More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (7 page)

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 he 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.

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…

With all this he completely forgot where he was, and pushed the door handle so hard on his way out that he was thrown up to the ceiling. Embarrassed, he looked around, but no one was there. All Luna Base seemed empty. True, the big work was under way a few hundred kilometers to the north, between the Hypatia region and the Toricelli crater. The engineers and technicians, who a month ago were all over the place here, had already left for the construction site. The UN’s great project, Luna Base 2, drew more and more people from Earth.

“At least this time there won’t be any trouble getting a room,” he thought, taking the escalator to the bottom floor of the underground city. The fluorescent lamps produced a cold daylight. Every other one was off. Economizing! Pushing a glass door, he entered a small lobby. They had rooms, all right! All the rooms you wanted. He left his suitcase (it was really more a satchel) with the porter and wondered if Tyndall would make sure that the mechanics reground the central nozzle. Ever since Mars the thing had been behaving like a damned medieval cannon! He really ought to see to it himself: the proprietor’s eye and all that. But he didn’t feel like taking the elevator back up those twelve flights, and anyway, by now they had probably split up. Sitting in the airport store, most likely, listening to the latest recordings.

He walked, not really knowing where; the hotel restaurant was empty, as if closed—but behind its lunch counter sat a redhead, reading a book. Or had she fallen asleep over it? Her cigarette was turning into a long cylinder of ash on the marble top… Pirx took a seat and reset his watch to local time; and suddenly it became late, ten at night. And on board, why, only a few minutes before, it had been noon. This eternal whirl with sudden jumps in time was just as fatiguing as in the beginning, when he was first learning to fly. He ate his lunch, now turned into supper, washing it down with seltzer, which seemed warmer than the soup. The waiter, down in the mouth and drowsy like a true lunatic, added up the bill wrong, and not in his own favor, a bad sign. Pirx advised him to take a vacation on Earth, and left quietly, so as not to waken the sleeping countergirl.

He got the key from the porter and rode up to his room. He hadn’t looked at the plate yet and felt strange when he saw the number: 173. The same room he had stayed in, long ago, when for the first time he flew “that side.” But after opening the door he concluded that either this was a different room or they had remodeled it radically. No, he must have been mistaken, that other was larger. He turned on all the switches, for he was sick of darkness, looked in the dresser, pulled out the drawer of the small writing table, but didn’t bother to unpack; he just threw his pajamas on the bed and set the toothbrush and toothpaste on the sink. He washed his hands—the water, as always, infernally cold, a wonder it didn’t freeze. He turned the hot water spigot—a few drops trickled out. He went to the phone to call the desk but changed his mind: there was really no point. It was scandalous, of course—here the Moon was stocked with all the necessities, and you still couldn’t get hot water in your hotel room!

He tried the radio. The evening wrap-up—the lunar news. He hardly listened, wondering whether he shouldn’t send a telegram to the owner. Reverse the charges, of course. But no, that wouldn’t accomplish anything. These were not the romantic days of astronautics! They were long gone; now a man was nothing but a truck driver, dependent on those who loaded cargo on his ship. Cargo, insurance, demurrage… The radio was muttering something. Hold on—what was that?… He leaned across the bed and moved the knob of the apparatus.

“—in all probability the last of the Leonid swarm.” The soft baritone of the speaker filled the room. “Only one apartment building suffered a direct hit and lost its seal. By a lucky coincidence its residents were all at work. The remaining meteorites caused little damage, with the exception of one that penetrated the shield protecting the storerooms. According to our correspondent’s report, six universal automata designated for tasks on the construction site were totally destroyed. There was also damage to the high-tension line, and telephone communication was knocked out, though restored within a space of three hours. We now repeat the major news. Earlier today, at the opening of the Pan-African Congress…”

He shut off the radio and sat down. Meteorites? A swarm? Well, yes, the Leonids were due, but still the forecasts—those meteorologists were always fouling up, exactly like the synoptics on Earth. Construction site—it must have been that one up north. But all the same, atmosphere was atmosphere, and its absence here was damned inconvenient. Six automata, if you please. At least no one was hurt. A nasty business, though—a shield punctured! Yes, that designer, he really should have…

He was dog-tired. Time had got completely bollixed up for him. Between Mars and Earth they must have lost a Tuesday, since it went directly from Monday to Wednesday; that meant they also missed a night. “I better stock up on some sleep,” he thought, got up, and automatically headed for the tiny bathroom. But at the memory of the icy water he shuddered, did an about-face, and a minute later was in bed. Which couldn’t hold a candle to a ship’s bunk. His hand automatically groped around for the belts to buckle down the quilt, and he gave a faint smile when he couldn’t find them; after all, he was in a hotel, not threatened by any sudden loss of gravitation.

That was his last thought. When he opened his eyes, he had no idea where he was. It was pitch-black. “Tyndall!” he wanted to shout, and all at once—for no apparent reason—remembered how once Tyndall had burst terrified out of the cabin, in nothing but pajama bottoms, and desperately cried to the man on watch, “You! For God’s sake! Quick, tell me, what’s my name?” The poor devil was plastered; he had been fretting over some imagined insult or other and had drunk an entire bottle of rum.

In this roundabout way Pirx’s mind returned to reality. He got up, turned on the light, went to take a shower, but then remembered about the water, so carefully let out first a small trickle—lukewarm; he sighed, because he yearned for a good hot bath, but after a minute or two, with the stream beating on his face and torso, he actually began to hum.