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."

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."