Fiasco (6 page)

The grisly reptilian-amphibian dances of death gave way to gentle folds of rock covered with a volcanic tuff finer and lighter than sand. Though he could accelerate, he knew that the sensations experienced at full speed were hard to take for long, and he had a march of several hours ahead of him, in much more difficult terrain, before he reached the Depression. The flat, toothed contours on the horizon no longer looked like clouds. As he walked toward them, his shadow swept before him, misshapen. Because of the strider's great mass, the legs were only a third the length of the trunk. Pressed to increase its speed, it had to lengthen its steps, throwing each limb forward in turn with the hip. The hip could move because the circular mounting of the legs (more precisely, their undercarriage) was an enormous bearing plate into which the trunk fitted. The problem was that to the lateral tilting was then added the up-and-down motion of the giant, making the landscape reel before the operator like a drunkard. Such heavy machines were not built for running. Even a jump from a height of two meters was unwise on Titan. On lesser spheres, and on the Earth's Moon, there was more freedom of movement. But the constructors had not concerned themselves about the speed of these machines, whose walking was not to serve as a means of transportation but, rather, to perform heavy tasks. The ability to cover a distance was a plus, making the industrious colossi more self-sufficient.

For an hour or more, it seemed to Parvis alternately that 1) any second he would become stuck in a chaos of rock, and that 2) the azimuth line had been drawn by a genius, because each time Parvis approached a pile of rubble—slabs of stone balanced so precariously that it looked as if the least breeze would start a thundering avalanche—at the last moment there would always be a convenient way through, so he never needed to circle around or backtrack out of cul-de-sacs. Before long, he concluded that on Titan the best operator would be cross-eyed, since one had to watch the terrain in front of the machine, from a height, and at the same time the glowing directional indicator, which quivered like the needle of an ordinary compass on a semi-transparent map. Somehow he managed, doing not badly at all, relying on his eyes and on the needle. Cut off from the world by the roar of the power units and the overall rumble of resonance in the frame, he still could see Titan through the nonreflecting glass of his compartment. No matter where he turned his head—and he did so whenever more level terrain permitted—he saw, above a sea of mist, mountain ridges split by volcanoes that had been dead for centuries. Proceeding along the ragged ice, he noticed, sunken deep within it, the shadows of volcanic bombs and darker, unidentifiable shapes—as of starfish or octopuses set like insects in amber.

Then the land changed. It was still forbidding, but in a different way. The planet had gone through a period of bombardments and eruptions, sending blind bursts of lava and basalt skyward, to freeze in wild, alien immobility. He entered these volcanic defiles. The overhangs farther on were unbelievable. The nonliving dynamism of these seismic congealings—inexpressible in the language of beings raised on a tamer planet—was accentuated by a gravitation no greater than that of Mars. To a man lost in this labyrinth, his striding vehicle ceased to seem a giant. It dwindled, insignificant among the crags of lava, which once, in kilometer-long cascades of fire, had been transfixed by the cosmic cold. The cold cut short their flow, and before they froze, falling in the precipices, it drew them out into gigantic, vertical icicles—monstrous colonnades—a sight that was one of a kind. It made of the Digla a microscopic bug that inched past towering pillars—pillars of a building abandoned, after construction as careless as it was mighty, by the true giants of the planet. Or: a thick syrup flowing from the lip of some vessel and hardening into stalactites—as witnessed by an ant from its crack in the floor. The scale, however, was more awesome than that. It was in this wilderness, in this order-disorder so foreign to the human eye, bearing no similarity to any mountains on Earth, that the cruel beauty of the place showed itself, of a waste vomited from the planet's depths and turned, beneath a remote sun, from fire to stone. Remote—because the sun here was no flaming disk as on the Moon or Earth; it was a coldly glowing nail hammered into a dun sky, giving little light and even less heat. Outside, it was 90 below, the temperature of an exceptionally mild summer for this year. At the mouth of the gorge Parvis observed a glow in the sky. The glow rose higher and higher until it took up a quarter of the firmament. He did not realize at first that this was neither dawn nor the illumination of a selector, but the mother and ruler of Titan, great-ringed, yellow as honey: Saturn.

A sharp lurch, the reeling of the cabin, the sudden bellow of the engines—countered more swiftly by the reflex of the gyroscopes than by his maneuver—reminded him that now was not the time for astronomical or philosophical contemplation. Humbly he returned his eyes to the ground. Curiously, it was only then that he became aware of the ludicrousness of his movements. Hanging in the harness, he trod the air like a child playing on a swing, yet felt each thunderous step. The gorge grew steep. Although he shortened his stride, the engine room filled with the howl of the turbines. He found himself in deep shadow before he had time to switch on the headlights, and in the next second was walking into a bulge of rock larger than the Digla. The tendency of his pendular, driven mass—obeying Newton's first law—to continue its straight trajectory, when he forced it to turn, threw the engines into overload. All the dials, until now a peaceful green, flared purple. The turbines bellowed with despair, giving everything they had. The rpm indicator for the main gyroscope began to flash, which meant that the fuse was overheating. The cabin dipped, as if the Digla would fall any moment. Parvis broke into a cold sweat. To destroy, in such an insanely stupid way, the machine entrusted to him! But only the left elbow scraped the rock, with a grating sound as of a ship pushed up onto a reef. Smoke, dust, a shaft of sparks sprayed from under the steel, and the giant, shaking, regained its balance.

The pilot pulled himself together. He was glad that in the gorge he had lost radio contact with Goss: the automatic transmitter would have put this little incident on the monitor. Emerging from the shadow, he doubled his vigilance. He still felt shame, because it was an elementary thing, as old as the world. Any engineer knew from long experience, without thinking, that to start a locomotive by itself and to start it when it pulled a string of cars were two entirely different matters. So he advanced as if on inspection, and the colossus was again wonderfully obedient. Through the glass he saw how a small motion of his hand instantly became the sweep of a mighty tongs-shaped paw, and when he extended a leg, a tower moved forward, its knee shield gleaming.

He was now fifty-eight miles from the spaceport. Going by the map, by the satellite photographs that he had studied the previous evening, and by the diorama, which had a scale of 1:800, he knew that the way to Grail basically was divided into three parts. The first comprised the so-called Cemetery and the volcanic gorge he had just left. The second he could now see: a gap in the massif of frozen lava made with a series of detonated thermonuclear charges. This massif, the greatest of the flows from the Orlandian volcano, could not have been dealt with in any other way, on account of the bulwark steepness of its slopes. The nuclear blasts had chewed through the formation that blocked passage, had cut it in two, as a heated knife bisects a lump of butter. The pass, on the cabin's diagram of Titan, was circled with exclamation points, a reminder that here under no circumstance should one leave one's vehicle.

The residual radiation from the thermonuclears was still unsafe for a man outside the armor of his strider. Between the exit and entrance to the defile lay a mile-long plain, black, as if blanketed with soot. On it, he could hear Goss again. Parvis said nothing about his collision with the rock. Goss told him that after the defile, at the Promontory, the halfway point, Grail would take over on the radio to guide him. There, also, would begin the third, final stretch of the trail, through the Depression.

The black powder filling the plain between the two bulges of the formation covered the legs of the Digla above its knees. Parvis walked through the low puffs quickly and easily, toward the nearly perpendicular walls of the corridor. He reached a wall, stepping on rubble that was vitreous: smooth surfaces fractured by the solar heat of the explosions. These pieces, hard as diamonds, made sounds like gunfire when ground beneath the iridium heels of the Digla. But the bottom of the defile was as flat as a table. He walked between the blackened walls, in the rumbling echo of steps, steps that were his own: he had joined with the machine, it was his magnified body. Then he found himself in darkness so sudden, so thick, that he had to turn on the headlights. Their mercury glare contended, in the swirl of shadows between the pillar-jaws of rock, with the cold, reddish, unfriendly light of the sky framed by the far gate of the defile, which became larger the closer he drew to it. Toward the end the defile narrowed, as if it would not let his giant pass, as if he would be wedging the square shoulders in a chimneylike cleft. But this was an illusion—on either side there was clearance of several meters. Nevertheless, he slowed, because Pollux swayed more from side to side the faster it went. There was no help for this. The duck waddle when hurrying arose from the laws of dynamics, from angular momentum, and the engineers were unable to overcome it completely. For the last three hundred meters he again ascended, more and more steeply, planting the feet with care, leaning forward a little from his high, suspended place to see what he was stepping on. This close examination took so much of his attention that it was only when the light surrounding him on all sides filled the cabin that he lifted his head and saw the next—altogether different—unearthly landscape.

The Promontory stood above a white and ruddy ocean of fleecy clouds; solitary, black, slender, it was the only thing in the sky from horizon to horizon. Parvis understood why some called it God's Finger. Slowly he came to a halt and, with the magnificent scene spread out before him, tried—over the soft singing of the turbines—to catch the voice of Grail. But he heard nothing. He tried to raise Goss, but Goss did not respond, either. Parvis was still in radio shadow. Then a curious thing happened. Before, radio contact with the spaceport was somehow irritating to him, unpleasant, perhaps because he felt, not in Goss's words so much as in the man's voice, a concealed anxiety, a disbelief almost, that Parvis would make it, and in that anxiety there was an element of pity, which Parvis couldn't stand. But now that he was truly alone, with neither a human voice nor the automatic pulse of the radio beacon from Grail to guide him in this endless white waste, he felt not relief at being free but the uneasiness of a man who, in a palace full of marvels, though he has not the least desire to leave, sees the main door—before, open and inviting—now close behind him. He scolded himself for this unproductive frame of mind, akin to fear, and began to walk down to the surface of the sea of cloud, along a gradual incline—icy in places—directly toward the Promontory. Black, reaching the sky, it was bent, like a finger beckoning.

Once, twice, the sole-plate of the strider slipped with a dull grinding sound, sending great numbers of stones rolling down, knocked from their ice settings, but these slips did not threaten a fall. Parvis merely changed his gait so as to fix each step into the frozen snow crust, using the spikes of his heels, which made him proceed more slowly than before. He descended a bulging slope between two gullies, stamping with stubborn exaggeration, until arcing sprays of ice rattled on his shin guards and knee shields. He strained his eyes to see into the valley, whose bottom now appeared through gaps in the mist, and the lower he went, the more the black finger of the Promontory towered over him, rising above the distant, milky clouds. In this way he reached the level of the fluffy fog that floated evenly and slowly as over unseen water; it flowed around his thighs, his hips; one puff of cloud enwrapped him and the cabin, but vanished as if blown away. For a few moments yet the Black Finger loomed above the feathery whiteness—like a club of rock jutting out of an arctic sea, unmoved amid the foam and floes. But then it disappeared, as from the view of a diver submerging.

He stopped, listened; he thought that he could hear an intermittent thin, high tone. Turning the Digla now to the left, now to the right, he waited for the plaintive note, quite clear, to sound in both ears equally. This was not Grail itself but the directional radio beacon of the Promontory. He was supposed to head straight for it, and if he deviated from that path, the intermittent signal would split in two, depending on the deviation: going too far to the right, in the perilous direction of the Depression, he would hear in his right ear a warning squeal; and if he strayed the opposite way, toward the impassable, sheer walls, the signal would sound in a less urgent but nevertheless error-indicating bass, in the left ear. The odometer read a hundred miles. The greater, mechanically more difficult part of the trail was behind him. The more treacherous part lay before him, wrapped in depths of mist. Massive clouds now darkened overhead; the visibility was to several hundred meters; the aneroid barometer verified that the syncline trough of the Depression began here—or, more precisely, its mercifully solid rim. He walked, using his eyes as well as his ears, since the region was brightened by snow—frozen carbon dioxide, of course, and the anhydrides of other solidified gases.

Sometimes an erratic boulder protruded from their whiteness, the mark of a glacier that had once come from the north, packed itself into the rift of this volcanic massif, deepened it southward with its creeping body, like a plow, and put into the ground ice great hunks of rock. Later, retreating, or melting from the magma heat that came from deep within Titan, the glacier spat out and left behind a moraine, scattered in a disorderly retreat. The landscape reversed itself: as if laying out a wintry day at the bottom and then covering it with a night of impenetrable clouds. Parvis did not even have his own shadow now for a companion. He stepped steadily, sinking into the snow his steel boots, covered with the dust of tiny crystals, and in his wide-angle rearview mirrors he could see his own tracks, tracks worthy of a tyrannosaur, that greatest of the biped predators of the Mesozoic. Glancing back, he checked that his trail was staying straight. For an indeterminate time, however, he had an odd feeling, an impression that grew in strength but which he dismissed as impossible: that he was not alone in the cabin, that behind his back there was another man. The presence of the man was given away by his breathing. Finally, the illusion made him so nervous (he did not doubt that it was an illusion, caused, perhaps, by the fatigue of listening to the same, monotonous radio signal) that he held his breath. The other gave a long, unmistakable sigh. This could not be an illusion. In his astonishment, Parvis tripped, making the colossus stagger. He righted it in a blaze of indicators and a howl of turbines and brought it gradually to a halt.