Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain fv-2

by Isaac Asimov

  "We were on the wrong side of the capillary wall at the time. - Look, Albert, why are you arguing the matter? I'm asking you to try to detect brain waves. That's why you're here, isn't it?"

  "I was kidnapped," said Morrison violently. "That's why I'm here."

  Boranova leaned forward. "Albert, whatever the reason, you're here and Yuri's suggestion is a reasonable one. - And, Yuri, must you always be confrontational?"

  Morrison found himself shaking with anger and for a moment he wasn't sure why. Konev's suggestion was indeed reasonable.

  Then it occurred to him that he was being asked to put his theories to the test under conditions which would allow him no escape. He was on the very border of a brain cell that was magnified with respect to himself to mountainous proportions. He might be asked next to make his test inside, actually inside, such a cell. And if he did - and if he failed - under what blanket of argument and excuse could he hide from the fact that his work was wrong and had always been wrong?

  He was angry, surely, at being thrust into this uncomfortable corner by circumstance and not at Konev particularly.

  He was aware of Boranova waiting for him to say something and of Konev maintaining his incandescent stare.

  Morrison said, "If I detect signals, I will detect them from all sides. Except for the capillary we have just left, we're surrounded by uncounted numbers of neurons."

  "But some are closer than others," said Konev, "and one or two would be closest of all. Can't you detect the direction from which the signals will be the strongest? We can home in on that signal."

  "My receiving device isn't equipped to determine directional signals."

  "Ah! Then Americans, too, make use of devices that are equipped for specific purposes and do not prepare for emergency needs. It is not merely the ignorant Soviets who -"

  "Yuri!" said Boranova sternly.

  Konev swallowed. "I suppose you'll tell me I'm confrontational again. In that case, Natalya, you tell him to think of a way of devising something that will tell him the direction from which the strongest signals are coming."

  "Please, Albert, make the attempt," said Boranova. "If you fail, we shall just have to blunder our way through this collagen jungle and hope we come upon something before too long."

  "We're blundering onward even as we speak," put in Dezhnev almost cheerfully, "but I still see nothing."

  Still angry, Morrison activated his computer and put it into the brain wave reception mode. The screen flickered, but it was only noise - though the noise was more prominent than it had been within the capillary.

  Until now, he had always used leads that involved micropositioning inside a nerve. Where was he to put the leads now? He had no nerve to put them into - or, rather, he was already inside the brain, which made the whole matter of positioning anomalous. Perhaps, though, if he let the leads (made as stiff as possible) rise in the air and spread apart like a pair of antennae, they might play the part. At their present size, the spread would be tiny and could scarcely be useful but -

  He doubled and redoubled the leads and they stood up in long loops, looking very much like the insect antennae that had first given them their names. He then focused and sharpened reception as well as he could and the flickering on the screen suddenly broke into deep narrow waves - but only for a moment. Involuntarily, he let out a cry.

  "What happened?" said Boranova, startled.

  "I received something. Just a flash. But it's gone."

  "Try again."

  Morrison looked up. "Listen. All of you. Quiet. Working this thing is difficult and I manage best when I can concentrate entirely. Understood? No noise. Nothing."

  "What was it you received?" said Konev softly.

  "What?"

  "Like a flash. You received something like a flash. May we know what it was?"

  "No. I don't know what I received. I want to listen again." He looked behind him to the left. "Natalya, I'm in no position to give orders, but you are. I am not to be disturbed by anyone, particularly by Yuri."

  "We will all be quiet," said Boranova. "Proceed, Albert. - Yuri, not one word."

  Morrison looked sharply to his left, for there had been a soft touch on his hand. Kaliinin was looking at him keenly and there was a small smile on her face. She mouthed words in an exaggerated fashion and he managed to catch the Russian: "Pay no attention to him. Show him! Show him!"

  Her eyes seemed to glitter. Morrison could not help but smile warmly in response. She might be motivated entirely by a desire for vengeance against the man who had abandoned her, but he enjoyed the look of assurance and faith that was present in her eyes.

  (How long ago had it been since a woman had looked at him with pride and with trust in his abilities? How many years ago had it been since Brenda had lost hers?)

  A spasm of self-pity shook him and he had to wait for a moment.

  Back to the device. He tried to shut out the world, shut out his condition, think only of his computer, only of the tiny fluctuations in the electromagnetic field produced by the interchange of sodium and potassium ions across the neuronic membrane.

  The screen flashed again, steadied, and resolved into a pattern of low peaks and valleys. Carefully, barely daring to touch the keys, Morrison threw in an expansion directive. The peaks and valleys spread out, the edges sliding off the screen. On the single peak and valley left remaining, there was a fuzzy smaller wiggle.

  It's recording the waves, he thought, afraid to say so, afraid even to think it with any intensity, lest the slightest physical or mental effect suffice to blank it out.

  The minor wiggle - the skeptic waves, as he called them - went out of focus and back in, never quite sharpening.

  Morrison wasn't surprised. He might be detecting the fields of a number of cells that didn't quite duplicate each other. There was also the insulating effect of the plastic wall of the ship. There was the eternal shaking of Brownian motion. There might even be the interfering charge of atom groupings outside the miniaturization field.

  The wonder was that he had gotten waves at all.

  Slowly he made hand contact with the antennae - slid his fingers up and down, first one hand, then the other, then both in unison, then both in opposite directions. Then he bent the antennae gently, this way and that. There were sharpening and fuzzing of the skeptic waves, but he didn't know, for certain, exactly what he was doing that resulted in the sharpening.

  And then, at a certain point, the tiny waves sharpened acutely. A little to one direction and another they fuzzed, but in one particular direction they were sharp. He tried to keep his hands from trembling.

  "Arkady," he said.

  "Yes, my American magician," said Dezhnev.

  "Curve left and a little upward. I don't want to talk too much."

  "I'll have to curve around the fibers."

  "Curve slowly. Too fast and I'll lose the focus."

  Morrison fought to keep his eyes from flickering leftward toward Kaliinin. Just one look at her face and one inevitable thought of her prettiness would be distraction enough to fuzz out the screen. Even the thought of distraction was itself distracting enough for the thought wave to flicker.

  Dezhnev was curving the ship in the gentle arc that was all that the offset motors would manage and slowly Morrison shifted the antennae to suit. Occasionally he muttered a brief whispered direction: "Up and right," "Down," "A little left."

  Finally he gasped, "Straight ahead."

  It should get easier, he thought, as they got closer, but he couldn't relax until a neuron was actually in sight. And, through the obscuring collagen thicket, that was not likely to be until they were nearly on top of it.

  Concentrating on only one subject was as tiring as clenching a muscle and leaving it clenched. He had to introduce just a bit of quick variation. He had to think of something else, but something neutral, something that would, for a while, leave his mind unclenched. So he thought of his broken family because he had thought of them so often that the image h
ad faded and lost effect somehow. It was a photograph that was growing bent and gray and he could snap out of it quickly and return to the single-minded contemplation of the skeptic waves.

  Then - without warning and overwhelmingly - another thought invaded his mind. It was a sharp mental picture of Sophia Kaliinin, looking younger, prettier, and happier than she had ever seemed to him in the short time he had known her. And with that picture came a tumbling of love and frustration and jealousy that left him weak.

  He had not been consciously aware of any of these feelings, but who knew what unconscious thoughts and emotions might be hidden there in his own brain cells? Kaliinin? Did he feel that way about her? So quickly? Or was it the abnormal tensions of this fantastic voyage into the brain that had brought about fantastic responses?

  It was only then that he noticed that the screen had fuzzed out completely. He was about to shout a warning to Dezhnev to stop the motors while he concentrated and tried to recapture the waves when Dezhnev's voice boomed out.

  "There it is, Albert. You guided us to the cell like a bloodhound. Congratulations!"

  "Also," said Boranova, gazing at Konev's lowering countenance, "congratulations to Yuri for coming up with the idea and persuading Albert to make the effort."

  Konev's face relaxed and Dezhnev said, "But now, how do we get inide?"

  56.

  Morrison stared at the vista ahead with interest. What he saw was a vast ridged wall stretching up and down, right and left, as far as the ship's light made it possible to see. The ridges were themselves broken up into domes so that, on closer inspection, the wall seemed to be a checkerboard with each square bulging outward. There were ragged extensions jutting outward between the bulges, like thick, short, and branching ropes that gave the wall an appearance of being tattered.

  Morrison, with some effort, allowed for his own miniaturization and grasped the fact that the bulges were the ends of molecules (of phospholipids, he assumed) that made up the cell membrane. He realized with some dismay just what it meant for the ship to be the size of a glucose molecule. The cell was an enormous object; by present ship measure, it must be many kilometers across.

  Konev had been staring at the cell membrane also, but emerged from his thoughtful contemplation sooner than Morrison did.

  "I'm not sure," said Konev, "that this is a brain cell - or, at least, a neuron."

  "What else can it be?" said Dezhnev. "We're in the brain and that's a cell."

  Konev made no visible attempt to smother the disgust in his expression as he said, "There is more than one kind of brain cell. The neuron is the important cell, the chief agent of the mind. There are ten billion of them in the human brain. There are also some ten times as many glial cells of several kinds, which serve supporting and subsidiary functions. They are considerably smaller than the neurons. On the basis of chance, then, it is ten to one that this is a glia. The thought waves are in the neurons."

  Boranova said, "We can't be guided simply by chance, Yuri. Can you tell in some definitive way whether this is glia or a neuron without involving statistics?"

  "Not just by looking at it, no. From this size, all I see is a small section of a cell membrane and in such a case one cell looks like another. We'll have to become larger and get a more panoramic view. I presume we can become larger now, Natalya. After all, we're through what you called the collagen jungle."

  "We can deminiaturize, if necessary," said Boranova, "but increasing size is more tedious and risky than decreasing it. An increase means the generation of heat and must be done slowly. Is there any alternative?"

  Konev said tartly, "We might try Albert's instrument again. Albert, can you tell us if the skeptic waves you can detect are coming from straight ahead or from a slightly different direction?"

  Morrison hesitated. Before his instrument had fuzzed out at a time just before the cell had been sighted, there had been the Kaliinin vision and he didn't want it back. It was too embarrassing, too upsetting. Surely, if his mind hid and suppressed emotions, it was because they were better hidden and suppressed.

  He said uncertainly, "I'm not sure -"

  "Try it," said Konev and all four Soviets were now looking at Morrison earnestly.

  With an inward shrug, Morrison put his computer into action. After some consideration, he said, "I get the waves, Yuri, but not as strongly as I did on the way here."

  "Do they get stronger in another direction?"

  "Slightly, from a more upward direction, but I must warn you again that the directional abilities of my device are very primitive."

  "Yes, like this ship you complain about. - Here is what it seems to me has happened, Natalya. Coming here, we were able to detect a neuron directly above the top of a glia that lay before it. When he saw the glia, Arkady naturally steered for it and its bulk now masks the neuron and we get the thought waves more dimly."

  "In that case," said Boranova, "we must go over the glia to the neuron."

  "And in that case," said Konev, "I say again that we must deminiaturize. At our present glucose size, the distance we must pass in moving over the glia may well prove to be a hundred or a hundred and fifty kilometers. If we increase in length ten times, say to the size and mass of a small protein molecule, we would reduce the apparent distance to merely ten or fifteen kilometers."

  Kaliinin said in an abstracted voice, as though what she had to say bore no relationship to what had just been said, "We will have to be our present size to get into the neuron, Natalya."

  And, after a short pause, as though disengaging himself from the possibility of directly answering the remark, Konev said, "Of course. Once we reach the neuron, we readjust our size to whatever seems best."

  Boranova sighed and seemed lost in her own thought.

  Konev said with unaccustomed gentleness, "Natalya, we'll have to change size eventually. We can't stay glucose size forever."

  "I hate to deminiaturize oftener than I must," said Boranova.

  "But we must in this case, Natalya. We cannot spend hours cruising along a cell membrane. And deminiaturizing tenfold at this stage involved a very low absolute energy change."

  Morrison said, "Is it that starting the deminiaturizing process might initiate an uncontrolled and explosive continuation?"

  Boranova said, "There's nothing wrong with your intuition, Albert. Without knowing anything about miniaturization theory, you manage to grasp the point. Once started, it is safest to allow the deminiaturization to continue. Stopping it involves a certain risk."

  "So does remaining at glucose size for hours longer than we need," said Konev.

  "True," said Boranova, nodding her head.

  Dezhnev said, "Shall we put it to a vote and come to a people's democratic decision?"

  At this, Boranova's head snapped up and her dark eyes seemed to flash. Her heavy jaws set firmly and she said, "No, Arkady. It is my responsibility to make the decision and I will increase the size of the ship." Then, abandoning the air of majesty, she said, "Of course you can wish me well."

  Dezhnev said, "And why not? It would be the same as wishing all of ourselves well."

  Boranova bent over her controls and Morrison grew quickly tired of trying to watch. He couldn't actually see what she was doing, wouldn't understand that she was doing if he did see it, and there was the mundane fact that his neck was beginning to ache with the effort to keep it turned. He looked forward and found Konev peering at him over his shoulder.

  "About the skeptic wave detection," said Konev.

  "What about the skeptic wave detection?" said Morrison.

  "When we were making our way to this cell through the collagen jungle -"

  "Yes yes, what about it?"

  "Did you get any - images?"

  Morrison remembered that tearing vision of Sophia Kaliinin. Nothing like it existed in his mind now. Even when he thought of it as it had then been, it now roused no response. Whatever it was in his mind, it seemed to have been reached only under the intense stimulation of co
ncentrated skeptic waves; and whatever it was, he was not going to describe it to Konev - or to anyone else, for that matter.

  He temporized, "Why should I have sensed any images?"

  "Because you did on occasion when you analyzed skeptic waves at normal-size intensities."

  "You're assuming that analysis during miniaturization would produce greater intensities or possess greater image-producing powers."

  "It's a reasonable assumption. But did you or didn't you? The question doesn't involve theorizing. I'm asking about an observation. Did you get any images?"

  And Morrison sighed inwardly and said, "No."

  Konev continued his sidewise peering (under which Morrison felt himself grow a little restless and rather more than a little irate), then said softly, "I did."

  "You did?" Morrison's eyes widened in honest surprise. Then, more cautiously, "What did you sense?"

  "Not much, but I thought you might have gotten it more clearly. You were actually holding and manipulating your detector and it is probably more adapted to your brain than mine."

  "Just what was it you got? Can you can describe it at all?"

  "A kind of flicker that moved into and out of awareness. It seemed to me that I saw three human figures, one larger than the others."

  "And what did you make of that?"

  "Well, Shapirov had a daughter whom he adored and she had two children whom he also adored. I imagine that in his coma he may have been thinking of them, or remembering them, or being under the delusion that he was seeing them. Who knows what goes on in a coma?"

  "Do you know his daughter and his grandchildren? Did you recognize them?"

  "I was seeing them, as it were, through translucent glass in the twilight. It was all I could do to sense three figures." He sounded disappointed. "I had hoped you would see it more clearly."

  Morrison, thinking hard, said, "I neither saw, nor sensed, anything like that."

  Konev said, "Of course, things should be sharper once we are inside a neuron. It is not images we must sense, in any case. We want to hear words."

  "I've never heard words," said Morrison, shaking his head.