More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

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 Ampere, 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 Ampere 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,