Free Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem Page A

frozen molds of his iron limbs, of his shin guards, fell away in huge pieces. But when they hit, they became piles of delicate slivers. Light from the shaky maze brought out phantasmagoric shapes and dazzled the eye, but it did not illuminate the ground. Only now did Parvis appreciate the advantage given him by the radiator. Its invisible heat melted a tunnel in the thicket, which he entered, hearing—now on the right, now on the left—echoes of streams of gas coming from the locked bed of the cloud like cannon blasts. At one point he passed the plume of a geyser, not far off, jerked by furious spurts that whipped its perimeter. Suddenly the snow forest thinned out, making a kind of clearing beneath an inflated bubble-dome of branches. In the center lay a black giant, showing the bottoms of two iron feet, together, and a torso turned on its side, resembling, in perspective, a ship beached. The left arm, on top, went between white trunks, its hand hidden in undergrowth; the right was pinned to the ground beneath the body. The iron colossus lay twisted but not altogether conquered, because except for the rime on its limbs it was free of snow. The air wavered slightly over the bulge of the torso, heated by the warmth still inside.
    Parvis, transfixed before the twin strider, could not believe his eyes, that the miracle had taken place, after all. Of meeting. He was about to speak when two things simultaneously came to his attention. Under the fallen Digla was a spreading puddle of yellowish oil—from broken hydraulic lines, which meant at least a partial paralysis. Moreover, the front window of the cabin, now so similar to the porthole of a ship, gaped, broken, and only strips of insulation hung from the frame. The opening, completely dark, gave off vapor, as though the giant, in its throes, had not quite parted with its last breath. The pilot's triumph, joy, thankful amazement turned to horror. He knew, even before he bent carefully, slowly, over the wreck, that it was empty. His searchlight played across the interior: the wires hanging helter-skelter, the metallic skin draped over them. Unable to bend more, he peered with difficulty into the corners of the abandoned cabin, in the hope that the one shipwrecked, departing in his spacesuit, had left some message, some sign. But all Parvis found was an overturned toolbox and wrenches that had spilled from it. For a while he tried to guess what had happened. The Digla could have been knocked down by a cave-in, and the operator, when his efforts to lift the machine out of the crushing rubble failed, could have disconnected the system of cutoffs limiting the power allowable. The lines might then have burst from the excessive oil pressure. The cabin window he had not broken himself; he could have got out by the thigh exit or through the escape hatch on the back. The glass had probably shattered in the cave-in, when the strider fell. Originally lying flat, the strider had turned on its side in its struggle against the mass that bore down on it. The poisonous atmosphere entering the cabin would have killed the man more quickly than the cold. So the cave-in had not caught him unprepared. When the vaulted thicket began to press on the machine from above, the operator, seeing that it would not stop, managed to get into his spacesuit. Thus he gave up control of the Digla, first having to remove the electronic skin. His Digla possessed no high-temperature radiator, so he did the only thing that made sense, which spoke well for him. He took tools, crawled into the engine room, and, discovering that he would not be able to fix the hydraulics since too many of the pipes were cracked and the leakage also was too great, disconnected the whole transmission from the reactor and turned the reactor up all the way. The strider, he knew, was lost, but the heat from the nuclear pile, although it would burn through the power plant—or, rather, precisely for that reason—would be emitted through the