Isaac Asimov (13 page)

Carter considered praying but didn’t know how. On the map there seemed only the smallest distance between the position of the dot of light and the position of the blood-clot on the brain.

Carter watched as the Time Recorder moved to 57, then followed the unmistakable and rather rapid motion of the dot of light along the artery, headward and toward the clot.

Momentarily, he closed his eyes and thought: Please. If there is anything out there somewhere,
please
.

Grant called out, having a little difficulty catching his breath. “We’ve been moved toward Benes. They say they’re getting us into the needle and then into his neck. And I’ve told them we’re a little shook. Whoof—a little shook!”

“Good,” said Owens. He battled with the controls, trying
to guess at the rocking motions and neutralize their effect. He wasn’t very successful.

Grant said, “Listen, why—why do we have to get into the—oof—needle?”

“We’ll be more constricted there. Moving the needle will hardly affect us then. Another—uh—thing, we want as little of the miniaturized water pumped into Benes as possible.”

Cora said, “Oh, dear.”

Her hair had fallen into disarray and as she tried, futilely, to move it back and out of her eyes, she nearly fell over. Grant tried to catch her but Duval had her upper arm in a firm grip.

As suddenly as the erratic rocking had started, it ceased.

“We’re in the needle,” said Owens with relief. He turned on the ship’s outer lights.

Grant peered ahead. There was little to see. The saline solution ahead seemed to sparkle like a dusting of dim fireflies. Far up above and far down below was the distant curve of something which shone more brightly. The walls of the needle?

A quick sense of worry nagged at him. He turned to Michaels. “Doctor …”

Michaels’ eyes were closed. They opened reluctantly and his head turned in the direction of the voice. “Yes, Mr. Grant.”

“What do you see?”

Michaels stared forward, spread his hands slightly, and said, “Sparkles.”

“Do you make out anything clearly? Does everything seem to dance about?”

“Yes, it does. It dances.”

“Does that mean our eyes are affected by the miniaturization?”

“No, no, Mr. Grant.” Michaels sighed wearily. “If you’re worried about blindness, forget it. Look around you here in the
Proteus
. Look at me. Is there anything wrong with how it looks in here?”

“No.”

“Very well. In here, you are seeing miniaturized light-waves with an equally miniaturized retina and all is well. But when miniaturized light waves go out there into a less-miniaturized or completely unminiaturized world, they are not easily reflected. They’re quite penetrating, in fact. We
see only intermittent reflections here and there. Therefore, everything out there seems to flicker to us.”

“I see. Thank you, doc,” said Grant.

Michaels sighed again. “I trust I get my sea legs soon. The flickering light and the Brownian motion together are giving me a headache.”

“Here we go!” cried Owens, suddenly.

They were sliding forward now, the sensation was unmistakable. The far-off curving walls of the hypodermic needle seemed more solid now as the spotty reflection of miniaturized light from their walls blurred and melted together. It was like riding a roller-coaster down an infinite incline.

Up ahead, the solidity seemed to come to an end in a tiny circle of flicker. The circle enlarged slowly, then more rapidly, then yawned into an incredible abyss—and all was flicker.

Owens said, “We’re in the carotid artery now.”

The Time Recorder read 56.

Duval looked about with exultation. “Conceive it,” he said, “Inside a human body; inside an artery. —Owens! Put out the interior lights, man! Let us see God’s handiwork.”

The interior lights went off, but a form of ghostly light streamed in from outside; the spotty reflection of the ship’s miniaturized light beams fore and aft.

Owens had brought the
Proteus
into virtual motionlessness with reference to the arterial bloodstream, allowing it to sweep along with the heart-driven flow. He said, “You can remove harnesses, I think.”

Duval was out of his in a bound, and Cora was with him at once. They flung themselves at the window in a kind of marveling ecstasy. Michaels rose more deliberately, threw a glance at the other two, then turned to his chart, studying it closely.

He said tightly, “Excellent precision.”

“Did you think we might have missed the artery?” asked Grant.

For a moment, Michaels stared absently at Grant, Then: “—uh—no! That would have been unlikely. But we might have penetrated past a key branch point, been unable to buck the arterial current, and lost time having to plot an alternate and poorer route. As it is, the ship is just where it ought to be.” His voice quavered.

Grant said, encouragingly, “We seem to be doing well so far.”

“Yes.” A pause, then hastily, “From this spot, we combine ease of insertion, rapidity of current, and directness of route, so that we should reach our destination with an absolute minimum of delay.”

“Well, good.” Grant nodded, and turned to the window. Almost at once he was lost in amazement at the wonder of it all.

The distant wall seemed half a mile away and glowed a brilliant amber in fits and sparks, for it was mostly hidden by the vast mélange of objects that floated by near the ship.

It was a vast exotic aquarium they faced, one in which not fish but far stranger objects filled the vision. Large rubber tires, the centers depressed but not pierced through, were the most numerous objects. Each was about twice the diameter of the ship, each an orange-straw color, each sparkling and blazing intermittently, as though faceted with diamond slivers.

Duval said, “The color is not quite true. If it were possible to de-miniaturize the light waves as they leave the ship and miniaturize the returning reflection, we would be far better off. It is important to obtain an accurate reflection.”

Owens said, “You’re quite right, doctor, and the work done by Johnson and Antoniani indicates that this might actually be possible. Unfortunately, the technique is not yet practical and even if it were, we couldn’t have adapted the ship for the purpose in a single night.”

“I suppose not,” said Duval.

“But even if it’s not an accurate reflection,” said Cora in an awed tone, “surely it has a beauty all its own. They’re like soft, squashed balloons that have trapped a million stars apiece.”

“Actually, they’re red blood corpuscles,” said Michaels to Grant. “Red in the mass, but straw-colored individually. Those you see are fresh from the heart, carrying their load of oxygen to the head and, particularly, the brain.”

Grant continued to stare about in wonder. In addition to the corpuscles, there were smaller objects; flattened plate-like affairs were rather common, for instance. (Platelets, thought Grant, as the shapes of the objects brought up brightening memories of physiology courses in college.)

One of the platelets moved gently against the ship, so closely that Grant almost had the impulse to reach out and seize it. It flattened slowly, remained in contact for a moment, then moved away, leaving particles of itself clinging to the window—a smear that slowly washed away.

“It didn’t break,” said Grant.

“No,” said Michaels. “Had it broken, a small clot might have formed about it. Not enough to do any damage, I hope. If we were larger, though, we might run into trouble. —See that!”

Grant looked off in the direction of the pointing finger. He saw small rod-like objects, shapeless fragments and detritus and, above all, red corpuscles, red corpuscles, red
corpuscles. Then he made out the object at which Michaels was pointing.

It was huge, milky and pulsating. It was granular and inside its milkiness there were black twinkles—flashing bits of black so intense as to glow with a blinding non-light of their own.

Within the mass was a darker area, dim through the surrounding milkiness, and maintaining a steady, unwinking shape. The outlines of the whole could not be clearly made out but a milky bay suddenly extended in toward the artery wall and the mass seemed to flow into it. It faded out now, obscured by the closer objects, lost in the swirl …

“What was that?” asked Grant.

“A white blood cell, of course. There aren’t many of those; at least, not compared to the red corpuscles. There are about 650 reds for every white. The whites are much bigger, though, and they can move independently. Some of them can even work their way out of the blood vessels altogether. They’re frightening objects, seen on this scale of size. That’s about as close as I want to be to one.”

“They’re the body’s scavengers, aren’t they?”

“Yes. We’re bacterial-sized but we have a metal skin and not a mucopolysaccharide cell wall. I trust the white cells can tell the difference and that as long as we do no damage to the surrounding tissues, they won’t react to us.”

Grant tried to withdraw his too-particular attention from individual objects and attempted to absorb the panorama as a whole. He stepped back and narrowed his eyes.

It was a dance! Each object quivered in its position. The smaller the object, the more pronounced the quiver. It was like a colossal and unruly ballet in which the choreographer had gone mad and the dancers were caught in the grip of an eternally insane tarantella.

Grant closed his eyes. “Feel it? The Brownian motion, I mean.”

Owens answered, “Yes, I feel it. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. The bloodstream is viscous, much more viscous than the saline solution we were in; and the high viscosity damps out the motion.”

Grant felt the ship move under his feet, first this way, then that, but only soggily, not sharply as had been true while they were still in the hypodermic. The protein content of the fluid portion of the blood, the “plasma proteins”
(the phrase came swimming to Grant out of the past) cushioned the ship.

Not bad at all. He felt cheered. Perhaps all would be well yet.

Owens said, “I suggest you all return to your seats now. We will be approaching a branch in the artery soon and I am going to move over to one side.”

The others settled themselves into their seats, still watching their surroundings in absorption.

“I think it’s a shame that we’ll only have a few minutes for this,” said Cora. “Dr. Duval, what are those?”

A mass of very tiny structures, clinging together and forming a tight spiral-shaped pipe, passed by. Several more followed, each expanding and contracting as it went.

“Ah,” said Duval, “I don’t recognize
that
.”

“A virus, perhaps,” suggested Cora.

“A little too large for a virus, I think, and certainly like none I’ve seen. —Owens, are we equipped to take samples?”

Owens said, “We can get out of the ship, if we have to, doctor, but we can’t stop for samples.”

“Come now, we may not have this chance again.” Duval rose testily to his feet. “Let’s get a piece of that into the ship. Miss Peterson, you …”

Owens said, “This ship has a mission, doctor.”

“It doesn’t matter to …” began Duval, but then broke off at the firm grip of Grant’s hand on his shoulder.

“If you don’t mind, doctor,” said Grant, “let’s not argue about this. We have a job to do and we won’t stop to pick up anything or turn aside to pick up anything or as much as slow down to pick up anything. I take it you understand that and will not raise the subject again.”

In the uncertain flickering light reflected from the arterial world outside, Duval was clearly frowning.

“Oh, well,” he said, ungraciously, “they’ve gotten away anyhow.”

Cora said, “Once we complete this job, Dr. Duval, there will be methods developed for miniaturization for indefinite intervals. We can then take part in a real exploration.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

Owens said, “Arterial wall to the right.”

The
Proteus
had made a long, sweeping curve and the wall seemed about a hundred feet away, now. The somewhat corrugated amber stretch of endothelial layer that
made up the inner lining of the artery was clearly visible in all its detail.

“Hah,” said Duval, “what a way to check on atherosclerosis. You can count the plaques.”

“You could peel them off, too, couldn’t you?” asked Grant.

“Of course. Consider the future. A ship can be sent through a clogged arterial system, loosening and detaching the sclerotic regions, breaking them up, boring and reaming out the tubes. —Pretty expensive treatment, however.”

“Maybe it could be automated eventually,” said Grant. “Perhaps little housekeeping robots can be sent in to clean up the mess. Or perhaps every human being in early manhood can be injected with a permanent supply of such vessel-cleansers. Look at the length of it.”

They were closer still to the arterial wall now, and the ride was growing rougher in the turbulence near it. Looking ahead, though, they could see the wall stretching ahead for what seemed unbroken miles before veering off.