Stanislaw Lem - More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

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: