More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

THE ACCIDENT ^{Translated by Louis Iribarne}

When Aniel wasn’t back by four, no one thought much of it. Around five it started to get dark, and Pirx, more puzzled than alarmed, had an impulse to ask Krull what could be keeping him. But he didn’t; he was not the team leader, and anyhow, such a question, harmless and even legitimate in itself, was bound to set off a chain reaction of mutual needling. He knew the symptoms, all the more predictable when, as in their case, the team was a randomly selected one. Three people of widely divergent specialization, stuck in the mountains of an utterly worthless planet, on a mission that all, Pirx included, considered a waste of time.

They had come—their transport, a mini-gravistat so old it was good only for scrap iron, was to be junked afterward—equipped with a collapsible aluminum Quonset hut, a smattering of hardware, and a radio terminal so fatigued that it gave more trouble than service. A seven-week “general recon” mission—what a laugh! Pirx would have turned it down had he spotted it for what it was—a mop-up detail, designed to follow up on probes initiated by the Base Exploration Department, to add one more digit to the raw data fed their memory banks for programming next year’s manpower and resource allocation. And for the sake of that perforated figure, they had sat nearly fifty days in a wilderness that, in other circumstances, might have had its attractions—say, for mountain-climbing. But mountain-climbing, understandably, was strictly against regs, and the best Pirx could do was to contemplate the first pitches while he was out doing his seismic and triangulation surveys.

For want of another, the planet bore the name Iota-116-47, Proxima Aquarius. With its small yellow sun, its salt-water oceans shaded violet-green with oxygen-producing algae, and its sprawling, three-shelved, flora-crusted continent, it was the most Earthlike planet Pirx had ever seen. If not for its G-type sun, a recently discovered subspecies of G VIII—hence, one suspected, of unstable emission—it would have been ideal for colonization; but once vetoed by the astrophysicists, all plans for settling this Promised Land had to be scrubbed, even if it took another hundred billion years before going supernova.

Pirx’s regret at having been buffaloed into the expedition was not altogether genuine. Faced with being grounded during the three-month suspension of traffic in the solar system, with hanging around the Base’s air-conditioned subterranean gardens, glued to a TV and its mesmerizing programs (the shows were like canned preserves, oldies of at least ten years’ vintage), he had fairly jumped at the chief’s offer. The chief, for his part, was only too glad to be able to oblige Krull, two-man flights being against regs and Pirx being the only one on furlough. Pirx thus came as a godsend.

But if Krull was thrilled, he gave no sign of it, not then or later. At first Pirx thought he might have taken his joining the team as the magnanimous gesture of a chief navigator stooping to the level of a routine surveyor. But what looked to be a personal grudge was merely the bitterness—the kind nourished by wormwood—of a man in the throes of middle age (he had just turned forty). Still, there’s nothing like prolonged isolation to bring out a person’s foibles and virtues, and Pirx soon understood the source of Krull’s character flaw, of this man who was the toughened veteran of more than ten years of extraterrestrial duty. Krull was a case of frustrated ambition, a man unfit for his dream profession, which was to be an intellectronics engineer, not a cosmographer. What tipped Pirx off was Krull’s bullheadedness with Massena every time conversation turned to intellectronic—or, in professional parlance, “intellectral”—matters.

Massena was either too insensitive or just plain unmoved, because whenever the cosmographer insisted on some fallacious proof, he was not content merely to refute him, but had to take him to the mat; pencil in hand, he meticulously built his mathematical model and polished Krull off with a glee that seemed motivated less by self-vindication than by a desire to prove the cosmographer an arrogant ass. But Krull wasn’t arrogant, only touchy, no more and no less so than anyone whose ambition and abilities were not evenly matched.

Pirx, who was a captive audience for such scenes—unavoidable since they shared a living space measuring forty meters square, divided by partitions with next to no sound insulation—knew he would be made a scapegoat. And he was right. Not daring to show Massena he was a sore loser, Krull made Pirx bear the brunt of his frustration, and in a way that was typical of him: except when circumstances demanded otherwise, Pirx was given the silent treatment.

When that happened, he was left with only Massena for company, and he might have actually become pals with this clear-eyed, dark-haired man, except that Massena was high-strung, and Pirx had always had trouble with high-strung types, deep down distrusting them. And Massena had his tics: his throat needed constant examining, a twinge in his joints meant a change in the weather (not one of his prognostications had ever come true, but that didn’t stop him from making more); he complained of insomnia and made a point of scrounging pills every night, pills that he never took but placed beside his bunk, the next morning swearing to Pirx—who read till all hours and could hear the man snoring peacefully away—that he hadn’t slept a wink, and apparently believing it. Otherwise, he was a topflight specialist, a whiz of a mathematician, and a born programmer. He was also in charge of the computerized, unmanned surveying program now under way. He even made a hobby of it, working on one of these programs in his spare time, which rankled Krull no end: the man did his job so well and so quickly that he actually had time to spare, and he couldn’t be reproached for neglecting his duties. Massena was all the more valuable in that, paradoxically, their planetary mini-expedition included not a single certified planetologist; Krull was anything but.

It was as remarkable as it was distressing, the degree to which, with no special effort on anyone’s part, relations between three basically normal, ordinary individuals could become so embroiled in those rocky barrens that were the southern tableland of Iota Aquarius.

To the team belonged one other member, a nonhuman one—the afore-mentioned Aniel, a nondigital robot, one of the latest Earthside jobs to be developed for fully automated land probes. That Massena was there as a cyberneticist was an anachronism—because of a regulation which provided that where there was a robot, there had to be a repairman. Now, regulations, as everyone knows, are seldom updated, and this one was ten years obsolete, since, as Massena himself was often heard to quip, the robot stood a greater chance of repairing him than vice versa: not only was it infallible, it was also medically programmed. Pirx had long ago observed that a man could be judged better by his behavior toward robots than toward his fellow man. Pirx belonged to a generation born into a world of which robots were as natural a part as spaceships, though acceptance of robots was tainted with vestiges of irrationality. There were those, for example, more easily infatuated with an ordinary machine—with their own car, say—than with a thinking machine. The era of unbridled modular experimentation was waning, or so it seemed, and construction was now limited to two types: the narrowly specialized and the universal. Only a fraction of the latter were human-shaped, and only because, of all the models tested, those patterned on nature proved the most functional under conditions simulating planetary exploration.

Engineers were never gratified to see their products manifest the kind of spontaneity that grudgingly bespoke an inner life. Popular wisdom held that robots could think but were devoid of any personality. Admittedly, no robot had ever been known to throw a fit, go into ecstasies, laugh, or cry; they were perfectly balanced, just as their constructors had intended them to be. But because their brains were not mass-produced, because they were the product of a laborious monocrystallization susceptible to wide statistical variability and minute molecular shifts, no two were ever created exactly alike. So they were individuals, then? Not at all, replied the cyberneticists, merely the products of a random probability—a view shared by Pirx and by just about anybody who had ever rubbed elbows with them, spent years in close quarters with their thinking, with their always purposeful, logical bustle. Though more similar to one another than to humans, they, too, were subject to whims and predilections; some, when called upon to execute certain commands, even practiced a kind of passive resistance—a condition that, if it persisted, was remedied by a general overhauling.

In his attitude toward these quaint machines, so punctilious, at times even ingenious in carrying out orders, Pirx, and probably not he alone, had a not altogether clear conscience, perhaps a throwback to his navigational stint on the Coriolanus. In Pirx’s mind there was something inherently unfair, something fundamentally wrong, about a situation whereby man had created an intelligence both external to and dependent on his will. A slight unease, difficult to define, yet nagging at his conscience like an unbalanced equation or a bad decision—bluntly put, the sense of having perpetrated a very clever but nonetheless nasty trick. In the judicious restraint with which man had invested these cold machines with his cumulative knowledge, granting them only as much intelligence as was required, and no chance of competing with their creators for the world’s favor, lay a perverse subtlety. When applied to their ingenious constructors, Goethe’s maxim “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister” acquired the ring of a tribute perversely transformed into a mocking condemnation: they restrained not themselves but their own products, and with a mean precision. Pirx, of course, was not about to announce his qualms, knowing full well how preposterous they would have sounded. Robots were not really handicapped or exploited. No, a much simpler method had been found, one that was both more sinister and harder to attack morally: robots were crippled even before they were born—right on the drawing board.

That day—their next to last on the planet—was clean-up day. But when it came time to collate the recorded data, one of the tapes had been discovered missing. They ran a search through the computer, then ransacked all the drawers and files, in the process of which Krull twice made Pirx go through his gear, an insinuation resented by Pirx, who had never laid hands on the missing tape and who, even if he had, most certainly would not have stashed it in his grip. Pirx was itching to pay him back, all the more so because of all the anger he had been swallowing, bending over backward to rationalize Krull’s tactless, even abrasive manner. But, as usual, he held his tongue, volunteering, if worse came to worst, to team up with Aniel and re-record the missing data.

Krull said that Aniel was quite capable of handling it on his own, and after loading him up with camera and film stock, after stuffing his holsters with jet cartridges, they sent him up the massif’s lower summit.

The robot left at 0800 hours, with Massena boasting he would have the job done by lunchtime. The hours ticked by—two o’clock, three, then four… Darkness fell, but still no Aniel.

Pirx sat in one corner of the Quonset hut, trying to read a badly battered book lent him by one of the pilots back at the Base, but was unable to concentrate. He was not in the most comfy of sitting positions. The hut’s thin-ribbed, lightweight aluminum wall dug into his back, and his air mattress was so flat that the bunk’s nut-and-bolt frame kept jabbing him in the behind through the rubberized fabric. But he didn’t change his position; somehow it suited the smoldering rancor building inside him.

Neither Krull nor Massena seemed the least fazed by Aniel’s absence. For some reason Krull, who really was not much of a wit and never made any effort to be, had insisted from the start on the name “Angel,” even “Iron Angel,” and this, though trivial in itself, had rubbed Pirx the wrong way so many times as to be reason enough for disliking the man. Massena treated the robot in a purely professional sort of way and—like every intellectronics engineer who claims to know what responses are caused by what molecular processes and circuits—branded as sheer bull the faintest suggestion of any spiritual life. Still, he was as loyal and solicitous toward Aniel as any mechanic toward his diesel: he made sure he was never overloaded, respected him for his efficiency, and babied him.

By six, Pirx, who couldn’t take it any more—his leg had finally gone to sleep—stood up, stretched till his joints cracked, wiggled his foot and flexed his knee to restore circulation, and began pacing the hut cornerwise, sure that nothing could rile Krull now that he was engrossed in his final tabulations.

“A little consideration, fellas,” Krull said at last, seemingly unaware that the only one on his feet was Pirx, since Massena lay sprawled on his pneumatic couch, a pair of earphones on his head, listening to some broadcast with a look of bemused distraction. Pirx opened the door, felt the tug of a strong westerly wind, and, once the hut’s wind-rocked, sheet-metal wall was at his back and his eyes were accustomed to the dark, gazed in the direction of Aniel’s return route. A few vibrant stars were all he could see as a blustering, howling wind descended on him, engulfing his head like an icy stream, ruffling his hair, and swelling his nostrils and lungs—Pirx clocked it at around forty meters per second. He lingered for a while until a chill sent him back inside, where he found a yawning Massena taking off his headset and running his fingers through his hair, while Krull, frowning, businesslike, patiently went about filing papers in folders, shuffling each bunch to even the edges.

“No sign of him!” said Pirx, startling even himself with his defiant tone. They must have noticed it, too, because Massena skewered him with a brief, cold stare and remarked:

“So? He’ll make it back on infrared…”

Pirx returned the glare but held his peace. He brushed past Krull, picked up the book he’d left lying on a chair, settled back into his corner, and pretended to be reading. The wind was picking up, at times cresting to a wail; something—a small branch?—thumped against the outer wall, and then came a lull lasting several minutes.

Massena, who was obviously waiting for the ever-obliging Pirx to start supper, finally broke down and, after poring over the labels in hope of striking it rich with some hitherto undiscovered delicacy, set about opening one of the self-heating cans.

Pirx wasn’t much in the mood for eating. Famished as he was, he stayed put. A cool and malevolent rage was taking hold of him, and it was directed, God only knew why, against his bunkmates, who, as roomies went, were not even all that bad. Had he assumed the worst? An accident, maybe? An ambush by the planet’s “secret inhabitants,” by those creatures in which no one but a few spoofers claimed to believe? But if there’d been a chance, even a thousand-to-one chance, of the planet’s being inhabited, they’d have dropped their piddling exercises long ago and swung into action, following procedures outlined by Articles 2, 5, and 6 of Paragraph XVIII, along with Sections 3 and 4 of the Special Contingency Code. But there was not a chance, not the slimmest, of that happening. The odds were greater that Iota’s erratic sun would explode. Much greater. So what could be keeping him?

Pirx felt a deceptive calm in the hut that shook now with every gust of wind. All right, maybe he was pretending to be reading, to having lost interest in dinner, but the others were playing a similar game, a game as hard to define as it was increasingly obvious with every passing moment.

Since Aniel came under a dual supervision—Massena’s as the intellectronician in charge of maintenance, and Krull’s as the team leader—either man stood to be blamed for any possible foul-up. Negligence on Massena’s part, say, or a badly plotted route on Krull’s, though such mistakes would have been too obvious to have escaped notice. No, that was not the cause of the silence growing more studied by the second.

Krull had, it seemed, deliberately bullied the robot from the word go, putting him down schoolboy fashion, saddling him with errands unthinkable to the others—a universal robot, after all, was not a lackey. It was plain to see that, clumsily but persistently, through Aniel he was out to get Massena, whom he was not man enough to attack openly.

It now became a contest of nerves, the loser being the first to betray any anxiety over Aniel. Pirx felt himself being implicated in this silent game as crazy as it was nerve-racking. What would he have done in the team leader’s shoes? Not a whole lot, probably. Send out a search-and-rescue party? A bad night for that. No, a search would have to wait until morning. That left radio contact, on ultrashortwave, even though the densely mountainous terrain made getting through iffy. Aniel had never been sent out on a solo before; though it was not forbidden, the rules made it conditional on umpteen paragraphs. To hell with the regs! Massena could have at least tried radioing—thought Pirx—instead of scraping that can for the rest of his scorched rations. Think: what if I were out there instead of the robot? No, something must have happened. A broken leg? But who ever heard of a robot breaking his leg?

He got up, went over to the plotting board, and, feeling the furtive glances of the others, studied the map on which Krull had charted Aniel’s route. Maybe he thinks I’m checking up on him, Pirx wondered; he looked up suddenly and met Krull’s gaze. The team leader was on the verge of making some crack—his lips were already parted—when he backed down under Pirx’s cold hard stare, cleared his throat, and, hunching over, went back to sorting his papers. Pirx’s steely-eyed glower was not intentional; it was just that at such times he was roused to something that commanded on-board obedience and a respect tinged with anxiety.

He put aside the map. The robot’s route went up to and then skirted the towering rock mass fronted by three precipices. Could he have disobeyed instructions? Impossible. Maybe he got his foot wedged in a crack and sprained it? Nonsense. Robots like Aniel could survive a forty-meter fall. They had something better than brittle bones, were built to endure worse scrapes. So what the hell was it?

Pirx stood up straight and from his imposing height contemplated Massena, who sat wincing and blowing between sips of scalding tea, and then Krull, before making an exaggerated about-face and retreating to their cramped bunk room. He flipped down his bed from the wall, exerting a trifle too much force, shed his clothes in four fluid gestures, and crawled into his sleeping bag. Sleep, he knew, would not come easily, but he’d had enough of Krull and Massena for one day. If he was cooped up much longer with those two, he might really tell them off, but why waste his breath: the moment they boarded the Ampère, Operational Team Iota Aquarius would be terminated.

Silvery streaks snaked under his eyelids, fuzzy spots of light flickered and lulled the senses… He flipped his pillow onto its cooler side, then suddenly had a vision of Aniel, now close enough to be touched, looking exactly as he had earlier that day, a few minutes before eight. Massena was fixing him up with the jet cartridges for momentary propulsion—standard equipment, to be deployed under strictly prescribed conditions. It was too quaint to behold, as only the sight of a man helping a robot—rather than vice versa—can be, but Aniel’s hunchlike backpack kept him from being able to reach the cartridge holsters. (He carried a payload heavy enough for two men.) Not that this hurt his pride; he was, after all, a machine, equipped with a micro-strontium battery, capable of delivering sixteen horsepower in a pinch, for a heart. Perhaps just because he was in a semiconscious state, Pirx was repelled by the sight of it. Being heart and soul on the side of the mute Aniel, he was ready to believe that fundamentally the robot was no more the phlegmatic, easygoing type than he was, but that he only made it look that way for reason of expediency. Before dozing off, he had another vision, the most intimate kind a man can entertain, of the sort immediately forgotten on waking. He conjured up that legendary, wordless, mythical situation that everyone—Pirx included—now knew would never come to pass: a revolt of robots. And knowing with a tacit certitude that he would have taken their side, he fell asleep, somehow exonerated.

He woke early, and for some reason his first thought was: The wind has died down. Then he remembered Aniel and, with some discomfort, his fantastic visions of the night before, on the borderline of sleep. He lay there a good while before coming to the somewhat reassuring conclusion that they had not been conscious fantasies, even though, unlike in a dream, they must have had some encouragement, however little and unwilled, from him. But why was he sweating such psychological subtleties? He raised himself up on his elbow and listened: dead silence. He slid back the shutter of the little port beside his head, saw through the cloudy pane a pale dawn on the rise, and knew at once that he would be going up the mountain. He bolted out of bed to double-check the common room. No robot.

The others were already up. Over breakfast, as if the matter were already settled, Krull said it was time to get a move on, that the Ampère was due in before nightfall and they would need an hour and a half, minimum, for breaking camp. He neglected to say why the urgency, whether it was the missing data or the absent Aniel.

Pirx ate enough to make up for the night before and said nothing the whole meal. The others were still working on their coffee when he got up and, after rummaging in his duffel bag, took out a spool of white nylon, a hammer, and a few pitons; on second thought, he made room in his backpack for his climbing boots—just in case.

They went out into the still-unlit dawn. The sky was drained of stars, colorless. A heavy violet-gray, stagnant and bone-bracing, hugged ground, faces, air; the mountains to the north were a black mass, solidified in murk; the southern ridge, the one closest to them, its peaks brushed with a swatch of strident orange, stood silhouetted like a molded mask with blurred, runny features. The distant, unreal glare caught the plumes of breath billowing from their mouths—despite the thinner atmosphere, breathing was easy. They pulled up on the plateau’s outer rim as the stunted vegetation, dingy-brown in the halflight between retreating night and advancing day, yielded to a barren landscape. Before them stretched a rock-littered moraine that shimmered as if under water. A few hundred meters higher, a wind blew up, bracing them with its brisk gusts. They climbed, clearing with ease the smaller boulders, scaling the larger ones, occasionally to the sound of one rock slab nudging against another, of a piece of detritus, dislodged by a boot, cascading down with a rippling echo. The intermittent squeak of a shoulder strap or a metal fitting lent their expedition a certain esprit de corps, the professional air of a mountaineering party. Pirx went second, behind Massena. It was still too dark to discern the outline of the far walls; time and again, with his attention entirely at the mercy of his straining eyes, his absent-mindedly placed foot slipped, as if he was intent on distracting himself, not only from the terrain, but also from himself, from his qualms. Shutting out all thought of Aniel, he immersed his concentration in this land of eternal rock, of perfect indifference, which only man’s imagination had invested with horror and the thrill of adventure.

It was a planet with sharply defined seasons. Hardly had they landed at the tail end of summer when an alpine autumn, lush with reds and golds, began fading in the valleys. Yet even though leaves were borne on the foam of rushing streams, the sun was still warm—on cloudless days, even sweltering—on the tableland. Only the thickening fog signaled the approach of snow and frost. But by then the planet would be deserted, and to Pirx the prospect of that consummate wasteland cast in white suddenly seemed desirable beyond all else.

The brightening, so gradual as to be imperceptible, with every step brought a new detail of the landscape into prominence. The sky had taken on that pallor between night and day—dawnless, stark, hushed, as if hermetically sealed in a sphere of cooling glass. A little farther up, they passed through a fog bank, its wispy strands clinging to the ground, and after they emerged Pirx saw their destination, still untouched by sunlight but now at least whitened by the dawn: a rock-ribbed buttress that reached up to the main ridge, up to where, a few hundred meters higher, its twin peak, the most prominent, loomed blackly. At one point the rib flared out into a troughlike basin; in this saddle Aniel had conducted his last survey.

It was a straightforward ascent and descent—no surprises, no crevasses, nothing but gray scree dappled with chick-yellow mildew. As he trod nimbly from one clattering rock pile to another, Pirx fixed on the black wall leaning against the sky and, perhaps to distract himself, imagined he was making an ordinary ascent Earthside. Suddenly these crags seemed quite natural to him, the illusion of a conquest in the making rendered even more compelling by their vertical climb toward the notched spine heaving up out of the scree. The buttress ran one-third of the way up the face before disintegrating in a riot of wedged slabs, whence a sheer rock face shot straight up like a flight arrested. A hundred meters higher, the face was cleaved by a vein of diabase—red-tinted, brighter than granite—that bulged above the surface and snaked across the flank, like a trail of varying width.

Pirx’s eyes were held in thrall by the summit’s sublime outline, though as they climbed higher, and, as was usual with a mountain viewed from below, it receded farther, and the abrupt foreshortenings broke it up into a series of overlapping planes, the base lost its former flatness, and columns sprang up—a wealth of faults, shelves, aimlessly winding chimneys, a chaos of old fissures, an anarchy of cluttered accretion, momentarily illumined by the top now gilded by the sun’s first rays, fixed and strangely placid, then once more swallowed by shadow. Pirx could not tear his eyes from it, from this colossus that even on Earth would have commanded respect, challenging the climber with that rudely jutting vein of diabase. The stretch from there to the gold-plated summit looked short and easy compared with the overhangs, especially the largest of them, whose lower edge glistened with ice or moisture, reddish-black, like congealed blood.

Pirx let his imagination run wild, conjuring up not the cliff of some anonymous highland under a foreign sun, but a mountain surrounded by a lore of assaults and reverses, somehow distinct, unique, like a familiar face whose every wrinkle and scar contained a history of its own. Its sinewy, snakelike cracks on the border of visibility, its dark, threadlike ledges, its shallow grooves might have constituted the highest point achieved in a series of attempts, the sites of prolonged bivouacs, of silent reckonings, of momentous assaults and humiliating defeats, disasters sustained even though every variety of tactical and technical gimmick was applied. A mountain so bound up with the fate of man that every climber vanquished by it came back again and again, always with the same store of faith and hope in victory, bringing to each successive pass a new fixed route with which to storm the petrified relief. It could have been a wall with a history of detours, flanking movements, each with its own chronicle of successes and victims, documented by photos bearing the dotted lines of trails, little x’s marking the highest ascent… Pirx summoned this fantasy with the greatest of ease, actually astonished that it was not the real thing.

Massena walked ahead of him, slightly stooped, in a light whose growing limpidity annulled all illusion of an easy ascent, this illusion of easy access and safe passage having been fostered by the bluish haze that had peacefully engulfed every fragment of the glimmering cliff. The day, raw and full, had caught up with them; their shadows, exaggeratedly large, rolled and pitched under the ridge of the alluvial cone. The talus was fed by two couloirs, brimming with night, and the detritus ran straight up before being consumed by unrelieved black.

The massif could no longer be encompassed by the eye. Proportions had shifted, and the wall, similar to any other from a distance, now revealed its unique topography, its singular configuration. Bellying outward was a mighty buttress that rose out of a tangle of slab and plate, shot up, swelled, and spread until it obscured everything else, to stand alone, encircled by the dank gloom of places never touched by light. They had just stepped onto a patch of permanent snow, its surface strewn with the remnants of flying debris, when Massena began to slacken his pace, then finally stopped, as if distracted by some noise. Pirx, who was the first to catch up with him, saw him make a tapping gesture on his ear, the one fitted with the olive-sized microphone, and immediately grasped its meaning.

“Any sign of him?”

Massena nodded and brought the metal-detector rod up close to the dirty, snow-crusted surface. The soles of Aniel’s boots were impregnated with a radioactive isotope; the Geiger counter had picked up his trail. Though the trail was still alive from the day before, there was no way to read any direction in it—whether deposited on the robot’s way up, or back. But at least they knew they were on the right track. From here on in, they took their time.

The dark buttress should have loomed just ahead, but Pirx knew how easy it was to misjudge distances in the mountains. They climbed higher, above the snowline and rubble, proceeding along an older, smaller ridge notched with rounded pinnacles, and in the dead silence Pirx thought—wishful thinking?—he could hear Massena’s earphones crackling. Intermittently, Massena would stop, fan the air with the end of the aluminum rod, lower it until it nearly touched the rock, trace loops and figure eights like a magician, then, relocating the trail, move on. As they neared Aniel’s surveying site, Pirx scoured the area for any signs of the missing robot.

The face was deserted. The easiest part of the route was now behind them; before them towered a series of slabs that cropped up from the foot of the buttress at diverse inclinations. The whole resembled a gigantic cross-section of the wall’s strata, the partly exposed interior revealing the core’s oldest formation, fissured in places under the sheer rock mass lifting several kilometers up into the sky. Another forty or a hundred paces and—an impasse.

Massena worked in a circle, waving the end of the detector rod, squinting—his sunglasses were already propped up on his forehead—rotating aimlessly, expressionless, before stopping in his tracks a dozen or so meters away.

“He was here quite a while.”

“How can you tell?”

Massena shrugged, plucked the olive from his ear, and handed Pirx the earphone dangling on its thin connecting wire. Then Pirx heard it for himself, a twittering and screeching that at times rose to a whining plaint. The rock face was devoid of any prints or traces—nothing but that unremitting sound filling the skull with its strident crackling, the intensity of which was such that nearly every millimeter of rock testified to the robot’s prolonged and diligent presence. Gradually Pirx came to discern a certain logic in the apparent chaos: Aniel had apparently come up by the same route they had taken, set up the tripod, got the camera into position, and circled it several times in the process of surveying and photographing, even shifting it in search of the most favorable observation points. Right, that made sense. But then what?

Pirx began moving out concentrically, spiral-fashion, in hope of picking up his centripetal trail, but none of the trails led back to the starting point. Much as if Aniel had retraced his every step, which did not seem likely: not being equipped with a gamma-ray counter, he could hardly have reconstructed his return route to within a few centimeters. Krull made some comment to Massena which the circling Pirx ignored, for his attention was diverted by a sound, brief but distinct, transmitted by his earphones. He began backtracking, almost millimeter by millimeter. Here—I’m sure it was here. Staring intently, he scanned the terrain, squinting the better to concentrate on the whining. The rediscovered trail lay at the base of the cliff, as if, instead of taking the trail campward, the robot had headed straight for the vertical buttress.

That’s odd. What could have lured him there?

Pirx scouted around for a follow-up to the trail, but the boulders were mute; unable to divine Aniel’s footing on the next step, he had to canvass all the fissured slabs piled at the base of the buttress. He finally found it, some five meters away from the previous one. Why such a long jump? Again he backtracked, and a moment later picked up the missing step: the robot had simply hopped from one rock to another.

Pirx was still stooping and gracefully flourishing the rod when he was jolted by an explosion in his head—by a crackling in his earphones loud enough to make him wince. He peered behind a rock table and went numb. Wedged between two rocks so that it lay hidden at the bottom of a natural hollow was the surveying apparatus, along with the still camera, both intact. Propped up against a rock on the other side was Aniel’s backpack, unbuckled but unemptied. Pirx called out to the others. They came on the run and were as dumbfounded as he by the discovery. Immediately Krull checked the cassettes: surveying data complete, no repeat necessary. But that still left unsolved the mystery of Aniel’s whereabouts. Massena cupped his mouth and hollered several times in succession; as they listened to the distant echo bouncing off the rock, Pirx cringed, because it had the ring of a rescue call in the mountains. The intellectronician took from his pocket a flat cassette housing a transmitter, squatted, and began paging the robot by his call numbers, but his gestures made it plain that he did this more from duty than conviction. Meanwhile Pirx, who kept combing the area for more radioactivity, was bewildered by the profusion of traces resonating in his headset. Here, too, the robot had lingered. When at last he had established the perimeters of the robot’s movements, he began a systematic search in hope of finding a new lead to steer him in the right direction.

Pirx described a full circle until he was back under the buttress. A cleft, roughly one and a half meters wide, its bottom littered with tiny, sharp-edged ejecta, yawned between the shelf that supported him and the sheer wall opposite. Pirx probed the near side—silence. A riddle, as incomprehensible as it was inescapable: all indications were that Aniel had virtually melted into thin air. While the others conferred in subdued voices behind him, Pirx slowly craned his head and for the first time took stock of the steeply rising face at close range. The wall’s stony silence summoned him with uncanny force, but the summons was more like a beckoning, outstretched hand—and instantly the certitude of acceptance, the recognition that the challenge would have to be met, was born in him.

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.

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.