by Isaac Asimov
She replied, "We're affixed to the wall of the capillary, Albert."
Morrison nodded. If the ship was one piece with the capillary wall, so to speak, the bombarding water molecules that produced the Brownian motion would lose their effect. Their impacts would work toward moving an entire section of comparatively inert wall, instead of a tiny ship the size of a blood platelet. Naturally, the trembling would cease.
"How did you manage to affix the ship, Sophia?" he asked.
"The usual electrical forces. The capillary wall is partly protein, partly phospholipid in character. There are positively and negatively charged groups here and there. I had to detect a pattern sufficiently compact, and then produce a complementary pattern on the ship; negative where the wall is positive and vice versa. The trouble is that the ship is moving with the current, so that I have to detect it a little ahead and produce the complementary pattern before we pass it. I missed three such occasions and then we hit a region where there were no suitable patterns at all, so I had to get Arkady to move us ahead a bit into a better region. - But I made it."
"If the ship had a reverse gear," said Morrison, "there would have been no problem, would there?"
"True," said Kaliinin, "and the next ship will have one. But for now, we have only what we have."
"Quite so," put in Dezhnev. "As my father used to say: 'On tomorrow's feast, we can starve today.'"
"On the other hand," said Kaliinin, "if we had a motor that could do all we would want it to do, we would have a strong impulse to use it lavishly and that might not be so good for poor Shapirov. And it would be expensive besides. As it is, we used an electric field which is more sparing of energy than a motor would be and the price is only a little more work for me - and what of that?"
Morrison was quite certain she wasn't talking for his benefit. He said, "Are you always so philosophical?"
For a moment, her eyes widened and her nostrils tightened, but only for a moment. Then she relaxed and said with a small smile, "No, who could be? But I try."
Boranova interjected, impatiently, "Enough chat, Sophia. - Arkady, you are clearly in touch with the Grotto. What's the delay?"
Arkady held up a large hand, half-twisting in his seat to present its palm toward Boranova. "Patience, my captain. They want us to stay exactly where we are for two reasons. First, I'm sending out a carrier wave in three directions. They are locating each and using them to locate us in order to see if the location they determine jibes with what Yuri says it is by dead reckoning."
"How long will that take?"
"Who can say? A few minutes, at any rate. But then my carrier waves are not very intense and the location must be precise, so they may have to repeat the measurement several times and take a mean and calculate limits of error. After all, they have to be correct, for as my father used to say: 'Almost right is no better than wrong.'"
"Yes yes, Arkady, but that depends on the nature of the problem. What is the second reason we are waiting?"
"They're going through some observations on Pyotr Shapirov. His heartbeat has become slightly irregular."
Konev looked up, his mouth failing open slightly and his thin cheeks looking gaunt under his high cheekbones. "What! Do they say it's anything we're doing?"
"No," said Dezhnev. "Do not become a tragedian. They say nothing of the sort. And what can we be doing to Shapirov that is of any importance? We are merely a red corpuscle among red corpuscles in his bloodstream, one among trillions."
"Well, then, what's wrong?"
"Do I know?" said Dezhnev, clearly irritated. "Do they tell me? Am I a physician? I just maneuver this vessel and they pay me no mind except as a pair of hands on the controls."
Kaliinin said with a touch of sadness, "Academician Shapirov clings but weakly to life in any case. It is a wonder that he has remained in stable condition so long."
Boranova nodded. "You are right, Sophia."
Konev said savagely, "But he must continue to remain so. He can't let go now. Not now. We haven't made our measurements yet."
"We will make them," said Boranova. "An irregular heartbeat is not the end of the world, even for a man in a coma."
Konev pounded the arm of his seat with a clenched fist. "I will not lose a moment. Albert, let's begin."
Morrison was startled. He said, "What can be done here in the bloodstream?"
"A neural effect may be felt immediately outside the nerve cell."
"Surely not. Why would the neurons have axons and dendrites to channel the impulse if it was going to spread and weaken into space beyond? Locomotives move along rails, telephone messages along wires, neural impulses -"
"Don't argue the case, Albert. Let's not accept failure by some fine process of reasoning. Let's test the matter. See if you can detect brain waves and if you can analyze them in the proper fashion."
Morrison said, "I'll try, but don't order me around in that bullying tone."
"I'm sorry," said Konev, not sounding sorry at all. "I want to watch what you do." He unclasped himself, turned in his seat, holding on tightly, muttering, "We must have more room the next time."
"An ocean liner, certainly," said Dezhnev. "Next time."
"What we have to do first," said Morrison, "is to discover whether we can detect anything at all. The trouble is, we are surrounded by electromagnetic fields. The muscles are rich in them and each molecule, almost, is the origin point of a -"
"Take all that as known," said Konev.
"I am only filling in the time while I carry my device through some necessary steps. The neural field is characteristic in several ways and by adjusting the computer to eliminate fields without those characteristics, I leave only what the neurons produce. We blank out all microfields like so and we deflect the muscle fields in this manner -"
"In what manner?" demanded Konev.
"I describe it in my papers."
"But I didn't see what you did."
Wordlessly, Morrison repeated the maneuver slowly.
"Oh," said Konev.
"And by now we should be detecting only neural waves if any are present here to detect - and there aren't."
Konev's right fist clenched. "Are you sure?"
"The screen shows a horizontal line. Nothing else."
"It's quivering."
"Noise. Possibly from the ship's own electric field, which is complex and not entirely like any of the natural fields of the body. I've never had to adjust a computer to filter out an artificial field."
"Well, then, we have to move on. - Arkady, tell them we can wait no longer."
"I can't do that, Yuri, unless Natasha tells me to. She's the captain. Or had you forgotten?"
"Thank you, Arkady," said Boranova coldly. "You, at least, have not. We'll forgive Konev his lapse and put it down to overzealousness in pursuit of his work. My orders are not to move until the Grotto gives us the word. If this mission fails because of anything that goes wrong with Shapirov, there must be no opportunity for anyone to say it was because we did not follow orders."
"What if some disaster happens because we did follow orders? That can happen, too, you know." Konev's voice rose to near-hysteria.
Boranova replied, "The fault will then lie with those who gave the orders."
"I can find no satisfaction in apportioning blame, whether to myself or to anyone else. It is results that count," said Konev.
"I agree," said Boranova, "if we are dealing with finespun theory. But if you expect to continue working on this project past the time of a possible catastrophe, you will find that the manner of allotting blame is all-important."
"Well, then," said Konev, stuttering slightly in his passion. "Urge them to let us move as soon as possible and then we'll - we'll -"
"Yes?" said Boranova.
"And then we'll enter the cell. We must."
Chapter 12. Intercellular
In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.
— Dezhnev Senior
50.
A heavy silence fe
ll upon the five shipmates. Konev's silence was the least quiet. He was quivering with unrest and his hands would not keep still.
Morrison felt a dim sympathy. To have reached the destination, to have done just as planned, through difficulties, to imagine one's self at the point of snatching success, and to have to fear that it will be moved away from the eagerly grasping fingers even now - he knew the feeling. No longer quite as sharply perhaps, as once, now that he was ground down and dulled by frustration, but he remembered the early occasions. Experiments that raised hope, but were somehow never quite conclusive. Colleagues who smiled and nodded, but were never convinced.
He leaned forward and said, "Look, Yuri, just watch the red corpuscles. They're creeping ahead, one after the other, steadily - and that means the heart is beating and is doing so fairly normally. As long as the red corpuscles move steadily ahead, we're safe."
Dezhnev said, "There's the blood temperature, too. I've got it monitored at all times and it will have to start dropping slowly, but with determination, if Shapirov lets go. Actually, the temperature is at the upper edge of normal."
Konev grunted, as though scorning consolation and pushing it to one side, but it seemed to Morrison that he was noticeably quieter after that.
Morrison sank back in his seat and let his eyes close. He wondered if he was experiencing hunger and decided that he was not. He also wondered if there was a distinct sensation of bladder pressure. There wasn't but that did not relieve him much. One could always postpone eating for a considerable length of time, but the necessity of urination did not lend itself to quite the same flexibility of choice.
He was suddenly aware that Kaliinin had addressed him but he had not been listening. "Pardon me. What did you say?" he asked, turning toward her.
Kalfinin looked surprised. She said softly, "I ask your pardon. I interrupted your thoughts."
"They were worth interrupting, Sophia. I ask your pardon for being inattentive."
"In that case, I asked what it is you do in your analysis of brain waves. I mean, what is it you do that is different from what others do? Why was it necessary for us -" She paused, clearly uncertain as to how to proceed.
Morrison finished her thought without difficulty. "Why was it necessary for me to be abstracted forcibly from my country?"
"Have I made you angry?"
"No. I presume you did not advise the action."
"Of course not. I knew nothing of it. In fact, that is why I am asking you my question. I know nothing about your field except that there are electroneural waves; that electroencephalography has become an intricate study, and an important one."
"Then if you ask me what is special about my own views, I'm afraid I can't tell you."
"Is it secret, then? I thought it might be."
"No, it is not secret," said Morrison, frowning. "There are no secrets in science, or there should be none - except that there are struggles for priority so that scientists are sometimes cautious about what they say, and I am guilty of that, too, sometimes. In this case, though, I mean it literally. I can't tell you because you lack the basis for understanding."
Kaliinin considered, her lips compressed as though in aid to thought. "Could you explain a bit of it?"
"I can try, if you're willing to hear simple assertions. I can't very well describe the entire field. - What we call brain waves are a conglomeration of all sorts of neuronic activity - sense perceptions of various kinds, stimuli of various muscles and glands, arousal mechanisms, coordinations, and so on. Lost among all these are those waves that control, or result from, constructive and creative thought. Isolating those skeptic waves, as I call them, from all the rest is an enormous problem. The body does it without any difficulty, but we poor scientists are, for the most part, at a total loss."
"I'm having no difficulty understanding this," said Kaliinin, smiling and looking pleased. (She is remarkably pretty, thought Morrison, when she manages to get rid of her air of melancholy.)
"I haven't gotten to the hard part yet," he said.
"Please do, then."
"About twenty years ago, it was demonstrated that there was what seemed a random component in the waves that no one had ever picked up because the instruments that had been used until then did not pick up what we now call 'the twinkle.' It's a very rapid oscillation of irregular amplitude and intensity. That's not a discovery I made, you understand."
Kaliinin smiled again. "I imagine that twenty years ago you would have been too young to make the discovery."
"I was an undergraduate then, making the discovery that young women were not entirely unapproachable, which is by no means an unimportant thing to find out. In fact, each person may have to rediscover it now and then, I think. - But never mind that.
"A number of people speculated that the twinkle might represent thought processes in the mind, but no one managed to isolate it properly. It would come and go, be detectable at times and not at others, and the general feeling was that it was artifactitious, a matter of working with instruments that were too delicate for the thing they were measuring so that one picked up what was, essentially, noise.
"I thought not. In time I developed a computer program that made it possible for me to isolate the twinkle and to demonstrate it was always present in the human brain. For that I got some credit, though few people were able to duplicate my work. I used animals for types of experimentation that were too dangerous to perform on human beings and used the results to further sharpen my program of analysis. But the sharper I made the analysis and the more significant I thought the results, the less others were able to duplicate them and the more they insisted that I was misled by my animal experimentation.
"But even isolating the twinkle was a long way from demonstrating that it was a representation of abstract thought. I have amplified it, intensified it, modified my program over and over, and have convinced myself that I am studying thought, the skeptic waves themselves. Still, no one can duplicate the crucial points of my work. I have, on several occasions, allowed someone to use my program and my computer - the sort of thing I'm using now - and they invariably fail."
Kaliinin was listening gravely. She said, "Can you imagine why no one can duplicate your work?"
"The easiest explanation is that there is something wrong with me, that I am a crank - if not a madman. I believe that some of my colleagues suspect that to be the answer."
"Do you think you're a madman?"
"No, I don't, Sophia, but even I waver sometimes. You see, after you isolate the skeptic waves and amplify them, it is conceivable that the human brain itself might become a receiving instrument. The waves may transfer the thoughts from the thinker you are studying directly to you. The brain would certainly be an extraordinarily delicate receiver, but it would also be an extraordinarily individual one. If I improved my program so that I could sense the thoughts better, that would mean I improved it to suit my own individual brain. Other brains might not be affected and, in fact, might be less affected, the closer I adjusted it to mine. It would be like a painting. The closer a painting is made to look like me, the less it looks like anyone else. The more I can make my program produce sensible self-consistent results, the less anyone else can."
"Have you actually sensed thought?"
"I'm not sure. There are times I have thought I did, but I'm never quite convinced it's not my imagination. Certainly no one else - with my program or any other - has sensed anything. I have used the twinkle to track down the skeptic nodes in the brains of chimpanzees and from that reasoned out where they would be in human brains, but that is not accepted either. It is considered the overenthusiasm of a scientist oversold on his own unlikely theory. And even using leads into the skeptic nodes - on animals, of course - I couldn't be sure."
"With animals it would be difficult. Have you published these - sensations of yours?"
"I haven't dared," said Morrison, shaking his head. "No one would accept such subjective findings. I've mentioned it in passing to several
people - foolish of me - and the news spread and merely convinced my colleagues all the more firmly that I am, shall we say, unstable. It was only last Sunday that Natalya told me that Shapirov took me seriously, but he is considered, at least in my country, to be unstable, too."
"He is not," said Kaliinin firmly, "or was not."
"It would be nice to think he wasn't, obviously."
Konev, from in front of Morrison, said suddenly, without turning around, "It was your sensations of thought that impressed Shapirov. I know! He discussed it with me. He said on a number of occasions that your program was a relay station and he would like to try it himself. If you were inside a neuron, a key neuron of the skeptic node, things would be different. You would sense thoughts unmistakably. Shapirov thought so and I think so. Shapirov thought it possible you might even have sensed thoughts unmistakably as it was, but were not ready to let the world know. Is that so?"
How they harped on secrecy, all of them, thought Morrison. Then he caught the look on Kaliinin's face. Her mouth was partly open, her eyebrows drawn together, her finger hovering near her lips. It was as though she wanted to ask him to be quiet with a kind of agonizing intensity, without quite daring to do so openly.
But then he was distracted by Dezhnev's voice, joyfully loud. "Enough babble, my children. The Grotto has located us and we are, to their enormous astonishment, exactly where we say we are."
Konev threw up both hands and his voice sounded almost boyish. "Exactly where I say we are."
Dezhnev said, "Let us have communal responsibility. Where we say we are."
"No," said Boranova. "I ordered Konev to make the decision on his own responsibility. The credit is therefore his."
Konev was not mollified. He said, "You would not have so quickly demanded communal responsibility, Arkady Vissarionovich" - he used the patronymic in a style long out of fashion in the Soviet Union, as though to emphasize the fact that Dezhnev was the son of a peasant, among whom, only, the style remained in fashion - "had we proved to be in the wrong capillary."
