Stanislaw Lem - More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

However, he couldn’t just stand there. A few dozen steps lower was a solitary block of magma, evidently the end of that long tongue which once had poured red-hot off the great crags at the foot of Toricelli—and which had meandered its way finally to this sinkhole. It was the best cover available. He reached it in a single leap, though he found particularly unpleasant this prolonged lunar floating, this slow-motion flight as in a dream; he could never really get used to it. Crouched behind the angular rock, he peered out over it and saw the Setaur, which came from behind two jagged spires, went around a third, brushing it with a metal shoulder, and halted. Pirx was looking at it from the side, so it was lit up only partially; the right arm glistened, dully like a well-greased machine part, but the rest of its frame lay in shadow.

Pirx had just raised the laser to his eye when the other, as if in a sudden premonition, vanished. Could it be standing there still, having only stepped back into the shadow? Should he shoot into that shadow, then? He had a bead on it now, but didn’t touch the trigger. He relaxed his muscles; the barrel fell. He waited. No sign of the Setaur. The rubble spread out directly below him in a truly infernal labyrinth. One could play hide-and-seek in there for hours—the glassy lava had split into geometrical yet eerie shapes.

“Where is he?” Pirx thought. “If it were only possible to hear something, but this damned airless place, it’s like being in a nightmare… I could go down there and hunt him. No, I’m not about to do that, he’s the mad one, after all… But one can at least consider everything—the outcrop extends no more than twelve meters, which would take about two jumps on Earth; I would be in the shadow beneath it, invisible, and could move along the length of it, with my back protected by the rock at all times, and sooner or later he’d walk out straight into my sights.”

Nothing changed in the labyrinth of stone. On Earth by this time, the sun would have shifted quite a bit, but here the long lunar day held sway, the sun seemed to keep hanging in the very same place, extinguishing the nearest stars, so that it was surrounded by a black void shot through with a kind of orange, radial haze… He leaned out halfway from behind his boulder. Nothing. This was beginning to annoy him. Why weren’t the others showing up? It was inconceivable that radio contact hadn’t been established by now. But perhaps they were planning to drive it out of that rabble… He glanced at the watch beneath the thick glass on his wrist and was amazed: since his last conversation with McCork barely thirteen minutes had elapsed.

He was preparing to abandon his position when two things happened at once, both equally unexpected. Through the stone arch between the two magma embankments that closed off the basin to the east, he saw transporters moving, one after the other. They were still far away, possibly more than a kilometer, and going at full speed, trailing long, seemingly rigid plumes of swirling dust. At the same time two large hands, human-looking except that they were wearing metal gloves, appeared at the very edge of the precipice, and following them came—so quickly he hadn’t time to back away—the Setaur. No more than ten meters separated them. Pirx saw the massive bulge of the torso that served as a head, set between powerful shoulders, and in which glittered the lenses of the optic apertures, motionless, like two dark, widely spaced eyes, along with that middle, that third and terrible eye, lidded at the moment, of the laser gun. He himself, to be sure, held a laser in his hand, but the machine’s reflexes were incomparably faster than his own. He didn’t even try leveling his weapon. He simply stood stock-still in the full sun, his legs bent, exactly as he had been caught, jumping up from the ground, by the sudden appearance of him, and they looked at each other: the statue of the man and the statue of the machine, both sheathed in metal. Then a terrible light tore the whole area in front of Pirx; pushed by a blast of heat, he went crashing backward. As he fell he didn’t lose consciousness but—in that fraction of a second—felt only surprise, for he could have sworn it wasn’t the Setaur that had shot him, since up to the very last instant he had seen its laser eye dark and blind.

He landed on his back, for the discharge had passed him—but clearly it had been aimed at him, because the horrible flash was repeated in an instant and chipped off part of the stone spire that had been protecting him before; it sprayed drops of molten mineral, which in flight changed into a dazzling spider web. But now he was saved by the fact that they were aiming at the height of his head while he was lying down.

It was the first machine; they were firing the laser from it. He rolled over on his side and saw then the back of the Setaur, who, motionless, as if cast in bronze, gave two bursts of lilac sun. Even at that distance one could see the foremost transporter’s entire tread overturn, along with the rollers and guiding wheel; such a cloud of dust and burning gases rose up there that the second transporter, blinded, could not shoot. The giant slowly, unhurriedly, looked at the prone man, who was still clutching his weapon, then turned and bent its legs slightly, ready to jump back where it had come from, but Pirx, awkwardly, sideways, fired at it—he intended only to cut the legs from under it, but his elbow wavered as he pulled the trigger, and a knife of flame cleaved the giant from top to bottom, so that it was only a mass of glowing scrap that tumbled down into the field of rubble.

The crew of the demolished transporter escaped unhurt, without even bums, and Pirx found out—much later, it’s true—that they had in fact been firing at him, for the Setaur, dark against the dark cliffs, went completely unnoticed. The inexperienced gunner had even failed to notice that the figure in his sights showed the light color of an aluminum suit. Pirx was pretty certain that he would not have survived the next shot. The Setaur had saved him—but had it realized this? Many times he went over those few final seconds in his mind, and each time his conviction grew stronger that from where the Setaur had been standing, it could tell who was the real target of the long-range fire. Did this mean that it had wished to save him? No one could provide an answer. The intellectronicians chalked the whole thing up to “coincidence”—but none of them was able to support that opinion with any proof. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and the professional literature made no mention of such incidents.

Everyone felt that Pirx had done what he had to do—but he wasn’t satisfied. For many long years afterward there remained etched in his memory that brief scene in which he had brushed with death and come out in one piece, never to learn the entire truth—and bitter was the knowledge that it was in an underhanded way, with a stab in the back, that he had killed his deliverer.

“Next witness—Shennan Quine!”

“Quine, sir!”

“You are to testify before the Cosmic Tribunal, now in session, over which I am presiding. You will please address me as ‘Your Honor’ and members of the jury as ‘Your Honors.’ You are to answer promptly all questions put to you by the jury and by myself; those of the prosecution and defense, only with the Tribunal’s prior consent. Only testimony based on first-hand knowledge will be admissible, nothing on hearsay. Are my instructions clear?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Is Shennan Quine your proper name?”

“It is, Your Honor.”

“But aboard the Goliath you used an alias, did you not?”