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
