He could make out Konev looking out toward him, his expression dark and glowering. Kaliinin was directly behind him, since she had unclasped herself and moved over into what had been Morrison's seat. She was staring outward anxiously.
He caught her eyes and she seemed about to signal to him, but Boranova leaned forward and pushed her shoulder firmly. Kaliinin moved back to her own seat at once. (She had to, Morrison told himself, for her job was to keep an eye on the charge patterns of the ship and of himself right now and she could not - must not - abandon that job, no matter what her anxiety over him.)
For the sake of completeness, Morrison tried to catch Dezhnev's eye, but the angle required was too great for the twisting ability of his headpiece. He caught, instead, Konev motioning in what seemed, clearly, an interrogative gesture.
Morrison looked away petulantly, making no attempt to give information, and became aware of something in the distance looming toward him at a great speed. He could make out no details, but he automatically winced as he waited for the current to carry the ship and himself around it.
It came straight on like a juggernaut and Morrison cowered toward the hull of the ship.
The ship did evade the object, but not by much and as the looming monster passed him Morrison felt himself drawn outward and toward it.
It flashed through his mind that Kaliinin had put some random electric charge on his suit and that whatever it was he was passing, by the most miserable of coincidences, had a charge that exactly complemented his own.
Under normal circumstance, that would not have mattered. The ship and the structure passed each other at such a speed that no attraction could have sufficed to rip him loose, but he was a tiny object with neither mass nor inertia and, for a moment, he felt - stretched - as though the structure and the ship disputed ownership. The ship, it seemed to his appalled eyes, briefly faltered and then was pushed loose by the current.
Morrison had been peeled off by the object and the ship, still continuing with the current, moved off so rapidly that it was lost to sight at once. One second it was with him, the next second it was totally gone.
Before he had time to realize what had happened, he was alone and helpless - an atom-sized object in a brain cell. His only faint attachment to life and reality - the ship - was forever gone.
Some minutes must have been lost to Morrison. During that time, he had no conception of where he was or of what had happened. He was conscious only of absolute panic, of the conviction that he was on the point of death.
When life continued, Morrison was almost sorry. If that moment had been death, it would have been all over. Now he still had to wait for it.
How long would his air last? Would heat and humidity crawl on, even if more slowly than before, inexorably, just the same, perhaps. Would his light give out before he did and would he have to die in utter darkness as well as utterly alone? He thought, quite madly, How will I know when I'm dead if it's absolutely dark before and absolutely dark thereafter? (He thought of Ajax's prayer to Zeus that if he had to meet death, let it be in the light of day. And, with this, Morrison thought hopelessly, And with one person, at least, to hold one's hand.)
What to do, then?
Just wait?
What had gone wrong, anyway?
Ah, he was not yet dead. The fear had receded enough to allow room for a little curiosity - and a will to fight and live.
Could he somehow get loose from this thing? It seemed disgraceful, somehow, to die like a fly stuck in amber. - And every moment the ship was getting farther away. Almost at once he thought, It's already too far away for me to be caught, no matter what I do.
The thought drove him to frenzy and Morrison writhed with all his might, trying to break loose. It did no good and it occurred to him that he was wasting energy and increasing the heat within the suit.
He slid his hands upward along the misty structure that held him, but his hands bounced away. Like charges repel each other.
He reached along it - right, left, up, down. Somewhere there was the opposite charge. He might be able to seize hold then and try to tear the structure apart. (Why were his teeth chattering? Fright? Desperation? Both?)
His right hand clicked shut as it was attracted to a portion of the structure. He clenched hard, trying to push past the mere charge and tear at the atomic arrangement itself - if there was any atomic arrangement that had meaning aside from the charge itself.
For a moment, Morrison felt the structure resist a too-tight grip with a kind of rubbery rebound. And then, without warning, it crumbled in his hand. He stared in amazement at his hand, trying to make out what had happened. There was no tearing, ripping, or wrenching sensation. It seemed to him that a portion of the structure had simply disappeared.
Morrison tried again, groping here and there, until another portion vanished. What was happening?
Wait awhile! The miniaturization field extended beyond the ship slightly, Boranova had said. It would extend beyond the suit, too. When he squeezed as hard as he might, some of the atom he was touching would miniaturize and, in so doing, it would lose its normal architecture and break loose from the atoms to which it had formerly been bonded. Anything he touched - if he could touch it hard enough - would miniaturize.
Any atom or portion thereof that he miniaturized in this way would become a point-sized particle with far less mass than an electron. It would take off at nearly the speed of light, pass through matter as though that matter weren't there, and be gone.
Could this be so? It had to be so. Nothing else he could imagine would make sense.
And even as he thought this, Morrison began to push his hands and feet violently against the imprisoning material - and broke loose.
He was no longer glued to the structure. He was an independent body coursing along the intercellular stream.
It didn't stop the ship from being forever out of reach, but he was at least on its trail. (Foolish! Foolish! What good was it to be on its trail? On his own scale, he was dozens of kilometers from the ship - if not scores.)
Another thought struck him and staggered him. He had been miniaturizing atoms to get free, but such miniaturization required an input of energy. Not much at this stage, since there was so little mass to remove, but where would the energy come from?
It had to come from the suit's own miniaturization field. Every atom that miniaturized weakened the field, therefore. How much had he weakened it, then, by getting loose?
And was that why he wasn't feeling the heat? Had the miniaturization of his surroundings soaked up some of the heat as well as of the energy of the miniaturization field? No, that couldn't be so, for he hadn't felt much in the way of heat even before he began breaking loose.
Yet another thought struck him, making his position more desperate still. If he had broken loose from the structure at the expense of the energy of his field - if his field had been weakened - then he would have deminiaturized slightly. Was that the reason for spontaneous deminiaturization?
Boranova had talked of the possibility of such spontaneous deminiaturization. The possibility of that increased, the smaller the miniaturized object was. - And he was now small.
As long as he had been on the ship, he had been part of the overall miniaturization field of the ship. He was part of a molecule-sized object. While he was part of the cytoskeleton of the cell, he was part of an even larger object. But now he was alone, separate, part of nothing beyond himself. He was an atom-sized object.
He was much more likely, now, to deminiaturize spontaneously, except that it wouldn't be spontaneous - it would be the weakening of the field by the miniaturization of surrounding normal objects.
How could he tell if he were deminiaturizing? If he were, the process would proceed at an exponential rate. He would be deminiaturizing slowly at first, but as he grew larger he would affect a larger volume of surrounding material and he would grow larger at a faster rate, then still faster, and finally it would be an explosion and he would die.