Tales of Pirx the Pilot (12 page)

They slipped into the shadow. Occasionally a Sun-glazed wall would break up the darkness with its reflection, casting them and their surroundings in a bright radiance. The transition from sharp light to thick shadow made them lose sight of one another. Soon they were braced by a nocturnal cold. Pirx felt it penetrate the layers of his antithermal suit—not a biting, bone-clamping cold, more like a mute and icy presence. The twenty-degree drop in temperature made the aluminized layers of his suit vibrate. When his eyes had grown more accustomed to the dark, he observed that the balls atop the aluminum poles emitted a strong red light—beads in a ruby necklace that snaked its way up the slope before dissolving in the light. The serrated, rock-ribbed skyline flung its three precipices down to the plain, each traversed by a narrow, shelflike ledge of displaced rock. He could have sworn the serpentine chain of stakes led up to one of these shelves, but he also knew that it was an illusion. Higher up, the sundered wall of Mendeleev was grazed by an almost horizontal column of sunlight—a mute explosion, splashing buttes and crevasses with a blinding incandescence.

“Over there’s the station,” he heard Pnin’s voice say in his headset. The Russian, straddling night and day, cold and heat, was pointing up the mountain; but beyond a series of rocks, black even in the Sun, Pirx could see nothing.

“You see the Eagle? There’s the head; there you see the beak; and over there the wing.”

At first Pirx saw only a mass of light and shadow, then a hooked crag bulging over the eastern sunlit ridge, deceptively close because it was so clear in outline, unobscured by fog. Suddenly he saw the Eagle. The wall they were scaling was the wing; higher up was the head, a prominence framed by stars; the crag was its beak.

He glanced at his watch. They had been at it for forty minutes, with another hour of climbing ahead of them.

Before entering the next shadow zone, Pnin stopped to switch on his A/C unit. Pirx took advantage of the pause to ask which way the road had run.

“That way.” Pnin pointed down below.

Pirx saw only a huge gash, emptying out onto a cone-shaped talus littered with boulders.

“That’s where the wall gave way,” said Pnin. He pointed to a deep notch in the skyline. “There you see the Sun Gap. Our seismographs back at Tsiolkovsky registered the tremors. By our estimates, a half ton of basalt spilled down—”

“Hold it,” interrupted Pirx, a trifle bewildered. “How did they get the supplies up there?”

“You’ll see when we get there,” said the Russian, hitting the trail again.

Pirx fell in behind him, puzzling over the riddle. Did they backpack in every liter of water, every oxygen cylinder? No, impossible. They were moving along at a faster clip now. The last of the aluminum markers was buried at the top of the cliff. Darkness. They switched on their headlamps, the beams flitting aimlessly from one rocky hump to another, and started out along the ledge, which narrowed in places to two handwidths, in others to a trail wide enough for a man to stand up on with legs apart. They edged along the shelf, which was faintly undulating but otherwise level, its rugged surface making it good for footholds. Still, one false step, one dizzy spell…

Why haven’t we roped up? wondered Pirx. The light ahead of him suddenly came to a standstill. Pnin had stopped.

“The rope,” he said.

He handed one end to Pirx, who looped it through his belt buckle and tossed it back to Langner. Pirx, leaning against a boulder, surveyed the area.

The inside of the crater lay below him in all its pristine clarity: the black lava gorges, now shriveled to a net of cracks; the submerged cone in the center, throwing a long shadow…

Where was the ship? No sign of it. What about the trail? The hairpin turns? All that met the eye was an expanse of rocky basin, caught partially in a blinding glare, partially in a black configuration of shadows stretching from one rock pile to another. The luminous rocky powder accentuated the sculpture of the terrain—that grotesque proliferation of constantly diminishing craters, numbering in the hundreds in the vicinity of Mendeleev alone, ranging from a half kilometer in diameter to those barely visible to the naked eye; each crater perfectly round, with a gentle, tapered outer slope and an even steeper one converging toward a hill, a cone, or a navellike hollow in the center; the smallest being a replica of the larger ones, and all of them circumscribed by a rock-walled colossus measuring thirty kilometers in diameter.

This proximity of chaos and precision somehow jarred the mind: the proximity of waste and creation, both governed by a uniform design, implying simultaneously a mathematical perfection and the anarchy of death. He turned his gaze upward. The Sun Gap was still spewing a torrent of white fire.

The wall began to recede a few hundred paces past the ravine. They hiked, as before, in shadow, its thickness modulated by the light refracted by the vertical cudgel rising some 200,000 meters up out of the murk, and traversed a tongue of scree that frayed off at the top into a moderately steep slope. Pirx was gradually overcome by a strange torpor, not so much physical as mental, the effect, presumably, of his intense concentration, of this surge of impressions: the Moon, the rugged highland, glacial night alternating with blazing heat, and this ubiquitous, all-encompassing silence that reduced the sound of a human voice inside a space helmet to something as unlikely, as incompatible with its surroundings, as a goldfish on the Matterhorn.

Pnin rounded an aiguille—and was engulfed by fire. Pirx was blinded by the same burst of light before he understood: the Sun. They had reached the upper stretch of road, the only part salvaged in the avalanche.

They walked three abreast now, with both sun visors lowered.

“We’re almost there,” said Pnin.

The road was indeed passable. Hewn—or rather blasted—in the rock, it ran under the Eagle’s Wing clear up to the top of the ridge, where a low-slung saddle overlooked a natural rock basin. Thanks to the basin, the station was kept supplied even after the slide. A cargo ship, rigged with a special rocket launcher, flew in the supplies and fired the canisters into the basin. Though a few were lost in every shipment, most of the canisters were able to withstand the shock of impact, thanks to their extremely durable armor casings. In the old days, before there were any stations in operation, the only way of supplying expeditionary teams in the Sinus Medii had been by “spacelift.” Since parachutes were not deployable in an airless atmosphere, special shock-resistant canisters made of duralumin and steel had been designed. These were dropped like bombs and later collected by members of the teams, who sometimes found them scattered over areas a kilometer square. Now, many years later, the containers were again being put to good use.

A trail led from the pass, out along the ridge, to the northern peak of the Eagle’s head; three hundred meters below the peak, its dome shimmering bright, was the station. With a semicircle of boulders on the downslope and boulders pressing it on all sides, the bubblelike structure was wedged right into the cliff. A few of these boulders crowded the concrete platform by the entrance.

“Couldn’t they have found a better place?” exclaimed Pirx.

Pnin, one leg already on the platform, paused.

“For a moment I thought I heard Animtsev talking,” he said. Pirx detected a trace of laughter in his voice.

Pnin headed back—alone—four hours before sundown. But, in fact, he walked out into a lunar night, the way back being already blanketed by impenetrable darkness. Langner, a veteran of many lunar expeditions, told Pirx that the cold they had met on the way up was nothing compared to the cold that came within an hour after nightfall, when the rocks had had time to cool.

Pnin was supposed to report back the moment he reached the shuttle. An hour and twenty minutes later, a voice came over the station’s radio—Pnin’s voice. They exchanged only a few words. They were in a hurry … bad lift-off conditions … ship listing … feet anchored in the scree… Pirx and Langner slid back a metal shutter and watched the lift-off—not the very beginning, because a ridge blocked their view of the landing site, but in time to see a fiery line stitch the dense and shapeless black, trailed by a reddish-brown glow—dust swirls reflecting the exhaust flare. The smoldering javelin climbed higher and higher, the ship invisible except as a glowing piece of string that became more and more attenuated, vibrant, frazzled—the normal pulsation of an engine working at full blast. Then, their heads craning toward the sky, where a fiery trajectory was inscribing itself on a starry backdrop, they watched as the straight line tilted gently and described a beautiful arc over the horizon.

Now there were just the two of them, in the dark—they had doused the lights for a better view of the blast-off. They slid back the shutter and exchanged glances. Langner mustered a faint smile, then, with a slight stoop, dressed in his checkered flannel shirt, marched over to the table, to his pack, and began removing his books. Pirx, leaning against a concave wall, stood with his legs apart as if on a deep-space probe. His mind was aswarm with images: Luna Base, with its chilly basements, narrow hotel corridors, elevators, and bouncing, basalt-swapping tourists; the flight to Tsiolkovsky station, their visit with the Russians, the silver grid of the radartelescope strung between ridge and black sky; Pnin’s lecture; the second flight; and finally that eerie trek through a landscape of extremes, of icy cold and blinding heat, and those abysslike gorges staring into his visor… Golly, so much in the space of just a few hours. Time, grown gigantic, had swallowed and devoured these images, and now they were reasserting themselves, fighting for supremacy. He closed his hot, parched eyelids for a moment, then opened them again.

Langner was arranging his books on a shelf in meticulous order, and Pirx got his first real insight into the man. The calm, leisurely way he went about shelving his books, one next to the other, by subject, came not from insensitivity or dullness of intellect. Langner was not oppressed by his surroundings, by this desiccating world; he made it serve him. He had volunteered for station duty and felt not the slightest twinge of homesickness. His home was precisely here, among these spectrograms and computations and the phenomena giving rise to them; he was at home wherever he could quench his thirst for knowledge; he had a purpose in life. He was, in short, the last man in whom Pirx would have confided his romantic dreams of greatness. Pirx envied him his self-assurance, his self-confidence, but only for a split second, because he also sensed some deep incompatibility between them. Here they were, two men who had little to say to one another, forced to spend this first night together. Then tomorrow, and the next night…

Pirx let his eyes roam about the cabin. Curving, foam-padded walls. Recessed light panels in the ceiling. Several color reproductions sprinkled among shelves of reference works, and a small plaque inscribed with two columns of names: their predecessors. Corners were crowded with empty oxygen cylinders, tin cans filled with colorful mineral samples, and lightweight metal chairs with nylon webbing. A small table, a swivel desk lamp. Through a crack in the door he caught a glimpse of the radio station.

While Langner began sorting out a shelf stacked with photographic plates, Pirx maneuvered around him and went to explore the rest of the station. To the left, branching off a tiny vestibule, stood the door to the kitchen; straight ahead was the hatch to the pressure chamber, with two other doors to the right, both leading to tiny cubicles. He opened the door to his room: bare except for a bed, a folding chair, a collapsible writing desk, and a few bookshelves. The ceiling dropped down over the bed at an angle, as in an attic, but it was curved instead of sloping, matching the station’s exterior design.

He made his way back to the vestibule. The chamber hatch, rounded at the corners and hermetically sealed by a thick rubberized silicone gasket, was mounted with a spoked wheel and a small lamp, which, when lit, meant that the outer hatch was open and there was a vacuum inside. The lamp was off at the moment. He opened the door, tripping two lights, which revealed a narrow compartment with sheer metal walls and a vertical iron-rung ladder in the center, the ladder leading up to a hatch in the ceiling. Under the first rung was a chalk outline, partially obliterated by footsteps: the place where Savage’s body had been discovered. The body had been lying with its legs tucked up and on its side, frozen to the rough concrete slab where the blood had escaped from his eyes and mouth.

Pirx studied the blurry outline for a while, then withdrew. As he was sealing the airtight door, his head suddenly snapped back: footfalls overhead. It was Langner, who had climbed the ladder mounted opposite the vestibule and was prowling about the observatory. Pirx poked his head up through a round opening in the floor and took stock of the hardware: a slip-covered telescope the size of a small cannon, astrographs, cameras, plus two other fair-size pieces of equipment—one a Wilson cloud chamber, the other a high-voltage spark-gap chamber, rigged with an attachment for photographing ionization trails.

The station was designed for monitoring cosmic radiation, and the photographic plates were everywhere. The orange packets containing them were sandwiched between books, stacked under shelves, stuffed into drawers, plopped on the floor beside beds, and even strewn about the kitchen.

That was all there was to the station, not counting the huge water and oxygen tanks stored underground, deep beneath the station’s floor in the Mendeleev massif.

Above each compartment was a CO
₂
gauge and a perforated air vent. The air-conditioning system silently took in air, purified it of carbon dioxide, added the right amount of oxygen, and forced the mixture back out into the cabins. Pirx welcomed every footstep, every thud coming from the observatory; the moment the noises stopped, the silence swelled to the point that he could hear the whispering murmur of his own blood, as clearly as he had that time in the “loony dip,” though the latter had one distinct advantage: you could quit at any time.