Isaac Asimov - Fantastic Voyage II - Destination Brain

"Get back!" shouted Morrison, but the red corpuscle knew nothing of shouts. Its role was purely passive.

Morrison thrust at it with his hands and used his leg flippers to push harder. The elastic surface film of the red cell gave and bellied inward, but resisted more strongly, the more it gave until, finally, Morrison was pushing uselessly and, as he tired, was forced back against the ship.

He paused to catch his breath, which was difficult, hot and sweat-drenched as he was. He wondered whether he would be disabled first by dehydration or by the fever which would surely come over him if he could not get rid of the heat his own body was producing - and all the more so because of the effort he was making to free himself of the red corpuscle.

He lifted his arm again and brought it down, the plastic flipper held edgewise. It sliced through the pellicle of the corpuscle, puncturing it like a balloon. The surface tension of the film pulled the opening wider and wider. Matter exuded - a thin cloud of granules - and the red corpuscle began to shrink.

Morrison felt as though he had killed an inoffensive living creature and experienced a pang of guilt - then decided that there were trillions of others in the circulatory system and that a red corpuscle only had 120 days of functioning anyhow.

Now he could pull back toward the rear.

No fog collected on the inner surface of his suit. Why should it? The surface was as warm as he was and nothing would cling to the plastic anyway. What would have been fog was probably collecting as little pools of sweat in this corner and that of the suit, rolling around as he did.

He was back at the rear now, back where the ship's streamlining failed because the jets of each of the three microfusion engines broke the smooth lines. Here he was as far from the center of gravity of the ship as possible. (With luck, the other four would move as close to the front of the ship as they could. - He wished he had thought to make that explicit before getting into the suit.) What he had to do was to find positively charged areas that would hold his hands back and then - push!

He was feeling a little dizzy. Physical? Psychological? The effect was the same, either way.

He took another deep breath and blinked his eyes as perspiration leaked into them (there was no way he could brush it away and again he felt a spasm of fury against the fools who had designed a suit only microscopically better than none at all).

He found the handholds against the hull and paddled his feet. Would this work? The mass he was trying to turn was only micrograms in quantity, but he had at his disposal - what? Microergs? He knew that the square-cube law gave him a tremendous advantage, but how much efficiency could he put into his push?

But the ship moved. He could tell that by the motions of the tiling on the capillary wall. He could now reach that wall with his feet, so the ship must be lying across the capillary. He had turned it 90 degrees.

When his feet touched the capillary wall, he pushed with perhaps injudicious savagery. If he were to punch a hole in the wall, the results might be incalculably bad, but he was aware he had little time left and he could not think beyond that. Fortunately, his feet rebounded as though they had sunk into spongy rubber and the ship turned a bit faster.

Then stuck.

Morrison looked up blearily, squinting and willing himself to see. (He was almost past the ability to breathe in the squalid damp heat of the suit's interior.) It was another red corpuscle. Surely it was another red corpuscle. They were as closely spaced in capillaries as - as cars on a busy city street.

This time he did not wait. The flipper on his right hand came down at once, carving open a vast swath, and this time he did not spend a microsecond of worry over the murder of an innocent object. His legs worked again and the ship moved.

He hoped it was shifting in the same direction as before. What if he had managed to twist himself upside down in his mad attack on the red corpuscle and he was simply pushing the ship back into the wrong direction? He was almost beyond caring.

The ship was now parallel to the long axis of the capillary. Gasping, he tried to study the tiles. If they were moving forward toward the prow of the ship, then the ship was moving backward with the current and it was facing the junction of the arteriole.

He decided it was. No, he didn't care. Right way, wrong way, he had to get back into the ship.

He was not ready to sell his life for success.

Where? Where?

His hands were sliding along the walls of the ship. Sticking here. Sticking there.

Vaguely he saw the dim figures on the other side of the wall. Motioning. He tried to follow the gestures.

They were fading out.

Up? Signaling up? How could he clamber up? He had no strength.

His last truly sane thought, for a while, was that he needed no strength. Up meant no more than down for a weightless, massless body.

He wriggled upward, forgetting why, and a fog of darkness came down upon him.

The first thing Morrison sensed was cold.

A wave of cold. Then a touch of cold.

Then light.

He was staring at a face. For an interval of time, he did not grasp the fact that it was a face. It was just a pattern of light and shade at first. Then a face. Then the face of Sophia Kaliinin.

She said softly, "Do you know me?"

Slowly, creakily, Morrison nodded.

"Say my name."

"Sophia," he croaked.

"And to your left?"

His eyes turned, and difficulty focusing, then he turned his head. "Natalya," he said.

"How do you feel?"

"Headache." His voice sounded small and far away.

"It will go away."

Morrison closed his eyes and surrendered to the peace of nonstruggle. Just to do nothing was the highest good. To feel nothing.

Then he felt a cool stroke over his groin and his eyes opened again. He discovered that the suit had been removed and he was naked.

He felt arms holding him down and heard a voice say, "Don't worry. We can't give you a shower. There's no water for that. But we can use a damp towel. You need to be cooled - and cleaned."

"… undignified," he managed, struggling over the syllables.

"Foolish. We'll dry you now. A little deodorant. Then back into your one-piece." Morrison tried to relax. It was only when he felt cotton against his body that he spoke again. He asked, "Did I turn the ship properly?"

"Yes," said Kaliinin, nodding her head vigorously, "and fought off two red corpuscles most savagely. You were heroic."

Morrison said hoarsely, "Help me up." He pushed down with his elbows against his seat and, of course, drifted into the air.

He was brought down.

"I forgot," he muttered. "Well, strap me in. Let me sit and recover."

He fought down the dizzy feeling, then said, "That plastic suit is worthless. A suit for use in the bloodstream of a warm-blooded animal must be cooled."

"We know," said Dezhnev from his seat at the controls. "The next one will be."

"The next one," spat Morrison bitterly.

"At least," said Dezhnev, "you did what was necessary and the suit made that possible."

"At a cost," said Morrison, who then slipped into English in order to express his feelings more accurately.

"I understood that," said Konev. "I lived in the United States, you know. If it will make you feel better, I'll teach you how to say every one of those words in Russian."

"Thanks," said Morrison, "but they taste better in English." He licked his dry lips with a dry tongue and said, "Water would taste still better. I'm thirsty."

"Of course," said Kaliinin. She held a bottle to his lips. "Suck at it gently. It won't pour when it has no mass to speak of. - Slowly, slowly. Don't waterlog yourself."