Jarvis gazed at the fruitful planet, wondering if he'd become the Christopher Columbus of space, the discoverer of the first new world beyond Earth. Streaks of white, slivers of blue, the moderately polluted frame of the orb- not too thick, not too thin- peppered this gigantic billiards ball falling centripetally on a curve through space. All the screens on the dashboard indicated that the planet had sufficiently complex carbon molecules to sustain life. The atmospheric readings showed a modest amount of oxygen, nitrogen, traces of the noble gases, and to his surprise, an inordinate number of sulfuric compounds.
Mac, his navigator and technician, remarked how odd it was the planet looked green instead of yellow. That purest color of vegetation had to be down there. A hefty amount of volcanic activity would explain all the sulfur. But if there was so much foliage, where were the oceans to provide it rain? Both men anticipated unusual planetary processes on the hostile surface of the sphere they were descending upon.
After penetrating the rotten haze, a surface greener than they'd anticipated flooded their field of vision. It was the atmosphere that had made the surface appear yellow, for the sky looked like nothing but a ripe banana peel. They landed high in the air, on an arched branch as thick as a building. Jarvis looked out at an ocean of trees that looked to be as large as the one they were standing on. Not a mountain, lake or volcano was in sight. "No sign of intelligent life, either", said Mac. "Including you," he added, dryly.
Jarvis eyeballed his long-time technician with distaste. "We've just made one of the most important discoveries in history, and all you can do is provide a cheap shot?"
“Give me a break. You're the one who'll get remembered for this, not me."
Mac thought he came from a long line of sidekicks who felt underappreciated for doing more than their supervisors and having nothing to show for it. It was less an aggravation for him than a surrender to someone who thought he was wiser, and therefore might grant him a letter of recommendation to higher academies if his ass were kissed enough. Mac prided himself on being a master of delayed gratification: one of the hallmarks of success that he falsely believed would prove that hard work pays off in the end. Even when it became exceedingly difficult to say "Yes" whenever his boss was too lazy to do some menial task himself- usually above the novice's pay grade yet tedious enough to cause revulsion- the prospect of some future redemption fed his resilience during his tenure like a grandmother stuffing a Thanksgiving turkey.
"Don't be so hard on yourself," said Jarvis. "An asterisk next to your name is better than nothing." The casualness of this comment annoyed Mac, though he wouldn't show it. Before he could think of a reply, Jarvis saw movement in the foliage below. They quietly boarded the ship to fly down and see what it was.
As they descended upon the area, a large branch slung back and whipped itself right at their ship. Jarvis gripped the wheel, swerving left before it could make contact. "Did you see that!?", he yelled.
There were other branches coming at them, this time from above. Mac frantically derived their only option: diving under the canopy. His captain looked at him like he was mad, but the near contact of another prickly branch made his accomplice more agreeable.
Under the mega-leaves and dangling vines that looked like veins of chloroplast, they found what could only be described as a gray-green atmosphere of ungodly humidity, trapped between the canopy and one of the ugliest swamps they'd ever seen. There are axioms to universal landscapes, and the ugliness of a swamp is one of them. The travelers found no mercy here, for the trees kept attacking them, even miles apart from each other, like they were communicating en masse, trying to rid their world of an annoying gnat.
Jarvis was having quite enough of being swatted at by the limber bark, so he took the ship back up through the canopy this time, risking their lives to break free of their grasp in the sky. When a sliver of yellow sky appeared out of the density of shrub, Mac eagerly shouted, "That way! That way!". To which his impatient captain replied, "I see it, dummy."
After clearing the arboreal assault and catching their breath, they spotted a mountain range rising over the forest. Mac, for all his enthusiasm in blindly obeying the captain whenever the chance to prove his worth came, desperately wished he would heed his advice just this one time; that he'd keep them flying upward, safely away from the killer trees, to return to the fleet they'd come from. But the captain was more curious than afraid.
"Something less diabolical might be living on the other side of those mountains. I wanna give it a tryyyy," he said slowly, with a tone his navigator interpreted as not being entirely sure what he was doing. Some captains believe that instinct triumphs over reason, simply because their license to delegate means they don't have to think. Jarvis was one of those captains.
Suddenly a flood of white lay before them, out of the cradle of the mountains removed, a spilling of cream upon the rages of a wild world. A hole in the sky reveals a bird, falling to the ground at the firing of a beam. The ship rises through the clouds, avoiding what hostile forces the flatlands conceal. Ominously the holes in the clouds get bigger; the ship avoids them by following trails of the yellow cumulus intact. But the inevitable is soon upon them; the yellow of the sky gives way to the white of the land below, and soon they are fired upon without hesitation. Now the ship is in flames, their lives seem at an end. Falling, falling to the awful ground like the bird before them, serenity overthrown by a filmy sheen.
Jarvis awoke to the sound of scraping metal. Something was trying to get in. His thoughts before the crash came in a flash; they'd fallen, shot at by some hidden fiend on the ground.
Mac lay unconscious in the insufferable heat, but he was soon awoken by his commander. Through the windshield he saw a sight that turned his stomach. Militant flowers were pecking at the glass with thorny petals that looked like teeth.
"The petals are white… That’s what we were seeing!" gasped Mac, understanding the landscape had been entirely covered by them.
"Carnivorous flowers", inferred Jarvis. "An evolutionary warhead if I've ever seen one. We weren't shot down; we just fell on some thin ice. The flowers reflect sunlight to capture their prey. Ammunition: photosynthesis."
"I don't think anybody's been weeding this garden."
Mac didn't need orders to know that the only way out of the situation was by digging. The ship was nearly disabled: most systems were offline. Luckily the terraforming drill in the basement remained intact.
The ground before them was free of flowers and proved rather flexible, the soil being as soft as dry sand. It only took them an hour to penetrate the ultra-thin crust of the brittle planet. When water suddenly began bubbling up from the mantle, Jarvis cussed himself back to the cockpit, where he commenced to vandalize the control room in hopes of the electrical system powering back on.
"Boss, we're sinking fast!", came a desperate cry from below.
"Get out of there, Mac! Buckle up and prepare for the worst."
The ground gave way as the ship submerged into a murky, hazel-colored sea, smelling like decayed creatures washed up on a beach of perishables. Mac tried engaging the ship's aquatic propeller, which mercifully sprang into action, shooting the ship forward in a zipline of release.
Mac surmised, "This lovely place must be supplying that swamp with its much-needed nutrients.”
"Nutrients from Hell. We're in an underground ocean, filthy as a sewer," noted Jarvis. "It's like Godzilla's septic tank." Mac laughed for the first time since entering the planet’s atmosphere. "Look up there. The roots of those giant trees... It looks like they're swimming through the water," added Jarvis.
"This is unreal," said the mesmerized navigator.
If that wasn't odd enough, the movement of an enormous, scaly eel-looking creature came undulating through the water right in front of their ship.
"Tell Auntie Em we'll never see Kansas again," said the defeated captain.
"Oh my God", said Mac, eyeing a mutilated shark that would have made the megalodon look like a clownfish. "You just had to see what was beyond those mountains."
"Don't start. Look down there, where the ocean is bleeding. I'm sensing a rift of hydrothermal vents. Let's check it out."
"Sure, we're going to die here anyway. We may as well be the first to find out what nobody else will ever know."
As they got closer to the vents, the outline of a ridge of volcanic activity revealed itself.
"Am I dreaming?", said Jarvis.
"This explains the sulfuric atmosphere," said Mac. "I wouldn't be surprised if the whole planet is like this- a surface that floats on an ocean boiled over by the eruptions of all these volcanoes."
"Sounds about right. It must have an extremely unstable core, just like my wife."
Mac rolled his eyes. It depressed him that even in this darkest hour, his captain would still find a way to badmouth his beloved. If the captain's last words before being eaten by monstrosities were a curse upon his wife for letting him come to this godforsaken place, he wouldn't be surprised. Mac had just begun to muse on all the things he might say himself should his time come, when from out of the contorted oceanography returned the giant eel, heading straight for them.
Jarvis turned the ship around, but it was too late. The monstrosity swallowed them whole, the ship sliding down its throat for what felt like a mile.
For the second time in as many hours, Mac lost consciousness.
Horrible sounds, a turgid rumbling, the sensation of being rolled over, an aquarium of noise. The captain hysterically shouting for him to wake up, so unlike him to panic, even in dire situations. We must get out of here, we must, we must... The ship was being digested, acids corroding the mainframe like it was salt in a test tube. Wake up and fix the ship, stupid tech, wake up wake up please oh God wake the Hell up!
Then there comes a white light, soft as the fading trough of a satin sheet. It floods the frame of the ship with a blinding caress, spilling through the windows on a wave of fleece. A salubrious enchantment coddles the cabin, bringing with it the cindery sight of an angel in flight. Decadent are the prayers of atheists, who only submit that logic can save them. In the face of mortification, their transformation takes the shape of an asymptotic child, hyper-extended into the infinite, broken free of the gravity that holds them in place. Only the idea of death can show them the realization of their Source.
Mac finally woke after the captain threw a bucket of water on him. He tried once again to get the ship running before the digestive acids could penetrate their only defense from certain death. With the captain yelling at him and the walls closing in, Mac did all but give up as the prospect of a painful death sharpened his focus. That's when the brilliant flash had blinded the scene, and they'd suddenly moved at full speed. The eel had regurgitated them into the wasted waters, swam for the hollows of the deep dark seam, leaving them suspended in the discolored soup of its excrement.
Jarvis didn't believe in God. Nothing in the course of his short history had impressed him enough to believe in divine intervention. But when the door of death had unhinged itself upon him, he lost control of his rationalist doctrines, abandoning them to the wish that God really was listening to everyone's prayers, and listening now in particular.
The second cause for his immediate conversion was the angel of light that came in his most urgent hour of need. The light had led them out of the darkness, into nothing. They were suspended in a soupy void, becoming elemental. When the ship’s electronics came on, both the men realized that miracles happen every day: in the house, on the streets, even on distant planets.
Neither of them knew the real reason for their escape, but that hardly matters in the grand scheme of things. They never suspected that the eel’s acidic stomach had supplied them with some much-needed electric charge. Nor did they gather that their ship had unsettled the poor beast with such foul indigestion that the only option it had was to regurgitate the foreign object. As for the white light, who can say?
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