Super Extra Grande (12 page)

*

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.

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.

But under six gravities, and completely immersed in a medium much denser than water, a speed of seventy kilometers an hour is more than acceptable.

Since I wasn’t foresighted enough to stow a bubble generator on board
Beagle
for dealing with laminar-turbulent-flow interface problems, this is the fastest I can go in this cytoplasm without running into cavitation trouble…

Roughly seventy kilometers an hour, but from that I have to subtract the thirty kilometers an hour that the gel current’s moving. Curiously, the gel continues to flow at a steady rate even as I steer into narrower and narrower branches. What would Bernoulli say? Forty kilometers an hour, net, and I still don’t know where I’m going.

But I’m an optimist. I unequivocally expect to arrive somewhere or other before this bug’s powerful enzymes digest the Juhungan bioship with my two former employees inside it.

Or at least before the eighth intelligent race with the technological capability for faster-than-light travel appears in the galaxy…

And just when I’m giving in to these melancholic reflections, the magnetometer alarm rings.

I’d love to shout, “Eureka!” But I control myself, because I’m no Archimedes.