Last night I was somewhat startled to find a snail crawling across my bedroom wall by my open window. It had obviously crawled all the way up the wall of the house to the first floor and then found a way in through the window. I got a sheet of paper and put it in the snail’s path and as soon as it had crawled onto it (which seemed to involve lots of waggling of eyestalks) I lifted it from the wall, carried it to the front door and deposited it into the garden.
Since then I can’t stop thinking that I’ve probably just played a pivotal role in a real-life snail sf story. It’s just like one of those stories where brave astronauts travel into the unknown regions of the Frontier, encounter something ancient and vast and godlike and find themselves mysteriously transported far across space in implausibly short times, finally arriving back in their natural habitats. “It was like space just shifted with no sensation of movement, and here I was…” the snail must be saying to mission control right about now.
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