Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain fv-2

by Isaac Asimov

  Morrison spread out his arms. "I can't answer that. I am a private citizen and do not represent my nation."

  "As a private citizen you can help us, knowing that you will not be harming your own country."

  "I can't possibly know such a thing, since I only have your word for it and I don't believe you represent your nation any more than I represent mine. But all this is irrelevant, Natalya. Even if I wanted to, how on Earth can I help you make miniaturization practical, when I know nothing about the subject?"

  "Be patient. In a while we will have lunch. Dezhnev and Kaliinin will be through with the deminiaturization of Katinka by then and will join us, together with one other whom you must meet. Then, after lunch, I will take you to see Shapirov."

  "I'm not sure about that, Natalya. You told me just a while ago that it would be dangerous for me to meet anyone who really understood miniaturization. I might learn too much and this might raise problems with my return to the United States. Why, then, should I risk seeing Shapirov?"

  Boranova said sadly, "Shapirov is an exception. I promise you that you will understand this when you see him - and you will also understand why we must turn to you."

  "That," said Morrison with all the conviction with which he had lately proclaimed the impossibility of miniaturization, "I will never understand."

  20.

  Lunch was in a well-lit room, for strips of the walls, together with the entire ceiling, were electroluminescent. Boranova had pointed it out with obvious pride and Morrison had refrained from making invidious comparisons with the United States, where electroluminescence was widespread.

  Nor did he express his amusement over the fact that despite the electroluminescence there was a small but ornate chandelier centered in the ceiling. Its bulbs contributed nothing to the light, but it undoubtedly made the room seem less antiseptic.

  As Boranova had predicted, a fifth person had joined them and Morrison was introduced to someone named Yuri Konev. "A neurophysicist like yourself, Albert," said Boranova.

  Konev, who was darkly handsome and who seemed to be in his middle thirties, had an air of almost gawky youth about himself. He shook hands with wary curiosity and said, "I am most pleased to meet you," in creditable English, spoken with a distinct American accent.

  "You have been in the United States, I imagine," said Morrison, also in English.

  "I spent two years doing graduate work at Harvard University. It gave me a splendid opportunity to practice my English."

  "Nevertheless," said Boranova in Russian, "Dr. Albert Morrison does very well in our language, Yuri, and we must give him a chance to practice it here in our country."

  "Of course," said Konev in Russian.

  Morrison had, indeed, almost forgotten that he was underground. There were no windows in the room, but that was common enough in large office buildings even aboveground.

  The meal was not an ebullient one. Arkady Dezhnev ate with silent concentration and Sophia Kaliinin seemed abstracted. She glanced occasionally at Morrison, but ignored Konev completely. Boranova watched everyone, but said very little. She seemed content to leave the floor to Konev.

  Konev said, "Dr. Morrison, I must tell you that I have followed your work carefully."

  Morrison, who had been eating the thick cabbage soup appreciatively, looked up with a quick smile. This was the first reference to his work, rather than to their work, since he had arrived in the Soviet Union.

  "Thank you for your interest, but Natalya and Arkady call me Albert and I will have difficulty in responding to different names. Let us all be on a first-name basis for the brief time that remains before I am returned to my own land."

  "Help us," said Boranova in a low voice, "and it will indeed be a brief time."

  "No conditions," said Morrison in an equally low tone. "I wish to leave."

  Konev raised his voice, as though to force the conversation back into the track he had chosen. "But I must admit, Albert, that I have been unable to duplicate your observations."

  Morrison's lips tightened. "I have had this complaint from neurophysicists in the United States."

  "Now, why should this be? Academician Shapirov is greatly intrigued by your theories and maintains that you are probably correct, at least in part."

  "Ah, but Shapirov isn't a neurophysicist, is he?"

  "No, he's not, but he has an extraordinary feel for what is correct. I have never known him to say, 'It seems to me that this must be right,' in which whatever he is discussing hasn't proved to be right - at least in part. He says you are probably on the road to establishing an interesting relay station."

  "A relay station? I don't know what he means by that."

  "It's what he said once in my hearing. Some private thought of his own, no doubt." He cast a penetrating glance at Morrison, as though waiting for an explanation of the remark.

  Morrison simply shrugged it away. "What I have done," he said, "is to establish a new kind of analysis of the cephalic waves originating in the brain and to have narrowed the search for a specific network within the brain devoted to creative thought."

  "There you may be a little overoptimistic, Albert. I have not satisfied myself that this network of yours really exists."

  "My results mark it out quite clearly."

  "In dogs and monkeys. It is uncertain how far we can extrapolate such information to the much more complex structure of the human brain."

  "I admit I haven't worked with the human brain anatomically, but I have analyzed human brain waves carefully and those results are at least consistent with my creative structure hypothesis."

  "This is what I haven't been able to duplicate and what American researchers may not have been able to duplicate, either."

  Again Morrison shrugged. "Adequate brain wave analysis is, at best, a monumentally difficult thing at the quintenary level and no one else has given the years to the problem that I have."

  "Or possesses the particular computerized equipment. You have designed your own program for the purpose of brain wave analysis, haven't you?"

  "Yes, I have."

  "And described it in the literature?"

  "Certainly. If I achieved results with an undescribed program, they would be worth nothing. Who could confirm my results, lacking an equivalent computer program?"

  "Yet I have heard, at the International Neurophysical Conference in Brussels last year, that you are continually modifying your program and complaining that the lack of confirmation stems from the use of insufficiently complex programming incapable of Fourier analysis to the proper degree of sensitivity."

  "No, Yuri, that is false. Entirely false. I have modified my program from time to time, but I have carefully described each modification in Computer Technology. I have tried to publish the data in The American Journal of Neurophysics, but they haven't accepted my papers these last few years. If others confine their reading to the AJN and don't keep up with relevant literature elsewhere, that is not my fault."

  "And yet -" Konev paused and frowned in what seemed to be uncertain thought. "I don't know if I ought to say this because it may be something else that will antagonize you."

  "Go ahead. I have, in these last few years, learned to accept all kinds of remarks-hostile, sarcastic, and - worst of all - pitying. I am quite hardened to it. - This is good chicken Kiev, by the way."

  "This is a guest meal," murmured Kaliinin, almost under her breath. "Too buttery - bad for the figure."

  "Hah," said Dezhnev loudly. "Bad for the figure. That is an American remark that makes no sense in Russian. My father always said, 'The body knows what it needs. That's why some things taste good.'"

  Kaliinin closed her eyes in quite obvious distaste. "A recipe for suicide," she said.

  Morrison noticed that Konev did not look at the young woman during this bit of byplay. Not at all.

  He said, "You were saying, Yuri? About something that might antagonize me, you thought?"

  Konev said, "Well, then, is it true, Albert, or not true t
hat you actually gave your program to a colleague and that, using it in your computer, he was still unable to duplicate your results?"

  "That's true," said Morrison. "At least my colleague, an able enough man, said he could not duplicate my results."

  "Do you suspect he was lying?"

  "No. Not really. It's just that the observations are so delicate that to attempt them while certain of failure may well lead, it seems to me, to failure."

  "Might one not argue the other way around, Albert, and say that your certainty of success leads you to imagine success?"

  "Possibly," said Morrison. "That has been pointed out to me several times in the past. But I don't think so."

  "One more rumor," said Konev. "This I truly hate to repeat, but it seems so important. Is it true that you have claimed that in your analysis of brain waves you have occasionally sensed actual thoughts?"

  Morrison shook his head vigorously. "I have never made such a claim in print. I have said to a colleague, once or twice, that in concentrating on the brain wave analysis there are occasionally times when I seem to find thoughts invading my mind. I have no way of telling whether the thoughts are entirely mine or whether my own brain waves resonate to those of the subject."

  "Is such a resonance conceivable?"

  "I suppose so. The brain waves produce tiny fluctuating electromagnetic fields."

  "Ah! It is this, I suppose, that made Academician Shapirov make that remark about a relay station. Brain waves are always producing fluctuating electromagnetic fields - with or without analysis. You don't resonate - if resonance is what it is - to the thoughts of someone in your presence, no matter how intensely he may be thinking. The resonance takes place only when you are busily studying the brain waves with your programmed computer. It presumably acts as a relay station, magnifying or intensifying the brain waves of the subject and projecting them into your mind."

  "I have no evidence for that except for an occasional fugitive impression. That's not enough."

  "It might be. The human brain is far more complex than any other equivalent piece of matter we know of."

  "What about dolphins?" said Dezhnev, his mouth full.

  "An exploded view," said Konev at once. "They're intelligent, but their brains are devoted too entirely to the minutiae of swimming to allow enough room for abstract thought on the human scale."

  "I have never studied dolphins," said Morrison indifferently.

  "Ignore the dolphins," said Konev impatiently. "Just concentrate on the fact that your computer, properly programmed, may act as a relay station, passing thoughts from the mind of the subject you are studying to your own mind. If that is so, Albert, we need you and no other person in the world."

  Morrison said, frowning and pushing his chair away from the table, "Even if I can pick up thoughts by way of my computer - a claim I have never made and which, in fact, I deny - what can that possibly have to do with miniaturization?"

  Boranova rose and looked at her watch. "It is time," she said. "Let us go and see Shapirov now."

  Morrison said, "What he says will make no difference to me."

  "You will find," said Boranova with a hint of steel in her voice, "that he will say nothing - but will be utterly convincing just the same."

  21.

  Morrison had kept his temper well so far. The Soviets were, after all, treating him as a guest and if he could overlook the small matter of his being carried off by force, he had little of which to complain.

  But what were they getting at? One by one, Boranova had introduced him to others - first Dezhnev, then Kaliinin, then Konev - for reasons he had not penetrated. Over and over, Boranova had hinted of his usefulness without actually saying what it might be. Now Konev talked of it and was equally uncommunicative.

  And now they were to see Shapirov. Clearly this had to be a climax of sorts. From the first mention of him by Boranova at the convention two days ago, Shapirov had seemed to hover over the whole matter like a thickening fog. It was he who had worked out the miniaturization process, he who seemed to detect a connection between Planck's constant and the speed of light, he who seemed to value Morrison's neurophysical theories, and he who made the remark about the computer as relay station that had apparently set off Konev's conviction that Morrison - and only Morrison - could help them.

  It remained for Morrison, now, to resist any blandishments or arguments that Shapirov could present. If Morrison insisted that he would not help them, what would they do when all the blandishments and arguments had failed?

  Crude threat of force - or torture?

  Brainwashing?

  Morrison quailed. He dared not put his refusal on the basis that he would not. He would have to persuade them that he could not. Surely that was a reasonable position on which to take his stand. What could neurophysics - and a dubious, unaccepted bit of neurophysical work at that - have to do with miniaturization?

  But why didn't they see that for themselves? Why did they all act as though it were conceivable that a person like himself, who had never as much as thought of miniaturization until some forty-eight hours before, could do something for them - them, the only experts in the field - that they could not do for themselves?

  It was a rather lengthy walk along corridors and, lost in his own uncomfortable thoughts, Morrison did not notice that they were fewer in number than he had thought.

  He said to Boranova suddenly, "Where are the others?"

  She said, "They have work to do. We do not have forever to do what we must, you know."

  Morrison shook his head. Chatty, they were not. None of them seemed to scatter information. Always close-lipped. A long-standing Soviet habit, perhaps - or something that was ground into them through their work on a secret project in which even the scientists dared not step outside the narrow limits of their immediate work.

  Were they coming to him as a storybook American generalist? Nothing he had ever done, surely, would give anyone that impression. As a matter of fact, he was himself a narrow specialist, knowing virtually nothing outside of neurophysics. - This was a worsening disease of modern science, he thought.

  They had entered another elevator, something he had scarcely bothered to notice, and they were now on another level. He looked around him and recognized characteristics that seemed to transcend national differences.

  "Are we in a medical wing?" he asked.

  "A hospital," said Boranova. "The Grotto is a self-contained scientific complex."

  "And why are we here? Am I -" He stopped suddenly, as the horror of the thought smote him. Was he to be drugged or, by some other medical means, made more compliant?

  Boranova had walked on for a moment, then stopped, looked back, and came toward him, saying snappishly, "Now what is frightening you?"

  Morrison felt ashamed. Were his facial expressions that transparent? "Nothing is frightening me," he grumbled. "I am simply tired of walking aimlessly."

  "What makes you think we are walking aimlessly? I said we were going to see Pyotor Shapirov. We are walking toward him now. - Come, we have only a few steps left."

  They turned a corner and Boranova beckoned him to a window.

  He stepped to her side and looked in. It was a room and there were a number of people present. There were four beds, but only one was occupied and it was surrounded by equipment that he did not recognize. There were tubes and glassware extending toward the bed and Morrison counted a dozen functionaries, who might be doctors, nurses, or medical technicians.

  Boranova said, "There is Academician Shapirov."

  "Which one?" said Morrison, his eyes traveling from one of the figures to the other and finding no one who seemed similar in appearance to the scientist he recalled haVing met once.

  "In the bed."

  "In the bed? He's ill, then?"

  "Worse than ill. He is in a coma. He has been in a coma for over a month and we strongly suspect it is an irreversible state."

  "I'm terribly sorry to hear that. I presume that is why you r
eferred to him in the past tense before lunch."

  "Yes, the Shapirov we know is in the past tense, unless -"

  "Unless he recovers? But you just said the coma is probably irreversible."

  "That's true. But neither is he brain-dead. The brain is damaged certainly or he wouldn't be in a coma, but it is not dead and Konev, who has followed your work closely, thinks that some of his thinking network is still intact."

  "Ah," said Morrison, the light breaking. "I begin to understand. Why didn't you explain this to begin with? If you had wanted to consult me on such a matter and had explained, I might have been willing to come here with you voluntarily. Yet, on the other hand, if I were to study his cerebral functioning and tell you, 'Yes, Yuri Konev is right,' then what good will that do you?"

  "That will do us no good at all. You don't yet begin to understand, you see, and I can't explain exactly what it is I want until you understand the problem. Do you quite realize what is buried there in the still-living portions of Shapirov's brain?"

  "His thoughts, I suppose."

  "Specifically, his thoughts of the interconnection of Planck's constant and the speed of light. His thoughts of a method for making miniaturization and deminiaturization rapid, low-energy, and practical. With those thoughts, we give humanity a technique that will revolutionize science and technology - and society - more than anything since the invention of the transistor. Perhaps more than anything since the discovery of fire. Who can tell?"

  "Are you sure you're not being overdramatic?"

  "No, Albert. Does it occur to you that if miniaturization can be tied in with a vast acceleration of the speed of light, a spaceship, if sufficiently miniaturized, can be sent to anywhere in the Universe at many times the ordinary speed of light. We won't need faster-than-light travel. Light will travel fast enough for us. And we won't need antigravity, for a miniaturized ship will have close to zero mass."