Fiasco (7 page)

The other stopped breathing. Was it, then, after all, an echo from the machine wells of the Digla? Standing still, he cast his eye around and noticed, on the endless beds of snow, a black mark, an exclamation point drawn in India ink on the white horizon, though the illumination did not show whether the horizon was a bank of windblown drifts or a bank of clouds. Even though he had never seen a strider from a mile away in such a winter setting, the conviction seized him that this was Pirx. He headed for him, not caring about the increasing division of the signal in his earphones. He hurried. The black mark, moving along the same wall of white, was a figure now, and it, too, swayed in walking quickly. After about fifteen minutes its true proportions became evident. A half a mile separated them, perhaps a little more. Why didn't Parvis speak, call him on the transmitter? He didn't know why, but somehow didn't dare. Looking hard, he observed in the small glass window—the heart of the colossus—an extremely tiny man who, suspended, moved like a puppet on strings. Parvis kept after him, and both left long plumes of powder behind them, like ships in a channel pulling foaming furrows after themselves. Parvis rushed to overtake him, at the same time noting what was happening ahead of them—and something was indeed happening, because in the distance a thick white blizzard fluttered and rippled. Its curving arcs shone brighter than the snow. This was the region of the cold geysers. Parvis then called out, once, twice, three times, but the one he chased, instead of answering, increased the pace, as if to flee his rescuer; so Parvis did the same, rushing, with more and more swinging of the trunk and waving of the powerful arms, toward the nearing peril. The speedometer pointed, quivering, at the red limit: forty-eight miles an hour. Parvis yelled, his voice hoarse, but the yell died on his lips, because suddenly the black figure widened, swelled, lengthened, and its contours lost their sharpness. It was not a man in a Digla that he saw now, but a large shadow diffusing into an amorphous blotch. And then it was gone.

He was alone. He had been chasing himself. Not a common phenomenon, but known even on Earth. The Brocken Specter in the Alps, for example. One's own reflection, enlarged, against bright clouds. Not he—it was his body, shocked by the discovery, full of bitter disappointment, its muscles tight, breathless in a rush of rage and despair—it was his body that wanted to stop immediately, that instant, and then in the roar that burst from the bowels of the colossus he was pitched forward. The dials flared like severed veins spurting blood; the Digla shook like a vessel striking its hull against an underwater barrier. The trunk tilted with the momentum, and if Parvis had not supported it, had not pulled it out of its forward plunge with a series of gradually braking steps, it definitely would have crashed to the ground. The choral protest from the abruptly overburdened units quieted. Feeling tears of disappointment and anger running down his flushed face, he stood on spread legs, panting, as if he had run the last kilometers himself. He calmed down. With the soft inner lining of his glove he dabbed the sweat that hung on his eyebrows, and saw the giant paw of the strider, magnifying this involuntary gesture, lift, block the window of the cabin with the whole width of the forearm, and with a thud hit the radiator that was secured atop the headless shoulders. He had forgotten to disconnect the right Hand from the amplifier circuit! This additional stupidity sobered him completely. He turned to retrace his steps, because the tones of the directional signals were now totally out of key. He would have to return to the trail, then stay on it as long as possible, and in the event of zero visibility due to a blizzard from the geyser region—he remembered its appearance during the chase—make use of the radiator. He came to the place where the fata morgana, with its trick mirror of clouds and gases, had disoriented him completely. Or possibly he had gone soft in the head sooner, when he suffered not the optical but the acoustical illusion and stopped comparing the route indicated by the beacon with the terrain map in his cabin.

In the place to which his own phantom had led him, not that far from the designated path—nine miles in all, according to the odometer—there were no geysers shown on the map. Their border ran farther north, judging by the last survey made. On the basis of flight reports and the radar pictures taken via the patsat, Marlin had ordered that the route from Roembden to Grail be changed to a roundabout southern course, so that it would run—inconveniently but safely—through a shallow of the Depression which had never yet been inundated though it was covered with snow from the geysers. The bed of this shallow might at worst become obstructed with drifts of dioxide snow, but a Digla had sufficient power to wade through drifts five meters deep; and if it got stuck, it could radio and Grail would send unmanned bulldozers, redirected from the mines. The problem was that no one knew exactly where the three striders vanished. On the old trail, abandoned after previous disasters, the Depression had permitted uninterrupted radio contact, but shortwave signals didn't reach the southern syncline directly, and one couldn't use reflection, since Titan possessed no ionosphere. It was necessary to employ relay satellites, but for a week now Saturn had interfered, drowning out with the tail of its stormy magnetosphere all emissions except lasers. Grail's lasers, indeed, could penetrate the cloud layers and thus reach the patsats. The patsats, however, not equipped with wave transformers over such a wide range, were unable to convert light impulses into radio. True, they could collimate the received flashes and send them into the Depression, but that would be futile. In order to penetrate the geyser storms it would be necessary to beam with an energy that would melt the satellite mirrors. Put into orbit when Grail was still in the setting-up stage, the mirrors had undergone slow corrosion; clouding, they absorbed too much radiant energy, not reflecting it with 99-percent efficiency.

Into this concatenation of oversight, poorly conceived economizing measures, haste, shipping delays, and ordinary foul-ups—typical of people everywhere and therefore in space as well—went one unfortunate strider after the other. The solid ground of the southern shallow was supposed to have been a last resort. How solid it actually was, Parvis would soon find out. He had counted on coming across the trail of his predecessors, but quickly gave up that hope. He followed the azimuth, trusting it, because the terrain rose and led him away from the blizzard. To the left he saw slopes of old magma, topped with clouds and swept clear of snow. He traversed these with caution. He walked through a quarry, across ice-filled gullies, but the ice contained bubbles of unfrozen gas. When once or twice the iron foot broke through the ice crust and sank into an empty space, the noise of the engines ceased and his ears were filled with a rattling and snapping so loud, it was like being aboard an icebreaker battering its way through polar ridges. Carefully, each time, he inspected the foot pulled from the hole before moving on. He labored in this way until the radio dialogue, keeping the same tone and pitch, began to stammer. The right gave a strangled whistle, and the left dropped to a bass. Parvis turned until the notes were equal. Then before him opened a wide passageway between high stacks of ice slabs, except that it wasn't ice, he knew, but congealed hydrocarbons. Down dry, coarse-grained scree he stepped, braking as much as possible to contain the pull of the seventeen-hundred-ton strider on the incline. Volcanic walls among clouds opened into a view of a valley, where instead of firm ground he saw Birnam Wood.

Thousands of chasms, at least, spewed from narrow outlets, throwing into the poisonous atmosphere streams of ammonium salts. Ammonium radicals, kept in their free state by the tremendous pressure of the rocks, shot up into the dark sky, boiling, and turned it into churning chaos. He knew that this was not supposed to extend here; the experts said that it couldn't happen—but he was not thinking about the experts. He either had to return to Roembden at once or stay with the guiding song—an innocent song, though as false now as the sirens of Ulysses. Dirty-yellow clouds moved slowly and heavily over the whole Depression, to fall in strange, sticky, ropy snow that stiffened to form Birnam Wood. The name had been given it because it traveled.

It was not a wood, of course, and only from a great distance did it resemble a forest buried in snow. The furious play of chemical radicals, continually fed with new material because the different groups of geysers erupted each with its own incessant rhythm, created a crusty porcelain jungle that attained heights of a quarter of a mile; the weak gravitation assisted its growth, so that there were treelike formations and thickets of glassy white laid upon each other in successive layers, until finally the bottom could no longer support the endlessly climbing mass of lacy branchings and collapsed with a slow, grating clatter, like a planetary china shop leveled in an earthquake. Someone, in fact, had casually dubbed these cave-ins of Birnam Wood "china quakes," a stunning spectacle harmless only when viewed from the safety of a helicopter.

From close up, this forest of Titan looked like a transitory construction, a thing of lace and white foam, and it seemed, therefore, that not only a strider but even a man in a spacesuit could push his way through its frozen embroidery. But it was not that easy to penetrate the hardened froth lighter than pumice, a stuff between a snowy grease inflated as it froze and a lace spun from the thinnest china fibers. One could make slow progress, however, because the enormous bulk was actually a solidified cloud formed of spiderweb capillaries in every shade of white, from pearly opalescent to dazzling milky. It was possible to walk into the forest, yet one never knew when the section one was in would reach the limit of its strength and crumble, burying the traveler beneath a several-hundred-meter layer of pulverized enamel, which was light as fluff only in a small spray.

Even before, when he had got off the track, the forest, hidden then by the dark spur of the mountainside, had indicated its presence by the white glow from that direction, as if the sun were about to rise there. The glow was exactly like the spreading brightness in the clouds of the northern seas on Earth, when a ship, sailing clear water, approached a field of ice.

Parvis headed for the forest. The impression that he was standing on a ship—or that he himself was the ship—was strengthened by the rhythmic rocking of the giant that bore him. As he descended the steep slope, he ran his eye along the horizon, a bright line in the distance. The forest, seen from above, seemed a cloud flattened on the ground, a cloud whose entire surface unaccountably swelled and crawled. He walked, swaying, and the cloud before him grew like the headland of a continental glacier. Now he could make out long, twisted spits emerging from it, avalanches of snow moving in weird slow motion. When no more than a few hundred feet separated him from the snowy billows, he began to make out openings in them like the mouths of caves, with some smaller, like burrow holes. They gaped dark in the gleaming tangle of fluffy limbs and antler-branches made of semiopaque, off-white glass. Then a sharp, brittle rubble began to crunch underneath his iron boots. The doubled radio sound continued to assure him that he was going in the right direction. So he went, hearing over the heightened drum of the engines—which increased their
RPM
to overcome the growing resistance—the harsh screech of the thicket broken by his knees and torso. His initial nervousness now gone, he felt not a trace of fear. He felt despair, understanding only too well that it would take a miracle for him to hit upon any one of those lost. He would sooner find a needle—not in a haystack, in a mountain of hay. There could not be any footprints in this thicket; the continually shooting geysers replenished the cloud, so that every breach and break in it grew over quickly like a healing wound. He cursed the beauty surrounding him, possibly unique in all the world. Whoever had named it, from
Macbeth,
must have been an aesthetic soul, but Parvis in his Digla was not interested in such associations now. The Birnam Wood of Titan, for a combination of reasons known and unknown, alternately retreated and advanced within the Depression, across thousands, tens of thousands of its hectares. The geysers themselves were not too dangerous, since one became aware of their presence at a distance, before actually seeing the skyward-spouting, vibrating columns of gases that were thickened from subterranean pressure. Their roar alone, the terrifying thunder and whistling—as if the planet itself, in labor, were howling out of pain or rage—set the foundations in motion and with the might of a cyclone leveled all the trembling, cracking, tinkling glass thicket in the vicinity. It would take extraordinary bad luck to tumble into the vent of a geyser that was momentarily dead, between eruptions. But it was easy to keep a safe distance from those that announced their activity with a constant whistle, rumble, and the quivering of the surrounding underbrush, a white quivering that signaled doom. Unexpected explosions, however, explosions not even that close, were what most often caused the gigantic cave-ins.

Parvis practically pressed his face to the reinforced window and looked, as he slowly, slowly placed footstep after footstep. He saw milk-white trunks of thick streams frozen vertically, and how higher up they branched into a flickering swirl, being dense and massive only at the bottom. And above the icy jungle of the ground level there grew—in successive, increasingly airy stories—skeletal, weblike structures: cocoons, nests, club moss, euglenas, gills pulled from the bodies of fish but still pulsing, because everything, in a constant drizzle, crept and coiled. From clumps of snow there issued thin needle-shoots, which joined into ganglia, sank, flowed, and again were covered over with a freezing, glutinous milk that dripped-misted from unknown heights. No word in any terrestrial language could do justice to that artistry in the white, shadowless silence, the stillness beyond which one could hear a very distant, barely awakening mutter, evidence of the underground surge forced into the vents of the geysers.