Stanislaw Lem - More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

“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.