The interior of the LUCA was a daunting environment. A school of
Blue Whales might well have felt at home were the space to be
flooded and plentifully supplied with krill. There was all the room in
the Solar System for lunge feeding (a tactic which, I regret to say, I
have observed amongst colleagues at even quite formal occasions
such as those memorable Palace Garden Parties which now seemed
so very long ago and were indeed so very far away). But to parallel
my presence with that of a mouse in Westminster Abbey is to
understate my dimensional relationship with my surroundings by at
least two orders of magnitude. First think of an elephant. Then situate
the imaginary elephant within the confines of Westminster Abbey ,
where the beast will, admittedly, appear to outsize hassocks and
pews and many of the monuments, but then expand the Abbey, or
Collegiate Church, to the point at which the elephant, though still
remaining a proboscidean, has in relation to the hassocks and pews,
the dimensions of a mouse. This process of diminishment I was to
encounter and endure at levels wholly unprecedented in the world of
freelance journalism.
I remained at the console, my hands planted solidly on its slightly
yielding surface, thinking Terra and hoping that my Italian would not
be overtaxed. Before me was spread the widening field of the Ocean
Moon with its bands and dilated cracks, its lenticulae and chaos
regions. Now that we were leaving I felt the sorrow of departure for
never more would I set foot on Europa's thin crust of ice and watch a
visual recording, projected onto the sheer wall of a fragmented ice
raft, of a monarch doing the tango to a bagpipe band, and yet were I
to have been marooned there, as threatened, no horror could have
equalled the experience.
Vuoi tenere le portachiavi?
The voice seemed to come from the wall, and when I failed to
respond, the question was repeated, this time with a slight edge as if
much depended on my answer.
Certo! I responded, trying to sound as if I knew what I was doing. The
floor of the craft had become transparent and the field of vision so
extended that Pestit and I seemed to stand in air with only the solid
blue bank of glass before us. The panorama was breathtaking. We
were travelling at an altitude of 300 metres relative to the surface of
the planet-moon at a speed that enabled us to observe the
topography at our leisure without being subjected to overextended
scrutiny of individual features. This was clearly a dynamic world, and
