Tales of Pirx the Pilot Read online

  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.

  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 Tsi
olkovsky 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…