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maintaining balance. When he tried a sharper turn, the massive structure that he occupied proved to be not so maneuverable, and although the engines obediently roared full-force, the giant began to sway—but did not go out of control, because Parvis instantly eased up, increasing the radius of the curve.
    Then he began to play with lifting the multiton boulders that lay beyond the edge of the concrete field. Sparks flew and there was a shrill grating sound when the pincers grasped and bit into the stone. Before an hour went by, he felt sure of his Digla. He had achieved, again, the familiar state that veterans called "fusion of man and strider." The boundary between himself and the machine had disappeared; its movements were now his movements. To complete his preparation, he climbed quite high up a debris-covered slope, and had become so proficient that he could tell, from the rumble of the rocks as they began to slip from under his crushing feet, exactly how much he could demand of his colossus. Already he was fond of it.
    It was only when he went back down to the hazily lit lines of the landing field that his satisfaction with himself got punctured by the needle-reminder of the excursion before him—and the knowledge that Pirx and two other people, encased in the very same giants, had become trapped in the Depression of Titan. Whether it was for additional practice or to say good-bye, he could not say, but he circled the ship in which he had landed, then held a brief conversation with Goss. The chief was now standing beside London, behind the glass of the tower. Parvis saw them, heard from them that there was still no news about the missing men. Leaving, he lifted high an iron hand. Someone might have thought the gesture melodramatic or even clownish, but he preferred it to any words. He did a steady about-face, put a holographic of the terrain to be crossed on the single, ceiling-high monitor, switched on the azimuth finder and the projection of the path to Grail, and set out, a twelve-meter step at a time.
    There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate. Purpose informed every scene on Earth, the planet that produced life, because every detail there had its "benefit," its teleology. True, it did not always—but billions of years of organic labor had accomplished much: thus flowers possessed color for the purpose of attracting insects, and clouds existed for the purpose of dropping rain on pastures and forests. Every form and thing was explained by some benefit, whereas what was clearly devoid of any benefit, like the icebergs of Antarctica or the mountain chains, constituted an enclave of desolation, an exception to the rule, a wild though possibly attractive waste. But even this was not certain, because man—undertaking the deflection of the course of rivers to irrigate areas of drought, or warming the polar regions—paid for the improvement of some territories with the abandonment of others, thereby upsetting the climatic equilibrium of the biosphere, which had been adjusted so painstakingly (though with seeming indifference) by the efforts of natural evolution. It was not that the ocean depths served the creatures there with darkness, to protect them from attack—a darkness they could light, as they needed, with luminescence—but vice versa: the darkness gave rise precisely to those that were pressure-resistant and could illuminate themselves.
    On planets overgrown with life it was only in the depths, in caves and grottoes, that the creative power of nature could timidly express itself, a power that, not harnessed to any adaptational requirement, or hemmed in, in the struggle for survival, by the competition of its own results, could create—over billions of years, with infinite patience, in droplets of hardening salt solutions—phantasmagoric forests of stalactites and stalagmites. But on such globes this was a deviation from the planetary