Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm (14 page)

Chapter 22

Mission clock: 3:14 remaining

Cramped inside the
Mote's
dim engine closet, dodging shadows from his small flashlight, Devlin caressed the ship, as if he could bring her back to life. “Now let's try it.” Around him he could smell the chemical lubricants and the bright odor of soldered metal and burnt fuses.

Outside, the four alien microorganisms recuperated from the fission process. Their organelles glittered and shifted, building up to another deadly charge. The single-celled creatures began to stir.

“Major Devlin, they're moving closer,” Arnold Freeth said.

Sweating, Devlin studied the equipment using voltmeters, pulse-scanners, and bypass shunts from his black toolkit. “You're not knocked out for good. I've got faith in you.” He worked faster, skinning his knuckles on a metal ridge.

Since his youth, he'd loved to tinker with things, finding that there was
always
an alternative way to accomplish any engineering task. Once, when his sister Lenore went to summer camp, fifteen-year-old Marc Devlin had reconfigured her entire room—the stereo, the vanity light, the blow dryer, the television, even her phone. Thus, when Lenore came home and flipped on the CD player, the telephone rang; when she tried to dry her hair, the TV cycled through its channels.

How could rigging the
Mote's
engines be any more challenging than that?

The miniaturized ship drifted along, paralyzed and helpless. The first of the four xenozoans extruded cilia and nudged forward. Searching. Hungry.

He slammed a panel shut, and an indicator light winked on, blessedly green. “Ah, thank you!” He kissed the curved metal covering.

When the auxiliary power gauges crept up to sixty percent of total load, Devlin shut off the bypasses and shunted all power into the engines. When he smelled acrid smoke, he scrambled to shut the impeller turbines down again before the short circuits could cause further damage. The green lights flickered off again.

Disheartening, yes. But now, at least, he knew where the problem was located. At least one problem.

Devlin cast a wary glance at the pulsing ameboid cells. The xenozoans had no instinct or memory, and would likely forget about the ship. Probably. But he didn't want to take that chance.

The air inside the ship was growing thick, warm, and stuffy.

He tried to jump-start the engines again, stroking the controls, willing them to cooperate. He felt the ship
trying.
The impeller motors coughed, then hummed. The turbines spun.

He heard Tomiko applauding, and he crawled out of the compartment to take a bow. “The transformer generators will build up our charge again. For now, we can ease ourselves deeper into the pore. We should be reasonably functional in ten minutes.” In three strides he was back in the cockpit.

“I'd rather not give the xenozoans ten full minutes,” Tyler said, frowning out the window. “They're showing signs of increased activity.”

“Let's see what the
Mote
will do if I talk nice to her. We're on our way.” Devlin nudged the ship along without headlights, leaving the shapeless microorganisms behind.

“When will I have my laser cannons again?” Tomiko said.

“Working on it. Just don't shoot anything unless you absolutely have to.”

Her face brightened. “You think I do this for fun?” “Actually, yes.”

Flying blind in the dark, the
Mote
gathered speed as the engine power cells built up charge. Soon, the overhead cabin lights flickered on inside the craft, then the front cones of illumination shone onto the cellular wilderness ahead.

“If you keep going down the pore shaft, we should find capillaries at its base, feeding subcutaneous cells.” Tyler paced the deck in front of her analytical apparatus. “We can cut through a membrane, enter the circulatory system, and begin our overall exploration of the internal territory.”

“Beginning our explorations would be good,” Freeth said. “The circulatory system will take us away from the xenozoans, like a superhighway.”

As the
Mote's
recovering engines took them down the crimson-hued tunnel, Tomiko gave Devlin a respectful smile. “Not sure Garrett could have pulled us out of that.”

“Captain Wilcox would have gotten out and pushed the ship, if he needed to.” Devlin shot her a sidelong glance and added, “Not that I'm suggesting it would have been a smart thing to do.”

He kept an eye on the energy gauges of the primary power supply and finally reconnected their communications systems. “Steady yourselves. We need to send another message outside.” Devlin activated the transmission, gripping his seat as the ship rocked and recoiled. “This is Team Proteus. Hello? Did anybody miss us?”

When Hunter responded, the signal distortion was worse. “… lost contact. Severe … . static.” The Mote's windows rattled.

Slowly and clearly, Devlin described the encounter with the xenozoans, but he wasn't sure how many words got through. He heard nothing more than static in response. He looked over at Tomiko. “Don't you feel like Lewis and Clark?”

“Only without a native guide. And don't put
me
in the role of Sacajawea.” Once her lasers were fully operational, she breathed a sigh of relief, leaned back, and observed the cellular scenery.

Ahead, bathed in the Mote's bright searchlights, the organic shaft formed a curved barrier. “Bring us close to that tissue wall,” Tyler suggested. “I want to study the organelles in a cell that isn't attacking us.”

Devlin accelerated toward the pore's terminal end, where Tyler took photographs and recorded her commentary and conjectures on the cellular components and substructure inside the protoplasm. “Notice the equivalents of the endoplasmic reticulum, the lysosomes, vacuoles, tiny specks that might be ribosomes, structural proteins that might correspond to microfilaments.”

The UFO expert tried to stay out of her way. “Or all of those things might be something else entirely,” he said, doggedly forcing her to keep an open mind. “Form has to follow function, so they may just look similar.”

“I prefer to think I know a
few
answers, Freeth. After all, they
do
give out doctorates in
my
field of expertise.” Tyler looked down her nose at him. “That darkened line behind the wall must be a capillary delivering nutrients. If we push between the cells, the
Mote
can enter the circulatory system.”

“Okay, let's move it. That mission clock keeps ticking down.” Tomiko leaned forward. “Should I use the lasers to cut a breach?”

“No need,” Tyler said quickly. “Major Devlin, if you nose the
Mote
into the joining of those two cells, we can separate the membrane.”

The prow of the microscopic vessel struck the spongy wall, and Devlin added power to the impeller engines. The tiled cellular barrier split open like soft, gelatinous lips and allowed the minuscule vessel to slide through. The membranes folded around them, and the
Mote
passed through into a larger, fluid-filled passage.

Devlin looked at the handwritten card on his control panel.
Think small.

The ship began to drift in the alien's blood plasma. The widening channel was filled with floating islands, spherical globules, some green, some translucent, others reddish-brown.

As he accelerated through the alien circulatory system, Devlin remembered how much he and Kelli had enjoyed rafting through white water rapids—the Arkansas River in Colorado, the Rio Grande in New Mexico. They both loved the rush against rocks, ducking from the cold splash, guiding their raft around obstacles. It had been too long, and Devlin decided he'd have to do it again… even if it meant rafting with somebody else.

Tyler pointed out blood cells as they jostled past. “I'd compare these to human hemoglobin-carrying erythrocytes, larger leukocytes, and smaller platelets.”

“Let's just hope the white corpuscles don't try to eat us,” Freeth said. “Like everything else around here wants to do.”

The arterial tunnels were crowded with sluggish blood cells bumping along. Tyler checked the
Mote's
velocity gauges to determine the strength of the blood current. “If the alien were dead, there'd be no flow at all. On the other hand, the blood isn't flowing sufficiently to provide the necessary nutrients to sustain life.”

“Life, as we understand it,” Freeth countered. “Maybe the alien was put into suspended animation, which would slow its systems down to the edge of death. Interstellar journeys take a lot of time, unless the species has warp drive or some kind of faster-than-light travel. Alien astronauts would have to put themselves into cold sleep like this. We just need to find the correct trigger to wake him up.”

“If that's what we really want to do,” Tomiko said, as cautious as a security officer should be. “I'd want to know a bit more about E.T.'s rap sheet first.”

“A moot point,” Tyler said, “since we have no idea how to accomplish such a thing. Even if Freeth is correct.”

The
Mote
followed the capillary to a junction with a larger blood vessel, then plunged deeper into the fantastic world of the extraterrestrial body.

Chapter 23

Mission clock: 3:00 remaining

The
Mote
soared through curved arteries in the alien's circulatory system. Every cell barrier, every membrane, every tissue matrix was new terrain.

Devlin used his best instincts in following an obvious route into a major blood vessel, while the onboard navigation computer kept track of every move. The ship's spotlights illuminated the plasma and a traffic jam of spherical and donut-shaped cells.

Behind him, Tyler spoke in rapid-fire sentences as she poured data into her electronic notepad and tape recorder. It would take years to distill the information from this mission, but she would have the assistance of squadrons of international scientists.

“Let me know if you see any midi-chlorians, Doc,” Devlin said, tongue firmly in cheek. Tomiko jabbed him with her elbow.

“I'm not familiar with the term, Major Devlin,” Tyler said.

Arnold Freeth just let out a sigh. “Maybe it's not in your area of research.”

A purplish globule drifted past, paused as if inspecting the
Mote,
then drifted onward. Other cells bounced off the hull, like pedestrians jostling each other on a crowded New York street.

Farther into the circulatory system, arterial walls became thin enough that the vessel's lights shone onto smooth muscle strands laced with bladder-like constructions and pulsing green nodules. Tall sheets of cells hung down like the walls of a maze.

Pipelines of silvery fibers branched and rebranched as they threaded through tissue. At random intervals, photons rocketed down the strands, a chemical/electrical signal passed like an Olympic torch from one cell to another.

“A nerve fiber,” Tyler said. “Impulses sent to and from the alien's brain in response to stimuli.”

“Nerve impulses are good. If the neurons are still firing, that means the alien is
alive,”
Freeth pressed. “His body is still reacting to things.”

Tyler looked up from her notes. “To a certain extent. But the low incidence of signals indicates that the alien is much deeper below consciousness than from any anesthetic I know of.” She cut Freeth off before he could say anything. “I know, I know.
If
the body works like the ones I'm familiar with.”

The
Mote
passed beneath a lacy arched ceiling as beautiful as any cathedral's. Red, violet, and brown nodules hung down like ornaments. Another ganglion flashed a glittering signal that vanished into the thick tissue.

Tyler went to the lab tables and searched her CD-ROM databases, scanning comparative micrographs and tissue structures for ideas. Every similarity she found, though, seemed contradictory.

Ahead, the blood vessel branched into two wide corridors, and the
Mote
followed the main flow of bobbing cells. Devlin easily dodged floating globules and accelerated into a wider artery filled with murky plasma. The fluid churned with turbulence, and glowing sparkles shone through the arterial wall. He kept them steady as the
Mote
jounced through a confluence of blood vessels.

On unsteady feet, Cynthia Tyler came forward into the cockpit. With one look at her face, Devlin could tell that she had cooked up something. “We're deep within the body core now, and we've got to explore further before we start our retreat. If we emerge from these blood vessels into other tissues, I may be able to study major organs.”

Devlin watched the mission chronometer tick down. “Roger that. We lost a lot of time because of those xenozoans. Pick a membrane, any membrane.”

Tyler stared at the shadowy shapes, strange colors, and weird chlorophyll-based lights activated by biochemical phosphorescence. Ahead, a cluster of shimmering translucent layers blocked one channel like a round stained-glass window. “There. That's where we should go.”

Devlin diverted toward the membranous barrier. “Tomiko, if you'd be so kind as to open the door for us?” Her laser sliced a neat incision in the organic wall, splitting the cells apart far enough for the
Mote
to pass through.

Behind them, strange objects—platelet analogs— broke apart and stuck to the breach, sealing the wound. Tyler took dozens of images of the process.

Devlin guided the ship into a heavy forest of massed fibers. Clustered strands formed large caverns filled with a creamy liquid that sparkled with pearlescent light.

Inside the fluid, under the wash of bright illumination, boxy shapes glinted, knotted clusters composed of regular chains of carbon lattice-beads. Startlingly out of place, they were tiny, individual constructions, like a junkyard of automobile parts.

Artificial
devices.

“Like little building blocks.” Devlin moved the Mote's front lights, playing the spotlight beams over the unusual objects. “Whoa, it's a buckyball grid!”

Tomiko looked sidelong at him. “Being a showoff, Marc? What's a buckyball?”

“Buckminsterfullerene, named after the physicist Buckminster Fuller. A third allotrope of carbon, more exotic than graphite or diamond. A buckyball is a sphere of carbon atoms—at least twenty, but usually sixty or more.” Devlin was glad to demonstrate his expertise for a change; at least Tomiko seemed impressed. He pointed out the window. “Those… objects look like they've been assembled out of carbon buckyballs and buckytubes, like tinkertoys.”

“What purpose could such constructions serve?” Arnold Freeth asked. “They don't look natural.”

“Definitely artificial. Buckyballs are far too rare, and I don't believe they occur in nature. On Earth, anyway. I doubt they're an accident.”

In front of the
Mote,
the strange devices floated motionless in the murk, all sharp angles and smooth planes, far too geometric. Tiny
machines.
He spun the impeller turbines just enough to maintain their position. “It's like a graveyard of ships. Hundreds of them.”

“Even if they are manufactured devices,” Dr. Tyler said, sounding uncertain, “how did they get here, inside the organic tissue? I'm sure Freeth can make up an answer.”

The floating constructions were immobile, clumped together and shut down. Full of square corners and jointed limbs, nested molecular shapes like leftover pieces grabbed from mismatched model kits, they had a sinister, arachnid appearance.

Devlin noted several different designs. A nagging suspicion in the back of his mind finally led him to guess what the buckyball “bugs” must be.

“It's nanotechnology. Construction techniques on a molecular scale, fabricating devices from the atom up, guided by ultra-compact computer circuits probably made of diamond memory.”

Devlin enjoyed talking in engineering terms again, after being surrounded by bio-jargon for so long. “Some university laboratories have already created prototype motors smaller than a pinhead. One rotating three-bladed fan was made of a single molecule, powered by chemical energy. Back in 1989 researchers rearranged thirty-five xenon atoms to form the letters IBM. We've come a long way since then.”

Tomiko groaned. “Corporate sponsorship on a microscopic level.”

“I've seen theoretical designs for planetary gears and bearings and universal joints made entirely of hydrocarbon molecules. Nobody's been able to build them yet, though. At least, not on Earth.” He directed the ship's bright spotlights onto the jumbled constructions. “But maybe our aliens have already achieved functional nanotechnology.”

The dormant machines had articulated molecular-lattice armatures, grasping claws, and tools connected to body cores that contained ultra-small integrated circuits, much more compact than the ULSI chip Tomiko, Pirov, and Wilcox had explored that morning.

“Maybe they're switched off,” Freeth said. “Or just dormant, like the rest of the alien.”

“Could those machines generate the electromagnetic interference that's messing up our communications?” Tomiko asked.

“Affirmative.” Devlin's brow creased as his mind worked to understand how the devices functioned. “That nanotech would be as much of a breakthrough in our electronics technology as your observations will be in human medicine, Doc. Command decision: Tomiko and I are going to suit up and go outside to make a closer inspection.”

Devlin locked down the
Mote's
systems and strode to the compartment where the environment suits were stored. Tomiko practically leaped from her chair, ready to go. She shot her anchor harpoons into the nearest membrane wall and tethered the vessel in place.

“Sorry, Doc,” Devlin said as he passed Tyler's seat. “Now it's time for
my
expertise.”

“But why are you two going?” Freeth's voice was tinged with concern. “Not that I'm volunteering, believe me.”

Devlin smiled cryptically at him. “Because, Mr. Freeth, Tomiko and I are the ones who wear the red shirts.”

Tyler looked at them strangely. “What do you mean? Neither of you is wearing red.”

Freeth rolled his eyes, showing a mixture of alarm and humor. “I'll explain while they suit up.”