Free Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem

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