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
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
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