Fiasco Read Free

the air. I know there's a lot of hematite there. And mist. From the copters you can't see a thing."
    "And you'll take the machine straight to the bottom."
    The pilot's smile widened, showing his white teeth. Goss noticed that this kid—because it was practically a kid, only the size of the suit had added a few years—had the same eyes as Pirx. A little lighter perhaps, but with the exact same wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. When he squinted, he had the look of a large cat in the sun—both innocent and crafty.
    "He wants to enter the Depression and 'have a look around,'" Goss said to London, half as a question, half ridiculing the audacity of the volunteer. London didn't blink. Goss stood, removed the earphones, went to the cartograph, and pulled down, like a blind, a large map of the northern hemisphere of Titan.
    He pointed to two thick lines that curved on a yellow-purple field cut with contour lines.
    "We are here. As the crow flies, it's 110 miles to Grail. By this route, the black, it's 146. We lost four people on it when the concrete was being poured for Grail and ours was the only landing field. At that time, pedipulators on diesels were used, powered by hypergols. For local conditions, the weather was perfect. Two teams of machines reached Grail without a hitch. And then, in a single day, four striders disappeared. In the Depression. In this circle. Without a trace."
    "I know," said the pilot. "I learned that in school. I know the names of those people."
    Goss put a finger on the place where, along the black trail north, a red circle had been drawn.
    "The road was lengthened, but no one knew how far the treacherous terrain extended. Geologists were called in. It would have made just as much sense to call in dentists—they're experts on holes, too. No planet has traveling geysers—but we have them here. The blue in the north is the Mare Hynicum. We and Grail are deep inland. Except that this is not land—it's a sponge. The Mare Hynicum does not flood the depression between us and Grail, because the entire coastline is plateau. The geologists said that this so-called continent resembled the Baltic plate of Finno-Scandinavia."
    "They were wrong," the pilot put in. This was beginning to sound like a lecture. He set his helmet down in a corner, sat back in the chair, and folded his hands like an attentive student. He did not know whether Goss intended to acquaint him with the route or scare him away from it, but the whole situation was to his liking.
    "Of course. Beneath the rocks lies a slush of frozen hydrocarbons. An abomination discovered by the drills. A permanent ice, treacherous, made of polymers. The stuff doesn't melt even at zero Celsius, and the temperature here never gets higher than ninety below. Inside the Depression, there are hundreds of old calderas and extinct geysers. The experts said that these were the remnants of volcanic activity. When the geysers came back to life, we received visitors with higher degrees. Seismo-acoustics discovered, far beneath the rocks, a network of caves that branched to an extent never before seen. There was speleological research—people perished, and the insurance companies paid. Finally the Consortium, too, opened its pocket book. Then the astronomers said: When Saturn's other moons are between Titan and the Sun, and the gravitational pull reaches its maximum, the continental plate crumples and the fire beneath the mantle expels magma. Titan still has a hot core. The magma cools before it rises from the depths in vents, but, cooling, it heats all of Orlandia. The Mare Hynicum is like water, and the bedrock of Orlandia is like a sponge. The plugged subterranean channels soften and open. Hence the geysers. The pressure reaches a thousand atmospheres. One never knows where the damned thing will erupt next. But you have your heart set on going there?"
    "I do," replied the pilot in a studied manner. He would have liked to cross his legs, but could not in the suit. He