeter ledge, then empty space, followed by the darkly adumbrated vent of a chimney—whose very darkness seemed an invitation—yawning four meters away in a rock face so sheer and massive as to defy credulity. And granite, no less! he thought, almost reproachful. Water erosion, sure, he even saw the signs—dark patches on the slab, here and there some drops of water; he grabbed the rod with his right hand and probed the brink for some trace. Low, intermittent crackling. Affirmative. But how? A tiny patch of moss, granite-hued, caught his eye. He scraped it away. A chink, no bigger than a fingernail. It was his salvation, even though the piton refused to go in more than halfway. He yanked on the ringed eye—somehow it held. Now just clutch the piton with his left, slowly… He leaned out from the waist up, and let his eyes roam the rim, felt the pull of the half-open chute, seemingly preordained ages ago for this moment; his gaze plummeted like a falling stone, all the way down to a silvery-blue shimmer against the scree’s fuzzy gray.
The ultimate step was never taken.
“What’s wrong?” Massena’s voice reverberated.
“In a sec!” Pirx yelled back as he threaded the rope through the carabiner. He had to take a closer look. Again he leaned out, this time with three-fourths of his weight on the hook, jackknifed as if to wrench it from the rock, determined to satisfy his curiosity.
It was him. Nothing else could radiate from such a height—Pirx, having long ago passed beyond the perpendicular, was now some three hundred meters above the point of departure. He searched the ground for a landmark. The rope cut into his flesh, he had trouble breathing, and his eyes throbbed as he tried to memorize the landscape. There was his marker, that huge boulder, now viewed in foreshortened perspective. By the time he was back in a vertical position, his muscles were twitching. Time to rope off, he told himself, and he automatically pried out the piton, which slipped out effortlessly, as if embedded in butter; despite a feeling of unease, he pocketed the piton and began plotting a way down. Their descent was, if not elegant, then at least effective; Massena plastered his stance with pitons and shortened the line, and Pirx bellied some eight meters down the slab, below which was another chimney, and they abseiled the rest of the way down, alternating the lead. When Massena wanted an explanation, Pirx said:
“I found him.”
“Aniel?”
“He peeled off—up there, at the bottom of a chimney.”
The return trip took less than an hour. Pirx wasn’t sad to part company with his pitons, though it was strange to think he would never set foot here again, neither he nor any other human; that those scraps of metal, Earth-made, would remain ensconced for millennia—indeed, forever—in that cliff.
They had already touched down on the scree, and were staggering around in an obvious effort to regain their legs, when Krull came up to them on the run, yelling from a distance that he’d located Aniel’s holsters, jettisoned not far off. The robot must have junked them before scaling the rock, he said, proof positive of a breakdown, since the jets were his only means of bailing out in an emergency.
Massena, who seemed altogether unfazed by Krull’s revelations, made no secret of the toll taken by the climb; on the contrary, he plopped himself down on a boulder, spread out his legs as if to savor the firmness, and furiously mopped his face, brow, and neck with a handkerchief.
Pirx reported Aniel’s fall to Krull; a few minutes later they went out searching. It didn’t take them long to find him. Judging from the wreckage, his three-hundred-meter fall had been undeflected. His armor-plated torso was shattered, metal skull ditto, and his monocrystalline brain reduced to a powdered glass that coated the surrounding rocks with a micalike glitter. Krull at least had the decency not to lecture them on the futility of their climb. He merely repeated his contention, not without a certain satisfaction, that Aniel must have become “deprogrammed,” the clincher being the abandoned holsters.
Massena was visibly altered by the climb, and not for the better; he murmured not a peep in protest and altogether had the look of a man who would be a lot happier when the mission was terminated and each could go his own way.
There was silence on the way back, the more strained because Pirx was deliberately withholding his version of the “accident.” For he was sure it was not a mechanical defect—of monocrystals, mnestrones, or whatever—any more than he, Pirx, had been “defective” in hankering to conquer that wall.
No, Aniel was simply more like his designers than any of them cared to admit. Having done his work with his customary speed and skill, the robot found he had time to kill. He didn’t just see the terrain, he sensed it: programmed for complex problem-solving, for the challenge, he couldn’t resist the grandest sweepstakes of them all. Pirx had to smile. How blind the others were! Imagine taking the jettisoned holsters as evidence of a mechanical failure! Sure, anyone else would have done the same. Not to have junked them would have been to take all the risk out of it, to turn it into a gymnastics stunt. They were all wet, and no graphs, models, or equations could make him believe otherwise. He was only amazed that Aniel hadn’t fallen earlier—up there alone, with no training or climbing experience, unprogrammed for battling with rocks.
What if he’d made it back safely? For some reason Pirx was sure they would never have heard the tale. Not from Aniel, at any rate. What made him decide to risk a jump from that ledge, lacking both pitons and a second, without even knowing he lacked them? Nothing, probably—a decision as mindless as h
e was. Had he scraped or brushed the rim of that chimney? Pirx wondered. If so, then he must have left behind some trace, a sprinkling of radioactive atoms that would stay up there until they finally decomposed and evaporated.
Pirx knew something else: that he would never even hint about this to anyone. People would cling to the hypothesis of a malfunction, which was the simplest, most logical hypothesis, indeed the only one that did not threaten their vision of the world.
They reached the camp later that afternoon. Their elongated shadows moved apace as they tore down the barracks, section by section, leaving behind only a barren, flattened quadrangle. Clouds scudded across the sky as Pirx went about carting crates, rolling up maps—in short, filling in for Aniel, the thought of which made Pirx pause a second before delivering his burden into Massena’s outstretched arms.
THE HUNT
Translated by Louis Iribarne
He left Port Control hopping mad. It had to happen to him, to him! The owner didn’t have the shipment—simply didn’t have it—period. Port Control knew nothing. Sure, there had been a telegram: 72 HOUR DELAY—STIPULATED PENALTY PAID TO YOUR ACCOUNT—ENSTRAND. Not a word more. At the trade councilor’s office he didn’t get anywhere, either. The port was crowded and the stipulated penalty didn’t satisfy Control. Parking fee, demurrage, yes, but wouldn’t it be best if you, Mr. Navigator, lifted off like a good fellow and went into hold? Just kill the engines, no expenditure for fuel, wait out your three days and come back. What would that hurt you? Three days circling the Moon because the owner screws up! Pirx was at a loss for a reply, but then remembered the treaty. Well, when he trotted out the norms established by the labor union for exposure in space, they started backing down. In fact, this was not the Year of the Quiet Sun. Radiation levels were not negligible. So he would have to maneuver, keep behind the Moon, play that game of hide-and-seek with the sun using thrust. And who was going to pay for this? Not the owner, certainly. Who, then—Control? Did you gentlemen have any idea of the cost of ten minutes’ full bum with a reactor of seventy million kilowatts? In the end he got permission to stay, but only for seventy-two hours plus four to load that wretched freight—not a minute more! You would have thought they were doing him a favor. As if it were his fault. And he had arrival right on the dot, and didn’t come straight from Mars, either—while the owner…
More Tales of Pirx the Pilot Page 5
