by Isaac Asimov
He grimaced slightly. He would rather hear Russian than English delivered with quite so distorted an accent.
He said sullenly in Russian, "Please speak in Russian, Sophia."
His Russian might be as distressing to her, for all he knew, as her English was to him, but he didn't care. He was here by their doing and if his shortcomings troubled them, that was their doing, too.
She shrugged slightly and said in Russian, "Certainly - if that is what pleases you."
Then she stared at him for a thoughtful while. He met that stare easily enough for, at the moment, he did not much care what he did and looking at her was not much different to him than looking at something else would have been - or looking at nothing would have been. The momentary impression of beauty that had come with her entrance had faded.
She said finally, "I understand that you have now agreed to accompany us on our venture."
"Yes, I have."
"That is good of you. We are all grateful. In all honesty, I did not think you would do so, since you are an American. I apologize."
Morrison said with a far-off touch of regret and anger, "The decision to help you was not voluntary. I was persuaded - by an expert."
"By Natalya Boranova?"
Morrison nodded.
"She is very good at persuading," said Kaliinin. "Not very kind, usually, but very good. I, too, required persuasion."
"Why you?" said Morrison.
"I had other reasons - ones that were important to me."
"Indeed? What were they?"
"But unimportant to you."
There was a short uncomfortable pause.
"Come, the task I have been given is to show you the ship," said Kaliinin.
"The ship? How long have you been planning this? Have you had time to build a ship?"
"For the specific purpose of testing Shapirov's brain from within? Of course not. It was meant for other, simpler purposes, but it is the only thing we have that we can use. - Come, Albert, Natalya thinks it will be wise for you to become acquainted with it, see it, feel it. It is possible that the down-to-earthness of the technology will reconcile you to the task."
Morrison held back. "Why must I see it now? Can't I have time to grow accustomed to the whole subject of personal miniaturization?"
"That is foolish, Albert. If you had more time to sit in your room and brood, you would have more time to feed your uncertainty. Besides, we have no time. How long do you suppose we can allow Shapirov to lie there deteriorating, with his thoughts diminishing with each moment? The ship embarks on its journey tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow morning," muttered Morrison, his throat dry. Foolishly, he looked at his watch.
"You have few enough hours, but we'll keep track of the time for you so you need not consult your watch. Tomorrow morning the ship enters a human body. And you will be on the ship."
Then, without warning, she slapped his cheek hard. She said, "Your eyes were beginning to turn upward. Were you planning to faint?"
Morrison rubbed his cheek, grimacing with pain. "I wasn't planning anything," he mumbled, "but I might have fainted without planning it. Have you no gentler way of breaking the news?"
"Have I really caught you by surprise, when you already know that you have agreed to be miniaturized and it is self-evident that we have no time?"
She gestured peremptorily, "Now come with me."
And Morrison, still rubbing his cheek and seething with rage and humiliation, followed.
28.
It was back to the miniaturization area - back to the busy people, each concerned with their own affairs and paying no attention to one another. Through them all, Kaliinin walked with an erect carriage and maintained the aristocratic air that arises automatically when all defer to you.
She was one of the leading lights, Morrison could see (his hand still resting lightly on his cheek, which felt inflamed and which he hesitated to expose), and all who crossed or even neared her path nodded their heads in a kind of rudimentary bow and stepped a little backward, as though to make sure not to impede her patch. No one acknowledged Morrison's presence at all.
On, on, through one room after another - and everywhere the feel of pent-up energy held in bare check.
Kaliinin must have sensed it too, familiar as she must be with it, for she muttered to Morrison with a certain pride, "There's a solar power station in space, a major part of whose output is reserved for Malenkigrad."
And then they were upon it before Morrison had a true chance to realize what he was looking at. It was not a very large room and the object within it was not of impressive bulk. Indeed, Morrison's first impression was that it was a piece of artwork.
It was a streamlined object not much larger than an automobile, certainly shorter than a stretch limousine, though taller. And it was transparent!
Automatically, Morrison reached out to feel it.
It was not cold to the touch. It felt smooth and almost moist, but when he removed his hand, his fingertips were perfectly dry. He tried it again and as he ran his fingertips across the surface, they seemed to stick slightly, but they left no sweaty mark. On impulse, he breathed upon it. There was the shadow of condensing moisture on the transparent material, but it disappeared quickly.
"It is a plastic material," said Kaliinin, "but I don't know its composition. If I knew, it would probably come under the head of classified information anyway, but whatever it is, it is stronger than steel - tougher and more resistant to shock - kilogram for kilogram."
"Weight for weight, perhaps," said Morrison, for the moment his scientific curiosity drowning his uneasiness, "but such a thickness of plastic material could not possibly be as strong as the same thickness of steel. It could not be as strong, volume for volume."
"Yes, but where are we going?" said Kaliinin. "There will be no pressure differential inside and outside the ship; there will be no meteroids or even cosmic dust against which we must protect ourselves. There will be about us nothing but soft cell structure. This plastic will be ample protection and it is light. The two of us could perhaps lift it if we tried. That is what is important. As you can well understand, we must be sparing of mass. Every additional kilogram consumes considerable electromagnetic energy in miniaturization and delivers considerable heat in deminiaturization."
"Will it hold a large enough crew?" said Morrison, peering inside.
"It will. It is very compact, but it can hold six and we will only be five. And it contains a surprising amount of unusual gadgetry. Not as much as we would like, of course. The original plans - But what can we do? There are always pressures for economy, even unwarranted ones, in this unjust world."
Morrison said with a twinge of strong uneasiness, "How much pressure for how much economy? Does everything work?"
"I assure you it does." Her face had lit up. Now that the settled melancholy had left (temporarily only, Morrison felt sure), Kaliinin was unmistakably good-looking. "Everything in it has been tested exhaustively, both singly and all together. Zero risk is impossible of attainment, but we have a reasonably close to zero risk here. And all with virtually no metal. What with microchips, fiber optics, and Manuilsky junctions, we have all we want in a total of less than five kilograms of devices all together. That is why the ship can be so small. After all, voyages into the microcosm are not expected to last for more than some hours, so we don't need sleeping arrangements, cycling equipment, elaborate food and air supplies, anything other than quite simple devices for excretory functions, and so on."
"Who'll be at the controls?"
"Arkady."
"Arkady Dezhnev?"
"You seem surprised."
"I don't know why I should. I presume he's qualified."
"Completely. He's in engineering design and he's a genius at it. You can't go by the way he sounds - No, you can go by the way he sounds. Do you suppose any of us could endure his crude humor and affectations if he weren't a genius at something? He designed the ship - every part of it - and
all its equipment. He invented a dozen completely new ways of lowering mass and introducing compactness. You have nothing like it in the United States."
Morrison said stiffly, "I have no way of knowing what the United States may have or may not have in unusual devices."
"I am sure they don't. Dezhnev is an unusual person, for all his love of presenting himself as a boor. He is a descendant of Semyon Ivanov Dezhnev. You have heard of him, I suppose."
Morrison shook his head.
"Really?" Kaliinin's voice turned icy. "He is only the famous explorer who, in the time of Peter the Great, explored Siberia to its easternmost centimeter and said there was a stretch of sea separating Siberia and North America decades before Vitus Bering, a Dane in Russian employ, discovered the Bering Strait. - And you don't know Dezhnev. That's so American. Unless a Westerner did it, you never heard of it."
"Don't see insults everywhere, Sophia. I haven't studied exploration. There are many American explorers that I don't know - and that you don't, either." He shook his finger at her, again remembering her slap and rubbing his check once more, "This is what I mean. You find things to feed hate on - inconsequential things you should feel ashamed to grub up."
"Semyon Dezhnev was a great explorer - and not inconsequential."
"I'm willing to admit that. I am glad to learn of him and I marvel at his achievement. But my not having heard of him is not a fit occasion for Soviet-American rivalry. Be ashamed of yourself!"
Kaliinin's eyes fell, then lifted to his cheek. (Had she left a bruise there? Morrison wondered.) She said, "I'm sorry I struck you, Albert. It need not have been that hard, but I didn't want you to faint. At that moment, I felt I would have no patience to deal with an unconscious American. I did let unjustified anger guide me."
"I'll grant you meant well, but I, too, wish you had not struck so hard. Still, I will accept your apology."
"Then let us get into the ship,"
Morrison managed a smile. Somehow he felt a little better dealing with Kaliinin than he would have with Dezhnev or Konev - or even Boranova. A pretty woman, still quite young, does somehow distract a man's mind from his troubles more effectively than most things would. He said, "Aren't you afraid I might try to sabotage it?"
Kaliinin paused. "Actually, I'm not. I suspect you have enough respect for a vessel of scientific exploration to avoid doing it any damage whatever. Besides - and I say this seriously, Albert - the laws against sabotage are excessively severe in the Soviet Union and the slightest mistake in handling anything in the ship will set off an alarm that will have guards here in a matter of seconds. We have strict laws against guards beating up saboteurs, but sometimes they tend to forget themselves in their indignation. Please don't even think of touching anything."
She put a hand on the hull as she spoke and presumably closed a contact, though Morrison didn't see how it was done. A door - a rectangle curved at the edge - opened. (The door's own edge seemed to be double. Would it also act as an air lock?)
The opening was compact. Kaliinin, entering first, had to stoop. She held out a hand to Morrison. "Careful, Albert."
Morrison not only stooped, but turned sideways. Once inside the ship, he found that he could not quite stand upright. When he bumped his head gently, he looked up at the ceiling, startled.
Kaliinin said, "We'll be doing our work sitting down for the most part, so don't be concerned about the ceiling."
"I don't think claustrophobes would like this."
"Are you claustrophobic?"
"No."
Kaliinin nodded her relief. "That's good. We have to save space, you know. What can I tell you?"
Morrison looked around. There were six seats, in pairs. He sat down in the one nearest the door and said, "These are not exactly roomy, either."
"No," admitted Kaliinin. "Weight lifters could not be accommodated."
Morrison said, "Obviously, this ship was built long before Shapirov went into his coma."
"Of course. We've been planning to have miniaturized personnel invade living tissue for a long time. That would be necessary if we wished to make truly important biological discoveries. Naturally, we expected that we would work with animals at the start and study the circulatory system in fine detail. It is for that project that this ship was built. No one could possibly have guessed that when the time came to carry out the first such microvoyage, the subject would not only be a human body but Shapirov himself."
Morrison was still studying the interior of the ship. It seemed bare. Detail was surprisingly difficult to make out in the situation of transparency-on-transparency and miniaturization of the old-type - ordinary, but microscopic - components.
He said, "There will be five on the ship: you and I, Boranova, Konev, and Dezhnev."
"That's right."
"And what will each of us be doing?"
"Arkady will control the ship. Obviously, he knows how to do that. It's the child of his hands and mind. He'll be in the left front seat. To his right will be the other male, who has a complete map of the neurocirculatory pattern of Shapirov's brain. He will be the pilot. I will sit behind Arkady and I will control the electromagnetic pattern of the ship's surface."
"An electromagnetic pattern? What's that for?"
"My dear Albert. You recognize objects by reflected light, a dog recognizes objects by emitted odor, a molecule recognizes objects by surface electromagnetic pattern. If we're going to make our way as a miniaturized object among molecules, we must have the proper patterns in order to be treated as friends rather than foes."
"That sounds complicated."
"It is - but it happens to be my life study. Natalya will sit behind me. She will be the captain of the expedition. She will make the decisions."
"What kind of decisions?"
"Whatever kind are necessary. Obviously, those can't be predicted in advance. As for you, you will sit to my right."
Morrison rose and managed to shift his position along the narrow aisle on the door side of the seats and move one seat back. He had been in Konev's seat and now he was in what would be his own. He could feel his heart pounding as he imagined himself in that same seat on the following day, with the miniaturization process in progress.
He said in a muffled voice, "There is only one man, then - Yuri Konev - who was miniaturized and deminiaturized and was unharmed by the process."
"Yes."
"And he mentioned no discomfort in the process, no sickness, no mental disturbance?"
"Nothing of the sort was reported."
"Would that be because he is a stoic? Would he feel it would be beneath the dignity of a hero of Soviet science to complain?"
"Don't be foolish. We are not heroes of Soviet science and the one you speak of certainly isn't. We are human beings and scientists and, in fact, if there were any discomfort that we felt, we would be compelled to describe it in full detail, since it might be that with modifications of the process we could remove that discomfort and make future miniaturizations less difficult. Hiding any part of the truth would be unscientific, unethical, and dangerous. Don't you see that - since you are a scientist yourself?"
"Yet there may be individual differences. Yuri Konev survived untouched. Pyotr Shapirov did not - quite."
"That had nothing to do with individual differences," said Kaliinin impatiently.
"We can't really tell, can we?"
"Then judge for yourself, Albert. Do you think we would take the ship into miniaturization without a final testing - with and without human beings aboard? This ship was miniaturized, empty, during the course of this past night - not to a very great extent, but enough to know that all is well."
At once Morrison struggled upward to get out of his seat. "In that case, if you don't mind, Sophia, I want to get out before it is tested with human beings aboard."
"But, Albert, it's too late."
"What!"
"Look out the ship at the room. You haven't once looked outside since you got in, which, I suppose, was a
good thing. But look out now. Go ahead. The walls are transparent and the process is complete for now. Please! Look!"
Morrison, startled, did so and then, very slowly, his knees bent and he seated himself again. He asked (and even as he did so, he knew how foolish he must sound), "Do the ship's walls have a magnifying effect?"
"No, of course not. Everything outside is as it always is. The ship and I and you have been miniaturized to about half our linear dimensions."
29.
Morrison felt dizziness overcome him and he bent his head between his knees and breathed slowly and deeply. When he lifted his head again, he saw Kaliinin watching him thoughtfully. She was standing in the narrow aisle, leaning slightly against a seat's armrest to allow the ceiling to clear her head.
"You might have fainted this time," she said. "It would not have disturbed me. We are being deminiaturized now and that will be more time-consuming than the miniaturization, which took no more than three or four minutes. It will take an hour or so for us to get back, so you will have ample time to recover."
"It was not a decent act to do this without telling me, Sophia."
"On the contrary," said Kaliinin. "It was an act of kindness. Would you have entered the ship as freely and as easily as you did if you had suspected that we would be miniaturized? Would you have inspected the ship as coolly if you had known? And if you had been anticipating miniaturization, would you not have developed psychogenic symptoms of all sorts?"
Morrison was silent.
Kaliinin said, "Did you feel anything? Were you even aware that you were being miniaturized?"
Morrison shook his head. "No."
Then, driven by a certain shame, he said, "You've never been miniaturized before any more than I have, have you?"
"No. Before this day, Konev and Shapirov have been the only human beings to have undergone miniaturization."
"And you weren't at all apprehensive?"
She said, "I wouldn't say that. I was uneasy. We know from our experience with space travel that, as you said earlier, there are individual differences in reaction to unusual environments. Some astronauts suffer episodes of nausea under zero gravity and some do not, for instance. I couldn't be sure how I would react. - Did you feel nausea?"
