Free Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem Page B

red-hot hull and thereby melt the mountain of debris. Which created this domed cavern, the glassy walls bearing witness to the temperature produced by the wreck. Parvis tested his reconstruction of events, holding a Geiger close to the back of the hulk. Immediately the Geiger chattered. The pile had melted under its own heat and cooled, but the outer hull remained hot and radioactive. The operator left his vehicle, then, through the broken window, dropped the useless tools, and went into the forest on foot. Parvis looked for prints in the spilled oil. Finding none, he circled the metal corpse, looking for openings in the wall of the gleaming cave large enough to let a man pass. There were none. Parvis could not calculate in his head how much time might have elapsed since the disaster. Two people disappeared in the forest three days ago, and Pirx twenty to thirty hours later. The difference in time was too small to provide any basis for determining whether the wreck belonged to one of the operators from Grail or to Pirx. He stood—alive in iron over the lifeless iron—and coldly deliberated what to do next. In some recess of this melted bubble there had to be a passage used by the operator, but it had sealed over after he left. The porcelain seam should be very thin. From the Digla, Parvis would not see it. He turned off the Digla, changed as quickly as he could into his spacesuit, ran clanking down the stairs to the thigh hatch, slid down the ladder onto the foot, and jumped to the glassy ground.
    The melted-out cave immediately seemed much larger to him. Or, rather, it was as if he had suddenly shrunk. He walked around it: almost six hundred steps. He brought his helmet near the more transparent places and tapped. Unfortunately, there were many of them. Using a hammer taken from the control room, he tapped on a hollow between two truly oaklike columns. It shattered like glass, and at the same time pieces of the dome began to rain on him. The rubble trickled, then there was a cracking, and a real burst of hail—small chunks, bits of glass—came down on him. He realized then that this was pointless. He would not find any trail of the man—and was in something of a tight spot, himself. The breach through which he had entered this melted cave had already been closed with white icicles, icicles already like stout pillars of salt—but not earthly salt, because it grew in interwoven strands each thicker than an arm. Nothing could be done. Nor was there time to think carefully, because the dome was sinking, was now almost touching the radiator on the shoulders of his strider, as if the strider were an Atlas bearing the entire weight of the upward-congealed jets of the geysers.
    He did not remember how he got back in the cabin, which tilted slightly now, as the trunk was pushed millimeter by millimeter, or how he pulled on the electronic suit. For a moment he considered whether or not to turn on the radiator. Every action here contained unforeseeable risk. The remelted ceiling could just as easily collapse as yield. He found a little space, several steps, around the black wreck, which he could use to build momentum, and with full force rammed the frozen-over breach—not in shameful retreat, but to get out of this tomb of glass. And then he would see.
    The engine room resounded with the turbines. The drip-formed, swollen white of the wall cracked, struck by two steel hands; the dark cracks spread starlike upward and to the sides, and simultaneously thunder roared from every direction.
    What happened, happened too quickly for him to follow it. He felt a blow from above, so tremendous that the giant encompassing him gave a single bass groan, reeled, went flying through the broken breach as through a sheet of paper, and crashed—under an avalanche of chunks, shards, and dust—with such violence into the ground that in spite of all the suspension shock absorbers Parvis felt his innards driven straight into his throat. At the same