pull of the seventeen-hundred-ton strider on the incline. Volcanic walls among clouds opened into a view of a valley, where instead of firm ground he saw Birnam Wood.
Thousands of chasms, at least, spewed from narrow outlets, throwing into the poisonous atmosphere streams of ammonium salts. Ammonium radicals, kept in their free state by the tremendous pressure of the rocks, shot up into the dark sky, boiling, and turned it into churning chaos. He knew that this was not supposed to extend here; the experts said that it couldn't happen—but he was not thinking about the experts. He either had to return to Roembden at once or stay with the guiding song—an innocent song, though as false now as the sirens of Ulysses. Dirty-yellow clouds moved slowly and heavily over the whole Depression, to fall in strange, sticky, ropy snow that stiffened to form Birnam Wood. The name had been given it because it traveled.
It was not a wood, of course, and only from a great distance did it resemble a forest buried in snow. The furious play of chemical radicals, continually fed with new material because the different groups of geysers erupted each with its own incessant rhythm, created a crusty porcelain jungle that attained heights of a quarter of a mile; the weak gravitation assisted its growth, so that there were treelike formations and thickets of glassy white laid upon each other in successive layers, until finally the bottom could no longer support the endlessly climbing mass of lacy branchings and collapsed with a slow, grating clatter, like a planetary china shop leveled in an earthquake. Someone, in fact, had casually dubbed these cave-ins of Birnam Wood "china quakes," a stunning spectacle harmless only when viewed from the safety of a helicopter.
From close up, this forest of Titan looked like a transitory construction, a thing of lace and white foam, and it seemed, therefore, that not only a strider but even a man in a spacesuit could push his way through its frozen embroidery. But it was not that easy to penetrate the hardened froth lighter than pumice, a stuff between a snowy grease inflated as it froze and a lace spun from the thinnest china fibers. One could make slow progress, however, because the enormous bulk was actually a solidified cloud formed of spiderweb capillaries in every shade of white, from pearly opalescent to dazzling milky. It was possible to walk into the forest, yet one never knew when the section one was in would reach the limit of its strength and crumble, burying the traveler beneath a several-hundred-meter layer of pulverized enamel, which was light as fluff only in a small spray.
Even before, when he had got off the track, the forest, hidden then by the dark spur of the mountainside, had indicated its presence by the white glow from that direction, as if the sun were about to rise there. The glow was exactly like the spreading brightness in the clouds of the northern seas on Earth, when a ship, sailing clear water, approached a field of ice.
Parvis headed for the forest. The impression that he was standing on a ship—or that he himself was the ship—was strengthened by the rhythmic rocking of the giant that bore him. As he descended the steep slope, he ran his eye along the horizon, a bright line in the distance. The forest, seen from above, seemed a cloud flattened on the ground, a cloud whose entire surface unaccountably swelled and crawled. He walked, swaying, and the cloud before him grew like the headland of a continental glacier. Now he could make out long, twisted spits emerging from it, avalanches of snow moving in weird slow motion. When no more than a few hundred feet separated him from the snowy billows, he began to make out openings in them like the mouths of caves, with some smaller, like burrow holes. They gaped dark in the gleaming tangle of fluffy limbs and antler-branches made of semiopaque, off-white glass. Then a sharp, brittle rubble began to crunch underneath his iron boots. The
Thousands of chasms, at least, spewed from narrow outlets, throwing into the poisonous atmosphere streams of ammonium salts. Ammonium radicals, kept in their free state by the tremendous pressure of the rocks, shot up into the dark sky, boiling, and turned it into churning chaos. He knew that this was not supposed to extend here; the experts said that it couldn't happen—but he was not thinking about the experts. He either had to return to Roembden at once or stay with the guiding song—an innocent song, though as false now as the sirens of Ulysses. Dirty-yellow clouds moved slowly and heavily over the whole Depression, to fall in strange, sticky, ropy snow that stiffened to form Birnam Wood. The name had been given it because it traveled.
It was not a wood, of course, and only from a great distance did it resemble a forest buried in snow. The furious play of chemical radicals, continually fed with new material because the different groups of geysers erupted each with its own incessant rhythm, created a crusty porcelain jungle that attained heights of a quarter of a mile; the weak gravitation assisted its growth, so that there were treelike formations and thickets of glassy white laid upon each other in successive layers, until finally the bottom could no longer support the endlessly climbing mass of lacy branchings and collapsed with a slow, grating clatter, like a planetary china shop leveled in an earthquake. Someone, in fact, had casually dubbed these cave-ins of Birnam Wood "china quakes," a stunning spectacle harmless only when viewed from the safety of a helicopter.
From close up, this forest of Titan looked like a transitory construction, a thing of lace and white foam, and it seemed, therefore, that not only a strider but even a man in a spacesuit could push his way through its frozen embroidery. But it was not that easy to penetrate the hardened froth lighter than pumice, a stuff between a snowy grease inflated as it froze and a lace spun from the thinnest china fibers. One could make slow progress, however, because the enormous bulk was actually a solidified cloud formed of spiderweb capillaries in every shade of white, from pearly opalescent to dazzling milky. It was possible to walk into the forest, yet one never knew when the section one was in would reach the limit of its strength and crumble, burying the traveler beneath a several-hundred-meter layer of pulverized enamel, which was light as fluff only in a small spray.
Even before, when he had got off the track, the forest, hidden then by the dark spur of the mountainside, had indicated its presence by the white glow from that direction, as if the sun were about to rise there. The glow was exactly like the spreading brightness in the clouds of the northern seas on Earth, when a ship, sailing clear water, approached a field of ice.
Parvis headed for the forest. The impression that he was standing on a ship—or that he himself was the ship—was strengthened by the rhythmic rocking of the giant that bore him. As he descended the steep slope, he ran his eye along the horizon, a bright line in the distance. The forest, seen from above, seemed a cloud flattened on the ground, a cloud whose entire surface unaccountably swelled and crawled. He walked, swaying, and the cloud before him grew like the headland of a continental glacier. Now he could make out long, twisted spits emerging from it, avalanches of snow moving in weird slow motion. When no more than a few hundred feet separated him from the snowy billows, he began to make out openings in them like the mouths of caves, with some smaller, like burrow holes. They gaped dark in the gleaming tangle of fluffy limbs and antler-branches made of semiopaque, off-white glass. Then a sharp, brittle rubble began to crunch underneath his iron boots. The
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