"No!" said Boranova forcefully, seeming to find relief in being able to deny something. "The miniaturization field overlaps where it deals with particles sufficiently close together, and that are at rest, or nearly at rest, relative to each other. An extended body - such as the ship and everything it contains - is treated as a large but single particle and has a half-life of deminiaturization to match. There miniaturization differs from radioactivity."
"Ah," said Morrison, "but when I was out of the ship and out of contact with it, could it be that I was then a separate particle with a much smaller mass than the ship and its contents and that I had a miniaturization half-life much smaller than we have now?"
"I'm not sure," said Boranova, "whether the distance between yourself and the ship was great enough to make you a separate body. Possibly it did, for the time you were not in contact."
"And I then had a shorter half-life - much shorter."
"Possibly - but then you were out of contact only a matter of minutes."
"Well, then, what is the half-life of this ship at the present level of miniaturization?"
"We can't really speak of the half-life of a single object."
"Yes, because half-lives are statistical. For any particle, deminiaturization can come, spontaneously, at any time, even after a very short time and even though the half-life of a large number of similar particles would be quite long."
"For spontaneous deminiaturization to come after a very short time when the statistical half-life is long is extremely improbable."
"But not impossible, is it?"
"No," said Boranova. "It is not impossible."
"So we can suddenly deminiaturize in five minutes, or even in one minute, or even as I take my next breath."
"In theory."
"Did you all know?" His eyes darted around the ship. "Of course you all knew. Why was I not told?"
Boranova said, "We are volunteers, Albert, working for science and for our nation. We know all the dangers and accept them. You have been forced into this and you don't have the motives that drive us. It seemed possible that if you knew all the dangers, you would have refused to enter the ship voluntarily under any persuasion or that, being brought on board ship by force, you would be altogether useless to us out of sheer -" She paused.
"Out of sheer fright, you were going to say," said Morrison. "Surely I have a right to be afraid. There is reason for fear."
Kaliinin interrupted, her voice a little shrill. "It is time to stop harping on Albert's fear, Natalya. It is he who left the ship in an inadequate suit. It is he who turned the ship around at the risk of his life. Where was his fear then? If he felt it, he bottled it inside and didn't let it prevent him from doing what had to be done."
Dezhnev said, "And yet it was you who did not hesitate to say, in the past, that Americans were all cowardly."
"Then I was wrong. I was speaking unfairly and I ask Albert's pardon."
It was at this point that Morrison caught Konev's eye. The man was twisting around in his seat and glowering at him. Morrison did not pretend to be a master at reading facial expressions, but felt that he could, at a glance, tell what was ailing Konev. The man was jealous - furiously and quite impressively jealous.
The ship continued its slow way along the capillary toward the destination Konev had marked out: the skeptic node. It was not depending on the current now, which was slow indeed. The engines were going, as Morrison could tell, in two different ways. First, it steadied the ship to have it move along actively, rather than drift passively, and it further deadened the already surprisingly small effect of Brownian motion. Second, the ship was overtaking one red corpuscle after another.
In most cases these were nudged to one side and the red corpuscles then rolled backward between the ship and the wall. Occasionally, a red corpuscle would be met too near dead-center and it would then be pushed forward for a while until it burst. The debris would flow backward, leaving the ship's hull unmarked. With at least five million corpuscles in every cubic millimeter of blood, it didn't matter how many were disrupted and Morrison had become hardened to the carnage.
Morrison deliberately thought of the red cells, rather than of the chance of spontaneous deminiaturization. He knew there was no appreciable chance of exploding outward in the next few moments and, even if it happened, it would simply mean blackout. Death by fried brain would take place so quickly that there would be no conceivable way of sensing it.
Not long before, he had been heating much more slowly in the bloodstream itself. He had felt himself dying. After that, instantaneous death had no terrors.
But he preferred to think of other things just the same.
Konev's look! What was seething within him and tearing him apart? He had abandoned Sophia with the utmost cruelty. Did he really think the child was not his? People needed no reason to come to an emotional conclusion and the suspicion of being wrong just bolted the conclusion defensively and immovably in place. Pathological. Think of Leontes in The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare always got these things right. Konev would push her away and hate her for the wrong he had done her. He would push her into another man's arms and hate her for being pushed - and be jealous in addition.
And she? Did she know of the jealousy and play upon it? Would she deliberately turn to Morrison, an American, to tear Konev into strips? Tenderly patting the American with the wet towel. Defending him at every step. With Konev, of course, a witness to everything.
Morrison's lips tightened. He didn't like to be a tennis ball, batted from one to another in order to produce maximum pain.
It was none of his business, after all, and he shouldn't take sides. But how was he going to not take sides? Sophia Kaliinin was an attractive woman who reacted with silent sorrow. Yuri Konev was a frowning nasty man who reacted with a compressed boiling of anger. He could neither help liking Sophia nor help disliking Yuri.
He then noted Boranova staring at him gravely and wondered if she were misinterpreting his thoughtfulness and silence. Did she feel he was brooding about the possibility of death by miniaturization - which he was manfully trying not to do?
It seemed so, when Boranova suddenly said, "Albert, none of us are reckless. I have a husband. I have a son. I want to go back to them alive and I intend to get us all back alive. I want you to understand that."
"I'm sure your intentions are good," said Morrison, "but what can you do against a possibility of deminiaturization that is spontaneous, unpredictable, unstoppable?"
"Spontaneous and unpredictable, I agree, but who said unstoppable?"
"Can you stop it, then?"
"I can try. We each have our jobs here. Arkady maneuvers the ship. Yuri directs it to the destination. Sophia gives the ship its electric pattern. You will study the brain waves. As for me, I sit back here and make decisions - my major decision up to now was a mistake, I admit that - and I watch the heat flow."
"The heat flow?"
"Yes. Before the deminiaturization takes place, there is a small evolution of heat, characteristic in pattern. It is that emission that is destabilizing; it is what tips the delicate balance and, after a small delay, starts the process of deminiaturization. When that happens, if I am fast enough, I can intensify the miniaturization field in such a way as to reabsorb the heat and reestablish the metastability."
Morrison said dubiously, "And has that ever been done - actually been done under field conditions - or is it simply theory?"
"It has been done - under much smaller intensities of miniaturization, of course. Still, I have trained at this and my reflexes are sharpened. I hope not to be caught short."