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

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