Fiasco Read online

  The chief was in the corridor, already in coveralls. The hour had struck. Parvis ran to the supply room for his spacesuit. He got into it efficiently, connected the oxygen tank to the hose, but did not open the valve or put on the helmet, not sure that they would be leaving immediately. They took a different elevator—for freight—to the basement. There was storage there, too, piles of containers resembling artillery caissons, with oxygen cylinders jutting from them, five apiece, like heavy-caliber shells. The storeroom was large but packed; one walked between walls of boxes pasted with labels in different languages. Here was cargo from manufacturers on every continent on Earth. The pilot waited quite a while for Goss, who went to put on his suit, and then did not recognize him at first: the suit was the heavy kind that a mechanic wore, smeared with grease and having a night visor drawn over the glass of the helmet.

  They went outside through a pressure chamber. The underside of the building hung above them, the whole resembling a giant mushroom with a glass cap. At the top, London was already busy at his station, his silhouette against the green glow of the monitors. They went around the base of the tower—circular, windowless, like a lighthouse raised against the sea—and Goss opened wide the gate of a garage made of corrugated metal. Fluorescent lights fluttered. The garage was empty except for a lift truck by the back wall and a jeep similar to the old lunar vehicles of the Americans. An open chassis, seats with footrests, nothing but a frame, tires, a steering wheel, and a storage battery in the rear. Goss drove it out onto the uneven rubble that covered the ground near the tower and stopped so that the pilot could get on. They moved through red-brown mist toward an indistinct, low structure, blocklike, with a flat roof. In the distance, behind a mountain ridge, were dull columns of illumination, like antiaircraft searchlights. They had nothing in common, however, with such antiquated nonsense.

  Titan's sun, on cloudy days, provided little light; therefore, giant mirrors were put into stationary orbit over Grail during the working of the uranium ore. Called "selectors," they concentrated the Sun's rays on the mining area. Their usefulness proved problematic. Saturn and its moons constituted a region of the interaction of many masses, setting up perturbations impossible to calculate. Thus, despite the efforts of the astrophysicists, the columns of light underwent deviations, often wandering as far afield as the Roembden Crater. The solitary souls of Roembden took pleasure—a pleasure not merely sardonic—in these solar visitations, since, especially at night, the whole basin of the crater emerged suddenly from darkness and showed its grim, fascinating beauty.

  Goss, taking the jeep around obstacles—cylindrical blocks that resembled misshapen vats, plugs from small volcanic fumaroles—also noticed the brightness cold as northern lights, and muttered, half to himself:

  "Heading our way. Good. In a minute or two we'll be able to see everything like on a stage."

  And he added, with obvious malice:

  "Nice of Marlin to share with us."

  Parvis understood the joke, because the illumination of Roembden meant that it would be pitch-black at Grail, and therefore Marlin and his dispatcher were now getting the selector maintenance crew out of bed, to man the engines that would put the space mirrors back where they belonged. But the two columns of light came closer, and under one of them flashed an ice-covered peak on the eastern ridge. An additional benefit for the Roembdenites was the remarkable clarity of the atmosphere (considering Titan) in their crater. It allowed them for weeks at a time to admire, against the starry firmament, the yellow, flat-ringed disk of Saturn. Though it was at a distance five times greater than the Moon was from the Earth, the ascending planet's size always shocked novices. With the naked eye one could see the many-colored stripes on the surface as well as the black dots that were shadows cast by Saturn's nearer moons. Such views were made possible by the northern wind that drove through the gorges and chasms with such force that it produced a foehn effect. Nowhere else on Titan was it as warm as at Roembden.

  Whether the maintenance crew had not yet managed to regain control of their selectors, or whether because of the emergency there was no one around to do this, the beam of sunlight was already moving across the bottom of the basin. The basin became as bright as day. The jeep didn't even need its headlights. The pilot saw the stained gray concrete around his Helios. And beyond that, in the place where they were heading, there stood, like petrified stumps of unbelievable trees, volcanic plugs that had been ejected from seismic blowholes millions of years ago and congealed. In foreshortened perspective, these looked like the colonnade of a ruined temple; their moving shadows were pointers on a row of sundials that indicated an alien, galloping time. The jeep passed this irregular palisade. It rolled, lurching; its electric motor whined. The flat building still lay in darkness, but they could now see two black silhouettes looming behind it—like Gothic cathedrals. The pilot appreciated their true size when he and Goss got off and approached them on foot.

  Such giants he had never seen before. (And had never operated a Digla, either, which he hadn't admitted.) Put one of these machines in a fur suit and you had King Kong. The proportions were more anthropoid than human. The legs, made of bridge trusswork, descended vertically to feet as mighty as tanks, embedded in the rubble and motionless. The towerlike thighs rose to a pelvic girdle, in which, like a flat-bottomed boat, rested the iron trunk. The hands of the upper limbs could be seen only by throwing one's head back. They hung alongside the torso like useless, lowered derrick cranes with fists of steel. Both colossi were headless. What at a distance he had taken for turrets turned out to be, against the sky, antennas atop the shoulders of each.

  Behind the first Digla, practically touching its armor plate with an arm bent at the elbow joint—as if, intending to poke the thing in the side, it had frozen in place—stood a second, identical. Because it was a little farther off, one could see in its chest the gleam of a glass window: the driver's cabin.

  "This is Castor, and this is Pollux," Goss made the introduction. He played a hand-held floodlight on the giants. The beam brought out, from the semidarkness, the plate metal of the shin guards, the shields protecting the knees, and the trunk that was as smooth and black as the carcass of a whale.

  "Hartz, that blockhead, couldn't even put them in the hangar," said Goss. He groped on his chest for a knob: his breath was fogging the glass of the helmet. "He barely braked in time, before that slope…"

  The pilot understood why Hartz had packed both colossi into this gap in the rock and why he had chosen to leave them there. It was the inertia. Just like a seagoing vessel, a walking machine responded more sluggishly to the helmsman the greater its mass. He was about to ask how much a Digla weighed, but, not wanting to show his ignorance, instead took the light from Goss and proceeded along the foot of the giant. Running the light over the steel, he found, as he expected, a name plate riveted at eye level. Maximum operating power 14,000 kw; overload limit 19,000 kw; rest mass 1680 tons; reactor multishielded Tokamak with Foucault converter; hydraulic drive, main transmission, and gears by Rolls-Royce; chassis made in Sweden.

  He directed the cone of light upward, along the beams and girders of the leg, but couldn't take in the entire frame at once. The light barely showed the contours of the black, headless shoulders. When he returned, Goss was gone—probably to switch on the heating system of the landing field. Indeed, the pipes that ran along the ground were beginning to dispel the thin, low-flowing mist. The wandering column of sunlight moved across the basin like a slow drunkard, tearing the darkness from the blocks that were storehouses, or from the mushroom of the control tower with the green band of its own light, or it made flashes that faded instantly, touching the ice patches on more distant cliffs, as if trying to waken the dead landscape by giving it motion. Suddenly the column swerved, rushed across the wide concrete, jumped the mushroom tower, the palisade of magma stumps, the hangar, and hit the pilot, who raised a protecting glove and quickly craned his neck as much as possible in his helmet, taking this opportunity
to see the whole Digla at once.

  Coated with a black anticorrosive enamel, it gleamed above him like a two-legged battleship rearing. Holding a pose for a flash camera. The tempered breastplates, the circular undercarriage of the hips, the beams and drive shafts of the thighs, the shielding on the knee joints, the ribwork of the shins—everything shone, spotless, indicating that the giant had as yet done no work. Parvis experienced both joy and butterflies in the stomach. He swallowed with difficulty. As the light moved off, he walked around behind the Digla. Its foot, as he approached it, bore less and less of a resemblance to a human foot of steel; it became a caricature, and then, near the sole sunken in the dust, bore no resemblance at all. Parvis stood as if at the base of a dock derrick that nothing could budge. The armored heel could have served as the support of a hydraulic press. The ankle had cotter pins like screw propellers, and the knee, bulging halfway up the leg, at a height of at least two stories, was like the drum of a steam roller. The hands of the giant, larger than power-shovel dippers, hung motionless, frozen at attention.

  Though Goss had gone off somewhere, the pilot did not intend to wait. He saw the steps that jutted from the back edge of the heel, and the grip bars, so he began to ascend. The ankle was encircled by a small platform from which rose, now inside the trusswork of the calf, a vertical ladder. It was not difficult so much as strange to climb its rungs. The ladder led him to a hatch that was situated not too conveniently above the right thigh—for the reason that the original, most logical place (for the builders) had become the butt of endless jokes. The designers of the first striders ignored this low humor, of course, but later they had to take it into account. It came to light that operators were reluctant to sign up for these Atlases, teased by their colleagues about how one got inside them.

  Unbolting the hatch activated a garland of tiny lights. He took a spiral staircase to the cabin. The cabin was like a great glass barrel or section of pipe transfixing the chest of the Digla—not in the center but on the left, as if the engineers had wanted to put a man in the place the heart would be if the giant were living.

  He cast his eyes around the interior, now also lit, and with considerable relief saw that the control systems were familiar. He felt at home. Quickly removing his helmet and getting out of his suit, he turned up the heat: all he was wearing was a jersey and tights, and to move the giant he would need to strip completely. Warm air filled the cabin. At the convex front pane, he gazed into the distance. It was daybreak, and gloomy as usual; on Titan a storm always seemed to be brewing. In the dim light he observed the scattered rocks of a region far beyond the landing field. He was eight stories up, and it was like looking from the window of an office building. He could even look down on the mushroom of the control tower. Except for the mountain peaks at the horizon, only the prow of the Helios stood above him. Through the side walls of glass, also curved, he could see into the dark shafts, poorly illuminated, full of machinery that slowly, steadily sighed, as if awakened from a trance or sleep. The cabin contained no control consoles, no steering wheels, no viewscreens; there was nothing but a piece of clothing, crumpled on the floor like an empty, metallically glittering skin, and two mosaics of black cubes fastened to the front glass. The cubes were like blocks in a child's playpen, because their surfaces held silhouettes of tiny arms and legs—the right on the right mosaic, the left on the left. When the colossus walked and everything in it functioned smoothly, each little picture glowed a peaceful willow-green. In the event of a disturbance, the color changed to brown if the problem was minor, and purple for emergencies.

  This was a segmented image of the entire machine projected onto the black mosaic. The young man, in a current of heated air, removed the rest of his clothes; he tossed the jersey in a corner and began pulling on the operator's suit. The elastic material, yielding, clung to his bare feet, his thighs, belly, shoulders. Aglitter to his neck in the electronic snakeskin, he eased his hands carefully, finger by finger, inside the gloves. Then, when he pulled the zipper up past his chest in a single movement, the black mosaic burst into colored lights. A glance verified that this system was the same as in the ordinary ice striders that he had handled in Antarctica, though those didn't compare with the Digla in mass. He reached to the ceiling for a strap, a kind of harness, and put it around him, buckled it tight across his chest. When the buckle clicked shut, the harness lifted him gently, resiliency, so that, supported from under the arms, as in a well-padded corset, he was suspended and could move either leg freely. Checking that the arms were just as free, he felt for the main switch at the neck, found the lever, and threw it all the way. The lights on the cubes doubled in intensity, and at the same time he heard, deep beneath him, the engines of all the limbs. They idled in neutral, making soft sucking noises because there was excess grease on the connecting rods, from the rotary bearings, which had been packed at the Earth shipyard to protect against corrosion.

  Looking down with care, so as not to hit the side of the storage building, he made his first, tentative, small step. In the lining of his suit were thousands of electrodes, sewn in supple spirals. Pressed against the naked body, they gathered the impulses from the nerves and muscles and transmitted them to the Goliath. Just as to each of the skeletal joints of the man there corresponded, in the machine, a magnified, hermetically sealed joint of metal, so for each group of muscles that flexed or straightened a limb there were cannonlike cylinders in which pistons moved, pushed by pumped oil. But the operator did not need to think or even know about all this. He merely moved as if walking, as if treading the ground with his feet, or as if bending his torso to pick up, with outstretched hand, a desired object. There were only two significant differences. First, that of size, since a single human footfall equaled a twelve-meter step by the machine. It was the same with every movement. Thanks to the extraordinary precision of the relays, the machine was able, if the operator wished to demonstrate his skill, to lift a full liqueur glass from a table and raise it to a height of twelve stories without spilling a drop or crushing the crystal stem in the great tongs of its grip. But the colossus was made to lift not little glasses or pebbles but multiton pipes, beams, and boulders. With the appropriate tools put in its hands, it became a drilling rig, a bulldozer, a crane—but always a mighty union of virtually inexhaustible force with human dexterity.

  The giant striders were an extension of the concept of the exoskeleton, which, as an external amplifier of the human body, had been applied in many twentieth-century prototypes. The invention languished, because on Earth no immediate practical use was found for it. What revived the idea was the exploitation of the solar system. Planetary machines arose, adapted to the globes on which they were to work, to the local tasks and conditions. In weight the machines varied, but in inertial mass they were the same everywhere, and therein lay the second important difference between them and people.

  Both strength of construction material and engine power had their limits. The limits were imposed, even at a distance from all gravitational bodies, by the machine's inertial mass. One could not make sudden movements in a strider, just as one could not stop an ocean liner on a dime or spin the arm of a crane like a propeller. Trying that in a Digla would break its girdered limbs. To protect against any such self-destructive maneuver, therefore, the engineers had installed safety cutoffs in each of the branching drive units. The operator, however, could override any or all of these neutralizers if he found himself in dire straits. He might be able, at the cost of ruining the machine, to save his own neck—to emerge from a cave-in, for example. And if that did not save him, he had one last resort, an ultimate refuge: the vitrifax.

  The man was protected by the outer armor of the strider and by the inner shields of its cabin—but inside, above the operator, in the shape of a bell, was the open mouth of the vitrifax. The device could freeze a man in the blink of an eye. Granted, medicine still lacked the means to restore the frozen one to life. Victims of catastrophes, preserved in cylinders of liquid nitrogen,
lay waiting, unchanged, for the advent of a resurrection technology in the next century.

  This medical passing of the buck to an indefinite future seemed, to many people, a gruesome desertion of duty, a promise of rescue with no guarantee of its fulfillment. There was, however, more than one precedent in medicine of such extreme, terminal measures. The first transplants of ape hearts in dying patients evoked similar reactions of indignation and horror. Still, polling the operators themselves revealed how little hope they placed in the vitrifax apparatus. Their profession may have been brand-new, but the death that lurked in it was as old as any human enterprise. Therefore Angus Parvis, treading the ground of Titan with heavy steps, gave no thought to the black shaft above his head, or to the pushbutton glowing like a ruby within its transparent little bubble-case.

  With exaggerated caution he moved out onto the concrete slab of the spaceport, to test-walk the Digla. Instantly the old feeling came back to him, that he was both incredibly light and incredibly heavy, free and constrained, swift and slow. The closest analogy might have been the sensation of a diver, whose weight was lessened by the buoyancy of the water, but who found greater resistance in the medium the faster he tried to go. The first prototypes of the planetary machines, after a few hours of operation, ended up on the scrap heap, lacking motion neutralizers. The novice who took a few steps in an early strider got the impression that there was nothing to it, and thus, when he went to execute a simple task—say, setting a row of crossbeams on the walls of a house under construction—he would demolish the wall and bend the pipes before he knew what was happening. But a machine with neutralizers could also be treacherous for an unskilled operator. Reading numbers of maximum loads was as easy as reading a book on skiing, but no one ever mastered the slalom from a book. Parvis, well acquainted with thousand-ton craft, judged, from the small acceleration of the steps at first, that the giant under his control had almost double that mass. Suspended in his glass cabin like a spider in a strange net, he immediately moderated the movements of his legs, and even stopped, in order to begin—very slowly—exercises in place. He shifted from foot to foot, bending the trunk to either side, and only then walked several times around his ship.