Sunday November 24, 2013
Book 14: Broken Wind — Part III: Exhalation and Exit Strategies

Transcript

NARRATOR: Chemistry before "roughing it..."

EBBY: We are not going to be eating this.

MURTAUGH: What if we cook it really well?

EBBY: That will make things immeasurably worse, depending on how you like your aluminum.

EBBY: This monster is full of metals ranging from indigestible to toxic, and in off-the-chart concentrations.

The bones are almost 70% metallic glasses, and the musculature is riddled with strands of the stuff.

EBBY: If you wanted to build a monster that could grow to be the size of a city block, this is definitely the chemistry to use.

MURTAUGH: I don't think I'd make it violently allergic to its own digestive juices.

EBBY: Good point.  We're looking at the inedible result of what happens when intelligent design is peppered with random idiocy.

MURTAUGH: Mad science?

EBBY: Hah!  Unsupervised for ten thousand lifetimes in a lab the size of a planet.

MURTAUGH: Maybe that's exactly what we're looking at... artificial organisms that have been running amok for millions of years.

EBBY: Oh, yeah.  And we've got an example of that right here.  It's what Sergeant Schlock is.

SCHLOCK: I have not been running amok.

SCHLOCK: Okay, but not for that long.