Isaac Asimov - Fantastic Voyage II - Destination Brain

"Why you?" said Morrison.

"I had other reasons - ones that were important to me."

"Indeed? What were they?"

"But unimportant to you."

There was a short uncomfortable pause.

"Come, the task I have been given is to show you the ship," said Kaliinin.

"The ship? How long have you been planning this? Have you had time to build a ship?"

"For the specific purpose of testing Shapirov's brain from within? Of course not. It was meant for other, simpler purposes, but it is the only thing we have that we can use. - Come, Albert, Natalya thinks it will be wise for you to become acquainted with it, see it, feel it. It is possible that the down-to-earthness of the technology will reconcile you to the task."

Morrison held back. "Why must I see it now? Can't I have time to grow accustomed to the whole subject of personal miniaturization?"

"That is foolish, Albert. If you had more time to sit in your room and brood, you would have more time to feed your uncertainty. Besides, we have no time. How long do you suppose we can allow Shapirov to lie there deteriorating, with his thoughts diminishing with each moment? The ship embarks on its journey tomorrow morning."

"Tomorrow morning," muttered Morrison, his throat dry. Foolishly, he looked at his watch.

"You have few enough hours, but we'll keep track of the time for you so you need not consult your watch. Tomorrow morning the ship enters a human body. And you will be on the ship."

Then, without warning, she slapped his cheek hard. She said, "Your eyes were beginning to turn upward. Were you planning to faint?"

Morrison rubbed his cheek, grimacing with pain. "I wasn't planning anything," he mumbled, "but I might have fainted without planning it. Have you no gentler way of breaking the news?"

"Have I really caught you by surprise, when you already know that you have agreed to be miniaturized and it is self-evident that we have no time?"

She gestured peremptorily, "Now come with me."

And Morrison, still rubbing his cheek and seething with rage and humiliation, followed.

It was back to the miniaturization area - back to the busy people, each concerned with their own affairs and paying no attention to one another. Through them all, Kaliinin walked with an erect carriage and maintained the aristocratic air that arises automatically when all defer to you.

She was one of the leading lights, Morrison could see (his hand still resting lightly on his cheek, which felt inflamed and which he hesitated to expose), and all who crossed or even neared her path nodded their heads in a kind of rudimentary bow and stepped a little backward, as though to make sure not to impede her patch. No one acknowledged Morrison's presence at all.

On, on, through one room after another - and everywhere the feel of pent-up energy held in bare check.

Kaliinin must have sensed it too, familiar as she must be with it, for she muttered to Morrison with a certain pride, "There's a solar power station in space, a major part of whose output is reserved for Malenkigrad."

And then they were upon it before Morrison had a true chance to realize what he was looking at. It was not a very large room and the object within it was not of impressive bulk. Indeed, Morrison's first impression was that it was a piece of artwork.

It was a streamlined object not much larger than an automobile, certainly shorter than a stretch limousine, though taller. And it was transparent!

Automatically, Morrison reached out to feel it.

It was not cold to the touch. It felt smooth and almost moist, but when he removed his hand, his fingertips were perfectly dry. He tried it again and as he ran his fingertips across the surface, they seemed to stick slightly, but they left no sweaty mark. On impulse, he breathed upon it. There was the shadow of condensing moisture on the transparent material, but it disappeared quickly.

"It is a plastic material," said Kaliinin, "but I don't know its composition. If I knew, it would probably come under the head of classified information anyway, but whatever it is, it is stronger than steel - tougher and more resistant to shock - kilogram for kilogram."

"Weight for weight, perhaps," said Morrison, for the moment his scientific curiosity drowning his uneasiness, "but such a thickness of plastic material could not possibly be as strong as the same thickness of steel. It could not be as strong, volume for volume."

"Yes, but where are we going?" said Kaliinin. "There will be no pressure differential inside and outside the ship; there will be no meteroids or even cosmic dust against which we must protect ourselves. There will be about us nothing but soft cell structure. This plastic will be ample protection and it is light. The two of us could perhaps lift it if we tried. That is what is important. As you can well understand, we must be sparing of mass. Every additional kilogram consumes considerable electromagnetic energy in miniaturization and delivers considerable heat in deminiaturization."

"Will it hold a large enough crew?" said Morrison, peering inside.

"It will. It is very compact, but it can hold six and we will only be five. And it contains a surprising amount of unusual gadgetry. Not as much as we would like, of course. The original plans - But what can we do? There are always pressures for economy, even unwarranted ones, in this unjust world."

Morrison said with a twinge of strong uneasiness, "How much pressure for how much economy? Does everything work?"

"I assure you it does." Her face had lit up. Now that the settled melancholy had left (temporarily only, Morrison felt sure), Kaliinin was unmistakably good-looking. "Everything in it has been tested exhaustively, both singly and all together. Zero risk is impossible of attainment, but we have a reasonably close to zero risk here. And all with virtually no metal. What with microchips, fiber optics, and Manuilsky junctions, we have all we want in a total of less than five kilograms of devices all together. That is why the ship can be so small. After all, voyages into the microcosm are not expected to last for more than some hours, so we don't need sleeping arrangements, cycling equipment, elaborate food and air supplies, anything other than quite simple devices for excretory functions, and so on."

"Who'll be at the controls?"

"Arkady."

"Arkady Dezhnev?"

"You seem surprised."

"I don't know why I should. I presume he's qualified."

"Completely. He's in engineering design and he's a genius at it. You can't go by the way he sounds - No, you can go by the way he sounds. Do you suppose any of us could endure his crude humor and affectations if he weren't a genius at something? He designed the ship - every part of it - and all its equipment. He invented a dozen completely new ways of lowering mass and introducing compactness. You have nothing like it in the United States."

Morrison said stiffly, "I have no way of knowing what the United States may have or may not have in unusual devices."

"I am sure they don't. Dezhnev is an unusual person, for all his love of presenting himself as a boor. He is a descendant of Semyon Ivanov Dezhnev. You have heard of him, I suppose."

Morrison shook his head.

"Really?" Kaliinin's voice turned icy. "He is only the famous explorer who, in the time of Peter the Great, explored Siberia to its easternmost centimeter and said there was a stretch of sea separating Siberia and North America decades before Vitus Bering, a Dane in Russian employ, discovered the Bering Strait. - And you don't know Dezhnev. That's so American. Unless a Westerner did it, you never heard of it."

"Don't see insults everywhere, Sophia. I haven't studied exploration. There are many American explorers that I don't know - and that you don't, either." He shook his finger at her, again remembering her slap and rubbing his check once more, "This is what I mean. You find things to feed hate on - inconsequential things you should feel ashamed to grub up."