Mortal Engines

“Easy, take your time!” said Pirx. “Well, what’s up?”

“Contact has been resumed…” The cadet squatted by Pirx, who could see the youth’s eyes blinking behind the viewplate of the helmet. “In that machine, the one that was destroyed … there were four people from Construction. The second must have withdrawn, because it had a defective laser … and the rest went by, off to the side, and didn’t see anything…” Pirx nodded as if to say: “I thought as much.”

“What else? Where’s our group?”

“Practically all of them—twenty miles from here, there was a false alarm there, some rocket patrol said it saw the Setaur and pulled everyone to the spot. And three machines don’t answer.”

“When will they get here?”

“At the moment we’re only receiving…” said the cadet, embarrassed.

“Only receiving? What do you mean?!”

“The radio operator says that either something’s happened to the transmitter, or else in this place his emission is damping out. He asks if he might change the parking location, so he can test…”

“He tan change his location if he has to,” Pirx replied. “And please stop running like that! Watch where you put your feet!”

But the other must not have heard, for he was racing back.

“At best they’ll be here in half an hour, if we succeed in making contact,” observed Pirx. McCork said nothing. Pirx pondered the next move. Should they wait or not? Storming the basin with transporters would probably ensure success, but not without losses. Compared with the Setaur their machines made large targets, were slow and would have to strike together, for a duel would end as it had with that tractor from Construction. He tried to come up with some stratagem to lure the Setaur out into the lighted area. If it were possible to send in one unmanned, remote-control transporter as a decoy, then hit the automaton from elsewhere, say, from above…

It occurred to him that he really didn’t have to wait for anyone, he already had one transporter. But somehow the plan didn’t jell. To send a machine out blindly like that wouldn’t be any good. He would just blow the thing to bits, and wouldn’t have to move to do it. Could he have possibly realized that the zone of shadow in which he stood was giving him so much of an advantage? But then this was not a machine created for battle with all its tactics… There was method in his madness, yes, but what method? They sat, bent over, at the foot of a rocky scarp, in its dense, cold shadow. Suddenly it struck Pirx that he was acting like a complete idiot. What would he do, after all, if he were the Setaur? Immediately he felt alarm, for he was certain that he—in his place—would attack. Passively waiting for things to happen gained nothing. So then, could he be advancing towards them? Even now? One could surely reach the western cliff, moving under cover of darkness the whole time, and farther on there were so many huge boulders, so much fissured lava, that in that labyrinth one could hide for God knows how long…

He was almost positive now that the Setaur would proceed in precisely this way, and that they could expect him at any moment.

“Doctor, I fear he will take us by surprise,” he said quickly, jumping to his feet. “What do you think?”

“You believe he might sneak up on us?” asked McCork and smiled. “That occurred to me too. Well yes, it’s even logical, but will he behave logically? That is the question…”

“We’ll try it one more time,” Pirx muttered. “We have to roll these cylinders down the hill and see what he does…”

“I understand. Now?…”

“Yes. And be careful!”

They dragged them to the top of the rise and, doing their best to remain unseen from the bottom of the basin, pushed both metal cylinders practically at the same time. Unfortunately the absence of air did not let them hear if the things were rolling, or in what way. Pirx made up his mind and—feeling strangely naked, as though there were no steel sphere over his head, nor a heavy three-layered suit covering his body—he pressed himself flat against the rock and cautiously stuck out his head.

Nothing had changed below. Except that the wrecked machine had ceased to be visible, for its cooling fragments merged with the surrounding darkness. The shadow occupied the same area, the shape of an irregular, elongated triangle, its base abutting the cliffs of the highest, western ridge of rocks. One cylinder had stopped some hundred feet beneath them, having struck a stone that put it in a lengthwise position. The other was still rolling, slowing down, growing smaller, till it stood still. The fact that nothing more happened was not at all to Pirx’s liking. “He isn’t stupid,” he thought. “He won’t shoot at a target someone sticks under his nose.” He tried to find the place from which the Setaur, some ten minutes before, had betrayed itself by the flash of its laser eye, but that was extremely difficult.

“Perhaps he’s not there anymore,” he reflected. “Perhaps he’s simply retreating to the north; or going parallel, along the bottom of the basin, or along one of those rifts of magnetic course… If he makes it to the cliffs, to that labyrinth, then we’ve lost him for good…”

Slowly, groping, he raised the butt of his laser and loosened his muscles. “Dr. McCork!” he said. “Could you come here?”

And when the doctor had scrambled up to him, he said:

“You see the two cylinders? One straight ahead, below us, and the other farther on…”

“I see them.”

“Fire at the closer one first, then at the other, in an interval, say, of forty seconds… But not from here!” he added quickly. “You’ll have to find a better place. Ah!” He pointed with his hand. “There is not a bad position, in that hollow. And when you shoot, crawl lack immediately. All right?”

McCork asked no questions, but set off at once, keeping low, in the direction indicated. Pirx waited impatiently. If he was even a little like a man, he had to be curious. Every intelligent creature was curious—and curiosity prompted it to act when something incomprehensible took place… He couldn’t see the doctor now. He forced himself not to look at the cylinders, which were to explode under McCork’s shots; he focused all his attention on the stretch of sunlit debris between the zone of shadow and the outcrop. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on that section of the lava flow. In the lenses grotesque shapes filed slowly by, shapes as though formed in the studio of some sculptor-abstractionist: tapering obelisks twisted about like screws, plates furrowed with snaking cracks—the jumble of glaring planes and zigzag shadows had an irritating effect on the eye. At the very edge of his vision, far below him, on the slope, there was a burgeoning flash. After a long pause the second went off. Silence. The only sound was his pulse throbbing inside his helmet, through which the sun was trying to bore its way into his skull. He swept the lenses along a stretch of chaotically interlocking masses.

Something moved. He froze. Above the razorlike edge of a slab that resembled the fractured blade of some giant stone ax there emerged a shape, hemispherical, in color much like a dark rock, but this shape had arms, which took hold of the boulder from both sides. Now he could see it—the upper half of it. It didn’t look headless, but rather like a man wearing the supernatural mask of an African magician, a mask that covered the face, neck and chest, but flattened out in a manner that was somewhat monstrous… With the elbow of his right arm he felt the butt of his laser, but didn’t dream of shooting now. The risk was too great—the chance of getting a hit with a relatively weak weapon, and at such a distance, was minuscule. The other, motionless, seemed to be examining with that head it had, which barely protruded above the shoulders, the remains of the two gas clouds that were drifting along the slope, helplessly expanding into space. This lasted a good while. It looked as if it did not know what had happened, and was unsure of what to do. In that hesitation, that uncertainty, which Pirx could understand full well, there was something so uncannily familiar, so human, that he felt a lump in his throat. What would I do in his place, what would I think? That someone was firing at the very same objects I had fired at before, and therefore this someone would be not an opponent, not an enemy, but instead a kind of ally. But I would know, surely, that I had no ally. Ah but what if it were a being like myself?

The other stirred. Its movements were fluid and uncommonly swift. All at once it was in full view, erect on that upended stone, as though still looking for the mysterious cause of the two explosions. Then it turned away, jumped down and, leaning slightly forward, began to run—now and then it dropped from Pirx’s sight, but never for more than a few seconds, only to break out into the sunlight again on one of the spurs of the magma labyrinth. In this way it approached Pirx, though running the whole time at the bottom of the basin. They were separated now only by the space of the slope and Pirx wondered whether he shouldn’t shoot after all. But the other whisked past in narrow strips of light and again dissolved into the blackness—and since it continually had to change direction,