"I was an undergraduate then, making the discovery that young women were not entirely unapproachable, which is by no means an unimportant thing to find out. In fact, each person may have to rediscover it now and then, I think. - But never mind that.
"A number of people speculated that the twinkle might represent thought processes in the mind, but no one managed to isolate it properly. It would come and go, be detectable at times and not at others, and the general feeling was that it was artifactitious, a matter of working with instruments that were too delicate for the thing they were measuring so that one picked up what was, essentially, noise.
"I thought not. In time I developed a computer program that made it possible for me to isolate the twinkle and to demonstrate it was always present in the human brain. For that I got some credit, though few people were able to duplicate my work. I used animals for types of experimentation that were too dangerous to perform on human beings and used the results to further sharpen my program of analysis. But the sharper I made the analysis and the more significant I thought the results, the less others were able to duplicate them and the more they insisted that I was misled by my animal experimentation.
"But even isolating the twinkle was a long way from demonstrating that it was a representation of abstract thought. I have amplified it, intensified it, modified my program over and over, and have convinced myself that I am studying thought, the skeptic waves themselves. Still, no one can duplicate the crucial points of my work. I have, on several occasions, allowed someone to use my program and my computer - the sort of thing I'm using now - and they invariably fail."
Kaliinin was listening gravely. She said, "Can you imagine why no one can duplicate your work?"
"The easiest explanation is that there is something wrong with me, that I am a crank - if not a madman. I believe that some of my colleagues suspect that to be the answer."
"Do you think you're a madman?"
"No, I don't, Sophia, but even I waver sometimes. You see, after you isolate the skeptic waves and amplify them, it is conceivable that the human brain itself might become a receiving instrument. The waves may transfer the thoughts from the thinker you are studying directly to you. The brain would certainly be an extraordinarily delicate receiver, but it would also be an extraordinarily individual one. If I improved my program so that I could sense the thoughts better, that would mean I improved it to suit my own individual brain. Other brains might not be affected and, in fact, might be less affected, the closer I adjusted it to mine. It would be like a painting. The closer a painting is made to look like me, the less it looks like anyone else. The more I can make my program produce sensible self-consistent results, the less anyone else can."
"Have you actually sensed thought?"
"I'm not sure. There are times I have thought I did, but I'm never quite convinced it's not my imagination. Certainly no one else - with my program or any other - has sensed anything. I have used the twinkle to track down the skeptic nodes in the brains of chimpanzees and from that reasoned out where they would be in human brains, but that is not accepted either. It is considered the overenthusiasm of a scientist oversold on his own unlikely theory. And even using leads into the skeptic nodes - on animals, of course - I couldn't be sure."
"With animals it would be difficult. Have you published these - sensations of yours?"
"I haven't dared," said Morrison, shaking his head. "No one would accept such subjective findings. I've mentioned it in passing to several people - foolish of me - and the news spread and merely convinced my colleagues all the more firmly that I am, shall we say, unstable. It was only last Sunday that Natalya told me that Shapirov took me seriously, but he is considered, at least in my country, to be unstable, too."
"He is not," said Kaliinin firmly, "or was not."
"It would be nice to think he wasn't, obviously."
Konev, from in front of Morrison, said suddenly, without turning around, "It was your sensations of thought that impressed Shapirov. I know! He discussed it with me. He said on a number of occasions that your program was a relay station and he would like to try it himself. If you were inside a neuron, a key neuron of the skeptic node, things would be different. You would sense thoughts unmistakably. Shapirov thought so and I think so. Shapirov thought it possible you might even have sensed thoughts unmistakably as it was, but were not ready to let the world know. Is that so?"
How they harped on secrecy, all of them, thought Morrison. Then he caught the look on Kaliinin's face. Her mouth was partly open, her eyebrows drawn together, her finger hovering near her lips. It was as though she wanted to ask him to be quiet with a kind of agonizing intensity, without quite daring to do so openly.
But then he was distracted by Dezhnev's voice, joyfully loud. "Enough babble, my children. The Grotto has located us and we are, to their enormous astonishment, exactly where we say we are."
Konev threw up both hands and his voice sounded almost boyish. "Exactly where I say we are."
Dezhnev said, "Let us have communal responsibility. Where we say we are."
"No," said Boranova. "I ordered Konev to make the decision on his own responsibility. The credit is therefore his."
Konev was not mollified. He said, "You would not have so quickly demanded communal responsibility, Arkady Vissarionovich" - he used the patronymic in a style long out of fashion in the Soviet Union, as though to emphasize the fact that Dezhnev was the son of a peasant, among whom, only, the style remained in fashion - "had we proved to be in the wrong capillary."
Dezhnev's smile became an uncomfortable one and his somewhat yellow upper incisors caught at his lower lip.
Boranova said in her masterful contralto, cutting off any retort Dezhnev might have made, "And Shapirov. What of him?"
"That," said Dezhnev, "has passed. An injection of some sort steadied the heartbeat."
Konev said, "Well, then, are we ready to go?"
"Yes," said Boranova.
"In that case - out of the bloodstream at last."
Boranova and Kaliinin were bent over their instruments. Morrison watched them for a few moments, but, of course, knew nothing of what was going on. He turned to Dezhnev, who sat in a relaxed position (unlike Konev, whose body was tense, almost ridged with muscle), and said, "What will be done, Arkady? We can't very well just blast our way out of a blood vessel in the brain."
"We'll sneak out once we're small enough. We're miniaturizing again. Look around you."
Startled, Morrison did. He realized that every time the outside world seemed to stabilize, he quickly learned to take it for granted and to pay no attention to it.
The current had picked up speed. Or, rather, it hadn't, but the ship had shrunk in size once more and objects moving by took correspondingly less time to pass, so that the mind, insisting on considering the ship's size unchanged, interpreted what was seen as a faster current.
A red cell passed by, moving as it had (or seeming to move as it had) in the carotid artery, but despite its speed, it billowed past for a long time, like a quivering whale passing a rowboat. It had grown faint indeed. It was almost transparent now and its edge was fuzzy with Brownian motion. There was a grayish dimness about it, so that it looked like an angry thundercloud spreading its way over the heavens. It had lost most of its oxygen by this time, of course, giving it up to the avid brain cells which, without motion or visible signs of life, consumed one quarter of all the oxygen carried by the blood to the various organs of the body. For all that the brain seemed to simply sit there, sense perception, response, and thought, all of it coordinated with a complexity that no human computer could come within an astronomical distance of duplication - might never duplicate - did not come cheap.