Tales of Pirx the Pilot (11 page)

“Anyway, once the site was selected, a road survey was done. Animtsev tipped us off that the British were planning to lay concrete bridges across the ravines along the projected route but that the Canadians had rejected the idea as being too costly—double the original estimate. They decided to blast two ribs into the face of Mendeleev, using directional charges. I warned them that they ran the risk of disturbing the equilibrium of the basalt’s crystal core. But they wouldn’t listen. Well, what could we do? They weren’t kids, you know. We had all the selenological experience on our side—but then we thought if they won’t listen, we can’t force them to take our advice. Animtsev cast his dissenting vote, and that was that. They started blasting. One silly mistake compounded by another. The English built three slide barriers, got the station up, and brought in their crawler transports. So far, so good. But the station wasn’t three months in operation when, at the foot of the overhang, just under the Gap—the ridge’s western pass—cracks started to appear…”

Pnin got up, opened a desk drawer, and produced several large photographs.

“There,” he said, pointing to the cracks, “you’re looking at what is—or was—a kilometer-and-a-half-long wall. The road ran roughly a third of the way up the side—there, where you see that red line. The Canadians were the first to sound the alarm. Animtsev—who had hung around, still trying to convince them of their errors—told them, ‘Look, there’s a three-hundred-degree difference in temperature between day and night. The cracks are sure to expand. It’s no use. You can’t shore up a kilometer-and-a-half-long wall! Close the road, and since the station is already up, build a cable railway up there.’ Well, they began calling in the experts—from England, Canada… It was a farce: those who corroborated Animtsev’s opinion headed back as fast as they had come. The only ones left were those who advocated—cement. Yes, that’s right. They began pouring cement into those cracks. They injected, they put up abutments, they injected more cement, then more abutments, because whatever they cemented during the day would crack overnight. By this time the couloirs were beginning to spill over, but the walls held. To divert any worse slides they put up a system of wedges. That’s when Animtsev told them: ‘You’re worried about a few landslides when the whole wall is about to cave in!’

“Poor Animtsev. I couldn’t bear to look at him when he came to see us. The man was frantic. He could see it coming but was helpless to do anything about it. Granted, the English have their share of top-notch specialists. But, you see, this wasn’t a problem for a specialist, it wasn’t a selenological problem. Their prestige was at stake! They had built that road and were damned if they were going to back out. Animtsev protested for the umpteenth time and finally resigned. We later heard that the English and Canadians had quarreled about what to do with the wall—the shoulder of what’s known as the Eagle’s Wing. The Canadians were all for blowing it up—let’s destroy the road, they said, and build a safer one later on. The English didn’t like the idea. Anyway, it was wishful thinking; Animtsev estimated it would have taken a six-megaton hydrogen blast, and the UN charter expressly prohibits the use of radioactive materials as explosives… Well, they kept bickering back and forth until, finally, the wall really did collapse… The English wrote that it was all the fault of the Canadians for having rejected their original proposal—those concrete viaducts…”

Pnin pondered a blowup of the Gap; black dots marked the place where the landslide had obliterated the road and its abutments.

“The station is reasonably accessible by day—just a few traverses along the outcrop I mentioned earlier—but almost impossible at night. We’re not back on Earth, you know…”

Pirx understood; the Russian was alluding to the fact that the side of long lunar nights was not illuminated by Earth’s generous lamp.

“Infrared doesn’t help?”

Pnin grinned.

“Infrared goggles, you mean? But how, my friend, when the surface temperature drops to minus 160 degrees within an hour after sunset? Theoretically, I suppose, radar might work, but have you ever tried climbing with a radarscope?”

Pirx admitted he hadn’t.

“And I wouldn’t advise you to, either. It’s an exceedingly complicated way of committing suicide. Radar is fine on level terrain, but not when you’re scaling—”

Langner and the professor came in: time to shove off. A half-hour flight and a two-hour hike still lay ahead of them, and sunset was only seven hours away. Only? thought Pirx, for whom seven hours seemed like an ample amount of time.

Dr. Pnin insisted on accompanying them to Mendeleev. The visitors politely protested, saying that it was not really necessary, but their hosts merely shrugged off their protests. Ganshin asked, as they were getting ready to leave, if there were any messages they wanted relayed to Earth. It would be their last chance: once they were inside the terminator, all radio communication would be suspended.

Pirx was tempted to send Matters’s sister “Greetings from the Far Side” but lost his nerve. They thanked their hosts and went below, where, again, the Russians insisted on escorting them to their ship. Pirx broke down at this point and complained about his g-suit. The Russians offered him one of theirs, which he gladly exchanged, leaving the old one to hang in the Tsiolkovsky pressure chamber.

The Russian suit was unconventional in a number of ways. For one thing it had three, instead of two, visors: one for high Sun, one for low, and one—shaded dark orange—for dust. The air-valve arrangement was different, and it was rigged with inflatable boots that cushioned the impact of rocks and gripped even the slipperiest surface; they called it the “high-mountain model.” Even the coloring was different: half in black and half in silver. When you stood with the black side facing the Sun, you broke out in a sweat; with the silver you were braced by a delicious coolness.

Pirx found the idea had one basic flaw in it: a man couldn’t always be pointed in the direction of the Sun. So what was he supposed to do? Walk backward?

The others chuckled and called his attention to a color alternator located on his chest. If he adjusted the knob, the colors could be reversed: black in front, silver in back, and vice versa. The mechanics of it were interesting. The suit’s outer ply was made of a clear, tear-resistant nylon fabric; between it and his body was a thin air barrier filled with two different kinds of dye, or rather semiliquid substances—one aluminized, the other carbonized. Pressure came from the air respirator.

It was time to leave for the launchpad. Earlier he had been too blinded, having just emerged from the Sun, to notice anything inside the pressure chamber. Now he had occasion to observe that one of the walls operated on the same principle as a piston. “The advantage being,” said Pnin, in reply to his question, “that you can let in or out any number of people at one time, with no appreciable air loss.” Pirx, on hearing this, felt a slight twinge of envy; the Institute’s chambers were antiquated boxes by comparison, at least five years behind the time, a five-year lag in technology being tantamount to a whole epoch.

The Sun’s course seemed to have been arrested. Walking in inflated boots for the first time was a strange sensation, a little like floating on air, but the feeling was gone by the time they reached the ship.

Professor Ganshin bumped helmets with him and shouted a few parting words, there was a flurry of handshakes in heavy gloves, and the threesome followed the pilot into the belly of the ship, which had shifted slightly from the added weight.

The pilot waited until the others were a safe distance away before igniting the engines. The inside of Pirx’s suit resonated with the sullen rumble of gathering thrust. Gravitation increased, but they felt nothing on takeoff. Stars swung in the ports; a rocky wilderness dipped below the rim and vanished from view.

They were flying low. The only one with any ground visibility was the pilot, whose eye was fixed on the fleeting landscape below. The ship hung vertically, like a helicopter, the blast of pulling engines and a vibrating hull being the only signs of surging speed.

“Stand by for landing!” Pirx couldn’t tell if the voice in his headset had been the pilot’s, coming over the on-board radio, or Pnin’s. Their seats tilted back. Pirx took a deep breath, felt light enough to float up to the ceiling, and gripped the armrests. The pilot braked sharply; rockets blazed and squealed; fiery implosions licked the outside walls; the gravitation climbed and fell… Pirx heard a couple of hollow thuds in quick succession. They had landed. Then something unexpected. The ship, which had already gone into its rocking motion, seesawing up and down on its insectlike legs, suddenly listed to one side and, accompanied by a clattering cascade of rock, started to slide downhill…

We’ve crashed! Pirx thought. Instinctively, without panicking, he braced himself. The other two lay perfectly still. Engine shutoff. He grasped the pilot’s dilemma at once: the craft was lamely, fitfully sliding along with the debris; a burst of thrust, instead of lifting them, could, with a sudden lurching of one of the legs, capsize or hurtle them onto the rocky fragments below.

Gradually, the clattering and grating of heaving rock beneath the ship’s steel feet let up. A trickle of shingle clanking against metal, a final shifting of bedrock under the weight of the ship’s telescoped legs, and the cabin stabilized at a ten-degree angle.

The pilot crawled up out of the deck hatch, somewhat jittery in his gestures, and started making apologies. Ground profile had changed, he said, another landslide down the northern gully… He had put her down on the scree, close to the wall, to save them a long hike.

Pnin to that: A fine way to take shortcuts. A lava bed was not a cosmodrome. And: One should avoid taking any unnecessary risks.

This brief exchange ended, the pilot let the others get by him. They filed through the air lock, climbed down the footladder, and stepped onto the scree.

The pilot remained aboard ship to await Pnin’s return, while the others set out for the station, the towering and lanky Russian in the lead.

Pirx had always felt at home on the Moon. Until now, that is. The terrain around the Tsiolkovsky station was a boardwalk promenade in comparison with his present surroundings. Their ship, listing on its maximally stressed legs, mired in a mass of ejecta, was parked some three hundred steps beyond the shadow cast by Mendeleev’s main wall. The Sun, a blazing chasm against the black sky, grazed the ridge, creating a mirage of melting rock. But the expanse of vertical walls rising up out of the darkness to heights of one, and, in the distance, two kilometers—that was no illusion. Stark-white alluvial cones ran down out of the gullies and spilled out onto the flat, deeply crevassed crater bed below; the blurry outline of boulders—blurred by dust clouds that took hours to settle—marked the latest cave-ins. The floor of the crater, a bed of fissured lava, was likewise mantled with luminous dust; the whole Moon, in fact, was powdered with the microscopic debris of meteors—that desiccating rain that had been pelting the surface for millions of years. The trail—a trail in name only, being rather a heaping up of block and slab, every bit as rugged as the rest of the terrain—was marked with aluminum stakes, anchored in cement and capped with ruby-red balls; on both sides of this trail cutting up through the talus, one half bathed in light, the other half black as galactic night, loomed a wall surpassing in grandeur the giants of the Alps or the Himalaya.

The diminished lunar gravity had allowed the rocky matter to assume nightmarish shapes, able to withstand the test of ages; forms so bizarre that the eye, no matter how accustomed to the sight of it, sooner or later went astray as it meandered up to the summit, the unreality, the implausibility of the landscape being heightened by the spectacle of powdery white pumice rising up like soap bubbles, of heavy chunks of basalt being hurtled through space in eerie slow motion, noiselessly subsiding in the talus below, more dreamlike than real.

A few hundred paces up the trail the rocks changed color. Riverbeds of rosy-hued porphyry framed the ravine ahead of them. Stone mesas, piled several stories high in places, their razor-thin edges delicately intertwining, stood there tenuously, begging to be nudged, to be toppled down in a wild and uncontainable rockslide.

Pnin guided them through this forest of petrified eruptions leisurely but infallibly. Now and then he would put his space boot on a slab; if it wobbled, he would stop and brood, then either proceed on a straight course or maneuver around it, intuiting by means of signs recognizable only to him whether or not it could sustain a man’s weight—sound, the warning signal of mountain climbers, being wholly absent here. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, one of the stone witches they had passed earlier broke loose and started down the slope, slowly and somnolently at first, then bouncing and ricocheting to touch off a stampede of stone, a furious rush of rock and rubble that was gradually enveloped by milky-white swirls of dust. It was a spectacle bordering on a hallucinatory vision—collisions without noise, a mute avalanche without tremors or vibrations, thanks to the inflated boots. When they veered sharply around the next hairpin bend farther up, Pirx beheld the trail left by the avalanche—a cloud of serenely undulating waves. Instinctively, with unease, his eyes scanned the horizon in search of the ship; it was safely parked in the same place as before, a kilometer or two away, its shiny hull and three hyphenlike legs clearly visible. A weird lunar spider resting on the site of an old avalanche, on what only a short while ago had seemed so precipitous but now lay flat as a tabletop.

As they neared the shadow zone, Pnin quickened his step. Until now the terror, the extremity of the landscape had so engaged Pirx that he had neglected to notice Langner. He was struck now by the surefooted agility with which the little astrophysicist moved.

They came to a four-meter-wide rift. Leaping broadjump-style, Pirx managed to get too much into it, went sailing high up and over the ravine, and, pedaling his legs wildly, overjumped the opposite ledge by some eight meters. This kind of lunar hopping was a new experience, one that made a mockery of the tourists and their clowning acrobatics back at Luna Base.