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in dire straits. He might be able, at the cost of ruining the machine, to save his own neck—to emerge from a cave-in, for example. And if that did not save him, he had one last resort, an ultimate refuge: the vitrifax.
    The man was protected by the outer armor of the strider and by the inner shields of its cabin—but inside, above the operator, in the shape of a bell, was the open mouth of the vitrifax. The device could freeze a man in the blink of an eye. Granted, medicine still lacked the means to restore the frozen one to life. Victims of catastrophes, preserved in cylinders of liquid nitrogen, lay waiting, unchanged, for the advent of a resurrection technology in the next century.
    This medical passing of the buck to an indefinite future seemed, to many people, a gruesome desertion of duty, a promise of rescue with no guarantee of its fulfillment. There was, however, more than one precedent in medicine of such extreme, terminal measures. The first transplants of ape hearts in dying patients evoked similar reactions of indignation and horror. Still, polling the operators themselves revealed how little hope they placed in the vitrifax apparatus. Their profession may have been brand-new, but the death that lurked in it was as old as any human enterprise. Therefore Angus Parvis, treading the ground of Titan with heavy steps, gave no thought to the black shaft above his head, or to the pushbutton glowing like a ruby within its transparent little bubble-case.
    With exaggerated caution he moved out onto the concrete slab of the spaceport, to test-walk the Digla. Instantly the old feeling came back to him, that he was both incredibly light and incredibly heavy, free and constrained, swift and slow. The closest analogy might have been the sensation of a diver, whose weight was lessened by the buoyancy of the water, but who found greater resistance in the medium the faster he tried to go. The first prototypes of the planetary machines, after a few hours of operation, ended up on the scrap heap, lacking motion neutralizers. The novice who took a few steps in an early strider got the impression that there was nothing to it, and thus, when he went to execute a simple task—say, setting a row of crossbeams on the walls of a house under construction—he would demolish the wall and bend the pipes before he knew what was happening. But a machine with neutralizers could also be treacherous for an unskilled operator. Reading numbers of maximum loads was as easy as reading a book on skiing, but no one ever mastered the slalom from a book. Parvis, well acquainted with thousand-ton craft, judged, from the small acceleration of the steps at first, that the giant under his control had almost double that mass. Suspended in his glass cabin like a spider in a strange net, he immediately moderated the movements of his legs, and even stopped, in order to begin—very slowly—exercises in place. He shifted from foot to foot, bending the trunk to either side, and only then walked several times around his ship.
    His heart was beating more heavily than usual, but everything went without a hitch. He saw the barren basin, dark gray in the low mist, the distant rows of lights that marked the borders of the landing field, and, at the base of the control tower, the tiny form of Goss, a veritable ant. Parvis was surrounded by a pleasant, not insistent sound; his ears, able more and more to distinguish the different noises, recognized the background bass of the main engines, which sometimes built up to a muffled singing and sometimes grumbled a mild reproach when the hundred-ton legs, thrusting forward, were halted too abruptly. He was now able to pick out the choral call of the hydraulics, whose oil coursed through thousands of ducts and cylinders, setting up a steady beat of pistons that bent and extended each limb as the tank-clad feet walked the concrete. He could even hear the delicate whine of the gyroscopes that autonomously assisted him in