José Gómez - Super Extra Grande

But the main thing is that now I’ve blasted a way clear through for my Beagle .

I drive on, a little worried to find my path closing up this fast behind me.

Aftershocks rumble through the protoplasm. Maybe the explosions were directional, but Cosita must be asking itself what’s going on. I don’t think it comes down with digestive ailments very often.

But over there, at last, I see the digestive vacuole where my old assistants are trapped. One last little push with all engines blasting, and I punch through the membrane…

Well, that wasn’t so hard, after all.

I’m inside now.

Shit, what if I didn’t get here in time…

Cosita’s digestive enzymes are stronger than we thought. Or else laketons find the carbon-reinforced germanium foam in Juhungan bioships more tempting than we’d figured.

I can barely recognize the ship’s original form, it’s so deteriorated. Whole chunks are gone. The outer shell isn’t a shadow of its former self. And forget about it being hermetically sealed.

I gulp. Did Enti and An manage to…?

They did; there they are, alive and kicking. They must have detected me the moment I blasted my way through. They waddle over in their ultraprotective suits, which fortunately aren’t organic. The suits are too heavy to swim in, as I should have expected. At least they can still walk, leaning against the vacuole membrane for support.

I open the airlock—and they’re inside. A quick decontamination cycle, off with the suits, which are a little deteriorated after all—this vacuole is pure acid—and then…

I’m no fan of gratuitous pathos, so I won’t linger over a description of the scene that comes next: how they crawl and drag themselves into the cabin, how they hug me (An-Mhaly rubs her six pectoral protuberances all over me, and I don’t object), how they kiss me, cry, accuse each other, accuse their bosses, their subordinates, Cosita, the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee, and the universe itself.

The important thing is, they’re both unharmed, though pretty shaken up.

But no time for gushing; we’ve got to get out of here.

This second.

First, out of the vacuole—because even Beagle ’s theoretically inert metal casing is under attack from the aggressive enzymes, and suffering for it. And it’s made from a smart alloy that can’t regenerate at all, unlike living tissue, unfortunately.

A short engine pulse—and we’re out.

The bad thing is that now, according to the radar densimeter, there aren’t any gel-phase currents within several kilometers of here.

Am I going to have to use more missiles? I never found brute force very convincing as a solution to all my problems. Besides, it would take too many…

I explain things to my two new passengers, since they always say three heads are better than one… and An-Mhaly comes up with the idea that might save us: Why worry about extracting yourself from a place when it’s easy enough to get yourself kicked out?

All we have to do is make ourselves so undesirable and uncomfortable that Cosita expels us of its own accord.

Seconds later, I discharge all the salt I have left, together with two tons of colchicine (an eighty-percent concentration), into the cytoplasm around Beagle .

I knew it would come in handy.

It’s like pouring gasoline onto an anthill and setting it afire.

Cosita writhes in pain. But can this giant really feel pain?

Then, in less time than it takes to tell the story, we’re encased in an excretory vacuole, and three minutes later we’re expelled.

Hurray for the instinct of self-preservation.

Free at last!

It was practically child’s play.

The rest of the rescue, including our return to orbit via the nanotube cables suspended from the Juhungan ships, is mere routine, little more than retracing my steps. Though to lift us in this gravity, the heroic Beagle has to give every remaining drop of its strength.

Hard to believe, but from the time Gardf-Mhaly first contacted me to the moment she and her milk cousin embraced (back-to-back, as is their people’s bizarre custom), only sixteen hours have passed.

And just thirty-two hours passed from the moment the human and the Cetian fell into Cosita’s alimentary vacuole to when they were freed.

I dare anybody to do it better—or faster.

All’s well that ends well, as somebody once said.

Enti Kmusa and An-Mhaly returned home, unharmed and on time, and no one guessed why they had taken so long or what they’d been up to in the meantime. The super-duper-top-secret negotiations between Cetians and Olduvailans remained under wraps.

The human, Cetian, and Juhungan generals and Coordinators breathed a sigh of relief.

And, as they had all hoped, after the two negotiators reached a fair (and ultraconfidential) solution to the New Olduvai/Canaan/Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan disagreement, hostilities ceased.

The fifty-five thousand illegal colonizers remaining on Canaan, feeling undefeated, agreed to relocate to the second planet of Theta Muscae. Not as green or as fertile as New Olduvaila, but at least nobody else had ever claimed it before.

They named it Mvambaland. And who did they unanimously elect president but Enti Kmusa. That didn’t even take me by surprise.

The Cetians finally occupied Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan. Their Assimilation master was An-Mhaly, whose chief adviser was her milk cousin, Coordinator Gardf.

General Junichiro Kurchatov tried to lecture me about my unauthorized use of the missiles, but since nobody asks a winner for receipts… Let’s just say, they took the cost of the seventeen bunker-buster missiles out of what they paid me for “valuable services rendered.”

Which added up to quite a discount, but still, twelve million solaria (“we threw un pequeño incentivo for you to mantenerlo todo hush-hush,” said Admiral William Hurtado) is enough money that I wasn’t going to start complaining about a minor though fundamentally unfair tax.

On the other hand, good thing I didn’t use the thermonuclear warheads or I’d still be paying for them.

Truth is, I wasn’t expecting medals or public recognition (a secret’s a secret), but what I liked least about the whole deal was not being able to talk about it with anyone.

Not with my parents, who, for their part, each kept on grumbling that I’d wasted my life mucking through slime and mucilage.

Not with the eight veterinarian biologists from different species who had “observed” the whole rescue mission from their four observation vessels orbiting Brobdingnag.

Not even with Narbuk. To my endless surprise, and I suspect also to the amazement of the ecologists on Abyssalia, my secretary-assistant had dealt with the out-of-season spawning of the grendels with consummate skill. And entirely on his own! Though he never came within two kilometers of any of the gigantic crustaceans, it took him no more than twenty-six hours to analyze the water and discover the biochemical pollutant that, even in extremely diluted concentrations, was disrupting the critters’ life cycle.

How smug he was when he told me!

If he only knew…

As a reward for his splendid independent performance, I prepared a dish of fried eggplant with seasoned tomatoes and capers. And he loved it.

After wolfing down his second helping, the impudent little fellow hinted he’d like to set himself up on his own as a second “Veterinarian to the Giants.”

Fine by me, I told him. A little competition lends spice to life.

But he shouldn’t even dream of me lending him the money to get his business started.

And the slogan was all my idea.

Fair’s fair, but too much is too much. Love your neighbor as yourself, sure—but not more than yourself.