More Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online

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,