Morrison could make out the soft throbbing of the motors as they edged the ship toward the side of the stream. The dendrite toward which they aimed was a tube that was slipping sideways, a huge tube at their size scale, so huge they could only see a small arc of its circumference.
They continued to edge closer to it and Morrison found himself leaning toward the dendrite, as though adding body English could improve matters.
But it was not a matter of reaching the tube itself, merely moving over an eddying section of fluid, a rushing of water molecules that quieted into gentle circles and then slipped beyond into another stream that was curving off in another direction.
The ship made the transition and was suddenly plunging forward into the tube opening.
"Turn off the motors," said Konev excitedly.
"Not yet," grumbled Dezhnev. "We may be too near the countercurrent emerging from this thing. Let me slip over a bit closer to the wall."
He did so, but that did not take long. They were now essentially moving with the current, not against it. And when Dezhnev did finally shut off the engine and pushed back his damp, graying hair, he heaved a great breath and said, "Everything we do consumes a ton of energy. There's a limit, Yuri, there's a limit."
"We'll worry about that later," said Konev impatiently.
"Will we?" said Dezhnev. "My father always said: 'Later is usually too late.' - Natalya, don't leave all this to Yuri. I don't trust his attitude toward our energy supply."
"Calm yourself, Arkady. I will take care to override Yuri if it becomes necessary. - Yuri, the dendrite is not very long, is it?"
"We will come to the ending in short order, Natalya."
"In that case, Sophia, please see to it that we are ready to adopt the acetylcholine pattern at a moment's notice."
"You'll give me the signal, then?" said Kaliinin.
"I will not have to, Sophia. I'm sure that Yuri will whoop like a Cossack when the end is in sight. Shift the pattern to acetylcholine at that moment."
They continued sliding along the final tubular remnant of the neuron they had entered a considerable time before. It seemed to Morrison that, as the dendrite continued to narrow, he could see the wall arc above him, but that was illusion. Common sense told him that even at its narrowest, the tube would appear to be a few kilometers across at their present molecular size.
And, as Boranova had foreseen, Konev lifted his voice in a great cry, probably quite unaware that he was doing so. "The end is ahead. Quick. Acetylcholine before we're swept around and back."
Kaliinin's fingers flickered over the keyboard. There was no indication from inside the ship that anything about it had changed, but somewhere up ahead was an acetylcholine receptor - or, more likely, hundreds of them - and the patterns meshed, positive to negative and negative to positive, so that the attraction between ship and receptor was sharp and great.
They were pulled out of the stream and melted into and through the wall of the dendrite. For a few minutes they continued to be pulled through the intercellular medium between the dendrite of the neuron they had just left and the dendrite of the neighbor neuron.
Morrison saw almost nothing. The ship, he felt, was sliding along - or through - a complex protein molecule and then he noticed the formation of a concavity, as when the ship had first entered the first neuron.
Konev had unclasped himself so that he could stand up. (Quite obviously, he was too excited to feel this was something he could do sitting down.)
He said, almost stuttering, "Now, according to the Nastiaspenskaya hypothesis, the filtering out of the important thoughts is most evident immediately after the synapse. Once the cell body is approached, the difference fades. So once we are in the neighboring dendrite, open your minds. Be ready for anything. Say whatever you hear out loud. Describe any images. I'll record everything. You, too, Arkady. Albert, you, too. - We're in now. Begin!"
Chapter 15. Alone!
Good company robs even death of some of its terrors.
Morrison watched what followed with a certain detachment. He did not intend to participate actively. If something forced itself into his mind, he would respond and report it. It would be unscientific not to.
Kaliinin, at his left, looked grim and her fingers were idle. He leaned toward her and whispered, "Have you got us back as L-glucose?"
She nodded.
He said, "Are you aware of this Nastiaspenskaya hypothesis?"
She said, "It's not in my field. I've never heard of it."
"Do you believe it?"
But Kaliinin was not to be trapped. She said, "I'm not qualified either to believe or disbelieve, but he believes it. - Because he wants to."
"Do you sense anything?"
"Nothing more than before."
Dezhnev was, of course, silent. Boranova occasionally produced a crisp word or two, which, however, seemed to Morrison's ears to lack conviction.
Only Konev seemed to maintain enthusiasm. At one point, he cried out, "Did anyone get that? Anyone? 'Circular rhythm.' 'Circular rhythm.'"
There was no direct answer and, after a while, Morrison said, "What does that mean, Yuri?"
Konev did not answer. - And even he grew quiet after a while and was reduced to staring blankly ahead as the ship moved onward in the fluid stream.
Boranova asked, "Well, Yuri?"
Konev said rather hoarsely, "I do not understand it."
Dezhnev said, "Yuri, little son, it may be this is a bad neuron and isn't doing much thinking. We'll have to try another and maybe another. The first one may have been simply beginner's luck."
Konev looked at him angrily. "We don't work with single cells. We're in a group of cells - a million of them or more - that are a center of creative thought by Albert's theory. What one of them thinks, they all think - with minor variations."
Morrison said, "That's what I believe I have shown."
Dezhnev said, "Then we don't go looking from cell to cell?"
"It would be no use," said Morrison.
"Good," said Dezhnev heavily, "because we don't have the time and we don't have the energy. So what do we do now?"
In the silence that followed, Konev said again, "I do not understand it. Nastiaspenskaya could not be wrong."
And now Kaliinin, with great deliberation, unclasped herself and stood up.
She said, "I want to say something and I don't want to be interrupted. Natalya, listen to me. We have gone far enough. This is an experiment that perhaps had to be done, even though, in my opinion, it was sure to fail. Well, it has failed."
She pointed a slim finger briefly at Konev, without looking at him. "Some people want to alter the Universe to their liking. Whatever is not so, they would make so by sheer force of will - except that the Universe is beyond any person's will, squeeze he ever so hard.
"I don't know if Nastiaspenskaya is correct or not. I don't know if Albert's theories are correct or not. But this I know-what they think, and what any neuroscientist thinks about the brain generally, must be about a reasonably normal brain. Academician Shapirov's brain is not reasonably normal. Twenty percent of it is nonfunctioning-dead. The rest must be distorted in consequence and the fact that he has been in a coma for weeks shows that.
"Any reasonable human being would realize that Shapirov cannot be thinking in normal fashion. His brain is an army in - in disarray. It is a factory in which all the equipment has been jarred loose. It is sparking randomly, emitting broken thoughts, scattered pieces, splinters of memory. Some men" - she pointed again - "won't admit it because they believe that if they only insist loudly enough and strongly enough, the obvious will retreat and the impossible will somehow come into being."