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  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 beh
ind 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.

  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 t
he 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.