Pirx looked into a shallow basin enclosed on two sides by radially spreading, tapered embankments of old magma flows; two-thirds of the wide depression lay in glaring sun, a third was covered by a shroud of absolute black. On that velvet darkness there shone, like a weird jewel, fading ruby-red, the ripped-open skeleton of a vehicle. Besides Pirx, only the driver saw it, for the armor flaps of the windows had been lowered. Pirx, to tell the truth, didn’t know what to do. “A transporter,” he thought. “Where is the front of it? Coming from the south? Probably from the construction group, then. But who got it, the Setaur? And I’m standing here in full view, like an idiot—we have to conceal ourselves. But where are all the other transporters? Theirs and mine?”
“I have something!” shouted the radiotelegraph man. He connected his receiver to the inside circuit, so that they could all hear the signals in their helmets.
“Aximo-portable talus! A wall with encystation—repetition from the headland unnecessary—the access at an azimuth of—multicrystalline metamorphism…” The voice filled Pirx’s earphones, delivering the words clearly, in a monotone, with no inflection whatever.
“It’s him!” he yelled. “The Setaur! Hello, radio! Get a fix on that, quickly! We need a fix! For God’s sake! While it’s still sending!” He roared till he was deafened by his own shouts amplified in the closed space of the helmet; not waiting for the telegraph operator to snap out of it, he leaped, head bowed, to the top of the turret, seized the double handgrip of the heavy laser, and began turning it along with the turret, his eyes already at the sighter. Meanwhile, inside his helmet, that low, almost sorrowful, steady voice droned on:
“Heavily bihedrous achromatism viscosity—undecorticated segments without repeated anticlinal interpolations”—and the senseless gabble seemed to weaken.
“Where’s that fix, damn it?!!”
Pirx, keeping his eyes glued to the sighter, heard a faint clatter—McCork had run up front and shoved aside the operator; there was a sound of scuffling…
Suddenly in his earphones he heard the calm voice of the cyberneticist:
“Azimuth 39.9 … 40.0 … 40.1 … 40.2…”
“It’s moving!” Pirx realized. The turret had to be turned by crank; he nearly dislocated his arm, he cranked so hard. The numbers moved at a creep. The red line passed the 40 mark.
Suddenly the voice of the Setaur rose to a drawn-out screech and broke off. At that same moment Pirx pressed the trigger, and half a kilometer down, right at the line between light and shadow, a rock spouted fire brighter than the sun.
Through the thick gloves it was next to impossible to hold the handgrip steady. The blinding flame bored into the darkness at the bottom of the basin; a few dozen meters from the dimly glowing wreck, it stopped and, in a spray of jagged embers, cut a line sideways, twice raising columns of sparks. Something yammered in the earphones. Pirx paid no attention, just plowed on with that line of flame, so thin and so terrible, until it split into a thousand centrifugal ricochets off some stone pillar. Red swirling circles danced before him, but through their swirl he saw a bright blue eye, smaller than the head of a pin, which had opened at the very bottom of the darkness, off to the side somewhere, not where he had been shooting—and before he was able to move the handgrip of the laser, to pivot it around on its swivel, a rock right next to the machine itself exploded like a liquid sun.
“Back!” he bellowed, ducking by reflex, with the result that he no longer saw anything; but he wouldn’t have seen anything anyway, only those red, slowly fading circles, which turned now black, now golden.
The engine thundered. They were thrown with such violence that Pirx fell all the way to the bottom, then flew to the front, between the knees of the cadet and the radio operator; the cylinders, though they had tied them down securely on the armored wall, made an awful racket. They were rushing backward, in reverse, there was a horrible crunch beneath the tractor tread, they swerved, careened in the other direction, for a minute it looked like the transporter was going to flip over on its back… The driver, desperately working the gas, the brakes, the clutch, somehow brought that wild skid under control; the machine gave a long quiver and stood still.
“Do we have a seal?” shouted Pirx, picking himself up off the floor. “A good thing it’s rubber,” he managed to think.
“Intact!”
“Well, that was nice and close,” he said in an altogether different voice now, standing up and straightening his back. And added softly, not without chagrin: “Two hundredths more to the left and I would have had him.”
McCork returned to his place.
“Doctor, that was good, thank you!” called Pirx, already back at the periscope. “Hello, driver, let’s go down the same way we came up. There are some small cliffs over there, a kind of arch—that’s it, right!—drive into the shadow between them and stop.”
Slowly, as if with exaggerated caution, the transporter moved in between the slabs of rock half buried in sand and froze in their shadow, which would render it invisible.
“Excellent!” said Pirx almost cheerfully. “Now I need two men to go with me and do a little reconnoitering…”
McCork raised his hand at the same time as the cadet.
“Good! Now listen; you”—he turned to the others—“will remain here. Don’t move out of the shadow, even if the Setaur should come straight at you—sit quietly. Well, I guess if it walks right into the transporter, then you’ll have to defend yourselves; you have the laser. But that’s not very likely. You,” he said to the driver, “will help this young man remove those cylinders of gas from the wall, and you”—this to the radio operator—“will call Luna Base, the cosmodrome, Construction, the patrols, and tell the first who answers that
Since each of them could carry only one cylinder, the driver accompanied them and they took four. Pirx led his companions not to the top of the “skull,” but a little beyond, where a small, shallow ravine could be seen. They went as far as they could and set the cylinders down by a large boulder; Pirx ordered the driver to go back. He himself peered out over the surface of the boulder and trained his binoculars on the interior of the basin. McCork and the cadet crouched down beside him. After a long while he said:
“I don’t see him. Doctor, what the Setaur said, did it have any meaning?”
“I doubt it. Combinations of words—a sort of schizophrenic thing.”
“That wreck has had it,” said Pirx.
“Why did you shoot?” asked McCork. “There might have been people.”
“There wasn’t anyone.”
Pirx moved the binoculars a millimeter at a time, scrutinizing every crease and crevice of the sunlit area.
“They didn’t have time to jump.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he cut the machine in half. You can still see it. They must have practically run into him. He hit from a few dozen meters. And besides, both hatches are closed. No,” he added after a couple of seconds, “he’s not in the sun. And probably hasn’t had a chance to sneak away. We’ll try drawing him out.”
Bending over, he lifted a heavy cylinder to the top of the boulder and, shoving it into position before him, muttered between his teeth:
“A real live cowboys-and-Indians situation, the kind I always dreamed of…”
The cylinder slipped; he held it by the valves and, flattening himself out on the stones, said:
“If you see a blue flash, shoot at once—that’s his laser eye.”
With all his might he pushed the cylinder, which, at first slowly but then with increasing speed, began to roll down the slope. All three of them took aim; the cylinder had now gone about two hundred meters and was rolling more slowly, for the slope lessened. A few times it seemed that protruding rocks would bring it to a stop, but it tumbled past them and, growing smaller and smaller, now a dully shining spot, approached the bottom of the basin.
“Nothing?” said Pirx, disappointed. “Either he’s smarter than I thought, or he just isn’t interested in it, or else…”
He didn’t finish. On the slope below them there was a blinding flash. The flame almost instantly changed into a heavy, brownish-yellow cloud, at the center of which still glowed a sullen fire, and the edges spread out between the spurs of rock.
“The chlorine…” said Pirx. “Why didn’t you shoot? Couldn’t you see anything?”
“No,” replied the cadet and McCork in unison.
