The snail seemed completely oblivious to what she was doing, and soon she had a hole chiseled through its shell. Then she started on another.
Greg found a pointed rock. “How many holes?”
“One to see through, one to steer it with, and four others to anchor our slings—a pair here for me and back there for you. We’ll cut some vines and wrap the ends around rocks too big to fit through the holes, and let the other ends dangle inside. We can finish the job inside.”
“Standing in its stomach?”
“You’ve got the picture. It’s really more of a colony of cells than a true multicellular organism. The cells are only partly specialized, and they part with each other fairly easily, and they can change specializations. If you pet an eyestalk, it will start trying to digest your hand.”
Greg shuddered, and got back to chipping. The shell was full of bubbles and wasn’t exceptionally hard—though obviously strong for its mass.
It took less time than he thought.
“OK, what now?”
“We’ve got to make a trail of snail goodies, leading as close as we can to the field. Let’s find a pagoda nut tree. Strip off the shells, and the meat inside is snail caviar. Pull off the helicopter vines, too. We’ll use those to support us inside.”
Finding and gathering the nuts was two hours of exhausting work. They scraped out the inside of a barrel section of a fallen pagoda tree to make a bag for the nut meat. They used that to lay trail to within a few hundred meters of the field over ground level enough for the big snail to pass. That took them to sundown. Then they filled the bag with nutmeats again and went back to the snail. It hadn’t moved.
Would it ever move? Was this whole idea a time-wasting idiot’s errand?
Kanti laid some nut meat directly in “front” of the symmetrical giant snail, that is to say beside it, in the direction they wanted to go.
It did nothing.
She pushed the meat closer.
They waited.
Finally, a band of tissue flowed out from under the shell, and a couple of eyestalks grew out of it and waved around. It came almost as a surprise to Greg that the distance between the shell and the nutmeats had grown less—there was no sound at all above the rustle of windblown pagoda leaves and occasional three-prong hoots. Yet in seconds, the snail had moved over the offering.
They followed the snail for five hours, until it was within two hundred meters of the launch field perimeter.
“Ready?” Kanti asked.
“You’re sure you’ve done this before?”
“Once, when I was eight. Wipe yourself with the roundleaf. Then lie down beside me and put some nut meat on top of yourself. Cover your face with leaves and stand up as soon as you’re inside.”
A minute later, he was lying down holding leaves over his face with his hands, passive as an offering to some omnipotent god, waiting to be eaten.
It didn’t take long. The snail’s dim nervous system had gotten used to finding nut meat in their direction. Warm folds of flesh enveloped his boots, his legs, his chest and arms. Despite himself, he shook. Despite the coating of roundleaf juice, an itching, burning sensation began to take over his nether parts.
The flesh flowed over his hands and pressed the leaves to his face. It was warm, rubbery, and smelled of many, many dead things. He sucked in a last lungful of air.
Then the pressure lessened—he must be under the shell. He felt himself lifted—the snail’s banded foot muscle was pressing him upward into its prime digestive layer. He sat up, and the flesh flowed easily around him. He was in air again—if that’s what you could call the rank, fetid, putrid gas in the snail’s pulmonary cavity.
Kanti was already standing beside him, and reached down to help him up. They were moving noticeably toward the “rear” of the snail, their boots on the ground, as its “foot” flowed around them. A small springcroc appeared in the purple folds of snail flesh around his boots, opened and shut its jaws once, then was still.
“Like this,” Kanti said. She grabbed two of the vine ends hanging down from the holes in the “front” of the shell and tied them together in a square knot, making a loop. Then she hoisted herself up and sat in the loop.
Greg had to “walk” a couple of steps through the grisly flesh before he got his seat right, but he finally managed it, and was rewarded by the tough vine making an uncomfortable dent in his buttocks. But at least he got his feet out of the snail’s digestive layer.
The itching feeling did not go away, however. There would, he realized, be nothing he could do about that until they were out of the shell. He looked down at the springcroc. The outer layers had already been stripped from its foot, showing tubes of smooth muscle. An eye hung out of its socket, and dropped out as he watched, its optic nerve or whatever dissolving in real time.
He looked up at the dome. The pulmonary cavity was lined with a thin layer of cells as well, and glistened in a mucousy sort of way. It was the job of those cells, he remembered, to maintain the shell—over time their holes would be filled in by fresh silica sponge. At least they didn’t drip on him.
Kanti had her face near one of the holes they’d chopped in front of the shell. “So far, so good.” She stuck a hand out and dropped some nut meat in front of the snail. “I hope I brought enough.”
The shell glided forward—Greg could tell by the slight changes in pitch as they went over the rough forest floor.
An hour went by, then two. Greg’s rear end was killing him, he tried putting a hand between his rump and the vine. Pretty soon, the hand started hurting. Kanti said they were getting closer to the field, but progress was, well, at a snail’s pace.
Three hours into it, she turned from the eye hole. “Will you shut your eyes for a moment?”
“Huh? Why?” The failing twilight that slipped through the holes in the shell was hardly enough to see anything with.
“Let’s just say I have to feed the snail.”
“But you’re… oh.”
He shut his eyes, there was some rustling, some spraying, and a whiff of ammonia that was almost refreshing compared to the general bouquet of the shell. At length she said she was done, and he opened his eyes again—and saw nothing. Night had fallen.
“Can you see anything?”
“Some stars—maybe a clearing ahead. The Uthers don’t light defense perimeters—their sentries depend on night-adapted vision, and lights would ruin that for them.”
“Great.”
“Don’t worry. These snails wander all over the place at night, though one this big is rare.”
Another hour went by. Greg developed the habit of moving his rear end every five minutes or so, so the vines didn’t always press in the same place, before his rear started hurting. This helped.
“We’re across the clearing. Is the first rocket we get to good enough? I can see its silhouette against the Milky Way.”
There was nothing Greg wanted to do more than get out of this putrid snail. But the Uther perimeter would have the most surveillance.
“Let’s get a little farther in, if we can.”
Kanti shoved more nut meats out the hole in the shell. Gradually, they glided onward.
“We’re about four ranks in now, it’s beginning to get light, and we’re about out of fuel.”
There was no possibility of staying another day in the shell. “OK. Let’s get out,” he said.
Silence.
“Kanti. How do we get out?”
“The way we got in, I think. If I can throw nutmeats far enough ahead of the snail, but…”
“We’re out of nutmeats?” Greg imagined the snail losing the nutmeat trail and stopping with the edge of its shell over his head.
“Just about,” Kanti said in a very small voice, “and I can’t throw them very far through the hole.”