More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (10 page)

“I didn’t think of that,” said the engineer, then added, with a smile, “Why did you tell me?”

“To free you of illusions,” replied Pirx, not looking up from the double eyepiece of his periscope. It had foam-rubber cushions, but he felt sure that he would be going around with black eyes for the longest time (assuming, of course, he came out of this alive). “And also to explain why we’re carrying that stuff in the back.”

“The cylinders?” asked McCork. “I saw you taking them from the storeroom. What’s in them?”

“Ammonia, chlorine, and some hydrocarbons or other,” said Pirx. “I though they might come in handy.”

“A gas smoke-screen?” ventured the engineer.

“No, what I had in mind was some way of aiming. If there’s no atmosphere, we create one, at least temporarily…”

“I’m afraid there won’t be time for that.”

“Perhaps not, but I brought it along just in case. Against something insane, insane measures are often best.”

They fell silent, for the transporter had begun to lurch like a drunk; the stabilizers whined and squealed, sounding as if at any minute the oil in them would begin to boil. They hurtled down an incline strewn with sharp boulders. The opposite slope gleamed, all white with pumice.

“You know what worries me most?” resumed Pirx when the heaving let up a little; he had grown strangely talkative. “Not the Setaur—not at all—it’s those transporters from Construction. If just one of them takes us for the Setaur and starts blasting away with its laser, things’ll get lively.”

“I see you’ve thought of everything,” muttered the engineer. The cadet, sitting beside the radio operator, leaned across the back of his seat and handed Pirx a scrawled radiogram, barely legible.

“We have entered the danger zone at relay twenty, so far nothing, stop, Strzibor, end of transmission,” Pirx read aloud. “Well, we’ll soon have to put our helmets on, too…”

The machine slowed a little, climbing a slope. Pirx noticed that he could no longer see the neighbor on his left—only the right-hand transporter was still visible, moving like a dim blot up the bank. He ordered that the machine on the left be raised on the radio, but there was no answer.

“We have begun to separate,” he said calmly. “I thought that would happen. Can’t we push the antenna up a little higher? No? Too bad.”

By now they were at the summit of a gentle rise. From over the horizon, at a distance of less than two hundred kilometers, emerged, full in the sun, the sawtooth ridge of the crater Toricelli, sharply outlined against the black background of the sky. They had the plain of the Sea of Tranquillity all but behind them now. Deep tectonic rifts appeared, frozen slabs of magma jutted here and there from under the debris, and over these the transporter crawled with difficulty, first heaving up like a boat on a wave, then dropping heavily down, as though it were about to plunge head over heels into some unknown cavity. Pirx caught sight of the mast of the next relay, glanced quickly at the celluloid map card pressed to his knees, and ordered everyone to fasten their helmets. From now on they would be able to communicate only by intercom. The transporter managed to shake even more violently than before—Pirx’s head wobbled around in its helmet like the kernel of a nut inside an otherwise empty shell.

When they drove down the slope to lower ground, the saw of Toricelli disappeared, blocked out by nearer elevations; almost at the same time they lost their right neighbor. For a few minutes more they heard its call signal, but then that was distorted by the waves bouncing off the sheets of rock. Complete radio silence followed. It was extremely awkward trying to look through the periscope with a helmet on; Pirx thought he would either crack his viewplate or smash the eyepiece. He did what he could to keep his eyes on the field of vision at all times, though it shifted drastically with each lurch of the machine and was strewn with endless boulders. The jumble of pitch-black shadow and dazzlingly bright surfaces of stone made his eyes swim.

Suddenly a small orange flame leaped up in the darkness of the far sky, flickered, dwindled, disappeared. A second flash, a little stronger. Pirx shouted, “Attention everyone! I see explosions!” and feverishly turned the crank of the periscope, reading the azimuth off the scale etched on the lenses.

“We’re changing course!” he howled. “Forty-seven point eight, full speed ahead!”

The terms of this order really applied to a cosmic vessel, but the driver understood it all the same; the plates and every joint of the transporter gave a shudder as the machine wheeled around practically in place and surged forward. Pirx got up from his seat: its tossing was pulling his head away from the eyepiece. Another flash—this time red-violet, a fan-shaped burst of flame. But the source of those flashes or explosions lay beyond the field of vision, hidden by the ridge they were climbing.

“Attention everyone!” said Pirx. “Prepare your individual lasers! Dr. McCork, please go to the hatch. When I give the word, or in case of a hit, you’ll open it! Driver! Decrease velocity!”

The elevation up which the machine was clambering rose from the desert like the shank of some moon monster, half sunken in debris; the rock in fact resembled, in its smoothness, a polished skeleton or giant skull; Pirx ordered the driver to go to the top. The treads began to chatter, like steel over glass. “Hold it!” yelled Pirx, and the transporter, coming to a sudden halt, dipped nose-down toward the rock, swayed as the stabilizers groaned with the strain, and stopped.

Pirx looked into a shallow basin enclosed on two sides by radially spreading, tapered embankments of old magma flows; two-thirds of the wide depression lay in glaring sun, a third was covered by a shroud of absolute black. On that velvet darkness there shone, like a weird jewel, fading ruby-red, the ripped-open skeleton of a vehicle. Besides Pirx, only the driver saw it, for the armor flaps of the windows had been lowered. Pirx, to tell the truth, didn’t know what to do. “A transporter,” he thought. “Where is the front of it? Coming from the south? Probably from the construction group, then. But who got it, the Setaur? And I’m standing here in full view, like an idiot—we have to conceal ourselves. But where are all the other transporters? Theirs and mine?”

“I have something!” shouted the radiotelegraph man. He connected his receiver to the inside circuit, so that they could all hear the signals in their helmets.

“Aximo-portable talus! A wall with encystation—repetition from the headland unnecessary—the access at an azimuth of—multicrystalline metamorphism…” The voice filled Pirx’s earphones, delivering the words clearly, in a monotone, with no inflection whatever.

“It’s him!” he yelled. “The Setaur! Hello, radio! Get a fix on that, quickly! We need a fix! For God’s sake! While it’s still sending!” He roared till he was deafened by his own shouts amplified in the closed space of the helmet; not waiting for the telegraph operator to snap out of it, he leaped, head bowed, to the top of the turret, seized the double handgrip of the heavy laser, and began turning it along with the turret, his eyes already at the sighter. Meanwhile, inside his helmet, that low, almost sorrowful, steady voice droned on:

“Heavily bihedrous achromatism viscosity—undecorticated segments without repeated anticlinal interpolations”—and the senseless gabble seemed to weaken.

“Where’s that fix, damn it?!!”

Pirx, keeping his eyes glued to the sighter, heard a faint clatter—McCork had run up front and shoved aside the operator; there was a sound of scuffling…

Suddenly in his earphones he heard the calm voice of the cyberneticist:

“Azimuth 39.9 … 40.0 … 40.1 … 40.2…”

“It’s moving!” Pirx realized. The turret had to be turned by crank; he nearly dislocated his arm, he cranked so hard. The numbers moved at a creep. The red line passed the 40 mark.

Suddenly the voice of the Setaur rose to a drawn-out screech and broke off. At that same moment Pirx pressed the trigger, and half a kilometer down, right at the line between light and shadow, a rock spouted fire brighter than the sun.

Through the thick gloves it was next to impossible to hold the handgrip steady. The blinding flame bored into the darkness at the bottom of the basin; a few dozen meters from the dimly glowing wreck, it stopped and, in a spray of jagged embers, cut a line sideways, twice raising columns of sparks. Something yammered in the earphones. Pirx paid no attention, just plowed on with that line of flame, so thin and so terrible, until it split into a thousand centrifugal ricochets off some stone pillar. Red swirling circles danced before him, but through their swirl he saw a bright blue eye, smaller than the head of a pin, which had opened at the very bottom of the darkness, off to the side somewhere, not where he had been shooting—and before he was able to move the handgrip of the laser, to pivot it around on its swivel, a rock right next to the machine itself exploded like a liquid sun.

“Back!” he bellowed, ducking by reflex, with the result that he no longer saw anything; but he wouldn’t have seen anything anyway, only those red, slowly fading circles, which turned now black, now golden.

The engine thundered. They were thrown with such violence that Pirx fell all the way to the bottom, then flew to the front, between the knees of the cadet and the radio operator; the cylinders, though they had tied them down securely on the armored wall, made an awful racket. They were rushing backward, in reverse, there was a horrible crunch beneath the tractor tread, they swerved, careened in the other direction, for a minute it looked like the transporter was going to flip over on its back… The driver, desperately working the gas, the brakes, the clutch, somehow brought that wild skid under control; the machine gave a long quiver and stood still.

“Do we have a seal?” shouted Pirx, picking himself up off the floor. “A good thing it’s rubber,” he managed to think.

“Intact!”

“Well, that was nice and close,” he said in an altogether different voice now, standing up and straightening his back. And added softly, not without chagrin: “Two hundredths more to the left and I would have had him.”

McCork returned to his place.

“Doctor, that was good, thank you!” called Pirx, already back at the periscope. “Hello, driver, let’s go down the same way we came up. There are some small cliffs over there, a kind of arch—that’s it, right!—drive into the shadow between them and stop.”

Slowly, as if with exaggerated caution, the transporter moved in between the slabs of rock half buried in sand and froze in their shadow, which would render it invisible.

“Excellent!” said Pirx almost cheerfully. “Now I need two men to go with me and do a little reconnoitering…”

McCork raised his hand at the same time as the cadet.

“Good! Now listen; you”—he turned to the others—“will remain here. Don’t move out of the shadow, even if the Setaur should come straight at you—sit quietly. Well, I guess if it walks right into the transporter, then you’ll have to defend yourselves; you have the laser. But that’s not very likely. You,” he said to the driver, “will help this young man remove those cylinders of gas from the wall, and you”—this to the radio operator—“will call Luna Base, the cosmodrome, Construction, the patrols, and tell the first who answers that
it
destroyed one transporter, probably belonging to Construction, and that three men from our machine have gone out to hunt it. So I don’t want anybody barging in with lasers, shooting blindly, and so on… And now let’s go!”

Since each of them could carry only one cylinder, the driver accompanied them and they took four. Pirx led his companions not to the top of the “skull,” but a little beyond, where a small, shallow ravine could be seen. They went as far as they could and set the cylinders down by a large boulder; Pirx ordered the driver to go back. He himself peered out over the surface of the boulder and trained his binoculars on the interior of the basin. McCork and the cadet crouched down beside him. After a long while he said:

“I don’t see him. Doctor, what the Setaur said, did it have any meaning?”

“I doubt it. Combinations of words—a sort of schizophrenic thing.”

“That wreck has had it,” said Pirx.

“Why did you shoot?” asked McCork. “There might have been people.”

“There wasn’t anyone.”

Pirx moved the binoculars a millimeter at a time, scrutinizing every crease and crevice of the sunlit area.

“They didn’t have time to jump.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he cut the machine in half. You can still see it. They must have practically run into him. He hit from a few dozen meters. And besides, both hatches are closed. No,” he added after a couple of seconds, “he’s not in the sun. And probably hasn’t had a chance to sneak away. We’ll try drawing him out.”

Bending over, he lifted a heavy cylinder to the top of the boulder and, shoving it into position before him, muttered between his teeth:

“A real live cowboys-and-Indians situation, the kind I always dreamed of…”

The cylinder slipped; he held it by the valves and, flattening himself out on the stones, said:

“If you see a blue flash, shoot at once—that’s his laser eye.”

With all his might he pushed the cylinder, which, at first slowly but then with increasing speed, began to roll down the slope. All three of them took aim; the cylinder had now gone about two hundred meters and was rolling more slowly, for the slope lessened. A few times it seemed that protruding rocks would bring it to a stop, but it tumbled past them and, growing smaller and smaller, now a dully shining spot, approached the bottom of the basin.

“Nothing?” said Pirx, disappointed. “Either he’s smarter than I thought, or he just isn’t interested in it, or else…”

He didn’t finish. On the slope below them there was a blinding flash. The flame almost instantly changed into a heavy, brownish-yellow cloud, at the center of which still glowed a sullen fire, and the edges spread out between the spurs of rock.

“The chlorine…” said Pirx. “Why didn’t you shoot? Couldn’t you see anything?”

“No,” replied the cadet and McCork in unison.

“The bastard! He’s hid himself in some crevice or is firing from the flank. I really doubt now that this will do any good, but let’s try.”