These were, undoubtedly, very thin collagen fibers that preserved the shape of the irregular neuron and kept it from converting itself into a roughly spherical blob under the pull of its own surface tension. Had he been watching for it, he would have noticed it before. It occurred to him that Dezhnev, as navigator, had to watch for everything and, in the entirely unprecedented situation in which the ship found itself, Dezhnev had had no guide, no instruction, no experience to let him know what to watch for. There was no question but that Dezhnev's task had placed him under greater tension than the others had allowed for.

Certainly, to Morrison himself, Dezhnev had been taken for granted as the least of the five. Not fair, Morrison thought now.

Dezhnev had straightened up now. He had an earphone in one ear canal and said, "I should be able to establish communication." He said, "Are you there? Grotto. -Grotto."

Then he smiled. "Yes. We are, to this point, safe. - I'm sorry, but as I told you, it was either communicate or steer. - How is it at your end? - What? Repeat that, more slowly. - Yes, I thought so."

He turned to the others. "Comrades," he said, "Academician Pyotr Leonovich Shapirov is dead. Thirteen minutes ago, all vital signs ceased and our task now is to leave the body."

Chapter 17. Exit

A gray silence fell over the ship.

Kaliinin buried her face in her hands and then, after a long moment, broke the silence by whispering, "Are you sure, Arkady?"

And Dezhnev, blinking hard to hold back tears, said, "Am I sure? The man has been on the brink of death for weeks. The cellular flow is slowing, the temperature is falling, and the Grotto, which has him wired with every instrument ever invented, says he is dead. What is there to be but sure?"

Boranova sighed. "Poor Shapirov. He deserved a better death."

Konev said, "He might have held out another hour."

Boranova said with a frown, "He did not pick and choose, Yuri."

Morrison felt chilled. Until now he had been conscious of some surrounding red corpuscles, of a specific speck of intercellular region, of the interior of a neuron. His environment had been circumscribed to the immediate.

Now he looked out of the ship, through its transparent plastic walls, at what appeared to him, for the first time, to be thickness upon thickness of matter. On their present scale, with the ship the size of a glucose molecule and himself not much more than the size of an atom, the body of Shapirov was larger than the planet Earth.

Here he was, then, buried in a planetary object of dead organic matter. He felt impatience over the pause for mourning. Time for that later, but meanwhile - He said in a voice that was perhaps a little louder than it ought to have been, "How do we get out?"

Boranova looked at him in surprise, eyes widening. (Morrison was certain that in her grief for Shapirov the thought of leaving had been momentarily buried.)

She cleared her throat and made a visible effort to be her usual businesslike self. She said, "We must deminiaturize to some extent, to begin with."

Morrison said, "Why only to begin with? Why not deminiaturize all the way to normality right now?" Then, as though to forestall the inevitable objection, "We will inflict damage on Shapirov's body, but it is a dead body and we are still alive. Our needs come first."

Kaliinin looked at Morrison reproachfully. "Even a dead body deserves respect, Albert, especially the dead body of a great scientist like Academician Pyotr Shapirov."

"Yes, but surely not to the entent of risking five lives." Morrison's impatience was growing. Shapirov was only someone he had known by distant reputation and peripherally - to Morrison he was not the demigod he seemed to be to the others.

Dezhnev said, "Aside from the question of respect, we are enclosed by Shapirov's cranium. If we expand to fill that cranium and then try to crumble the cranium by the effect of our miniaturization field, we will lose too much energy and deminiaturize explosively. We must first find our way out of the cranium."

Boranova said, "Albert is right. Let's begin. I will deminiaturize to cell size. Arkady, have the people in the Grotto determine our exact position. Yuri, make sure you locate that position accurately on your cerebrograph."

Morrison stared out the hull at the distant cell membrane - a brighter and more continuous sparkle, one that was visible through the occasional flicker of light from the intervening molecules.

The first indication of deminiaturization was the fact that the molecules - subsided. (It was the only word Morrison could think of to describe what happened.)

It was as though the little curved swellings that filled the space around them - and which Morrison's brain constructed out of twinklings rather than saw directly - shrank. It was for all the world as though they were balloons with the air being let out of them until the surroundings seemed relatively smooth.

But even as the liquid around them grew smooth, the large macromolecules in the distance - the proteins, the nucleic acids, the still larger cellular structures - also shrank and, in doing so, grew more distinct. The sparks of light they reflected were more closely spaced.

The cell membrane itself seemed to be approaching and it, too, could be seen more clearly. It came closer still and yet closer. The ship was, after all, in a narrow dendrite that projected from the cell body itself and if the ship was going to enlarge to the size of a cell, it would have to grow much larger than this mere projection.

It was clear that the membrane was going to collide with the ship and Morrison automatically clenched his teeth and steeled himself for the shock of impact.

There was none. The membrane came closer and closer and then simply separated and was not there. It was too thin a structure and too lightly bound to withstand the consequences of being forced into a miniaturization field. Though the ship was derniniaturizing to an extent, it was still far, far smaller than the normal world around it and the molecules of the membrane, on entering the field and shrinking, lost contact with each other so that the integrity of the whole vanished.

Morrison watched everything after that with fascination. The surroundings seemed chaotic until, as objects continued to shrink, he began to recognize the intercellular jungle of collagen that they had encountered before entering the neuron. That jungle continued to shrink, in its turn, until the collagen trunks and cables became nothing more than twine.

Boranova said, "And that is all. We will want to be able to fit within a small vein."

Dezhnev grunted. "That is all under any circumstances. Our remaining energy supply is not great."

Boranova said, "It will last until we find our way out of the cranium, surely."

Dezhnev said, "We can hope so. However, you're only the captain of the ship, Natasha; you are not the captain of the laws of thermodynamics."

Boranova shook her head as though in reproof and said, "Arkady, have them determine our position - and don't lecture me."

Konev said, "I'm certain, Natalya, that it is not terribly important to determine our position. It cannot be measurably different from what it was when we left the capillary. All our wanderings since have merely taken us to a nearby neuron and from that to a neighboring neuron. The difference in position on even an ordinary microscopic scale is scarcely measurable."