Konev ground his teeth. "There must be something we can do. We can't give up."
Morrison said, "Natalya, make the decision. Is there any point in investigating this cell any further? And are we in a position to seek out another cell?"
Boranova raised her hand and bowed her head in a moment of thought. The others turned to look at her and Konev seized the opportunity to grasp Morrison by the upper arm and pull him closer. His eyes were dark with hostility. He whispered, "How is it you think I am in love with -" he jerked his head in Kaliinin's direction. "What gives you the right to think so? Tell me that."
Morrison looked at him blankly.
At this point, Boranova spoke, but it was not to answer Morrison's question. She said mildly, "Arkady, what is it you are doing?"
Dezhnev, who was bent over his controls, lifted his head. "I am rearranging the wiring back to what it was. I am hooking up communications again."
Boranova said, "Have I told you to do that?"
Dezhnev said, "Necessity has told me to do that."
Konev said, "Does it occur to you it will be impossible to steer?"
Dezhnev growled and said in sullen irony, "And does it occur to you that there may be no more steering to do?"
"What is the necessity that drives you, Arkady?" said Boranova patiently.
Dezhnev said, "I don't think it's this cell alone that is out of order. The temperature around us is going down. - Slowly."
Konev sneered. "By your measurements?"
"No. By the ship's measurements. By the background infrared radiation we're getting."
"You can't tell anything by that," said Konev. "At our size, we get very few infrared photons. The level would vary all over the lot."
Dezhnev nodded at Konev and said, "Like this." His hand waved up and down frenetically. "Still, it can wave up and down like a rowboat in a typhoon and yet do so at a lower and lower average level." And his hand sank ever lower as it continued its trembling.
Boranova said, "Why should the temperature be dropping?"
Morrison smiled grimly. "Come on, Natalya. I think you know why. I know that Yuri knows why. Arkady must find out and for that reason necessity is forcing him to put back communications."
An uncomfortable silence fell, except for Dezhnev's occasional grunts and muttered expletives as he struggled with the ship's wiring.
Morrison gazed out at the surroundings, which he could once again see in the usual unsatisfactory fashion now that ship's lighting had been restored. There were the usual dim glitter of molecules, large and small, that traveled with them. Now that Dezhnev had mentioned it, he saw the occasional reflection of light from a line that stretched across the path before them and then moved over (or under) and behind at express speed.
These were, undoubtedly, very thin collagen fibers that preserved the shape of the irregular neuron and kept it from converting itself into a roughly spherical blob under the pull of its own surface tension. Had he been watching for it, he would have noticed it before. It occurred to him that Dezhnev, as navigator, had to watch for everything and, in the entirely unprecedented situation in which the ship found itself, Dezhnev had had no guide, no instruction, no experience to let him know what to watch for. There was no question but that Dezhnev's task had placed him under greater tension than the others had allowed for.
Certainly, to Morrison himself, Dezhnev had been taken for granted as the least of the five. Not fair, Morrison thought now.
Dezhnev had straightened up now. He had an earphone in one ear canal and said, "I should be able to establish communication." He said, "Are you there? Grotto. -Grotto."
Then he smiled. "Yes. We are, to this point, safe. - I'm sorry, but as I told you, it was either communicate or steer. - How is it at your end? - What? Repeat that, more slowly. - Yes, I thought so."
He turned to the others. "Comrades," he said, "Academician Pyotr Leonovich Shapirov is dead. Thirteen minutes ago, all vital signs ceased and our task now is to leave the body."
Chapter 17. Exit
If trouble were as easy to get out of as into - life would be one sweet song.
A gray silence fell over the ship.
Kaliinin buried her face in her hands and then, after a long moment, broke the silence by whispering, "Are you sure, Arkady?"
And Dezhnev, blinking hard to hold back tears, said, "Am I sure? The man has been on the brink of death for weeks. The cellular flow is slowing, the temperature is falling, and the Grotto, which has him wired with every instrument ever invented, says he is dead. What is there to be but sure?"
Boranova sighed. "Poor Shapirov. He deserved a better death."
Konev said, "He might have held out another hour."
Boranova said with a frown, "He did not pick and choose, Yuri."
Morrison felt chilled. Until now he had been conscious of some surrounding red corpuscles, of a specific speck of intercellular region, of the interior of a neuron. His environment had been circumscribed to the immediate.
Now he looked out of the ship, through its transparent plastic walls, at what appeared to him, for the first time, to be thickness upon thickness of matter. On their present scale, with the ship the size of a glucose molecule and himself not much more than the size of an atom, the body of Shapirov was larger than the planet Earth.
Here he was, then, buried in a planetary object of dead organic matter. He felt impatience over the pause for mourning. Time for that later, but meanwhile - He said in a voice that was perhaps a little louder than it ought to have been, "How do we get out?"
Boranova looked at him in surprise, eyes widening. (Morrison was certain that in her grief for Shapirov the thought of leaving had been momentarily buried.)
She cleared her throat and made a visible effort to be her usual businesslike self. She said, "We must deminiaturize to some extent, to begin with."
Morrison said, "Why only to begin with? Why not deminiaturize all the way to normality right now?" Then, as though to forestall the inevitable objection, "We will inflict damage on Shapirov's body, but it is a dead body and we are still alive. Our needs come first."
Kaliinin looked at Morrison reproachfully. "Even a dead body deserves respect, Albert, especially the dead body of a great scientist like Academician Pyotr Shapirov."
"Yes, but surely not to the entent of risking five lives." Morrison's impatience was growing. Shapirov was only someone he had known by distant reputation and peripherally - to Morrison he was not the demigod he seemed to be to the others.
Dezhnev said, "Aside from the question of respect, we are enclosed by Shapirov's cranium. If we expand to fill that cranium and then try to crumble the cranium by the effect of our miniaturization field, we will lose too much energy and deminiaturize explosively. We must first find our way out of the cranium."
Boranova said, "Albert is right. Let's begin. I will deminiaturize to cell size. Arkady, have the people in the Grotto determine our exact position. Yuri, make sure you locate that position accurately on your cerebrograph."
Morrison stared out the hull at the distant cell membrane - a brighter and more continuous sparkle, one that was visible through the occasional flicker of light from the intervening molecules.
The first indication of deminiaturization was the fact that the molecules - subsided. (It was the only word Morrison could think of to describe what happened.)
It was as though the little curved swellings that filled the space around them - and which Morrison's brain constructed out of twinklings rather than saw directly - shrank. It was for all the world as though they were balloons with the air being let out of them until the surroundings seemed relatively smooth.