Fantastic Voyage : Microcosm

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Don't get the idea that this is a democracy,” he said, his voice deep enough to be a growl, “but I can accommodate the change if it increases our chances of success.” He waited only a moment for his people to object, and no one did.

  “Be prepared for miniaturization and launch in two hours.”

  Chapter 11

  Time to mission: 2:00 hours

  Before launch, while the other team members completed their final mission preparations, Devlin devoted every moment to the vessel that would carry them through the alien's body.

  Though qualified inspection crews had given the Mote a clean bill of mechanical health, Devlin didn't trust anyone else's assessment. Extensive pre-flight checks were not just a matter of pride, they were also a matter of survival. He wanted to touch the ship's hull, polish the control board, test the systems himself, check the engines to make sure everything was up to his specifications.

  Wearing clean-room overalls, rubber gloves, and elastic-trimmed booties, Devlin adjusted the mesh over his unruly dark hair and passed through a line of air blowers and scrubbers. Next he crossed a pad of gray stickum that grabbed loose debris from his feet on his way into the echoing, white-tiled room.

  Brightly lit in the center, surrounded by the prismatic reflectors of the miniaturization apparatus, sat the Mote, a vision of engineering style and grace. She was raised off the floor on landing struts, ready to go.

  Engrossed in the challenge of the impending mission, Devlin felt more alive than he had for a long time. He was glad he'd accepted Felix's invitation to join Project Proteus three years earlier.

  After Kelli's death, Devlin's dad, a retired Air Force colonel, had been unable to help him through the period of mourning. The gruff older man simply didn't have the emotional tools to face such distress. His best commiseration had amounted to “Keep your chin up. You'll get over it.”

  But Devlin didn't want to “get over” his wife, had no wish to brush aside his years with her. He wasn't looking for another love of his life. Still, five years after losing Kelli, Marc Devlin had fallen in love again. With a ship.

  The wedge-shaped Mote had a creamy white hull, aerodynamic lines, sensual curves. To him, few things were sexier than a ramjet configuration or thruster assembly, and the unusual impeller engines (his own design) made him giddy. The ship was a work of art, a cross between a jet fighter and a submarine, with inspiration drawn from his favorite science fiction shows—everything from Star Trek's shuttlecraft to the Flying Sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

  When he'd first been invited to join Project Proteus, Devlin had been afraid that working for his father-in-law would provide too many reminders, bring raw emotions to the surface, cause too much strain between them. But when he realized how lackluster his consulting career had been after his retirement from the Air Force, dabbling with silly inventions and marking time, Devlin had accepted the offer.

  Over coffee one day, Felix Hunter had explained the Project's overall parameters, then given the young man carte blanche. By hand, Devlin had drawn the vessel's original schematics, incorporating innovative ideas that other engineers might have considered too impractical or unorthodox.

  Curved windows made of reinforced plasglass gave an unobstructed view from the ship's front and sides. Directly behind the cockpit, the main cabin held laboratory tables, a full suite of analytical equipment, and movable work chairs where Arnold Freeth and Cynthia Tyler would sit. High-powered, fast-processing laptop computers had access to the Mote's main computer and its extensive library of CD-ROMs packed with reference material.

  While useless at full size and mass, the impeller engines and exhaust cones could push a miniaturized vessel at great speed. Though Captain Wilcox had been slated as the first mission pilot, Devlin had designed the Mote's cockpit controls to fit his own grip; buttons and dials were arranged to match his personal preferences. It was his ship, and he had designed everything to the most exacting specifications.

  Kelli would have been proud… and probably a bit jealous.

  Devlin's dust-protective booties made no sound on the polished floor as he walked across the grid of prismatic projectors. He ran his hands over ivory hull plates that would have made a space shuttle proud. He closed his eyes and “saw” through his fingertips, as if he were a psychic healer searching for an imbalance in a person's aura.

  “We'll be on our way in two hours. Ready to show everybody what you can do?” Alone, he wasn't embarrassed to talk to the ship; after all, some people talked to their plants.

  Because Felix Hunter had to deal with so many hands controlling the purse strings, Devlin's original designs had been adapted and “improved”—then built by the lowest bidder. As a result, the finished vessel had been created by committee, with all the quality and reliability that implied.

  On miniaturized test flights, Devlin had taken his vessel through rigorous environments, testing her limits. At the conclusion of each run, he'd spent hours tinkering with the controls, modifying them to be more responsive. He had disconnected and reconnected the subsystems until he had an intuitive grasp of every wire, every circuit, and every control board. No one understood the Mote better than he did—which was just the way he liked it.

  Devlin ducked around the landing struts and hunkered down to climb through the bottom hatch. Inside the craft, he inhaled the new-car smell of fabric, paint, and metal. He scanned the cockpit, making sure not a single paperclip was out of place.

  His black-leather pilot seat was fronted by the curved control board, a Christmas tree of lights and dials, some cryptically marked, some with grease-penciled annotations. Following tradition, he reached into his pocket and removed a snapshot of Kelli and himself (laughing and drenched after a water-balloon fight). He taped it just at the edge of the cockpit window, where he could easily see it. Beside the photo, he'd handwritten his new motto on an index card: think small.

  From the copilot's seat, Tomiko Braddock would control all the weaponry and defense mechanisms. During the ship's final modification phase, she had insisted on adding high-powered laser projectors (“cannons,” she called them) to use against obstacles in the uncharted microscopic terrain. “At our size, even a dust mite will look like Godzilla romping through Tokyo. Give me some firepower.”

  When miniaturized, the streamlined vessel would be surrounded by a containment field, a barely visible force that maintained their reduced size and dispersed quantum forces. Once they entered the hostile micro-universe, the team would be entirely on their own. Self-sufficient—or vulnerable, depending on how one looked at it—without the possibility of outside intervention.

  A vertical airlock cylinder ran through the center of the vessel like an apple core, with its hatch on the underbelly of the craft. When miniaturized, the crew would be able to explore outside in environmental suits. Devlin walked past the airlock to the back bulkhead and opened a hatch into the cramped engine compartment. Shining a handlight inside, he inspected the impeller cowlings, the turbines. Perfect.

  “You're beautiful,” he said to the ship. Compliments never hurt.

  He carried his “little black bag,” in which he kept every conceivable low-tech gadget to repair those engines, even rebuild them from scratch, if the sophisticated modular systems failed. Torque wrenches, needle-nosed pliers, screwdrivers… cotton swabs, toothpicks, chewing gum, Band-Aids, and the ubiquitous duct tape. All the essentials.

  While Devlin understood his tools and every system aboard the Mote, it bothered him no end that he could not fathom the scientific details of the miniaturization process itself. The two senior project physicists, Quentin and Cutter, were so absorbed in their esoteric work that it seemed they could barely dress themselves or eat their meals without assistance. Brilliant to the edge of being idiot savants, they never took furloughs, even to Fresno, unless the Director ordered them to. And then they had to be escorted.

  National treasures, Felix called them. Who was Devlin to argue?

  The physic
ists loved to explain their pet theories to anyone who had a security clearance and the possibility of comprehending what they were talking about. Someone like Devlin. Quentin and Cutter spoke of quantum effects, overlapping waveforms, the arbitrary space between the electron cloud and an atomic nucleus. It all made sense to them.

  In his post-grad engineering training at MIT, Devlin and his fellow classmates had engaged in a friendly rivalry with the head-in-the-clouds physicists. Trusty engineers knew how to make things work. They solved problems and made useful items based on pie-in-the-sky theories that physicists cooked up. But these two geniuses went farther beyond the mental fringe than anyone Devlin had ever met in his professional career.

  Cutter, whose wild hair looked as if it had been combed with a ceiling fan, cited holographic theory, explaining how a three-dimensional pattern could be stored in a hologram, which, when illuminated by intersecting laser beams, would project the original image at any size. Counter-intuitively, the complete information was stored in every part of that hologram; a sliver cut from the overall piece could project the entire image.

  “And what does that have to do with miniaturization technology?” Devlin had asked.

  Cutter had scratched his unruly hair. “It seemed an interesting analogy.”

  Quentin, tall and lantern-jawed, had furrowed his brow when Devlin asked, “But what happens to the mass when we miniaturize? If we shrink a ship down to the size of a cell, why don't we still have several tons worth of matter? Where does it go? Is there some sort of mass sink?”

  The lantern-jawed physicist cleared his throat. “An imaginary-space quantum reservoir where all the mass goes? Intriguing idea.” Quentin looked toward the armored walls at the far end of the chamber. “Recent theoretical extrapolations suggest that mass is a tensor property, not a scalar. Therefore, a simple four-by-four space-time transformation can yield a zero or infinitesimally small mass.”

  “Fine theory. And how do you perform a four-by-four space-time transformation on a real object?”

  “Why with our apparatus, of course.”

  Devlin wondered if he should duck while the physicist vigorously waved his hands. “Roger that. So what you're saying is it all functions by magic?”

  Quentin scratched his heavy jaw and quoted Clarke's Law. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  After that, Devlin had stopped asking questions.

  With a glance at his watch, he closed the engine cowlings and backed out to the main compartment. Soon the team would regroup for miniaturization and insertion into the alien capsule. His heart fluttered with excitement rather than anxiety.

  Devlin patted the cockpit controls again. “Let's get ready to dance, baby. You and me. We'll make them all proud.”

  Chapter 12

  Time to mission: 1:00 hour

  Politics.

  Felix Hunter enjoyed challenges as much as the Project scientists, but his battles were fought in a political arena, not a technical one. Engrossed in their own pieces of the puzzle, the Proteus crew never saw all the troubleshooting Hunter did from the battleground of his office.

  He spent hours on secure phones, facing teleconferences, sending faxes and documents over scrambled lines. He had to smooth the feathers of ambassadors, industrial leaders, and world-class scientists—all of whom had agendas of their own.

  No wonder his wife preferred to stay by herself at their house in Carmel, dabbling with watercolors and interior design. Their marriage was like a pair of old slippers, a bit ragged but too comfortable to discard. Helen had never much cared for the overblown elegance of upper-crust diplomatic functions. After losing their only daughter, Hunter and his wife had both withdrawn into private interests. Instead of retiring to the California coast with her, Hunter had chosen to helm a major classified project.

  Hunter sat back at his desk, a clunky old army-issue monstrosity painted seafoam green. He could have arranged for extravagant mahogany furniture, an ambassadorial relic to flaunt his status. Years ago, in his Washington, D.C., offices, he'd bowed to such ostentation. His priorities and preferences had changed since then. Here, deep in the mountain, the metal desk reminded him of the scientific glory days of the 1950s and '60s, when people had believed technology would solve the world's problems. Hunter wanted to recapture that sense of infinite possibilities…

  Few things, however, were as dull or as tedious as sifting through treaties, agreements, regulations. Taking a heavy breath, Hunter opened the immense volume he'd taken from the document room, the Code of Federal Regulations. There, exactly as Arnold Freeth had claimed, under Title 14, Aeronautics and Space, he found the lengthy and convoluted guidelines that theoretically applied in this situation. Trust the government to write a regulation for everything.

  “ 'Quarantine' means the detention, examination and decontamination of any person, property, animal or other form of life or matter whatever that is extra-terrestrially exposed, and includes the apprehension or seizure of such person, property, animal or any other form of life or matter whatever. For example, if person or thing 'A' touches the surface of the Moon, and on 'A's return to Earth, 'B' touches 'A' and, subsequently 'C' touches 'B,' all of these—'A' through 'C' inclusive—would be extra-terrestrially exposed ('A' and 'B' directly; 'C' indirectly).”

  Hunter's eyes glazed from the bureaucratic definitions. And the Code applied only to U.S. law; finding a common ground with international law would be more difficult yet.

  In only two days, the alien lifepod had become a political hot potato behind the scenes. Vasili Garamov had so far managed to stall with red tape, but the clock was ticking.

  Once word got out, a flood of so-called “experts” would insist on seeing the specimen. Some would want to pry open the containment vessel and begin dissection; others would demand that the alien be summarily destroyed to avoid any risk to humans and prevent a “world-wide panic.”

  Shooting down the UFO had been an unprovoked act of aggression. If the aliens had other ships in the vicinity, they could launch a full-scale assault upon the entire Earth. Before it was too late, the human race had to learn everything possible about this species—preferably without causing more damage to the sole “survivor.”

  Deputy Foreign Minister Garamov was scheduled to arrive before the launch of Team Proteus, as an official observer. Upon completion of the miniaturized mission, he would oversee the return of the alien body to Russia.

  Unfortunately, Hunter had just learned that Congressman Edwin Durston had intercepted Garamov upon his arrival at the San Francisco International Airport. The Congressman, a long-time opponent of Project Proteus and its level of secret funding, intended to escort the Russian to the mountain facility so they could watch the mission together. Although Durston would accomplish little here, he insisted on being present.

  And Hunter would have to play the host, all smiles. It was an opportunity, really. At last, he could demonstrate the value of Project Proteus, even to a perennially tough customer like Congressman Durston. This was the Director's chance, and he was sure his lost friend Chris Matheson would have been proud.

  Hunter slid shut the clunky drawers and straightened papers on his desk, rearranged the pencils, checked to make sure the stapler and the tape dispenser were full. He looked at his watch again. The four team members would be getting prepared.

  Since she was to be the medical expert on board, Dr. Cynthia Tyler had taken the time to double-check all the analytical and recording equipment that could be crammed into the laboratory space. A nervous Arnold Freeth had finished another rushed simulation. Devlin had completed a full systems check on the Mote.

  Hunter knew he shouldn't be uneasy about sending his son-in-law on the mission. Marc Devlin was perfectly qualified, probably more so than Captain Wilcox. But it was hard to risk losing one of the few remaining connections to his daughter…

  The intercom crackled on. “Director Hunter, the group is suiting up in the prep room. We are ready t
o proceed to the Mote for the final countdown. Everything's on schedule, sir.”

  Though he was tired, his eyes scratchy from too much time without enough sleep, Hunter smiled. This was the moment he'd been waiting for. “Excellent. I'll be right down.”

  Before he could go, he turned to find senior pathologist Trish Wylde standing at his door. She looked flushed, as if she had worked herself up to a confrontation. Her gentle, narrow face was lovely, though she didn't seem to realize it.

  “Felix, I know it's too late.” Trish managed to cover her hurt feelings with a veneer of pride. “Cynthia's fully qualified in the technical area, but she's a loose cannon. She can't hold a candle to my skills. When Dr. Pirov asked to be pulled from the team, I should have been your next choice. I'm the best person for this job.”

  He could see that Trish had rehearsed her words over and over. “Did I do something to make you lose faith in me?”

  He had to fight to keep his shoulders from slumping. Trish Wylde, a talented pathologist who had worked in many exotic situations, had an extraordinary talent for determining what had gone wrong inside a living body. She could find clues, chemical traces, and damage marks with an ease and speed that put most analytical teams to shame.

  “It was an on-the-spot decision, Trish. Dr. Tyler is a perfectly credible pathologist, and she also has expertise in microbiology, which you don't have.”

  “Come on! Familiarity with Earth-based microorganisms won't mean squat once they get inside the alien. None of it is going to apply.” Trish crossed her arms over her chest, daring him to deny it. “And you know I'm a better choice than putting Dr. Pirov in the isolation chamber. Or was it in the agreement with the Russians to have him as part of the hands-on team?”

  Hunter frowned. “Hundreds of factors enter into every decision I make, Trish. After this mission is successful, we'll have other opportunities for miniaturization missions. You're next on the list. I trust your expertise. Now you have to trust mine.”