"Get rid of that!" I snarled. It vanished.
I sat back. The capsule began to rock and shiver as we entered the atmosphere.
Trina's gold eye opened to join her green one in projecting a look of calm resignation. “If you don't get us out of this," she said, "I'll never trust you with my life again."
"You're right about that," I agreed. With nothing left to do, I reached up and yanked the T-handle.
It came out in my hand. I stared at the piece of polished metal. Thank you, Blutonian Inspector # 7,149,008(b). At least nothing else could go wrong, though only because there wasn't anything else left to go wrong, and even if there was, it wouldn't have time.
There was an odd clunking sound, then nothing. The chute? I knew we were so high that it would barely inflate, but that was the idea. A slow deceleration, in the high thin air.
"Why bother? It'll either burn up or rip off," complained Ned drearily.
That was probably true, I knew. “At least then I'll be rid of you."
Ned snapped away.
The capsule shivered and bobbed and quivered; air roared over us. At least it wasn't hot.
Yet.
Slowly, like an invisible blanket, the weight of Boff lay down upon us as we slowed.
The capsule jolted; the rush of air fell off; we swayed.
I called up an external, upward view. Once again, I realized without a hint of modesty, I'd underestimated my own feckless resourcefulness.
We were dangling beneath a large green canopy. We had been going far too fast; I had actually thought we might not survive. But for some reason the Blutonians had equipped their lifeboat with a parachute worthy to the task. Now we were about to float down, light as the neck feathers of an Altarian virgin. Which are, of course, very light indeed. The green canopy would even camouflage us against the nauseous sky.
I turned towards Trina, prepared to crow and gloat, to claim my rightful place as her savior. Her gaze was fixed on the screen, an odd expression on her face.
I glanced up at the canopy again. The green was now flecked with gold, I saw. It was a pleasing effect. For what seemed like no reason at all I suddenly recalled that Altarian virgins don't have neck feathers, they have pebbly scales. Heavy scales.
The gold grew. Not gold at all, I realized. Fire.
"We're on fire," Ned announced smugly. “We were going too fast. Friction. I knew it."
"What's that?" Trina asked suspiciously, pointing at the flames. Of course she couldn't hear Ned.
The shroud lines ripped away and the chute billowed upward as we plunged hellward. We were in freefall. Zero g.
"Oh," she said quietly. No dummy, her.
Well, at least it had been close, I decided. We had over a thousand meters to fall yet. My feckless resourcefulness had drowned in feck.
"Time for a quickie?" I suggested.
For once, Trina wasn't in the mood. Though I wouldn't get to tease her about it for long. She looked away, pointedly.
"Well, then," I said, and settled onto my couch. As best I could, that is, given the zero G of freefall.
I wondered whether we would have any sensation of the impact, of being flattened and squished into monomolecular pancakes, or if the world would just go black. I supposed it would be a race between the rate of actually being crushed, and the rate of the actually-being-crushed signals zooming up our neurons to inform our already-crushing brains of this useless news. I wasn't sure which I should root for.
I was still trying to decide when everything went black.
CHAPTER 7. LUNCHMEAT
And then, much later, it went green.
I had a horrible thought. Suppose, just suppose, that the Boffs are the only species really to figure out the whole furball of metaphysics and the afterlife. Or, perhaps, no less tragically, that on any given planet the locals govern what happens in those mist-encrusted realms. That might create a tumultuous situation on Earth, with its welter of religions - Crusaders and Aborigines, together in Heaven? - but the Boffs were far more homogenous.
If either of these possibilities were true, then Trina and I would be consigned to the Boff version of Heaven or Hell. From the warm green glow I could see everywhere, this might well be Boff heaven. Which should be only an inch or so from human hell. How convenient! At least I'd know people there.
"Diz!" Something slapped my face. “Do something! We're sinking!"
I focused my eyes. The lifeboat was indeed all aglow with a dark, and darkening, green. A wet green.
By Mercury's burnt butt! We were in the swamp. Somehow the bog had slowed us enough - which, I recalled proudly, had been my original plan in aiming at it. Although, to be honest, I perhaps hadn't thought things through quite far enough. We were far too deep to just blow the hatch and swim for it - even assuming that that green stuff wasn't a sea of acid, an important point which for some reason I couldn't quite remember. It might have been.
The lifeboat groaned. The pressure, I surmised.
"The pressure," Trina said. She was, after all, the smart one.
"Ah," I said, while scanning the control console. It seemed impossible that I would find another miracle there but I looked anyway, for the simple reason that impossible things have an inexplicable tendency to happen to and around me. Of course, a parachute was far more likely than something that would save us here. Of all the unlikely possibilities an escape pod might encounter, this one - deep in a swamp, and sinking - had to be one of the most unlikely of all. But look I did. Court diz Astor does not give up. I squinted madly in the green dimness. Thrusters, jets, view controls, buttons, big hole for missing T-handle. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. I was about to give up when - wait! There, hidden in a corner, a small orange button with a dusty label bearing a magic word: Floatation.
"Aha!" I said, and pressed the small orange button.
The capsule shook. Green bubbles streamed by the windows. We seemed to sink faster.
What? Tricked? I banged an inquiry into the computer, which after a moment of battery-powered electronic smugness explained the situation in calm terms. The impact had ruptured the air cells that would have floated us.
Down we went. A very dark green, now. The lifeboat groaned again, a sinister sound of high-strength metal under serious stress. The sound of metal fretting.
I winced.
Trina gave me a look of extreme discomfort, a look of agony. Waiting for death, it said. No, make that waiting for an uncommonly unpleasant death. It was a little hard to read.
"This is not so good," she observed.
The capsule groaned in emphasis. The air seemed to squeeze us.
Ned flashed into being, a petulant look on his face. He was a kimono-clad Japanese warrior, short sword aimed at his own abdomen. “Just kill us, Court. Just get it over with. I can't stand the tension. So many possibilities! Will we be blasted? Burn up? Fall to our deaths? Squash? Maybe-"
"None of those," I interrupted, staring out the viewport, which framed a large and growing black shape at its green center. The Fates seemed to be toying with us; things had careered from bad to terrible and were now plainly on the way to outright perverse. We would reach that plateau of high irony, I estimated, in approximately four seconds.
I finished my thought: "We'll be eaten."
And we were.
CHAPTER 8. DIGESTIONTACT
It was just our bad luck that a Blutonian lifeboat happens to look very much like the ripe egg pod of the Boffian manta, a huge underwater flying-carpet of a creature the size of a city block. This odd coincidence was our bad luck for a very simple reason: the ripe egg pod of the Boffian manta is the favorite food of the Nagung.
And it was a Nagung, of course, that I had seen heading our way with the joy of a growth-spurting teenager finding one last potato chip in an otherwise empty bag. A Nagung is a quarter-mile tube with a round mouth like the back of cat, except for a lot of curved slavering fangs. This particular one had no trouble neatly ingesting us whole. It simply sucked us in,
smoothly. Almost gently. Happily, it didn't chew.
"Well this is new," Ned sulked. “Once again you surprise me, Court. How novel. We're going to be digested."
It was very dark inside the Nagung, with only a dim red glow from the control panel. Now and then something alarmingly slimy would press up against the viewports.
Trina shot a single black look at me, then crossed her arms and turned away. A protuberance like a giant tongue, but festooned with tiny waving appendages, slathered across her port. She made a rude gesture at it. It didn't seem to care.
The lifeboat began to bob and weave as the Nagung accelerated, no doubt in search of fresh victims.
"Yes, probably," I agreed. In some ways - in most ways, in fact - it was amazing that we had made it this far. We had been doomed from the start, of course - the Etzans were onto us from the beginning, and the loss of the Blue Bean had sealed our fates as surely as if we had stepped off a cliff. Since then we simply had been waiting for the end.
With that thought, I reached out for Trina's end. She slapped my hand away; our imminent digestion was having different effects on us.
"Can't you do something?" she hissed. “We do have a planet to save!"
Oh, now she was concerned about dear old Earth, I noted caustically.
"I've always been concerned. In space, we had hours. Here, we have only minutes. At least being digested won't take long. Although it looks highly unpleasant."
Minutes? "What are you talking about?"
"Diz, dear. Look." She pointed at the port. It was wavy and etched; half of it was gone. It was made of clearsteel, a chemical cousin of the alloy of the hull. And it was being dissolved away like candy in water. Which meant the whole hull was quickly melting away.
"Ug," I muttered. We had minutes at best. I rustled through the tiny package of supplies we had managed to bring: Nothing of any use. I turned once more that now-dry well, the control panel. You'd think I was expecting new switches and levers to have sprouted, but I wasn't, and none had. The same pitiful array dolefully greeted me. There was only one button - a deep red octagonal one - that I hadn't pushed. The label had fallen off, so on general principle I had avoided it. That's usually sound advice, especially in vehicles made by aliens. But the time for general principle seemed long past.
I pressed it. A whirring sounded.
"Now what are you doing?" Trina asked in a biting tone. The pod made a groaning, crackling sound.
A new indicator light glowed on a status panel. Dump, it glimmered, before fading away.
"Dumping," I said, wondering what I was dumping. A quick inquiry to the computer revealed that I was dumping - everything. Lifeboat fuel, coolants, waste, toxics, batteries - everything. Life support, too, I saw. Life support?
The lifepod went dark. Black. Really black. The air instantly became thicker.
"Zot," I said. Why oh why would those pesky Blutonians put such a button - unguarded, with no safety - in a lifeboat? When would you ever want to dump everything from a lifeboat? Including life support? It defied all logic. It was as crazy as, well, nipples for men. Though Trina had some interesting insights into those.
The air grew steadily fouler and thicker, and soon Trina and I began to wheeze and gasp.
"Asphyxiation," surmised a luminous Ned, now in lederhosen and purposefully acting as if he was drawing huge gulps of fresh mountain air. “Clever of you. Really. I never would have guessed. I had us pegged for drowning in Nagung bile, if it didn't dissolve us first. But once again you have surprised me."
I imagined myself making a gesture with a building-sized middle finger.
The air thickened, wrapping around us. Squeezing.
We began to bob and weave, faster and faster, up and down and up. No doubt our Nagung was closing in on some other hapless prey. The chase was long and hard - apparently the next tasty morsel wasn't happy about its fate. We jerked left, jibed right, then rose up high and crashed down hard.
"Positively Jonah-esque," Ned commented archly. “You have an unexpected flair for a literary end with both biblical and alimentary overtones."
My head hurt. I wheezed, "Didn't Jonah survive?"
"Yes, actually. But he had help from a source that is plainly not on your side."
"Uh," Trina gasped. “If you get us out of this, I'll let you have me," she grunted.
The air took on the consistency of hot stinking fetid wool, except that it wasn't quite that pleasant.
"You'd do that anyway," I groaned. More dodging and weaving, left and right, up and down, back and forth, to and fro. I wondered, academically, what was about to share the Nagung's intestine with us.
"True," she rasped.
A much higher jump up, followed by a bone-shaking impact with something. Dessert? I couldn't bring myself to glance at the port, and not only because it was too dark. I didn't want to see the new kid in town.
We stopped moving back and forth, and instead began slowly bobbing up and down, rocking as if on some oddly biological conveyor belt. Moving to some other part of the Nagung, perhaps? To an intestinal loop reserved for the dissolution of the toughest nuggets? The Nagung appendix? A strange Sargasso sea filled with the Boffian versions of boots and batteries? More bobbing. We were certainly going somewhere. Green and brown and yellow flesh licked and sucked and tickled at the viewports; we were a pill sliding through the Nagung bowels. For a moment I wished I knew more about Nagung biology. That moment didn't last, as I quickly decided I was just as happy - happier, even, given the circumstances - not knowing.
The air - a term I use loosely - was now a worthless scraping mass. On the bright side, it looked like we'd asphyxiate before we could be digested. Your future is dark indeed when that counts as a bright side.
Trina and I flopped about weakly.
"Oog," she said.
"Arg," I replied.
Then we fell back, helpless.
It turns out that there is exactly one situation in which you should dump everything from a Blutonian lifeboat. That situation is when you have been eaten by a giant Nagung. The mix of noxious chemicals, coolants, and fuels is, to a giant Nagung, highly unpalatable. Nauseating. And most importantly of all, emetic. It turns out that much of the up and down and side to side wasn't a hunt at all, but rather a spaceship-sized belly ache.
This was illustrated to us in a peristaltically graphic manner when, a moment later, we were vomited onto the surface of Boff.
CHAPTER 9. ROADTRIP
The sky was dark green. The sand was dark brown. The bog was somewhere between the two. It would have driven any self-respecting homosexual interior designer mad - there wasn't a tasteful pastel in sight. I forced myself to stop enjoying the view and kicked the emergency hatch release; gasping, we tumbled out onto the beach itself. The air wasn't exactly fresh, but had a warm, swampy odor of decay and mildew and old vegetables. It was delicious.
I grabbed our emergency packs from the lifeboat, in case our reluctant host decided that although we weren't so good the first or second time, the third might be the charm.
The Nagung lay beside the scorched, burned, battered, and digested lifeboat, heaving as pathetically as a thousand-foot carnivorous worm can heave. There was, I realized, some fairly noxious stuff in the lifeboat's system. Even for a Nagung. Its three grapefruit-sized eyes watched us, suspiciously and dully considering our edibility. Then, with a giant wet sigh that dampened us both, it slithered backwards into the swamp, leaving a huge furrow. Wriggly yellow forms appeared in the wall of the cavity. Drillers. Voracious, but slow, parasites. I took Trina's hand and led her away quickly.
"Well," I said as brightly as I could. “Welcome to Boff."
Her eyes flashed. “Go to-" She looked around, quickly at first, then more slowly. “Nevermind. It seems we've already arrived precisely there."
"Perhaps. But now that I've gotten us to Boff, from here on you shall lead and I shall follow. Where to, master? I await your beneficent command."
She grabbed my cheek and
twisted. Hard.
"Ouch!"
"Diz, dear, I'll handle the Time Oscillator. You are supposed to get us to it. I don't see it anywhere nearby."
"The Time Oscillator is right over that way." I pointed at the featureless brown horizon. The lock on my cheek released.
She looked but saw nothing but endless brown. Her eyes, when they returned to me, radiated a familiar combination of suspicion and hostility. “Right over where?"
"That way. Two thousand kilometers or so. In the metropolis of Gastro."
"Two thousand kilometers?" She giggled, but not out of good humor. “Two thousand kilometers? Two? Thousand?" She took a threatening step forward.
I took a hasty step back. “We were supposed to land nearby there. But as you know, unforeseen circumstances blah blah blah."
"I hadn't forgotten. I doubt I ever will."
"Fear not. I happen to have an idea," I lied. Then, suddenly and unaccountably, one popped into my head. “You see, you're forgetting that the Bog of Boff is a major tourist attraction. They come by the bushel just to see this." I waved my arms at our green and brown swampy surroundings, a gesture that in other circumstances would have said, Someday, son, all this will be yours. “Marvelous, isn't it," I finished.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
I took her arm and ushered her around a low bright brown hillside. As we rounded it we saw, below, a huge hoverbus huffing to a halt. A herd of Boffs swarmed off to gaze with awe at the cesspool that was their planet's greatest natural wonder. They looked exactly like a herd of mobile giant asparagus: tapering green cones, eight feet tall and wrapped in overlapping sheaves which hid their various tentacles and razor-scythes, long wicked sabers grown from the Boff version of bone. They were complete xenophobes, and reserved a special hatred for humanoids in general and Earthers in particular. Earth agents had standing orders to engage them only from a distance; hand-to-bonesaber combat was always disastrous for the primate.
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