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of a ruined temple; their moving shadows were pointers on a row of sundials that indicated an alien, galloping time. The jeep passed this irregular palisade. It rolled, lurching; its electric motor whined. The flat building still lay in darkness, but they could now see two black silhouettes looming behind it—like Gothic cathedrals. The pilot appreciated their true size when he and Goss got off and approached them on foot.
    Such giants he had never seen before. (And had never operated a Digla, either, which he hadn't admitted.) Put one of these machines in a fur suit and you had King Kong. The proportions were more anthropoid than human. The legs, made of bridge trusswork, descended vertically to feet as mighty as tanks, embedded in the rubble and motionless. The towerlike thighs rose to a pelvic girdle, in which, like a flat-bottomed boat, rested the iron trunk. The hands of the upper limbs could be seen only by throwing one's head back. They hung alongside the torso like useless, lowered derrick cranes with fists of steel. Both colossi were headless. What at a distance he had taken for turrets turned out to be, against the sky, antennas atop the shoulders of each.
    Behind the first Digla, practically touching its armor plate with an arm bent at the elbow joint—as if, intending to poke the thing in the side, it had frozen in place—stood a second, identical. Because it was a little farther off, one could see in its chest the gleam of a glass window: the driver's cabin.
    "This is Castor, and this is Pollux," Goss made the introduction. He played a hand-held floodlight on the giants. The beam brought out, from the semidarkness, the plate metal of the shin guards, the shields protecting the knees, and the trunk that was as smooth and black as the carcass of a whale.
    "Hartz, that blockhead, couldn't even put them in the hangar," said Goss. He groped on his chest for a knob: his breath was fogging the glass of the helmet. "He barely braked in time, before that slope…"
    The pilot understood why Hartz had packed both colossi into this gap in the rock and why he had chosen to leave them there. It was the inertia. Just like a seagoing vessel, a walking machine responded more sluggishly to the helmsman the greater its mass. He was about to ask how much a Digla weighed, but, not wanting to show his ignorance, instead took the light from Goss and proceeded along the foot of the giant. Running the light over the steel, he found, as he expected, a name plate riveted at eye level. Maximum operating power 14,000 kw; overload limit 19,000 kw; rest mass 1680 tons; reactor multishielded Tokamak with Foucault converter; hydraulic drive, main transmission, and gears by Rolls-Royce; chassis made in Sweden.
    He directed the cone of light upward, along the beams and girders of the leg, but couldn't take in the entire frame at once. The light barely showed the contours of the black, headless shoulders. When he returned, Goss was gone—probably to switch on the heating system of the landing field. Indeed, the pipes that ran along the ground were beginning to dispel the thin, low-flowing mist. The wandering column of sunlight moved across the basin like a slow drunkard, tearing the darkness from the blocks that were storehouses, or from the mushroom of the control tower with the green band of its own light, or it made flashes that faded instantly, touching the ice patches on more distant cliffs, as if trying to waken the dead landscape by giving it motion. Suddenly the column swerved, rushed across the wide concrete, jumped the mushroom tower, the palisade of magma stumps, the hangar, and hit the pilot, who raised a protecting glove and quickly craned his neck as much as possible in his helmet, taking this opportunity to see the whole Digla at once.
    Coated with a black anticorrosive enamel, it gleamed above him like a two-legged battleship rearing. Holding a pose for a flash camera. The tempered breastplates, the circular undercarriage of the