I’m starting to get a bad feeling. A suspicion, really.

What if Taumoeba can, for lack of a better description, work their way around the molecules of xenonite? What if there’s no hole at all?

We tend to think of solid materials as magical barriers. But at the molecular scale they’re not. They’re strands of molecules or lattices of atoms or both. When you get down to the teeny, tiny realm, solid objects are more like thick jungles than brick walls.

I can work my way through a jungle, no problem. I may have to climb over bushes, weave around trees, and duck under branches, but I can make it.

Imagine a thousand tennis-ball launchers at the edge of that jungle aimed in random directions. How deep into the jungle will the tennis balls get? Most of them won’t get past the first few trees. Some may get lucky bounces and go a little deeper in. Fewer still may get multiple lucky bounces. But pretty soon, even the luckiest tennis ball runs out of energy.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any tennis balls 50 feet into that jungle. Now, let’s say it’s a mile wide. I can make it to the other side, but there’s just no chance a tennis ball can.

That’s the difference between Taumoeba and nitrogen. The nitrogen is just moving in a line and bouncing off stuff like a tennis ball. It’s inert. But Taumoeba is like me. It has stimulus-response capabilities. It senses its environment and takes directed action based on that sensory input. We already know it can find Astrophage and move toward it. It definitely has senses. But nitrogen atoms are ruled by entropy. They won’t “exert effort” to do anything. I can walk uphill. But a tennis ball can only roll so far before it rolls back down.

That all seems really weird. How could Taumoeba, from the planet Adrian, know how to carefully navigate its way through xenonite, a technological invention from the planet Erid? It does not make sense.

Life-forms don’t evolve traits for no reason. Taumoeba lives in the upper atmosphere. Why would it develop the ability to work its way through dense molecular structures? What evolutionary reason could there be to—

I drop my burrito.

I know the answer. I don’t want to admit it to myself. But I know the answer.

I go back to the lab and perform a nerve-wracking experiment. The experiment itself isn’t nerve-wracking. I’m just worried that the results will be what I expect.

I still have Rocky’s AstroTorch. It’s the only thing on the ship that can get hot enough to dissociate xenonite. There’s plenty of xenonite to be had throughout the ship, thanks to Rocky’s tunnel system. I cut into the dormitory divider wall. I can only cut a little bit at a time, then I have to wait for life support to cool things back down. The AstroTorch makes a lot of heat.

In the end, I have four rough circles, each a couple of inches across.