More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (6 page)

Purely by instinct, his eyes sought out the first holds; they looked solid. One long, carefully executed step to cross the gap, first foothold on that tiny but sturdy-looking ledge, then a diagonal ascent along that perfectly even rift that opened a few meters higher into a shallow crevasse… For some reason, unknown even to himself, Pirx lifted the rod, arched his body as far as he could, and aimed it at the rock ledge on the far side of the cleft. His earphones responded. To be on the safe side, he repeated the maneuver, fighting to keep his balance—he was practically suspended in midair—and again heard a crackle. That cinched it. He rejoined the others.

“He went up,” Pirx said matter-of-factly, pointing toward the wall. Krull did a double take, while Massena asked:

“Went up? What for?”

“Search me,” replied Pirx with seeming apathy. “Check for yourself.”

Massena, rashly thinking that Pirx had made a mistake, conducted his own probe and was soon convinced. Aniel had most definitely spanned the gap and moved out along the partly fissured wall—buttress-bound.

Consternation reigned. Krull postulated that the robot had malfunctioned after the survey, that he had become “deprogrammed.” Impossible, countered Massena; the positioning of the surveying gear and the backpack was too deliberate; it looked too suspiciously like a jettisoning prior to attempting a rugged ascent—no, something must have happened to make him go up there.

Pirx held his peace. Secretly he had already made up his mind to scale the wall, with or without the others. Krull was out of the picture, anyway; this was a job for a professional, and a damned good one at that. Massena had done a fair bit of climbing—or so he had said once in Pirx’s presence—enough, at least, to know the ABC’s of belaying. When the other two were finished, Pirx made his intention known. Was Massena willing to team up?

Krull immediately objected. It was against regs to take risks; they had to be mustered for that afternoon’s pick-up; the camp still had to be broken, their gear to be packed. They had their data now, didn’t they? The robot had simply malfunctioned, so why not chalk it up and explain all the circumstances in the final report…

“Are you saying we should just cut out and leave him here?” inquired Pirx.

His subdued tone obviously unnerved Krull, who, visibly restraining himself, answered that the report would give a complete rundown of the facts, along with individual comments by the crew, and a statement as to probable cause—short-circuiting of the memory mnestrones, directional-motivation circuit, or desynchronization.

Massena pointed out that none of those was possible, since Aniel didn’t run on mnestrones but on a homogeneous, monocrystalline system, molecularly grown from supercold diamagnetic solutions vestigially doped with isotopic contaminants.

It was plainly a put-down, Massena’s way of telling the cosmographer that he was talking through his hat. Pirx played deaf. Turning his back on them, he again surveyed the base, but with a difference: this time it was not a fantasy but the real thing. And although he somehow sensed the impropriety of it, he now exulted over the prospect of a climb.

Massena, probably just to spite Krull, took Pirx up on Ms offer. Pirx listened with only one ear to Massena’s spiel about how they owed it to themselves to solve the riddle, how they could hardly go back without investigating something urgent and mysterious enough to provoke such an unexpected reaction in a robot, and how even if there was only a thousand-to-one chance of ascertaining the cause, it was well worth the risk.

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.