The titanic amoeba of Brobdingnag has a feeding method as spectacular as its size. It has no eyes or ears, and it wouldn’t even need them to capture its “prey”: the meteoroids continuously falling from space. Its cellular membrane, several meters thick in some areas, is highly resistant to cosmic and ultraviolet rays but also extremely sensitive to changes in the intensity of light, air pressure, and, above all, gravity.
No gravimeter made by humans or any of the other “lucky seven” races could compete. A laketon has been shown to have the ability to detect a fragment with a mass of only ten kilos falling through the planet’s atmosphere at a distance unimaginable for any artificial instrument. By some unknown means, which must be entirely instinctive given that it has nothing remotely resembling a brain, it instantly completes the complex ballistic calculations that reveal the meteoroid’s velocity and trajectory, telling it to a very close approximation where its delicious “snack” will fall—and allowing it to capture the meteor in flight.
A laketon can also determine—by spectrography, long-distance taste, smell, or some other poorly understood sense—whether the meteoroid is an indigestible fragment of purely inorganic rock with metallic ore (best avoided) or a succulent cometary agglomeration of ice water or carbonaceous chondrites (not to be missed).
It also has a sense of its own reach and abilities that would make it the envy of many baseball players. If the impact site is too far off, it doesn’t even budge, but if the zone lies instead at a reasonable distance, it will stretch trillions of tons of cytoplasm in that direction at the speed of an express train, forming a pseudopod dozens of kilometers long by a few hundred meters wide, which it uses to capture the meteoroid before it touches the ground.
Fly ball! Yer out.
How it absorbs the tremendous kinetic energy of the impact, dissipating it throughout its gigantic body without the heat generated by the blow vaporizing its cytoplasm or causing any other damage, is an enigma that has fascinated engineers and biologists alike. But so far, in vain.
A pity, because you could perform miracles with a thermal conduction system as efficient as that.
Engineers also dream of constructing similar gravitational wave detectors and/or controls for spaceships. Biologists, for their part, fantasize about synthesizing materials to keep astronauts equally comfortable in weightlessness or under dozens of g’s of acceleration.
While they’re at it, they’d love to discover the genetic mechanisms behind these creatures’ unmatched longevity.
It is a law of biology that the more massive an animal is, the longer it lives. Tsunamis and other giants tend to be quite long-lived. But even titans die.
So far, no laketon has ever been known to die. Some biologists even doubt they can. It’s hard to imagine the sort of planetary cataclysm it would take to wipe out so much living matter.
In short, they’re fascinating bugs. Given their huge size and the powerful gravity on their home world, they are studied from the comfort of orbit, using telescopes. Floating in weightlessness while observing such magnificent beings can be an absorbing occupation—but also monotonous and boring; no observer can take it for more than a week.
But of course there’s never any shortage of enthusiastic volunteers to take their place. The crew of the Fancy Appaloosa would have been surprised to learn that four fully crewed biological observation ships are now in permanent orbit around the planet that they somewhat rashly described as being “of no interest whatsoever.” Each ship holds four observers… and the waitlist holds the names of more than fifteen thousand applicants, with representatives from each of the “lucky seven” races.
Mine is one of them. I checked my place on the loooong list a few days before Governor Tarkon called me to Nerea, and there were still three thousand applicants ahead of me, so I’d have to wait “only” another three and a half years…
They’re popular critters, no doubt about it. At least among veterinarian biologists like me.
My never having been within fifty light-years of a laketon was a painful, unpardonable gap in my résumé. What sort of a “Veterinarian to the Giants” was I, if I hadn’t been able to study the largest of all known living beings?
Aside from two or three parasites, which some even doubt count as distinct and independent species, there seem to be no life forms on Brobdingnag other than laketons. So it wasn’t strange at all for me to volunteer, without a moment’s hesitation, the second I deduced from what Gardf-Mhaly was saying that the affair would involve the titans I had yearned to see for so long.
There’s an old Cuban saying: “If he doesn’t want soup, give him three bowlfuls.”
But what if he does want soup? What then? Pelt him with bouillon cubes?
To lend a little stylistic variety to my still-pending autobiography (and who knows how much longer it will pend), I could narrate my face-to-face meeting with Gardf-Mhaly and the other top brass in the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee in the form of a play.
Might be interesting.
It would go something like this:
SCENE: Inside a Juhungan mother ship. Probably a hangar for faster, smaller attack craft, judging from its size and the honeycombed walls.
In this room, the volutes of germanium polymerase foam that characterize the hydrogen breathers’ organic constructs are lined with a neutral boron nitride coating, allowing the beings engaged in heated debate around a giant holoprojection to breathe oxygen freely without danger of compromising the vehicle’s internal structure.
There are two Cetians, two humans, and one Juhungan. The last, barely a meter tall, is apparently the host; he only watches, takes no part. Decked out in an organic spacesuit typical of his species, he looks like a gigantic, transparent sea urchin.
The members of the two oxygen-breathing races, wearing a variety of uniforms all tinted the distinctive silver of the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee, argue among themselves in Spanglish.
GARDF-MHALY, CETIAN COORDINATOR: Este ship acaba de docked; he’ll be aquí in a few minutos. Insisto que we must tell him toda la verdad. The fact que sus two former employees happened to coincide en estos… discussions may be a signo. The Goddess esta trying to tell us algo…
ADMIRAL WILLIAM HURTADO, HUMAN COORDINATOR: Yes, que we’ve got a ticking bomba de tiempo en our hands! Goddess o no Goddess, if young Kmusa no regresa a home within las próximas seventy-two horas, the gang of Olduvailan fanatics que follow her como they used to follow a su padre will pensar que she fell into a Cetian trap. They’ll atacar, y luego you can kiss adiós a nuestro ceasefire y to any hopes of settling nuestras interspecies differences pacíficamente.
CONFLICTMASTER JHUN-LIKHA, CETIAN COORDINATOR: Admiral, does it not le preocupa what my people might hacer if they creen their envoy fue asesinado by the human colonizers ilegales? Su frustrated and regrettable… romantic affair con the human Sangan Dongo has made her muy popular among our people. If she does not regresa soon, ni siquiera nosotros, their elected military leaders, will be able to controlar la situación. The anti-human faction es already very strong, and if they come al poder, an immediate escalation de ataques on the Olduvailans will follow.