Fiasco

by Stanisław Lem

  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.

  Stopping to listen, to tell the direction of this voice of disaster, he noticed that Birnam Wood had begun to absorb him into itself. It did not approach him like the forest in Macbeth, but came as if out of nowhere. From the
air, which was completely still here, appeared microscopic flakes of snow. The snow did not fall; it formed on the dark plates of the armor, on the welds of the shoulder shields. Already his entire upper trunk was dusted with this snow, which lost its similarity to snow because it did not descend compliantly on the metal surfaces of the hull, did not collect loosely in its hollows, but adhered like a white syrup, sprouted, sent out milky threads, and before Parvis realized it, he had grown snowy fur all over. Thousands of fibers extending and catching the light covered him and changed the hull of the Digla into an enormous white doll, an eccentric snowman. Then he made a small movement, a jerk, and frozen molds of his iron limbs, of his shin guards, fell away in huge pieces. But when they hit, they became piles of delicate slivers. Light from the shaky maze brought out phantasmagoric shapes and dazzled the eye, but it did not illuminate the ground. Only now did Parvis appreciate the advantage given him by the radiator. Its invisible heat melted a tunnel in the thicket, which he entered, hearing—now on the right, now on the left—echoes of streams of gas coming from the locked bed of the cloud like cannon blasts. At one point he passed the plume of a geyser, not far off, jerked by furious spurts that whipped its perimeter. Suddenly the snow forest thinned out, making a kind of clearing beneath an inflated bubble-dome of branches. In the center lay a black giant, showing the bottoms of two iron feet, together, and a torso turned on its side, resembling, in perspective, a ship beached. The left arm, on top, went between white trunks, its hand hidden in undergrowth; the right was pinned to the ground beneath the body. The iron colossus lay twisted but not altogether conquered, because except for the rime on its limbs it was free of snow. The air wavered slightly over the bulge of the torso, heated by the warmth still inside.

  Parvis, transfixed before the twin strider, could not believe his eyes, that the miracle had taken place, after all. Of meeting. He was about to speak when two things simultaneously came to his attention. Under the fallen Digla was a spreading puddle of yellowish oil—from broken hydraulic lines, which meant at least a partial paralysis. Moreover, the front window of the cabin, now so similar to the porthole of a ship, gaped, broken, and only strips of insulation hung from the frame. The opening, completely dark, gave off vapor, as though the giant, in its throes, had not quite parted with its last breath. The pilot's triumph, joy, thankful amazement turned to horror. He knew, even before he bent carefully, slowly, over the wreck, that it was empty. His searchlight played across the interior: the wires hanging helter-skelter, the metallic skin draped over them. Unable to bend more, he peered with difficulty into the corners of the abandoned cabin, in the hope that the one shipwrecked, departing in his spacesuit, had left some message, some sign. But all Parvis found was an overturned toolbox and wrenches that had spilled from it. For a while he tried to guess what had happened. The Digla could have been knocked down by a cave-in, and the operator, when his efforts to lift the machine out of the crushing rubble failed, could have disconnected the system of cutoffs limiting the power allowable. The lines might then have burst from the excessive oil pressure. The cabin window he had not broken himself; he could have got out by the thigh exit or through the escape hatch on the back. The glass had probably shattered in the cave-in, when the strider fell. Originally lying flat, the strider had turned on its side in its struggle against the mass that bore down on it. The poisonous atmosphere entering the cabin would have killed the man more quickly than the cold. So the cave-in had not caught him unprepared. When the vaulted thicket began to press on the machine from above, the operator, seeing that it would not stop, managed to get into his spacesuit. Thus he gave up control of the Digla, first having to remove the electronic skin. His Digla possessed no high-temperature radiator, so he did the only thing that made sense, which spoke well for him. He took tools, crawled into the engine room, and, discovering that he would not be able to fix the hydraulics since too many of the pipes were cracked and the leakage also was too great, disconnected the whole transmission from the reactor and turned the reactor up all the way. The strider, he knew, was lost, but the heat from the nuclear pile, although it would burn through the power plant—or, rather, precisely for that reason—would be emitted through the red-hot hull and thereby melt the mountain of debris. Which created this domed cavern, the glassy walls bearing witness to the temperature produced by the wreck. Parvis tested his reconstruction of events, holding a Geiger close to the back of the hulk. Immediately the Geiger chattered. The pile had melted under its own heat and cooled, but the outer hull remained hot and radioactive. The operator left his vehicle, then, through the broken window, dropped the useless tools, and went into the forest on foot. Parvis looked for prints in the spilled oil. Finding none, he circled the metal corpse, looking for openings in the wall of the gleaming cave large enough to let a man pass. There were none. Parvis could not calculate in his head how much time might have elapsed since the disaster. Two people disappeared in the forest three days ago, and Pirx twenty to thirty hours later. The difference in time was too small to provide any basis for determining whether the wreck belonged to one of the operators from Grail or to Pirx. He stood—alive in iron over the lifeless iron—and coldly deliberated what to do next. In some recess of this melted bubble there had to be a passage used by the operator, but it had sealed over after he left. The porcelain seam should be very thin. From the Digla, Parvis would not see it. He turned off the Digla, changed as quickly as he could into his spacesuit, ran clanking down the stairs to the thigh hatch, slid down the ladder onto the foot, and jumped to the glassy ground.

  The melted-out cave immediately seemed much larger to him. Or, rather, it was as if he had suddenly shrunk. He walked around it: almost six hundred steps. He brought his helmet near the more transparent places and tapped. Unfortunately, there were many of them. Using a hammer taken from the control room, he tapped on a hollow between two truly oaklike columns. It shattered like glass, and at the same time pieces of the dome began to rain on him. The rubble trickled, then there was a cracking, and a real burst of hail—small chunks, bits of glass—came down on him. He realized then that this was pointless. He would not find any trail of the man—and was in something of a tight spot, himself. The breach through which he had entered this melted cave had already been closed with white icicles, icicles already like stout pillars of salt—but not earthly salt, because it grew in interwoven strands each thicker than an arm. Nothing could be done. Nor was there time to think carefully, because the dome was sinking, was now almost touching the radiator on the shoulders of his strider, as if the strider were an Atlas bearing the entire weight of the upward-congealed jets of the geysers.

  He did not remember how he got back in the cabin, which tilted slightly now, as the trunk was pushed millimeter by millimeter, or how he pulled on the electronic suit. For a moment he considered whether or not to turn on the radiator. Every action here contained unforeseeable risk. The remelted ceiling could just as easily collapse as yield. He found a little space, several steps, around the black wreck, which he could use to build momentum, and with full force rammed the frozen-over breach—not in shameful retreat, but to get out of this tomb of glass. And then he would see.

  The engine room resounded with the turbines. The drip-formed, swollen white of the wall cracked, struck by two steel hands; the dark cracks spread starlike upward and to the sides, and simultaneously thunder roared from every direction.

  What happened, happened too quickly for him to follow it. He felt a blow from above, so tremendous that the giant encompassing him gave a single bass groan, reeled, went flying through the broken breach as through a sheet of paper, and crashed—under an avalanche of chunks, shards, and dust—with such violence into the ground that in spite of all the suspension shock absorbers Parvis felt his innards driven straight into his throat. At the same time, the final stage of the collapse was uncannily slow: the debris, filling up the way that he had come, drew nearer, visible in the window, as if he had not fallen at all but the snowy, smooth surface
, bombarded by a hail of rubble, had reared up vertically before him. From the many-storied heights the hail struck the whiteness that was wrapped in clouds of swirling dust, and then through all the girders of the hull—the howling engines, their mountings, the plates of armor—there sounded, claiming him, a final thunderclap.

  He lay sightless. The window had not been broken but was buried in a heap of debris, whose real mass he felt on himself, on the back of the Digla. The turbines howled not under him now, but behind him, idling, because at the height of the strain they had thrown themselves into neutral. Against the coal-black window all the indicators glowed. The ones on the right slowly paled, grayed, went to willow-green, but those on the left winked out, one after another, like cooling embers. He lay in a wreck that was paralyzed on the left side. To movements of his left arm and leg there was no response. Only the outline of the right half of the strider shone. Inhaling spasmodically, he smelled hot oil in the air: it had happened. Could he at least crawl with the half-paralyzed Digla? He tried. At first the turbines obediently sang in unison, but then the warnings again flared in purple. The cave-in had thrown him not completely forward but port side first, and when he fell that side took the brunt of the impact. Breathing deeply, with deliberate slowness, he turned on the interior light and checked the strider's damage interoceptor: to learn the position of the limbs and trunk, disregarding the drive units. In cold outline the picture showed immediately. The steel legs were caught together; they were crossed. The left knee joint was snapped. The left foot lay behind the right, but he could not move the right, either. Projecting structures must have caught each other, and the force of the cave-in did the rest. The smell of hot hydraulic fluid, obtrusive now, irritated his nostrils, burned them. One more time he struggled, switching the whole system of oil lines to a much weaker, backup circuit. In vain? Something warm and slippery was flowing softly across his feet, shins, thighs. In the white light of the fluorescent lamp above his head, as he lay on the window, he saw the oil leaking into the cabin. There was no alternative. He opened the zipper, slipped out of the electronic tights, kneeled naked to open the locker in the wall that was now the ceiling, and grunted when the spacesuit fell on him. The oxygen cylinders struck him in the chest, and the helmet, like a white sphere, rolled into a pool of oil. His clothes were soaked with the hydraulic fluid. Without hesitation, naked, in the calm, artificial light, he climbed into the suit, wiped the base of the helmet because it, too, had oil on it, put it on, closed the fasteners, and on all fours crawled down the well, now horizontal like a tunnel, to the thigh hatch.