Chapter 9. Artery

Morrison's eyes remained, for the most part, focused on the recess before him, on the computer, and on the software he had inserted. The software - the one material object of the long ago.

Long ago? It was less than a hundred hours ago that he was half-dozing his way through a dull talk on his last day at the conference and wondering whether there was any way to save his position at the university. And now a hundred subjective years had passed in those hundred objective hours and he could no longer clearly visualize the university at all or the life of sad frustration he had been leading there toward the end.

He would have given a great deal to have broken out of the dull cycle of useless striving a hundred hours ago. He would give a great deal more - a great deal more - to break back into it now, to wake up and to find the last hundred hours (or years) had never taken place.

He glanced through the transparent wall of the ship, there at his right elbow, his eyes half-closed as though he were really reluctant to see anything. He was reluctant. He did not want to see anything larger than it should be. It would interfere with his wild hope that the miniaturization process had broken down or that the whole thing had - somehow - been an illusion.

But a man walked into his view - tall, over two meters tall. But then, perhaps he was actually that tall.

Others appeared. They couldn't all be that tall.

He shrank down into his seat and looked no more. It was enough. He knew that the miniaturization process was going its inexorable way.

The silence inside the ship was oppressive, unbearable. Morrison felt he had to hear a voice, even if only his own.

Kaliinin, at his left side, was the one to whom he could speak most easily and she might be the best of a difficult choice, perhaps. Since Morrison did not want Dezhnev's misplaced jocularity, or Boranova's one-dimensional concentration, or Konev's dark intensity, he turned to Kaliinin's frozen sorrow.

He said, "How will we get into Shapirov's body, Sophia?"

It took a while, it seemed, for Kaliinin to hear him. When she did, her lips moved pallidly and she said in a whisper, "Injection."

Then, as though with a supreme effort, she apparently decided that she must be companionable, so she turned to him and said, "When we are small enough, we will be placed into a hypodermic needle and injected into Academician Shapirov's left carotid artery."

"We'll be shaken up like dice," said Morrison, appalled.

"Not at all. It will be complex, but the problems have been thought through."

"How do you know? This has never been done before. Never in a ship. Never in a hypodermic needle, Never into a human body."

"True," said Kaliinin, "but problems like this - much simpler ones, of course - have been planned for a long time and we have had extended seminars over the last few days on this mission. You don't think that Arkady's announcements before miniaturization began - the ones about toilet tissue and so on - were new to us, do you? We have heard it all before, over and over. It was for your benefit, actually, since you have attended no seminars, and for Arkady's, too, since he loves his moment in the sun."

"Tell me, then, what will happen?"

"I will explain events as they occur. For now we do nothing until we are in the centimeter range. It will take another twenty minutes, but not everything will be so slow. The smaller we get, the faster we can miniaturize, in proportion. - Have you felt any bad effects yet?"

Morrison mentally subtracted the rapid beating of his heart and the panting of his lungs and said, "None." Then, feeling that to be an unduly optimistic remark, he added, "At least so far."

"Well, then?" said Kaliinin and closed her eyes as though to indicate that she was tired of talking.

Morrison thought that might not be such a bad idea and closed his as well.

He might have actually fallen asleep or he might simply have gone into a protective state of semi unconsciousness, withdrawing from reality, for it seemed that no time had passed when he was brought to by a slight jar.

He opened his eyes wide and found himself a centimeter or so above the seat. He had the odd sensation of drifting with each vagrant puff of wind.

Boranova had moved over to the seat behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. She pushed down gently and said, "Albert, put on your seat belt. Sophia, show him how. I'm sorry, Albert - we should have gone over all of this - everything - before we started, but we had little time and you were nervous enough as it was. We did not wish to reduce you to utter helplessness by flooding you with information."

To his own surprise, Morrison had not been feeling helpless. He had rather enjoyed the sensation of sitting on air.

Kaliinin touched a spot on her seat edge between her knees and a belt around her waist flipped away. It had not been there, Morrison was sure, when he had closed his eyes and now it was again no longer there, for it disappeared, with a snap, into a recess in the seat to her left. She twisted toward Morrison and said, "This, here to your left, is your belt ejector." Morrison couldn't help noticing that, now unbound, she lifted up from her seat slightly as she moved toward him.

She pressed the ejector - a somewhat darker circle in a light background - and a flexible network of clear plastic shot out with a faint hiss, wrapped itself about him, and buried its triple tip into the seat at his other side. He found himself held, elastically, in a kind of lacework.

"If you want to free yourself, there is the belt release there, just between your knees." Kaliinin leaned farther toward him to indicate the place and Morrison found the pressure of her body against his to be pleasurable.

She did not seem to be aware of it and, having completed her task, she pulled herself back into her chair and re-belted herself.

Morrison glanced quicky around, squeezing upward and forward as far as the belt would let him, and peered, with difficulty, over Konev's shoulder. All five were belted.

He said, "We've miniaturized to the point where we have very little weight, is that it?"

"You only weigh about twenty-five milligrams now," said Boranova, "so that you might as well consider yourself weightless. Then, too, the ship is being lifted."

Morrison looked at Kaliinin accusingly and Kaliinin shrugged slightly and said, "I told you I'd describe things as they happened, but you seemed to be asleep and I thought it wiser to let you stay that way. The jar of the clamp woke you and lifted you out of the seat."

"The clamp?" He looked to one side. He had been conscious of a shadow on both sides, but walls were supposed to be opaque and he had dismissed the sensation. Now he suddenly remembered that the ship's walls were transparent and realized that the light on either side was blocked.

Kaliinin nodded. "A clamp is gripping us and helping to keep us steady so that we are not shaken up unnecessarily. It looks enormous, but it is a very small and delicately padded clamp. And we are being put into a small tank of saline solution. We are also being held steady by an airstream being sucked upward into a blunt nozzle. That pushes us against the nozzle so that, with the clamps, we are held three ways."

Morrison looked out again. Objects outside the ship that might have been visible through portions of the wall not blocked by the clamp or by the overhead nozzle were, nevertheless, not visible. Morrison could see occasional shifting of light and shadow and realized that whatever existed out there was too large to make out clearly with his tiny eyes. If the photons that approached the ship were not themselves miniaturized as they entered the field, they would behave as though they were long radio waves and he would have seen nothing at all.