Fiasco (3 page)

He touched the left monitor. In green rows the letters went:

He turned off the screen. They came in wearing sweatsuits. Sinko—thin, curly-haired—greeted them with embarrassment, because the pile turned out to have a leak after all. They sat down to canned soup. The thought occurred to Goss that this daredevil who would be taking the machine out had a jumbled name. He should have been not Parvis but
PARSIFAL
, which went with Grail. Not in the mood for jokes, however, Goss kept the anagram to himself.

After a short discussion on the subject of whether they were eating lunch or supper—unresolvable because of the difference in times: the ship's time, Earth time, Titan time—Sinko went down to talk with the technician about the defect scope, which was being set up for the end of the week, when the pile would be cool and the cracks in the housing could be temporarily sealed. The pilot, London, and Goss meanwhile viewed a diorama of Titan in an empty part of the hall. The image—created by holographic projectors, three-dimensional, in color, with the routes drawn in—went from the northern pole to the tropic parallel of latitude. It could be reduced or enlarged. Parvis studied the region that separated them from Grail.

The room that he was given was small but cozy, with a bunk bed, a little desk that slanted, an armchair, a cabinet, and a shower so narrow that when he soaped himself he kept banging his elbows into the walls. He stretched out on the blanket and opened the thick handbook of Titanography he had borrowed from London. First he looked in the index for
BIRNAM WOOD
, then
WOOD
,
BIRNAM
. It was not there; science had not taken cognizance of the name. He leafed through until he came to the geysers. The author's account of them was not exactly what Goss had said. Titan, solidifying more rapidly than Earth and the other inner planets, locked in its depths enormous masses of compressed gases. These gases, at the folds in Titan's crust, pressed against the bases of old volcanoes and against the subterranean veins of magma that formed a network of roots for hundreds of kilometers; at certain configurations of synclines or anticlines they could break into the atmosphere in fountains of high-pressure, volatile compounds. The mixture, chemically complex, contained carbon dioxide, which froze immediately into snow. Carried by strong winds, the snow covered the plains and mountain slopes with a thick layer. Parvis grew annoyed with the dry tone of the text. He turned out the light, got into bed, was surprised that both the blanket and the pillow stayed in place—accustomed as he was, after nearly a month, to weightlessness—and fell asleep in an instant.

Some internal impulse brought him out of unconsciousness so suddenly that he was sitting when he opened his eyes, ready to jump out of bed. Blankly he looked around, rubbing his jaw. The jaw reminded him of his dream. Boxing. He had been in the ring against a professional, knew the blow was coming, and fell like a ton of bricks, kayoed. When he opened his eyes wide, the whole room reeled like a cockpit in a sharp turn. He woke completely. In a flash everything returned to him—yesterday's landing, the malfunction, the argument with Goss, and the council of war around the diorama. The room was as cramped as a cabin in a freighter, which brought to mind Goss's parting words: that in his youth he had served on board a whaler. Shaving, Parvis reviewed his decision. If it hadn't been for the name Pirx, he would have thought twice before insisting on this excursion. Under the rush of hot, then ice-cold water, he tried singing, but it lacked conviction. He was not himself. He felt that the thing he had asked for was not merely risky but bordered on stupidity. With the stream in his raised face, blinded, he considered for a moment the idea of backing out. But he knew that that was out of the question. Only a kid would do such a thing. He toweled himself vigorously, made the bed, dressed, and went to look for Goss. Now he was beginning to hurry. He still had to acquaint himself with an unknown model, practice a little, recall the right movements.

Goss was nowhere. At the base of the control tower there were two buildings, one in either direction, connected to the tower by tunnels. The location of the spaceport was the result of an oversight or an outright mistake. According to unmanned soundings, mineral deposits were supposed to lie beneath this once-volcanic valley, while actually it was an old crater whose basin had been pushed up by the seismic contractions of Titan. So straightaway machines and people were thrown in, and they began to assemble the barrel-like conduit of living quarters for the mining crews—when the news came that a few hundred miles farther on was an incredibly rich and easily accessible lode of uranium.

The project administration, at that point, underwent a split. One group wanted to abandon this spaceport and start all over again to the northeast; the other group insisted on remaining, arguing that, yes, beyond the Depression there were surface deposits, but they were shallow and therefore would yield little. Those in favor of dismantling the first bridgehead were called, by someone, Seekers of the Holy Grail, and the name of Grail stuck to that area of opencast mining. The first spaceport was not abandoned, but neither was it expanded. A weak compromise was struck, necessitated by the lack of capital. Thus, although the economists calculated
x
times that in the long run it would pay to close the landing field in the old crater and concentrate all the activity in a single place—Grail—the ad hoc logic of meeting the demands of the moment prevailed. Grail was unable to receive the larger ships for a long time; but, then, the Roembden Crater (named after the geologist who discovered it) did not have its own repair docks, loading derricks, up-to-date equipment. And there was the constant debate over who served whom and who got what out of the arrangement. Some of the top brass still seemed to believe that there was uranium under the crater. Some drilling was done. But the drilling went slowly, because as soon as a few people and a little power were allocated here, Grail immediately expropriated them, intervening at headquarters, and once again construction halted and the machines stood idle by the darkening walls of the Roembden.

Parvis, like the other transporters, did not participate in these frictions and conflicts, though he had to have a passing knowledge of them; that was required by the delicate position of everyone in transport. Grail still wanted—by dint of the de facto situation—to dismantle the spaceport, particularly after the expansion of its own landing field, but Roembden thwarted Grail. Or, whether it thwarted Grail or not, it demonstrated its usefulness when the excellent concrete at Grail began to sink. Personally, Parvis was of the opinion that at the root of this chronic schism lay psychology and not money: that two local and therefore mutually antagonistic patriotisms—of the Roembden Crater and of Grail—had arisen, and everything else was a rationalization favoring one side or the other. But this was best left unsaid to anyone working on Titan.

The passageways beneath the control tower brought to mind an abandoned subterranean city, and it was painful to see how many supplies were piled up, untouched. He had landed at Roembden once before, as assistant navigator, but they were in such a hurry at the time that he did not even leave the ship during the unloading, to supervise it. Now he looked upon the unpacked—still sealed, even—containers with disgust, especially since he recognized among them the ones that he had brought then. Annoyed by the silence, he began yelling as in a forest, but only an echo boomed dully down the corridors of this storage section.

He took an elevator up. He found London in the flight-control room, but London had no idea where Goss was, either. No new communiqués had come in from Grail. The monitors flickered. The smell of bacon filled the air; London was making scrambled eggs in bacon fat. The shells he threw in the sink.

"You have
eggs
here?" The pilot was amazed.

"Oh, plenty."

London now spoke to him as one of the crew.

"There was an electronics guy, with ulcers. He brought a whole chicken coop with him—watching his diet. Well, there were protests at first: people complained that he was stinking up the place, and what would he feed the chickens with, etc. But he left a couple of hens and a rooster, and now we love them. Fresh eggs are a delicacy in these parts. Have a seat. Goss will turn up."

Parvis felt hungry. Stuffing his mouth with unaesthetically large pieces of scrambled egg, he justified this to himself: in the face of what awaited him, he ought to stock up on calories. The telephone buzzed; Goss wanted to talk to him. Parvis thanked London for the feast, bolted the rest of his coffee, and took the elevator down a floor.

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.