"We will all be quiet," said Boranova. "Proceed, Albert. - Yuri, not one word."
Morrison looked sharply to his left, for there had been a soft touch on his hand. Kaliinin was looking at him keenly and there was a small smile on her face. She mouthed words in an exaggerated fashion and he managed to catch the Russian: "Pay no attention to him. Show him! Show him!"
Her eyes seemed to glitter. Morrison could not help but smile warmly in response. She might be motivated entirely by a desire for vengeance against the man who had abandoned her, but he enjoyed the look of assurance and faith that was present in her eyes.
(How long ago had it been since a woman had looked at him with pride and with trust in his abilities? How many years ago had it been since Brenda had lost hers?)
A spasm of self-pity shook him and he had to wait for a moment.
Back to the device. He tried to shut out the world, shut out his condition, think only of his computer, only of the tiny fluctuations in the electromagnetic field produced by the interchange of sodium and potassium ions across the neuronic membrane.
The screen flashed again, steadied, and resolved into a pattern of low peaks and valleys. Carefully, barely daring to touch the keys, Morrison threw in an expansion directive. The peaks and valleys spread out, the edges sliding off the screen. On the single peak and valley left remaining, there was a fuzzy smaller wiggle.
It's recording the waves, he thought, afraid to say so, afraid even to think it with any intensity, lest the slightest physical or mental effect suffice to blank it out.
The minor wiggle - the skeptic waves, as he called them - went out of focus and back in, never quite sharpening.
Morrison wasn't surprised. He might be detecting the fields of a number of cells that didn't quite duplicate each other. There was also the insulating effect of the plastic wall of the ship. There was the eternal shaking of Brownian motion. There might even be the interfering charge of atom groupings outside the miniaturization field.
The wonder was that he had gotten waves at all.
Slowly he made hand contact with the antennae - slid his fingers up and down, first one hand, then the other, then both in unison, then both in opposite directions. Then he bent the antennae gently, this way and that. There were sharpening and fuzzing of the skeptic waves, but he didn't know, for certain, exactly what he was doing that resulted in the sharpening.
And then, at a certain point, the tiny waves sharpened acutely. A little to one direction and another they fuzzed, but in one particular direction they were sharp. He tried to keep his hands from trembling.
"Arkady," he said.
"Yes, my American magician," said Dezhnev.
"Curve left and a little upward. I don't want to talk too much."
"I'll have to curve around the fibers."
"Curve slowly. Too fast and I'll lose the focus."
Morrison fought to keep his eyes from flickering leftward toward Kaliinin. Just one look at her face and one inevitable thought of her prettiness would be distraction enough to fuzz out the screen. Even the thought of distraction was itself distracting enough for the thought wave to flicker.
Dezhnev was curving the ship in the gentle arc that was all that the offset motors would manage and slowly Morrison shifted the antennae to suit. Occasionally he muttered a brief whispered direction: "Up and right," "Down," "A little left."
Finally he gasped, "Straight ahead."
It should get easier, he thought, as they got closer, but he couldn't relax until a neuron was actually in sight. And, through the obscuring collagen thicket, that was not likely to be until they were nearly on top of it.
Concentrating on only one subject was as tiring as clenching a muscle and leaving it clenched. He had to introduce just a bit of quick variation. He had to think of something else, but something neutral, something that would, for a while, leave his mind unclenched. So he thought of his broken family because he had thought of them so often that the image had faded and lost effect somehow. It was a photograph that was growing bent and gray and he could snap out of it quickly and return to the single-minded contemplation of the skeptic waves.
Then - without warning and overwhelmingly - another thought invaded his mind. It was a sharp mental picture of Sophia Kaliinin, looking younger, prettier, and happier than she had ever seemed to him in the short time he had known her. And with that picture came a tumbling of love and frustration and jealousy that left him weak.
He had not been consciously aware of any of these feelings, but who knew what unconscious thoughts and emotions might be hidden there in his own brain cells? Kaliinin? Did he feel that way about her? So quickly? Or was it the abnormal tensions of this fantastic voyage into the brain that had brought about fantastic responses?
It was only then that he noticed that the screen had fuzzed out completely. He was about to shout a warning to Dezhnev to stop the motors while he concentrated and tried to recapture the waves when Dezhnev's voice boomed out.
"There it is, Albert. You guided us to the cell like a bloodhound. Congratulations!"
"Also," said Boranova, gazing at Konev's lowering countenance, "congratulations to Yuri for coming up with the idea and persuading Albert to make the effort."
Konev's face relaxed and Dezhnev said, "But now, how do we get inide?"
Morrison stared at the vista ahead with interest. What he saw was a vast ridged wall stretching up and down, right and left, as far as the ship's light made it possible to see. The ridges were themselves broken up into domes so that, on closer inspection, the wall seemed to be a checkerboard with each square bulging outward. There were ragged extensions jutting outward between the bulges, like thick, short, and branching ropes that gave the wall an appearance of being tattered.
Morrison, with some effort, allowed for his own miniaturization and grasped the fact that the bulges were the ends of molecules (of phospholipids, he assumed) that made up the cell membrane. He realized with some dismay just what it meant for the ship to be the size of a glucose molecule. The cell was an enormous object; by present ship measure, it must be many kilometers across.
Konev had been staring at the cell membrane also, but emerged from his thoughtful contemplation sooner than Morrison did.
"I'm not sure," said Konev, "that this is a brain cell - or, at least, a neuron."
"What else can it be?" said Dezhnev. "We're in the brain and that's a cell."
Konev made no visible attempt to smother the disgust in his expression as he said, "There is more than one kind of brain cell. The neuron is the important cell, the chief agent of the mind. There are ten billion of them in the human brain. There are also some ten times as many glial cells of several kinds, which serve supporting and subsidiary functions. They are considerably smaller than the neurons. On the basis of chance, then, it is ten to one that this is a glia. The thought waves are in the neurons."
Boranova said, "We can't be guided simply by chance, Yuri. Can you tell in some definitive way whether this is glia or a neuron without involving statistics?"
"Not just by looking at it, no. From this size, all I see is a small section of a cell membrane and in such a case one cell looks like another. We'll have to become larger and get a more panoramic view. I presume we can become larger now, Natalya. After all, we're through what you called the collagen jungle."
"We can deminiaturize, if necessary," said Boranova, "but increasing size is more tedious and risky than decreasing it. An increase means the generation of heat and must be done slowly. Is there any alternative?"
Konev said tartly, "We might try Albert's instrument again. Albert, can you tell us if the skeptic waves you can detect are coming from straight ahead or from a slightly different direction?"