Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain fv-2

by Isaac Asimov

  "I'll try, Natalya."

  Morrison said angrily, "Why didn't you think of this when we were in the wrong capillary? It might have saved me the small trouble of nearly dying trying to turn the ship by hand."

  Dezhnev said, "If you hadn't so promptly suggested turning the ship by hand, we might have thought of it - but it wouldn't have been a good idea."

  "Why not?"

  "We were in the current of the bloodstream. The ship is carefully streamlined to take advantage of it and its surface is designed to allow water to flow past it without turbulence, which makes it all the harder to turn out of the current. It would have taken much longer than turning by hand - and very much more energy. The narrow confines of the capillary must be remembered, too. Here, there is no current and because we've been so miniaturized there is a great deal of room."

  "Enough," said Boranova. "Get to work, Arkady."

  Dezhnev did so, rummaging through a tool chest, removing a cover plate and studying the control details within, maintaining through it all a kind of incoherent muttering.

  Konev, his hands clasped behind his neck, said, without turning, "Albert, tell us about those sensations you receive."

  "Sensations?"

  "You were telling us about them just before we got the news from the Grotto that we were located in the correct capillary. I'm talking about the sensations you experienced when you were trying to analyze the thought waves."

  "Ah," said Morrison and caught Kaliinin's eye.

  Very slightly, she shook her head. Very tentatively, a warning finger crossed her lips.

  Morrison said, "Nothing to tell. I had vague sensations I couldn't describe in any objective way. It could well have been my imagination. Certainly those whom I tried to tell about it were convinced it was."

  "And you never published anything about them?"

  "Never. I merely mentioned it in passing at conventions and that was bad enough. If Shapirov and you heard of it, it was through word of mouth only. If I had published, that would have come as near to scientific suicide as I would ever want to be."

  "Too bad."

  Morrison looked briefly toward Kaliinin. She had nodded very slightly, but said nothing. Clearly, she couldn't say anything without being overheard by the entire ship.

  Morrison looked around carelessly. Dezhnev was lost in his work, clucking to himself. Konev stared straight ahead, lost in whatever tortuous thoughts he happened to have. Boranova, behind Kaliinin, was studying the screen of her computer carefully and was making notes. Morrison did not try to read them - he could read English upside down, but he hadn't come to that pitch of ease with Russian.

  Only Kaliinin, to his left, was looking at him.

  Morrison pressed his lips together and then shifted his computer into a word-processing mode. It did not have a Cyrillic adjunct, but he spelled out the Russian words in phonetic Roman lettering. WHAT IS WRONG?

  She hesitated, probably not very much at home in Roman.

  Then her own fingers flashed and the neat Cyrillic on her screen read: DON'T TRUST HIM. SAY NOTHING. It was erased at once.

  Morrison wrote: WHY?

  Kaliinin said: NOT EVIL, BUT PRIORITY, CREDIT. WILL DO ANYTHING, ANYTHING, ANYTHING.

  The words were gone and she looked away firmly.

  Morrison considered her thoughtfully. Was it only the vengefulness of a woman betrayed?

  It didn't matter, in any case, for he had no intention of talking about anything that he hadn't already given away, either in a paper or by word of mouth. He himself was not evil, but where priority and credit were concerned, he might not do anything, anything, anything, but he would do a great deal.

  Still, there was nothing to be done at that moment. Or one thing, perhaps, which was completely aside from the point, but which was beginning, just beginning, to occupy his mind to the exclusion of other things.

  He turned to Boranova, who was still staring at her instrument and tapping her fingers softly against the arm of her seat in thoughtful concentration.

  "Natalya?"

  "Yes, Albert?" She did not look up.

  "I hate to introduce a note of ugly realism, but" - his voice lowered to near-soundlessness - "I'm thinking of urinating."

  She looked up at him, a corner of her lips twitching very slightly, but avoiding the smile. She did not lower her voice. "Why think of it, Albert? Do it."

  Morrison felt like a little boy raising his hand for permission to leave the room - unreasonably so, he knew. "I don't like to be the first."

  Boranova frowned, almost as though she were the teacher in the case. "That is quite silly and, in any case, you are not. I have already taken care of such a need in myself." Then, with a faint shrug, "Tension tends to increase urgency, I have frequently found."

  Morrison had frequently found that, too. He whispered, "It's all very well for you. You're there in the back seat alone." And he nodded slightly in the direction of Sophia.

  "So?" Boranova shook her head. "Surely you don't wish me to improvise a curtain for you? Shall I place my hand over her eyes." (Kaliinin looked in their direction in surprise.) "She will ignore you, I'm sure, out of decency and out of a feeling that in short order she will wish you to ignore her."

  Morrison was keenly embarrassed, for Kaliinin was now looking at him with obvious understanding. She said, "Come, Albert, I held you naked in my lap. What room need one make for modesty now?"

  Morrison smiled weakly and made a little thank-you gesture.

  He tried to remember how to manage the waste lid on his seat, but once he remembered, he found that it slid open with a small but definite click. (Those irritating Soviets! Backward always in small ways. It might easily have been designed to open noiselessly.)

  He also managed to loosen the electrostatic seam along his crotch and then found himself worrying whether he would manage to close it unobtrusively afterward.

  Morrison felt the current of air at the moment the waste lid opened and it felt uncomfortably cold against his bare skin. He sighed with a tremendous relief when he was done, then he managed to close the seal along the crotch and sat there, panting. He realized that he must have been holding his breath.

  "Here," said Boranova brusquely. He stared, for a moment, at what she was holding, then recognized it as a small sealed towel. He tore open the seal, found the towel within moistened and scented and rubbed his hands with it. (The Soviets were learning small elegances, obviously - or decadences, depending on whether finickiness or impatience won the battle for domination within you.)

  And then Dezhnev's throaty voice sounded loudly, very loudly, in Morrison's ear after all the whispering he had been engaged in. "That's done now."

  "What's done?" asked Morrison angrily, automatically assuming the reference was to his bodily functions.

  "The individual firing of the motors," said Dezhnev, making a there-you-are gesture with both hands in the directions of the ship's controls. "I can fire any one, or two, or all three, if I wish. Absolutely certain - I think."

  "Which is it, Arkady?" said Boranova waspishly. "Is it quite certain or is it a matter of opinion?"

  "Both," said Dezhnev. "It is my opinion that I am absolutely certain. The trouble is that my opinion isn't always right. My father used to say -"

  "I think we ought to try it out," said Konev, cutting off Dezhnev's father, perhaps in the full realization he was doing so.

  "Of course," said Dezhnev. "That goes without saying, but as my father used to say" - he raised his voice as though determined not to be again subverted - "the sure thing about anything that goes without saying is that someone is bound to say it. - And you might as well know -"

  He paused momentarily and Boranova said, "What might we as well know?"

  "Several things, Natasha," said Dezhnev. "In the first place, steering will take a lot of energy. I've done my best, but the ship is not designed for this. For another - well, I can't communicate with the Grotto now."

  "Can't communicate?" said Kaliini
n, her voice rising to a near squeak in what was either surprise or indignation.

  Boranova's voice marked her as definitely indignant. "What do you mean, we can't communicate?"

  "Come, Natasha, I can't wire up the motors separately without wires, can I? The best engineer in the world can't make wires out of nothing and can't manufacture silicon chips out of nothing, either. Something had to be dismantled and the one thing I could dismantle without disabling the ship was communications. I told them that out in the Grotto and there was a lot of shrieking and complaining, but how could they stop me? So now we can steer, I think - and we can't communicate, I know."

  54.

  There was silence as the ship began to move. The surroundings were utterly different now. In the bloodstream, there had been a heaving medley of objects - some crawling ahead of the ship, some slowly drifting behind, depending on eddies and streamlining, Morrison supposed. There was the feeling of movement, if only because the markings on the walls - fatty plaques in the arteries, tiling in the capillaries, slipped steadily backward.

  Here, in intercellular space, however, there was stasis. No motion. No feeling of life. The tangle of collagen fibers seemed a forest primeval, built up of trunks only, without leaves, without color, without sound, without motion.

  Once the ship pushed forward through the viscous intercellular fluid, however, everything began to move backward. The ship slipped toward and through a V-shaped meeting of fibers and, as they passed through, Morrison had the plain impression of a loose spiral making its way upward along each collagen fiber, the spiral being more marked on the thinner of the two.

  Up ahead was a thicker fiber still, a monarch of the collagen jungle.

  "You'll have to turn, Arkady," said Konev. "Now's the time to test it."

  "All right, but I'll have to lean over. I don't have the controls neatly at my fingertips. There's a limit to improvization." He leaned forward, groping at a level about that of his calves. "I do not relish the thought of having to do this constantly. It is hard on a man of portly habit."

  "You mean a man who is fat," said Konev ill-naturedly. "You have let yourself go flabby, Arkady. You should lose weight."

  Dezhnev straightened up. "Very well. I will stop right now, go home, and begin to lose weight. Is this a time, Yuri, to lecture me?"

  "It is not a time for you to get emotional either, Arkady," said Boranova. "Steer!"

  Dezhnev bent over, suppressing a grunt. Slowly, the ship turned rightward in a gentle arc; or, to judge more literally by appearance, the thick collagen fiber drifted leftward as it approached - as did everything else.

  "You will hit it," said Konev. "Turn more sharply."

  "It won't turn more sharply," said Dezhnev. "Each motor is only so far off-center and I can't change that."

  "Well, then, we will hit it," said Konev, an edge of anxiety in his voice.

  "Then let us hit," said Boranova angrily. "Yuri, do not go into panic over inconsequentials. The ship is tough plastic; that fiber is undoubtedly rubbery."

  And as she spoke, the prow of the ship began to pass the collagen fiber, with little room to spare. Watching through the port side of the ship, it was clear that the broadening beam of the ship would make contact. When the fiber was nearly level with Kalimin's seat, it happened. There was no scraping sound, only a very soft hiss could be detected. Not only was the fiber rubbery, as Boranova had said, so that it compressed slightly under the force of the collision, then rebounded, pushing the ship a trifle away - but the slimy intercellular fluid served as a cushion and a friction reducer.

  The ship continued to move and turned leftward in the direction of the fiber.

  Dezhnev said, "I shut off the motor as soon as I saw we were about to make contact. This leftward turn we're going through now is a friction turn."

  "Yes," said Konev, "but what if you had wanted to turn in the other direction?"

  "Then I would have used the motor. Or, considerably earlier in our progress, I would have made a turn toward a graze with the fiber to the right. That fiber would have turned us rightward. The main thing, in any case, is to use the motors as little as possible and the fibers as much as possible. In the first place, we don't want to consume our supply of energy too rapidly. In the second place, the rapid output of energy increases the chances of spontaneous deminiaturization."

  "What!" cried Morrison. He turned to Boranova. "Is that true?"

  "It's not an important effect," said Boranova, "but it's true. The chances go up a bit. I should say that conservation is the more important of the two reasons for saving energy."

  But Morrison could not repress his anger. "Don't you see how ridiculous - no, criminal - this whole situation is? We're in a ship that simply isn't up to the task and everything we do makes it worse."

  Boranova shook her head. "Albert, please. You know we have no choice."

  "Besides," said Dezhnev, grinning, "if we manage to do the job in this unsuitable ship, think how much more remarkable that will make us. We will be heroes. Authentic heroes. We will surely get the Order of Lenin - each one of us. It will be a foregone conclusion. And if we fail, it is comforting to think that we will be able to explain it as the ship's fault."

  "Yes. Soviet heroes, win or lose, all of you," said Morrison. "And what will I be?"

  Boranova said, "Remember, Albert, you will not be neglected if we succeed. The Order of Lenin has been given to foreigners on a number of occasions, including many Americans. Even if you should not want the honor for some reason, the success of your theories will be established and you may receive a Nobel Prize before any of us do."

  "We're in no position to count our chickens," said Morrison. "I shall refrain from composing my Nobel acceptance speech for just a while, thank you."

  "Actually," said Kaliinin, "I wonder if we're in a position to reach a neuron."

  "What's the difficulty?" asked Dezhnev. "We can move and steer and we're outside the capillary and in the brain. Just out there is a neuron, any number of them, billions of them."

  "Just out where?" Kaliinin asked. "I don't see any neurons. Just collagen fibers."

  Dezhnev said, "How much of this intercellular fluid do you think there is?"

  "A microscopic thickness," said Kaliinin, "if we were normal in size. However, we're the size of a glucose molecule and, relative to ourselves, there may be a kilometer's distance or more to the nearest neuron."

  "Well, then," said Dezhnev, "we'll move our ship a kilometer. It may take a little time but it can be done."

  "Yes, if we could move in a straight line, but we're in the middle of a dense jungle. We have to turn and twist around this fiber and that and, in the end, we may travel fifty kilometers by our own measurement and find ourselves back at our starting point. We're just going to be blundering through a maze and we won't reach a neuron except by sheerest accident."

  "Yuri has a map," said Dezhnev, sounding a little nonplussed. "Yuri's cerebro-whatever-"

  Konev, frowning, shook his head. "My cerebrograph shows me the circulatory network of the brain and the cell pattern, but I can't expand it to the point where it will indicate our position in the intercellular fluid between cells, We don't know that sort of fine detail and we can't get out of cerebrography any more than we can put into it."

  Morrison looked through the wall of the ship. In all directions, the collagen fibers could be made out, overlapping and blocking them in. In no direction could the eye see through them very far and in no direction was there any sign of anything but fiber upon fiber.

  No nerve cells! No neurons!

  Chapter 13. Cell

  The wall that says "Welcome, stranger" has never been built.

  — Dezhnev Senior

  55.

  Boranova's nostrils flared slightly and her dark eyebrows hunched together, but her voice remained calm.

  "Arkady," she said, "You will travel forward in as straight a line as possible. Curve to a minimum extent and, if you can, curve left and right alternat
ely. And, since we're in a three-dimensional situation, up and down alternately."

  "It would get confusing, Natasha," said Dezhnev.

  "Of course it will, but perhaps it won't get completely confusing. We may not be able to travel ruler-straight, but maybe we won't go in circles, spirals, or helixes either. And sooner or later we should reach a cell."

  "Perhaps," said Dezhnev, "if you deminiaturize the ship a little bit -"

  "No," said Boranova.

  "Wait, Natasha. Think about it. If we deminiaturize a bit, then there will be less space to travel. We grow larger, the space between blood vessel and neuron grows smaller." He made eloquent gestures with his hands. "You understand?"

  "I understand. But the larger we get, Arkady, the more difficult it will be to pass between the fibers. The neurons of the brain are well-protected. The brain is the only organ to be completely encased in bone and the neurons themselves, which are the most irregular in the body, are well-packed with intercellular material. Look for yourself. It's only if we're down to the size of a glucose molecule that we can make our way through and around the collagen without, perhaps, doing drastic damage to the brain."

  At this point, Konev committed the unusual act of turning in his seat, looking upward as he turned to his left so that his glance passed over Kaliinin before meeting Boranova's eyes. He said, "I don't think we have to travel onward completely blind - completely at random."

  "How otherwise, Yuri?" asked Boranova.

  "Surely the neurons give themselves away. Each has nerve impulses running its length periodically and at very short intervals. That might be detected."

  Morrison frowned. "The neurons are insulated."

  "The axons are - not the cell bodies."

  "But it is the axons where the nerve impulse is strongest."

  "No, it is the synapses where the nerve impulse may be strongest and they are not insulated, either. The synpases ought to be sparking all the time and you ought to be able to detect it."

  Morrison said, "We couldn't in the capillary."