by Isaac Asimov
Ideally, he should now have flipped the ship to make certain that Owens had been thrown clear, but there was no time.
No time, he thought, no time.
Frantically, he leaped to the bubble and studied the controls. Something would have to be thrown to start the engine. Ah, there! A thrill of triumph surged through him as he felt the distant drumming of the engines begin again.
He looked ahead toward the clot. Owens had been right. A glitter of light was racing down the length of a long nerve process which until then had been dark.
Duval was aiming the laser beam in short bursts now at quick intervals.
Grant said, “I think we’ve just about had it, doctor. Time’s gone.”
“I’m just about done. The clot has crumbled away. Just one portion. Ah … Mr. Grant, the operation has been a success.”
“And we’ve got maybe three minutes to get out, maybe two. Back to the ship, now …”
Cora said, “Someone else is here.”
Grant veered, lunged toward the aimlessly swimming figure. “Michaels!” he cried. Then, “No, it’s Owens. What …”
Owens said, “I don’t know. He hit me, I think. I don’t know how I got out here.”
“Where’s Michaels?”
“On the ship, I sup …”
Duval cried, “The ship’s motors have started.”
“What!” said Owens, startled. “Who …”
“Michaels,” said Grant. “Obviously he must be at the controls.”
“Why did you leave the ship, Grant?” demanded Duval, angrily.
“It’s what I’m asking myself now. I had hoped Owens …”
“I’m sorry,” said Owens, “I didn’t think he was really an enemy agent. I couldn’t tell …”
Grant said, “The trouble is I wasn’t completely certain of it myself. Now, of course …”
“An enemy agent!” said Cora, with horror.
Michaels’ voice sounded. “All of you, back off. In two minutes, the white cells will have come and by that time, I’ll be on the way out. I’m sorry, but you had your chance to come out with me.”
The ship was angling high now, and making a large curve.
“He’s got it under full acceleration,” said Owens.
“And,” said Grant, “I think he’s aiming at the nerve.”
“Exactly what I’m doing, Grant,” came Michaels’ voice, grimly. “Rather dramatic, don’t you think? First, I’ll ruin the work of that mouthing saint, Duval, not so much for the sake of that alone as to do the kind of damage that will call a cohort of white cells to the scene at once. They’ll take care of you.”
Duval shouted, “Listen! Think! Why do this! Think of your country!”
“I’m thinking of mankind,” shouted back Michaels, furiously. “The important thing is to keep the military out of the picture. Unlimited de-miniaturization in their hands will destroy the earth. If you fools can’t see that …”
The Proteus was now diving directly for the just-relieved nerve process.
Grant said desperately, “The laser! Let me have the laser!”
He snatched the instrument from Duval, forcing it away. “Where’s the trigger? Never mind. I’ve got it.”
He angled upward, trying to intercept the hurtling ship. “Give me maximum power,” he called to Cora. “Full power!”
He took careful aim and a pencil-wide beam of light emerged from the laser, and flickered out.
Cora said, “The laser gave out, Grant.”
“Here, then, you hold it. I think I got the Proteus, though.”
It was hard to tell. In the general dimness there was no way to see clearly.
“You struck the rudder, I think,” said Owens. “You’ve killed my ship.” Behind his mask, his cheeks were suddenly wet.
“Whatever you struck,” said Duval, “the ship doesn’t seem to be handling very well.”
The Proteus was shaking now indeed, its headlight flashing up and down in a wide arc.
The ship pulled downward, crashed through the arteriole wall, missed the nerve by a hand’s breadth and lunged downward into a forest of dendrites; catching and breaking free and catching again, until it lay here, a bubble of metal, entangled in thick, smooth fibers.
“He missed the nerve,” said Cora.
“He did damage enough,” growled Duval. “That may start a new clot—or maybe not. I hope not. In any case the white cells will be here. We had better leave.”
“Where?” said Owens.
“If we follow the optic nerve, we can make it to the eye in a minute or less. Follow me.”
“We can’t leave the ship,” said Grant. “It will de-miniaturize.”
“Well, we can’t take it with us,” said Duval. “We have no choice but to try to save our own lives.”
“We can still do something, perhaps,” insisted Grant. “How much time do we have left?”
Duval said emphatically, “None! I think we’re beginning to de-miniaturize now. In a minute or so we’ll be large enough to attract the attention of a white cell.”
“De-miniaturizing? Now? I don’t feel it.”
“You won’t. But the surroundings are slightly smaller than they’ve been. Let’s go.”
Duval took a quick view of his surroundings for orientation. “Follow me,” he said again, and began swimming away.
Cora and Owens followed and, after a last moment of hesitation, Grant followed them.
He had failed. In the last analysis, he had failed because, feeling not entirely convinced that Michaels was an enemy on the basis of some uncertain reasoning, he had vacillated.
He would turn himself in, he thought bitterly, as a jackass unfit for his job.
“But they’re not moving,” said Carter, savagely. They stay there at the clot. Why? Why? Why?” The Time Recorder read 1.
“It’s too late for them to get out now,” said Reid.
A message came through from the electroencephalographic unit. “Sir, EEG data indicates Benes’ brain action is being restored to normal.”
Carter yelled, “Then the operation is a success. Why are they staying behind?”
“We have no way of knowing.”
The Time Recorder moved to 0 and a loud alarm went off. Its shrill jangle filled the entire room with the clang of doom and remained so.
Reid raised his voice to be heard. “We’ve got to take them out.”
“It will kill Benes.”
“If we don’t take them out, that will kill Benes, too.”
Carter said, “If there’s anyone outside the ship, we won’t be able to get him out.”
Reid shrugged, “We can’t help that. The white cells may get them or they may de-miniaturize unharmed.”
“But Benes will die.”
Reid leaned toward Carter, and shouted, “There’s nothing to be done about that. Nothing! Benes is dead! Do you want to take a chance on killing five more uselessly?”
Carter seemed to shrink within himself. He said, “Give the order!”
Reid went to the transmitter. “Remove the Proteus,” he said quietly, then went on to the window overlooking the operating room.
Michaels was only semiconscious at best when the Proteus came to rest in the dendrites. The sudden veering that had come after the bright flash of the laser—it must have been the laser—had thrown him against the panel with great force. The only sensation he had from his right arm now was one of frightful pain. It had to be broken.
He tried to look behind him, fighting off the haze of agony. There was a tremendous cavity in the rear of the ship and viscous blood plasma bulged inward, held back partly by the pressure of the miniaturized air within the ship and partly by its own surface tension.
The air he had left would last him for the minute or two that would remain before de-miniaturization. Already, even as he watched, it seemed to his dizzying senses that the dendrite cables had narrowed a bit. They couldn’t really be shrinking, so he had to be expanding—very slowly just at fi
rst.
At full size, his arm could be taken care of. The others would be killed by white cells and be done with. He would say—he would say—something that would explain the broken ship. And in any case, Benes would be dead and indefinite miniaturization would die with him. There would be peace—peace …
He watched the dendrites while his body remained limply draped over the control panel. Could he move? Was he paralyzed? Was his back broken as well as his arm?
Dully, he considered the possibility. He felt his sense of comprehension and awareness slipping away as the dendrites became clouded over with a milky haze.
Milky haze?
A white cell!
Of course, it was a white cell. The ship was larger than the individuals out in the plasma, and it was the ship that was at the site of damage. The ship would be the first to attract the attention of the white cell.
The window of the Proteus was coated with sparkling milk. Milk invaded the plasma at the break in the ship’s hull in the rear and struggled to break through the surface tension barrier.
The next to the last sound Michaels heard was the hull of the Proteus, fragile in its makeup of miniaturized atoms, strained to the breaking point with what it had already been through, cracking and splintering under the assault of the white cell.
The last sound he heard was his own laughter.
CHAPTER 18
Eye
Cora saw the white cell at almost the time Michaels did.
“Look,” she cried in horror.
They stopped, turned to look back.
The white cell was tremendous. It was five times as large in diameter as the Proteus, perhaps larger; a mountain of milky, skinless, pulsing protoplasm in comparison to the individuals watching.
Its large, lobed nucleus, a milky shadow within its substance seemed to be a malevolent, irregular eye, and the shape of the whole creature altered and changed with every moment. A portion bulged toward the Proteus.
Grant started toward the Proteus, almost as though by reflex action.
Cora seized his arm. “What are you going to do, Grant?”
Duval said, excitedly, “There’s no way to save him. You’ll be throwing away your life.”
Grant shook his head violently, “It’s not he I’m thinking of. It’s the ship.”
Owens said, sadly, “You can’t save the ship, either.”
“But we might be able to get it out, where it can expand safely. —Listen, even if it is crushed by the white cell; even if it is separated into atoms, each miniaturized atom will de-miniaturize; it is de-miniaturizing right now. It doesn’t matter whether Benes is killed by an intact ship or by a pile of splinters.”
Cora said, “You can’t get the ship out. Oh, Grant, don’t die. Not after all this. Please.”
Grant smiled at her. “Believe me, I have every reason not to die, Cora. You three keep on going. Let me make just one college try.”
He swam back, heart beating in an almost unbearable revulsion at the monster he was approaching. There were others behind it, farther off, but he wanted this one; the one that was engulfing the Proteus, only this one.
At closer quarters, he could see its surface; a portion in profile showed clear, but within were granules and vacuoles, an intricate mechanism, too intricate for biologists to understand in detail even yet, and all crammed into a single microscopic blob of living matter.
The Proteus was entirely within it now; a splintering dark shadow encased in a vacuole. Grant had thought that for a moment he had seen Michaels’ face in the bubble but that might have been only imagination.
Grant was at the heaving mountainous surface now, but how was he to attract the attention of such a thing? It had neither eyes nor sense; neither a mind nor purpose.
It was an automatic machine of protoplasm designed to respond in certain fashion to injury.
How? Grant didn’t know. Yet a white cell could tell when a bacterium was in its vicinity. In some cellular way, it knew. It had known when the Proteus was near it and it had reacted by engulfing it.
Grant was far smaller than the Proteus, far smaller than a bacterium, even now. Was he large enough to be noticed?
He had his knife out and sank it deeply into the material before him, slitting it downward.
Nothing happened. No gush of blood, for there is no blood in a white cell.
Then, slowly, a bulging of the inner protoplasm appeared at the site of the ruptured membrane and that portion of the membrane drew away.
Grant struck again. He didn’t want to kill it; he didn’t think he could at his present size. But was there some way of attracting its attention?
He drifted off and, with mounting excitement, noticed a bulge in the wall, a bulge pointing toward him.
He drifted further away and the bulge followed.
He had been noticed. The manner of the noticing he could not say, but the white cell with everything it contained, with the Proteus, was following.
He moved away faster now. The white cell followed but (Grant hoped fervently) not quickly. Grant had reasoned that it was not designed for speed; that it moved like an amoeba, bulging out a portion of its substance and then pouring itself into the bulge. Under ordinary conditions it fought with immobile objects, with bacteria and with foreign inanimate detritus. Its amoeboid motion was fast enough for that. Now it would have to deal with an object capable of darting away.
(Darting away quickly enough, Grant hoped.)
With gathering speed, he swam toward the others who were still delaying, still watching for him.
He gasped, “Get a move on. I think it’s following.”
“So are others,” said Duval, grimly.
Grant looked about. The distance was swarming with white cells. What one had noticed, all had noticed.
“How …”
Duval said, “I saw you strike at the white cell. If you damaged it, chemicals were released into the bloodstream; chemicals that attracted white cells from all the neighboring regions.”
“Then, for God’s sake, swim!”
The surgical team was gathered round Benes’ head, while Carter and Reid watched from above. Carter’s mood of black depression was deepening by the moment.
It was over. All for nothing. All for nothing. All for …
“General Carter! Sir!” The sound was urgent, strident. The man’s voice was cracking with excitement.
“Yes?”
“The Proteus, sir. It’s moving.”
Carter yelled. “Stop surgery!”
Each member of the surgical team looked up in startled wonder.
Reid plucked at Carter’s sleeve. “The motion may be the mere effect of the ship’s slowly accelerating de-miniaturization. If you don’t get them now, they will be in danger of the white cells.”
“What kind of motion?” shouted Carter. “Where’s it heading?”
“Along the optic nerve, sir.”
Carter turned fiercely on Reid. “Where does that go? What does it mean?”
Reid’s face lit up, “It means an emergency exit I hadn’t thought of. They’re heading for the eye and out through the lachrymal duct. They may make it. They might just get away with it, damaging one eye at most. —Get a microscope slide, someone. —Carter, let’s get down there.”
The optic nerve was a bundle of fibers, each like a string of sausages.
Duval paused to place his hand on the junction between two of the “sausages.”
“A node of Ranvier,” he said, wonderingly, “I’m touching it.”
“Don’t keep on touching it,” gasped Grant. “Keep on swimming.”
The white cells had to negotiate the close-packed network and did it less easily than the swimmers could. They had squeezed out into the interstitial fluid and were bulging through the spaces between the close-knit nerve fibers.
Grant watched anxiously to make sure that the white cell was still in pursuit. The one with the Proteus in it. He could not make out the Proteus any longer. If it ex
isted in the white cell nearest, it had been transferred so deep into its substance that it was no longer visible. If the white cell behind was not the white cell, then Benes might be killed despite everything.
The nerves sparked wherever the beam from the helmet-lights struck and the sparkles moved backward in rapid progression.
“Light impulses,” muttered Duval. “Benes’ eyes aren’t entirely closed.”
Owens said, “Everything’s definitely getting smaller. Do you notice that?”
Grant nodded. “I sure do.” The white cell was only half the monster it had been only moments before; if that.
“We only have seconds to go,” said Duval.
Cora said “I can’t keep up.”
Grant veered toward her. “Sure you can. We’re in the eye now. We’re only the width of a teardrop from safety.” He put his arms around her waist, pushing her forward, then took the laser and its power unit from her.
Duval said. “Through here and we’ll be in the lachrymal duct.”
They were large enough almost to fill the interstitial space through which they were swimming. As they grew, their speed had increased and the white cells grew less fearsome.
Duval kicked open the membranous wall he had come up against. “Get through,” he said. “Miss Peterson, you first.”
Grant pushed her through, and followed her. Then Owens and finally Duval.
“We’re out,” said Duval with a controlled excitement. “We’re out of the body.”
“Wait,” said Grant. “I want that white cell out, too. Otherwise …”
He waited a moment, then let out a shout of excitement. “There it is. And, by heaven, it’s the right one.”
The white cell oozed through the opening that Duval’s boot had made, but with difficulty. The Proteus, or the shattered splinters of it, could be seen clearly through its substance. It had expanded until it was nearly half the size of the white cell and the poor monster was finding itself with an unexpected attack of indigestion.