Isaac Asimov - Fantastic Voyage II - Destination Brain

Morrison drew his head away from the bottle. "Do we have enough water?"

"You must replace what you lost. We'll have enough."

Morrison drank more, then sighed. "That's much better. - There was something I thought of when I was out in the capillary. Just a flash. I wasn't sufficiently myself to understand my own thought." He bent his head and,covered his eyes with his hands. "I'm not sufficiently myself to remember it now. Let me think."

There was silence in the ship.

And then Morrison said with a sigh and a rather massive clearing of his throat. "Yes, I remember it."

Boranova sighed also. "Good, then you have your memory."

"Of course I have," said Morrison pettishly. "What did you think?"

Konev said coldly, "That a loss of memory might be an early sign of brain damage."

Morrison's teeth clicked as his mouth snapped shut. Then he said, feeling a chill in the pit of his stomach. "Is that what you thought?"

"It was possible," said Konev. "As in Shapirov's case."

"Never mind," said Kaliinin insinuatingly. "It didn't happen. What was your thought, Albert? You still remember." It was half-confident statement, half-hopeful question.

"Yes, I do remember. We're pushing upstream now, aren't we? So to speak?"

"Yes," said Dezhnev. "I'm using the motors - expending energy."

"When you reach the arteriole, you'll still be heading upstream and you can't turn. You'll be heading back the way you came. The ship will have to be turned again from outside. It can't be me. Do you understand? It can't be me!"

Kaliinin put her arm around his shoulder. "Shh! It's all right. It won't be you.

"It won't be anyone, Albert, my friend," said Dezhnev jovially. "Look ahead. We're coming to the arteriole now."

Morrison looked up and felt a twinge of pain. He must have grimaced, for Kaliinin put a cool hand on his forehead and said, "How is your headache?"

"Getting better," said Morrison, shaking her hand off rather querulously. He was peering forward and relieved to find that his vision seemed normal. The cylindrical tunnel up ahead was widening somewhat and beyond an elliptical lip he could see a distant wall in which the tiling was much less pronounced.

Morrison said, "The capillary comes off the arteriole like the branch of a tree at an oblique angle. We go through that opening up ahead and we'll be pointed three quarters of the way upstream - and once we nudge the far wall, we'll bounce off and be moving fully upstream."

Dezhnev chuckled. "My old father used to say: 'Half an imagination is worse than none at all.' Watch, little Albert. See, I will wait until we are almost at the opening and I will throttle down the motor so that we make our way up the current very slowly. Now our ship sticks its snout out of the capillary - a little more - a little more - and now the main stream of arteriole blood catches us and pushes against the nose and turns us - and I push out a little more - and it turns us a bit more - and I come out the whole way - and behold I've been turned, I am heading downstream once more, and I cut the motors."

He grinned triumphantly. "Wasn't that well-done?"

"Well-done," said Boranova, "but impossible without what Albert had done first."

"True enough," said Dezhnev, waving his hand. "I give him full credit and the Order of Lenin - if he will take it."

Morrison felt infinite relief. He would not have to go out again. He said, "Thank you, Arkady." Then, rather bashfully, he added, "You know, Sophia, I'm still thirsty."

At once she handed him the bottle, but he hesitated. "Are you sure I'm not drinking more than my share, Sophia?"

"Of course you are, Albert," said Kaliinin, "but more than your share is your share. Come, water is easily recycled. Besides, we have a small additional supply. You did not fit into the air lock neatly. An elbow stuck well out and we had to crack the inner layer and pull it in - which meant the entry of some plasma. Not much, thanks to its viscosity. It's been miniaturized of course and is being recycled now."

"Once miniaturized, it can't amount to more than a droplet."

"That's all it does amount to," said Kaliinin, smiling, "but even a droplet is an extra supply and since you brought it in, you deserve an extra supply. Logic is logic."

Morrison laughed and sucked up additional water greedily, squeezing it out of the flexible container astronaut-style. He was beginning to feel comparatively normal - more than that. He was feeling the kind of dreamy contentment that comes from being freed from the intolerable.

He tried to concentrate, to gain some sense of reality, He was still in the ship. He was still the size of a bacterium, more or less. He was still in the bloodstream of a man in a coma. His chance of living another few hours was still problematical. - And yet, even as he told himself all this, he nevertheless couldn't flog himself out of the feeling that the mere absence of unbearable heat, the mere being with others, the mere existence of a woman's care was, in itself, a touch of heaven.

He said, "I thank not only Arkady but all of you for pulling me in and caring for me."

"Don't bother," said Konev indifferently. "We need you and your computer program. If we had left you out there, the project would be a failure, even if we found the right cell."

"That may be so, Yuri," said Boranova, clearly indignant, "but at the time we were bringing Albert in, I did not think of that, but only of saving his life. I cannot believe that even you were cold-blooded enough to feel no anxiety for a human being who was risking his life to help us, except insofar as we needed him."

"Obviously," muttered Konev, "plain reason is not wanted."

Plain reason was certainly what Morrison wanted. Since the mention of brain damage, he had been testing himself, thinking, trying to come to conclusions. He said, "Arkady, when the microfusion engines are working, you are converting miniaturized hydrogen into miniaturized helium, and some of the helium escapes along with miniaturized water vapor or other materials designed to produce thrust."

"Yes," said Arkady warily. "And if that is so, what follows?"

"And the miniaturized particles - atoms and less - simply escape through Shapirov and through the Grotto and through the Earth and end in outer space, as you told me."

"Again - what follows?"

"Surely," said Morrison, "they do not stay miniaturized. We are not initiating a process, are we, in which the Universe will gradually be filled with miniaturized particles as humanity proceeds to make use of miniaturization more and more?"

"If we did, what harm? All human activity for billions of years could not add a significant quantity of miniaturized particles to the Universe. But it is not so. Miniaturization is a metastable condition, which means that there is always a chance that a miniaturized particle will snap out, spontaneously, to true stability, that is, to the unminiaturized state." (Out of the corner of his eye, Morrison saw Boranova raise a warning hand, but Dezhnev was always hard to stop when in oral flood.)

"Naturally," he went on, "there is no predicting when a particular miniaturized particle will snap out of it, but it is a good wager that almost all will be beyond the moon when it happens. As for the few - there are always a few - who snap out of miniaturization almost at once, Shapirov's body can absorb them -"

He then seemed to see Boranova's gesture, which had grown peremptory, and he said, "But I'm boring you. As my old father said on his deathbed: 'My proverbs may have bored you, but now you can look forward to hearing them no more, so that you will mourn me less and, therefore, suffer less.' The old man would have been surprised - and disappointed, perhaps - to know how much we children mourned him, even so - but I think I won't risk it with my companions in this ship -"