Of course, no twentieth-century fighter jet would fly this smoothly. But the aerodynamics of a hyperdense atmosphere and high gravity calls for moving as gently as possible. No sudden swerves, no rapid nosedives at sharp angles. Not even all the hydraulic overload-absorption systems I have on board could handle the incredible acceleration caused by abrupt maneuvers.
That’s why I just glide down in an almost cowardly way, reducing my velocity kilometer by kilometer with the aerodynamic brakes while overflying the desolate surface of Brobdingnag, dotted here and there with the mobile bluish seas that are its only inhabitants… And right down below me comes Cosita.
Perfect timing, indeed.
Shit. You have no idea how huge it is until you see it close up.
It fills the horizon, even from this altitude. Of course, there’s almost two hundred kilometers of it…
Laketons? They could just as well have called them megaislands. Or minicontinents.
Impressive.
Very, very impressive.
After this inevitable moment of respectful astonishment, I activate my taste-and-smell camouflage. Since laketons have no eyes or ears, the only way for me to trick this one into engulfing me in its digestive vacuole is by pretending to be much tastier than I really am. Play with its senses of smell and taste.
Liquids spray from nozzles located at strategic points along my Beagle’s fuselage. A mixture of water and hydrocarbons coat it in a thick soup of substantial nutrients, no doubt in quantities never before witnessed by this enormous extraterrestrial amoeba.
Carbon à la carte. I’m a piece of bait no laketon could pass up—and Cosita doesn’t disappoint. I veer smoothly to one side to make sure it’s not just waiting to get hit by its food. But no, there’s the pseudopod, stretching out to catch me.
I think back to when my mother used to take me to the stadium on Sundays, back in Coaybay. Now the analogy seems more fitting than ever: the laketon looks like a baseball player waiting to catch a pop fly, reaching up with its pseudopod-mitt to trap the ball at all costs.
I’ve cut my speed to under fifty kilometers an hour. Impact is imminent.
I activate the acceleration-absorption system. Half a ton of soft elastic gel fills every gap between my body and Beagle’s cockpit. The abrupt reduction in velocity that awaits me won’t be fun, but I’ll hold up a lot better if I can make myself one with my ship.
We haven’t received any distress signals from Enti and An. The laketon’s bulk might complicate a radio broadcast, but… A terrible suspicion assails me: What if they died, their bones compacted to dust when they hit Cosita, and the most I can hope to accomplish with this whole song and dance is rescue a couple of stiffs?
There’d be such a fuss.
Shit, what an awful thing to occur to me right now…
While I console myself with the thought that the universe can’t be such an asshole as to play a nasty trick like that on us after all our plans and preparations, I’m already gliding over the titan.
I bite down on my mouth guard, praying for the worst to be over quickly, and…
Contact!
A perfect catch by center fielder Cosita. A textbook out, and…
…lights out for me.
It was like running head first into a wall. First everything turned red, then black, then I couldn’t see at all… until now. Everything hurts, even my spacesuit.
I’m not up to this anymore. I’ll never be young again. Time doesn’t stand still.
Speaking of time, my first conscious thought is to check and see exactly how much has gone by while I was out of the game. The clock is ticking on this rescue mission, in the form of Cosita’s potent digestive enzymes.
Just half an hour. Not too bad. Maybe I’m not so old after all…
The main thing is, I’m inside now. As the instruments confirm.
Others might find sailing through protoplasm gross, but after my recent intestinal adventure in the tsunami it seems like the height of asepsis to me.
Out there, the alimentary vacuole that engulfed me is well on its way to becoming a digestive apparatus. Beagle is floating in a sort of translucent broth pullulating with ribosomes and other enchanting cytoplasmic organelles, which are beginning to secrete the necessary acids and enzymes for absorbing my nutritious coating of hydrocarbons and water.
Who’d have thunk. For once, everything’s going according to plan. Phase two is working as smoothly as phase one did.
I’m the first veterinarian biologist to penetrate the cellular membrane of a laketon.
Too bad I’m not the first intelligent being, or even the first human being, to do so, and too bad I can’t spend weeks here at my leisure, tranquilly observing all the wonders of this unique and colossal organism.
I’m not here for pleasure or to satisfy my scientific curiosity; I have to hurry up and rescue the unfortunate pair who got here before me.
Just a matter of getting out of this vacuole and boldly going through the protoplasm until I find the other digestive vacuole that holds a small Juhungan ship, where Enti and An are trapped. Before Cosita has time to dissolve them, of course.
Simple, isn’t it? Much like finding a needle in a haystack two hundred kilometers wide.
How can I reckon my position and direction and set a course when the vehicle I’m driving is surrounded by billions of tons of cytoplasm?
Complicating the situation even more, this protoplasm isn’t homogeneous but a colloid with some zones in the high-density solution phase, others in the more aqueous gel phase, all shot through with a sort of internal hive-skeleton: the endoplasmic reticulum. My Beagle has magnetohydrodynamic engines to propel it through gel like a submarine through a sea of liquid mercury, but it would get hopelessly mired in the ultradense sol-phase cytoplasm.
I have a few emergency tools to deal with such exigencies, of course… but I’d rather not abuse them. In the process I might throw off Cosita’s entire complex metabolic process.
Gardf-Mhaly told me, perhaps to get me excited about the project, that I was embarking on the sort of adventure nineteenth-century boats engaged in when they navigated the Mississippi, a fickle river in earthly North America whose constantly shifting course quickly rendered maps obsolete. The only way ships could keep from running aground in its wide, muddy, treacherous water was to constantly sound its depths—and to count on the almost supernatural skill and intuition of their pilots.
Good metaphor, Gardf. If I make it out of here, I promise to read up on the Mississippi and its heroes.
The only name that comes to mind from that place and time is Mark Twain.
But now it’s my turn to imitate… Tom Sawyer? Huck Finn…? using the ship’s gyroscopic compass, radar densimeter, and inertial vector gauge, plus my own intuition.
The colossus is moving across the landscape in a north-by-north-northeasterly direction, so I should expect strong gel currents to flow towards what I’ll call its “head.” The digestive vacuoles, meanwhile, always flow towards the “tail,” because, like many living creatures, laketons don’t seem especially fond of crawling over their own excrement. So, obviously, if I want to catch up to the vacuole containing Enti and An, I’ll have to sail against the current, full speed ahead.
As soon as I get myself out of this vacuole, of course.
First step is to make myself, if not undetectable, at least a little less conspicuous and appetizing.
I apply a weak electrostatic charge to Beagle’s fuselage, causing the droplets of petroleum-water emulsion that had made me so succulent to disperse on the spot. Then (three cheers for smart alloys!) I modify the shape of my fuselage to that of a needle-nosed torpedo and aim it straight at the vacuole membrane.