Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain fv-2

by Isaac Asimov

  "I didn't until I found out we had been miniaturized, but I suppose feeling queasy now doesn't count. - Who planned this?"

  "Natalya."

  "Of course. I needn't have asked," he said drily.

  "There were reasons. She felt we couldn't have you break down once the voyage began. We couldn't be expected to deal with hysteria on your part once we began miniaturizing."

  "I suppose I deserve that lack of confidence," said Morrison, his eyes looking away in embarrassment from those of Kaliinin. "And I imagine she assigned you to come with me for the precise purpose of distracting my attention while all this was going on."

  "No. That was my idea. She wanted to come with you herself, but with her, by now, I thought you might be anticipating trickery."

  "Whereas with you, I might be at my ease."

  "At least, as you say, distracted. I am still young enough to distract men." Then, with a touch of bitterness, "Most men."

  Morrison looked up, eyes narrowing. "You said I might be anticipating trickery."

  "I mean, with Natalya."

  "Why not with you? All I see now is that everything outside seems enlarged. How can I be sure that that is not an illusion, something designed to make me think I have been miniaturized and that it is harmless - merely so that I step quietly into the ship tomorrow?"

  "That's ridiculous, Albert, but let's consider something. You and I have lost half our linear dimension in every direction. The strength of our muscles varies inversely with their cross-sections. They are now half their normal width and half their normal thickness, so that they have half times half or one fourth the cross-section and, therefore, the strength they would normally have. Do you see what I mean? Do you understand?"

  "Yes, of course," said Morrison, annoyed. "That is elementary."

  "But our bodies as a whole are half as tall, half as wide, and half as thick, so that the total volume - and mass and weight as well - is half times half times half or one eighth what it was originally. - If we are miniaturized, that is."

  "Yes. This is the square-cube law. It's been understood since Galileo's time."

  "I know, but you haven't been thinking about it. If I were to try to lift you now, I would be lifting one eighth your normal weight and I would be doing so with my muscles at one quarter their normal strength. My muscles compared to your weight would be twice as strong as they would appear to be if we were not miniaturized."

  And with that, Kaliinin thrust her hands under his armpits and, with a grunt, lifted. Up he moved from his seat.

  She held him so while she gasped twice and then she lowered him. "It's not easy," she said, panting a bit, "but I could do it. And since you may be telling yourself, 'Ah yes, but this is Sophia, probably a Soviet weight lifter,' then do it to me."

  Kaliinin seated herself in the seat before him and held out her arms to either side and said, "Come, stand up and lift me."

  Morrison rose to his feet and into the aisle. He moved forward, turned, and faced her. The slight bending enforced on him by the low ceiling made it an uncomfortable position. For a moment, he hesitated.

  Kaliinin said, "Come, seize me under the arms. I use deodorant. And you needn't be concerned about possibly touching my breasts. They have been touched before this. Come - I'm lighter than you are and you're stronger than I am. Since I have lifted you, you should have no trouble at all lifting me."

  Nor did he. He couldn't lift with his full strength because of his slight, uncomfortable stoop, but he automatically applied the force he judged, through years of experience, would be suitable for an object her size. She floated upward, however, almost as though she were weightless. Despite the fact that he had been somewhat prepared for the possibility, he almost dropped her.

  "Do you consider that an illusion?" Kaliinin asked. "Or are we miniaturized?"

  "We are miniaturized," said Morrison. "But how did you do it? I never saw you make a move that looked as though you might be using miniaturization controls."

  "I didn't. It's all done from outside. The ship is equipped with miniaturization devices of its own, but I wouldn't dare use them. That would be part of Natalya's job."

  "And now the deminiaturization is being controlled from outside, too, isn't it?"

  "That's right."

  "And if the deminiaturization gets slightly out of hand, our brains will be damanged as Shapirov's was - or worse."

  "That's not really likely," said Kaliinin, stretching her legs out into the aisle, "and it doesn't help to think about it. Why not just relax and close your eyes?"

  Morrison persisted. "But damage is possible."

  "Of course it's possible. Almost anything is possible. A three-meter-wide meteroite may strike two minutes from now, penetrate the mountain shell above us, flash into this room, and destroy the ship and us and perhaps the entire project in a few flaming seconds. - But it's not likely."

  Morrison cradled his head in his arms and wondered whether - if the ship started warming - he could feel the heat before his brain proteins denatured.

  30.

  Well over half an hour had passed before Morrison felt convinced that the objects he could see outside the ship were shrinking and were receding perceptibly toward their normal size.

  Morrison said, "I am thinking of a paradox."

  "What's that?" said Kaliinin, yawning. She had obviously taken her own advice about the advisability of relaxing.

  "The objects outside the ship seemed to grow larger as we shrink. Ought not the wavelengths of light outside the ship also grow larger, becoming longer in wavelength, as we shrink? Should we not see everything outside turn reddish, since there can scarcely be enough ultraviolet outside to expand and replace the shorter-wave visible light?"

  Kaliinin said, "If you could see the light waves outside, that would indeed be how they would appear to you. But you don't. You see the light waves only after they've entered the ship and impinged upon your retina. And as they enter the ship, they come under the influence of the miniaturization field and automatically shrink in wavelength, so that you see those wavelengths inside the ship exactly as you would see them outside."

  "If they shrink in wavelength, they must gain energy."

  "Yes, if Planck's constant were the same size inside the miniaturization field as it is outside. But Planck's constant decreases inside the miniaturization field - that is the essence of miniaturization. The wavelengths, in shrinking, maintain their relationship to the shrunken Planck's constant and do not gain energy. An analogous case is that of the atoms. They also shrink and yet the interrelationships among atoms and among the subatomic particles that make them up remain the same to us inside the ship as they would seem to us outside the ship."

  "But gravity changes. It becomes weaker in here."

  "The strong interaction and the electroweak interaction come under the umbrella of the quantum theory. They depend on Planck's constant. As for gravitation?" Kaliinin shrugged. "Despite two centuries of effort, gravitation has never been quantized. Frankly, I think the gravitational change with miniaturization is evidence enough that gravitation cannot be quantized, that it is fundamentally nonquantum in nature."

  "I can't believe that," said Morrison. "Two centuries of failure can merely mean we haven't managed to get deep enough into the problem yet. Superstring theory nearly gave us our unified field at last." (It relieved him to discuss the matter. Surely he couldn't do so if his brain were heating in the least.)

  "Nearly doesn't count," said Kaliinin. "Still, Shapirov agreed with you, I think. It was his notion that once we tied Planck's constant to the speed of light, we would not only have the practical effect of miniaturizing and deminiaturizing in an essentially energy-free manner, but that we would have the theoretical effect of being able to work out the connection between quantum theory and relativity and finally have a good unified field theory. And probably a simpler one than we could have imagined possible, he would say."

  "Maybe," said Morrison. He didn't know enough to commen
t beyond that.

  "Shapirov would say," said Kaliinin, warming to the task, "that at ultraminiaturization, the gravitational effect would be close enough to zero to be utterly ignored and that the speed of light would be so great that it might be considered infinite. With mass virtually zero, inertia would be virtually zero and any object, like this ship, for instance, could be accelerated with virtually zero energy input to any speed. We would have, practically speaking, antigravity and faster-than-light travel. Chemical drive, he said, gave us the Solar System, ion drive would give us the nearer stars, but relativistic miniaturization would give us the whole Universe at a bound."

  "It's a beautiful vision," said Morrison, ravished.

  "Then you know what we're looking for now, don't you?"

  Morrison nodded. "All that - if we can read Shapirov's mind. And if he really had something there and wasn't merely dreaming."

  "Isn't the chance worth the risk?"

  "I am on the point of believing so," said Morrison in a low voice. "You are terribly convincing. Why couldn't Natalya have used arguments of that sort, rather than those she did use?"

  "Natalya is - Natalya. She is a highly practical person, not a dreamer. She gets things done."

  Morrison studied Kaliinin as she sat, now in the seat to his left, looking straight ahead with an abstracted look that gave her profile the appearance of an impractical dreamer, at that - but perhaps not one who, like Shapirov, dreamed of conquering the Universe. With her, it was something closer to home perhaps.

  He said, "Your unhappiness is not my business, Sophia, as you've said - but I have been told about Yuri."

  Her eyes flashed. "Arkady! I know it was he. He is a - a -" She shook her head. "With all his education and all his genius, he remains a peasant. I always think of him as a bearded serf with a vodka bottle."

  "I think he's concerned about you in his own way, even if he doesn't express himself poetically. Everyone must be concerned."

  Kaliinin stared at Morrison fiercely, as if holding her words back.

  He prodded her gently, saying, "Why don't you tell me about it? I think it will help and I am a logical choice, being the outsider of the party - I assure you I am trustworthy."

  Kaliinin looked at him again, this time almost gratefully.

  "Yuri!" she spat. "Everyone may be concerned, except Yuri. He has no feelings."

  "He must have been in love with you at one time."

  "Must he? I don't believe it. He has a - a -" - she looked up and spread her hands, which were shaking, as though groping for a word and having to settle for something inferior - "vision."

  "We're not always masters of our own emotions and affections, Sophia. If he has found another woman and dreams of her -"

  "There's no other woman," said Kaliinin, frowning. "None! He uses that as an excuse to hide behind! He loved me, if at all, only absently, because I was convenient at hand, because I satisfied a vague physical need, and because I was also involved in the project, so that he didn't have to lose much time dallying with me. As long as he had this project firmly in hand, he didn't mind having me - quietly, unobtrusively - at odd moments."

  "A man's work -"

  "Need not fill every moment of time. I told you he has a vision. He plans to be the new Newton, the new Einstein. He wants to make discoveries so fundamental, so great, that he will leave nothing for the future. He will take Shapirov's speculations and turn them into hard science. Yuri Konev will become the whole of the natural law and everyone else will be commentary!"

  "Might that not be considered an admirable ambition?"

  "Not when it makes him sacrifice everything and everyone else, when it makes him deny his own child. I? What do I matter? I can be neglected, denied. I am an adult. I can take care of myself. But a baby? A child? To deny her a father? To refuse her? To reject her? She would distract him from his work, she would make demands on him, she would consume a few moments of time here and there - so he insists he is not the father."

  "A genetic analysis -"

  "No. Would I drag him to court and force a legal decision upon him? Consider what his denial implies? The child is not a virgin birth. Someone must be the father. He implies - no, he states - that I am promiscuous. He has not hesitated to give it as his opinion that I do not know the father of my child since I am lost among the numerous possibilities. Shall I labor to make a man as low as he is the legally proved father of my child against his will? No, let him come to me and admit he is the father and apologize for what he has done - and I may allow him a glance, now and then, at the child."

  "Yet I have a feeling you still love him."

  "If I do, that is my curse," said Kaliinin bitterly. "It shall not be my child's."

  "Is that why you have had to be persuaded to undertake this miniaturization?"

  "And work with him? Yes, that is why. But they tell me I cannot be replaced, that what we may do for science lies far above and beyond any conceivable personal feeling - any anger, any hate. Besides -"

  "Besides?"

  "Besides, if I abandon the project, I lose my status as a Soviet scientist. I lose many privileges and perquisites, which do not matter, and so does my daughter - which matters a great deal."

  "Did Yuri have to be persuaded, too, to work with you?"

  "He? Of course not. The project is all he knows and sees. He does not look at me. He does not see me. And if he dies in the course of this attempt -" She held out her hand in appeal to him. "Please understand that I do not for a moment believe that this will happen. It is just a stupidly romantic notion that I torture myself with for the love of pain, I suppose. If he should die, he would not even be aware that I would die with him."

  Morrison felt himself tremble. "Don't talk like that," he said. "And what would happen to your daughter in that case? Did Natalya tell you that?"

  "She did not have to. I know that without her. My daughter would be reared by the state, as the child of a Soviet martyr to science. She might be better off so." Sophia paused and looked around. "But it's beginning to look quite normal out there. We should be out of the ship soon."

  Morrison shrugged.

  "You will have to spend much of the rest of the day being medically and psychologically examined, Albert. So will I. It will be very boring, but it has to be done. How do you feel?"

  "I'd feel better," said Morrison in a burst of honesty, "if you hadn't talked about dying. - Listen! Tomorrow, when we make the trip into Shapirov's body, how far will we be miniaturized?"

  "That will be Natalya's decision. To cellular dimensions at the very least, obviously. Perhaps to molecular dimensions."

  "Has anyone ever done that?"

  "Not to my knowledge."

  "Rabbits? Inanimate objects?"

  Kaliinin shook her head and said again, "Not to my knowledge."

  "How, then, does anyone know that miniaturization to such an extent is possible? Or that, if it is, any of us can surivive?"

  "The theory says it is and that we can. So far, every bit of experimentation has fit in with the theory."

  "Yes, but there are always boundaries. Wouldn't it be better if ultraminiaturization were tested on a simple bar of plastic, then on a rabbit, then on a -"

  "Yes, of course. But persuading the Central Coordinating Committee to allow the energy expenditure would be an enormous task and such experiments would have to be dribbled out over months and years. We have no time! We must get into Shapirov immediately."

  "But we're going to be doing something unprecedented, crossing into an untested region, with only the maybes of theory to -"

  "Exactly, exactly. Come, the light is flashing and we must emerge and accompany the waiting physicians."

  But for Morrison the marginal euphoria of a safe deminiaturization was seeping away. What he had experienced today was in no way indicative of what he must face the next day.

  The terror was returning.

  Chapter 8. Preliminaries

  The greatest difficulty comes at the
start. It's called "getting ready."

  — Dezhnev Senior

  31.

  Later that evening, after a long - and tedious - medical exam, he joined the four Soviet researchers for dinner. The Last Supper, Morrison thought grimly.

  Sitting down, he burst out, "No one told me the results of my examination!" He turned to Kaliinin. "Did they examine you, Sophia?"

  "Yes, indeed, Albert."

  "Did they tell you the results?"

  "I'm afraid not. Since it is not we who pay them, I suppose they don't feel they owe us anything."

  "It doesn't matter," said Dezhnev jovially. "My old father used to say, 'Bad news has the wings of an eagle, good news the legs of a sloth.' If they said nothing, it was because they had nothing bad to report."

  "Even the bad news," said Boranova, "would have been reported to me - and only to me. I am the one who must decide who will accompany us."

  "What did they tell you about me?" asked Morrison.

  "That there is nothing important wrong with you. You will be coming with us and in twelve hours the adventure will begin."

  "Is there anything unimportant wrong with me, then, Natalya?"

  "Nothing worth mentioning, except that you display, according to one doctor, a 'typical American bad temper.'"

  "Huh!" said Morrison. "One of our American freedoms is that of being bad-tempered when doctors show a typical Soviet lack of concern for their patients."

  Nevertheless, his apprehension over the state of his mind ebbed and, as it did so, inevitably the apprehension over his impending miniaturization rose higher.

  He lapsed into silence, eating slowly and without much of an appetite.

  32.

  Yuri Konev was the first to rise from the dinner table. For a moment he remained standing, leaning forward over the table, a slight frown on his intense, youthful face.