by Yoss
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 kilom
eters 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.
Who said it was impossible? I’ve found the needle in the haystack.
Or at least I have a rough idea of where in the haystack it is.
Because localizing a few dozen kilos of metal, which is to say, all the magnetic material contained in the Juhungan bioship where Enti Kmusa and An-Mhaly are trapped, is still very different from being able to get there.
According to this ultrasensitive instrument, the girls and their ship are barely three hundred meters from here—but they might as well be in another galaxy. Between me and them lies nothing but sol-phase cytoplasm. And I’ve already learned how hard it is to force my way through that living flan.
For a second, despair overcomes me; I’m still drawing closer, and less than half a minute from now I’ll be as close as I can get to where they are, after which I’ll start moving away…
With them so close, could I really resign myself to not being able to…?
No way.
I’m not moving from this spot, to start with.
I deploy an anchor, a sort of metal claw on one end of a cable, which shoots out and sinks deep into the sol. It’ll stop me from moving till I can figure out how to get to Enti and An, who are now barely a hundred fifty meters from me…
Till I think of something…
It’s unfair. Have I swum so far just to drown here by the shore? Why won’t some brilliant idea pop into my head right now? Why can’t I be a holoseries hero, like the ones that always killed me even though they were so much smaller and weaker than me when I played giants on Anima Mundi? One of those characters who grow when the going gets tough?
I can’t crash into the sol protoplasm barrier using Beagle as a battering ram. I’d hardly get anywhere, and the crash alone could break my neck. If it isn’t broken already, I mean.
And I don’t have enough salt left to liquefy this much sol-phase cytoplasm by osmosis. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of the stuff.
I look desperately at the distance gauge; it’s showing 156 meters now… and growing.
Shit. I’m fuming. It’s enough to make you pull out a pistol and shoot yourself.
If I only had one…
Wait a sec!
That’s it!
A pistol.
I do have a pistol, and it’s a HUGE one.
Of course I didn’t bring any personal weapons aboard, whether sonic, projectile, or laser. What could I have done with one? Shoot Cosita? Blow out my brains before I died of asphyxiation or hunger if I got trapped in its cytoplasm?
We veterinarian biologists rarely fire anything but anesthetizing dart guns. Though, given my specialty, I’ve sometimes been tempted to use anesthetizing cannons.
But as it happens, Beagle is all one enormous gun—and I suspect it’s well loaded.
Who knows, but I won’t end up thanking that stuck-up Kurchatov for his intransigent militarism. And I’ll owe him one, precisely for not allowing me to remove the missiles from the magazines.
I just hope I’m able to fire them.
Let’s see…
On-board computer, what munitions am I carrying?
DATA UNAVAILABLE. TO UNLOCK OPERATIVE CAPABILITIES OF ON-BOARD WEAPON SYSTEMS, PLEASE INPUT PERSONAL PASSWORD OF GENERAL JUNICHIRO KURCHATOV. AWAITING INPUT.
Shit and triple shit. I’m sitting inside a gun loaded with God knows what, I don’t know where the safety is… and the computer has automatically defaulted to “don’t touch me unless you’re an officer” mode, blocking me from pulling the trigger.
Twelve characters? It could be anything… But I have to try. Try thinking like them. Kurchatov. Military. He once told me that Igor Kurchatov was the father of the Russian atomic bomb. Fix it up a little, and maybe…
Atomicbomber.
PASSWORD NOT RECOGNIZED.
No, it’s not going to be easy, like in a holoseries. But, twelve characters?
What if I misjudged him? What if all the disdain I thought he was showing for me was just envy and nostalgia for the good old times we had as students partying at Anima Mundi?
Let’s see, I’ll try it. If it’s a reference to veterinarian biology, what password would my old party buddy Juni Tacho pick? Ecology? Evolution? Seven and nine letters, too short. Cellularbiology? Fifteen, too long. What about my name? How ironic would that be… JanAmosSangan… No, could have worked, but it’s thirteen characters. Some professor, maybe—Argol Swendal? With no space it’s twelve letters. But forget it, Kurchatov hated symbolic logic, had a tutor assigned to help him both semesters. Raul Pineda? No, we only had classes with him in the fifth year, so Tacho never met him, and his name only has eleven characters even with the space. Besides, Juni Tacho didn’t bother going to classes very often; he was too busy hanging out in bars, cantinas, and other dives…
Heh.
Bars, cantinas, and dives. Could be. And it has exactly twelve letters.
But it’s so unserious. Well, it’s not like we were all that serious at Anima Mundi.
Besides, I imagine I’ll get three chances to guess the password.
I’m sure this can’t be right, either. In the holoseries, the hero always guesses it on the final attempt.
But before I get to my third try, I have to do my second.
Oceanography.
PASSWORD ACCEPTED. WELCOME ABOARD, GENERAL KURCHATOV.
ITEMIZING MUNITIONS CAPABILITIES: 46 MISSILES. 8 THERMONUCLEAR WARHEADS (20 KILOTONS EACH). 16 THERMOBARIC WARHEADS. 22 DIRECTIONAL HIGH-IMPACT BUNKER BUSTERS. ALL READY FOR USE. DO YOU WISH TO LOAD ANY?
A gun? Nope: Beagle is a fucking arsenal. I can’t believe it. Eight thermonuclear warheads? 160 kilotons? They weren’t just planning to get rid of me and Enti and An if things went downhill… I doubt even Cosita would survive an explosion of that magnitude going off inside its guts. They could have blown a hole in the planet Brobdingnag itself. How ridiculous.
Military brass. Always ready to blow everything up, obsessed with the power of destruction. It must have driven them crazy to find creatures like laketons in the galaxy that would just laugh at all their weaponry!
Naturally, sooner or later they’d want to prove who’s who.
But now it’s me with my finger on the trigger. Twenty-two “directional high-impact bunker busters”? Let’s see if they can open a path for me through… exactly 159 meters of sol-phase cytoplasm.
Shamelessly impersonating Kurchatov, I set the target coordinates, order the missile launch, and there goes the first one… And I’m still acting as thoughtlessly as before. Will the missile even work in liquid?
Turns out it does. It uses gas jets for propulsion, sending it off amazingly fast. Now I just need an explosion.
BOOOOOM.
It’s made a hole almost ten meters deep. I launch the second. BOOOOOM. And the third. BOOOOOM. What if I launch two at once? BOOOOOMBOOOOOM…
They don’t make quite as spectacular an explosion when they go off together; better space them out a little bit.
BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM…
Seventeen missiles later, whoever said that brute force never solved anything? Handled properly, it can perform miracles.
