Morrison looked around at his crewmates' faces, searching for help. Boranova - steadily studying him. Konev - staring him down imperiously. Dezhnev - looking awkward, not willing to commit himself either way. And Kaliinin… his only hope.
Morrison gazed at her thoughtfully and said, "What do you think, Sophia?"
Kaliinin hesitated, then said in a voice that did not tremble, "I think it is wrong to threaten you in this way. A task like this should be performed voluntarily and not under duress."
Dezhnev, who had been humming very softly to himself, now said, "My old father used to say: 'There is no duress like one's own conscience and it is that which makes life so needlessly bitter.'"
"My conscience doesn't trouble me in this matter," said Morrison. "Shall we put it to a vote?"
"It wouldn't matter," said Boranova. "I am the captain and in a case like this I alone have the vote."
"If I am out there and sense nothing, would you believe me?"
Boranova nodded. "I would. After all, you might so easily invent something that would sound useful if you wished us to be suitably grateful. If you come back with nothing or with trivia, I believe I would have a greater tendency to believe that than if you instantly claimed you had heard something of great importance."
Konev said, "I am not likely to be fooled. If he comes in with something that seems important, I will be able to tell if it truly is. And now, surely, we have had enough discussion. Let's go!"
And Morrison, his heart beating and his throat tightening, managed to say, "Very well, I will go - but only for a brief time."
Morrison, of his own accord, stripped himself of his cotton garment. The first time (was it really only a couple of hours before?) it had seemed to be a violation of modesty; this second time it was almost routine.
He was quite aware, as with Kaliinin's help he struggled into the suit, how easily he could suck in his abdomen. Despite a good breakfast, ample water, and a piece of chocolate, his stomach was empty and he was glad it was. He felt a twinge of nausea as the suit enclosed more and more of his body and to throw up, once enclosed, would have been unbearable. Just before enclosure, he refused another piece of chocolate with what was almost a shudder.
They put his computer into his sheathed hands and Boranova said to him loudly, "Can you work it?"
Morrison heard her without too much difficulty. He knew he wouldn't hear her once he was outside the ship. He balanced the essentially weightless computer in one hand and struck the keys carefully and rather gracelessly with the other. He shouted back, "I think I can manage."
Then, rather clumsily, they tied the computer to both his wrists with firm knots of tough plastic twine (probably the same material of which the suit and the ship itself were made).
"So you don't lose it," Boranova called out.
Out into the air lock he went. He felt himself embraced by it, then pressured as the air in it was withdrawn, and then he was outside the ship.
Outside again. For only a brief time, he had warned the rest, but what good was that? How could he enforce that, if the others within the ship refused to let him back in? Already, he was sorry he had let himself be talked out of the ship by any threat, but dared not articulate the thought. It would do him no good.
Morrison tucked the computer under his left arm, partly because he did not entirely trust the plastic twine that secured it and partly because he wanted to protect it from the cellular contents as much as possible. He felt the surface of the ship for some spot where the electric charge on his suit would adhere to a charge of opposite nature on the ship's hull.
Morrison found one that allowed him to keep his back on the ship. The electric field did not hold him tightly and there was considerable give. Still, he was the size of an atom and it might be difficult to concentrate electric charge on a portion of him.
Or would it be? Wouldn't the electrons that were the source of the charge be microminiaturized as well? He felt - and resented keenly - his ignorance of miniaturization theory.
He was little aware of his motion along the intracellular stream, for everything was moving along with him. He found himself, however, the center of a shifting and ever-changing panorama. With the thinner plastic of the suit between himself and the scene, with the beacon of his own suit turning here and there as he moved his head and felt the headpiece twist (a little resistantly) with it, he could make out more.
There was the knobbiness of the water molecules rubbing against each other, like dimly seen balloons. He could see them brush past him slowly, this way or that, and largely ignore him. Occasionally, one would cling for a moment, an electric charge meeting an opposite charge on his suit, so that they clutched at him and released their hold only lingeringly. It was almost as though a molecule occasionally yearned for him but couldn't manage to turn the wish into deed.
Among these were larger molecules, some as large as the ship, some far larger still. He could see them only because light glinted off them here and there in changing, prismatic fashion. He did not see them; his mind built them up out of what he could glimpse. That he could do this at all was the result of his knowing a good deal about the contents of the cell to begin with, or thought he did. It might also, he thought, simply be his imagination.
It even seemed to Morrison that he could make out the skeleton of the cellular interior; the large structures that remained in place while the fluid stream passed them and that gave the cell its more or less fixed shape. These structures seemed to go by so quickly he could barely take note of them before they were gone. They alone gave him the impression of the rapid movement of the intercellular stream that carried the ship and him along with it as it weaved in gentle swoops around those fixed structures.
All this observation had not taken very long, but it was enough. It was time that he now turned his attention to his computer.
Why? It would detect nothing. Morrison was sure of it, but he couldn't act on that belief, however strongly he felt it. He might be wrong, perhaps, and he owed it to the others - and to himself, too - to make the effort.
He tried clumsily to adjust the computer to maximum sensitivity, barely able to handle the keys correctly and relieved that the self-contained power pack in the computer worked properly. He concentrated hard in order to sense and tap the currents of thought passing by.
The device did its work. The water molecules drifted by it as gently and untouchingly as they drifted by him and, disregarding them, his computer portrayed the skeptic waves more purely etched, more steep and clear, more finely detailed, than he had ever before seen them. But for all that, he sensed nothing but a faint hissing whisper that produced neither words nor images but only sadness.
Wait! How did he know the whisper was sad? Surely that was merely a subjective judgment on his part. Or was he detecting an emotion? Was the partially brain-dead, totally comatose Shapirov sad? Would it be surprising if he were?
Morrison looked over his shoulder, back at the ship. Surely what he was detecting was enough. He was registering sad nothingness and nothing more. Should he signal now to be pulled in? Would they be willing to do so? And if they brought him in and if he told Boranova that he had sensed nothing, would not Konev tell him angrily that he had been out there only two minutes, that he hadn't given it a chance? Would Konev not demand he go out again?
And if he waited longer?
Actually, he could wait longer. At this stage of miniaturization (or for whatever cause), he did not feel any particular heat.
But if he waited longer - another two minutes, or five minutes, or an hour, for that matter - Konev would still say, "Not enough."