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

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,”