Perfect. Converting speed into penetration force, I cut through the thin barrier like a hot knife through a stick of butter. Some of the vacuole’s contents spill out, but a phalanx of organelles is already rushing over to seal the leak. If Cosita were microscopically small and we were on Earth, surface tension would suffice to fix the problem, but gravity on Brobdingnag is six times as powerful and the hole is nearly five meters wide, so an active sealing system is called for.
I leave it all behind; as much as I’d love to observe how the organelles function, I can’t dawdle.
I cut my speed to avoid getting mired in a sol-phase zone. Just as I thought: The enormous bubble that is the digestive vacuole I had been sailing through up until a few seconds ago is moving to the back, inside an even larger mass of cytoplasmic gel.
But not much larger. I’ve traveled a hundred meters at most when the radar densimeter warns me of an upcoming sol-phase zone.
My first barrier reef.
Now I understand why helmsmen and pilots in olden days felt so much respect for people who could navigate or fly by instruments alone, with zero visibility. Trying to navigate a “river” of protoplasm in which you can’t tell the “open channels” (gel-phase) from the “shoals” (sol-phase) just by looking at them is equally complicated. Or more so.
All I can see through Beagle’s portholes is a uniform blue, through which organelles meander lazily… Some of them, to be sure, have attached themselves to my fuselage, like barnacles to a ship’s hull.
They’d better not corrode the alloy, or someone’s going to have to zip down and rescue the rescuer.
Time to decide. According to the map I’m getting from the densimeter’s low-frequency waves, I’ve got two options: aim for a weak, narrow current of gel-phase near here, just a hundred meters from where I am now, or opt for a very strong and much broader current (several kilometers wide is my guess) that’s almost twice as far off, which means crossing a small but dense region of sol.
I have to choose, quick. The digestive vacuole I broke free from a minute ago is already moving off, and the back end of the gel-phase surrounding and propelling it is coming closer and closer.
Okay, since I’m the Veterinarian to the Giants and I’m inside the biggest giant there is, I head for the big dog and just hope bigger actually is better.
I back up, build up some steam—and here I go, full speed ahead, slamming straight into the sol-phase.
Another out.
Shit and double shit… How could I be so stupid? I completely forgot that, even though I don’t feel it so much here inside Cosita, the sextuple gravity operates everywhere on Brobdingnag. The accelerations that come with every collision can cause a lot of damage… Good thing the overload-absorption fluid was automatically discharged when I hit the elastic but tough sol-phase.
Again, it was like running head first into a wall. I was knocked out for nearly ten minutes, and everything hurts now, even more than before. When I get out of here I’ll have to get a checkup from an orthopedist… If I even have a skeleton left by then.
I’ll also have a psychiatrist check me out, to explain to me why I accepted this mission…
Ironically, according to the densimeter, my massive head-on collision only got me fifteen meters into the sol-phase shoals. Minimal progress, which I then completely squandered while I was unconscious. Everything’s moving in here; the large current is now three hundred meters from my current position—not exactly reassuring. I’m completely surrounded by sol-phase, like a fly caught in a cake.
I take a deep breath. Calm down, Jan Amos, analyze the data carefully, there’s always at least one way out…
And so there is. I discover that, since every cloud has a silver lining, while I missed my date with the Mississippi, I came a lot closer to its tributary. The weak, narrow current of gel-phase is now less than forty meters from my ship.
This business of navigating through cytoplasm has its ins and outs, I can see.
Too bad we haven’t come up with the ideal propulsion system for sailing through thousands of tons of glop the consistency of flan.
I’ll have to think this one through. Maybe some kind of screw propeller. For example, mounting giant drills on the prow of Beagle…
But since I didn’t think of it earlier, for now I’ll have to resort to extreme measures.
There’s an old Earth proverb: If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain. Even if there aren’t many Muslims anymore, it’s still a smart attitude.
I’m going to apply it here, with a slight variation: If you’re stuck in a medium so dense you can’t sail through it—well, then, make it less dense.
I use the nozzles on the sides of Beagle to spray a ton and a half of sodium chloride—that is, everyday table salt. And the sol that has me trapped immediately starts liquefying into gel.
I could give myself a standing ovation, but it’s just membrane physics: When you abruptly increase the concentration of salts in one zone, osmotic pressure causes an inflow of liquid in order to reestablish an equilibrium.
I move forward exactly twenty-three meters before the protoplasm congeals once more into sol, trapping me in its sticky jaws. I still have to navigate nearly that far again before I’ll come out into open gel.
Alright, let’s not panic. I’ve got more salt—enough for at least three more “liquidations” like this. After that, we’ll see. If I get stuck again farther on, I’ll have to rack my brains…
But I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it…
If I get to it, that is.
In the end, there’s always brute force.
So here we go again…
Now I push the engines and—a small partial victory that renews my confidence in a great final victory! I manage to emerge into the gel, though by a very narrow margin.
The current carries me away… No, I have to face it, I want to go in the opposite direction. Tough luck. It would have been so easy to let the current take me…
Fortunately, the gel isn’t flowing at more than thirty kilometers an hour, and it’s only 150 meters wide. It isn’t very powerful—whereas my engines are. But even so, it’s unspeakably hard for me—first to keep from being swept away, and then to slowly make up for lost ground.
I shudder to think what might have become of me if I had managed to penetrate the other current, the wide, powerful one. I’d be powerless now, swept away by its tremendous force, dragged farther and farther from the people I was supposed to be rescuing, maybe even carried up to Cosita’s “head.”
I have to be better at thinking things through—preferably before acting. Up to now I’ve been navigating (literally) by good luck, but fortune won’t smile on me forever.
As if to make up for these moments of stress, the next hour and a half is fairly monotonous.
I even allow myself a couple of quick naps, which do wonders for calming my nerves and giving my tortured body some rest.
Autopilot takes over the steering on Beagle… and each time we approach a fork in the gel river, the radar densimeter alarm gives me nearly a one-minute warning so I can choose which way to go.
To pretend I know where I’m going and lend an appearance of method to what is nothing but a random search, I always pick the right fork. Standard method in any labyrinth.
Laggoru magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, much more efficient than propellers and now used for powering aquatic vehicles by all the “lucky seven” races, allows a ship to travel several hundred kilometers an hour—under one Earth gravity.