Isaac Asimov (27 page)

He tried to look behind him, fighting off the haze of agony. There was a tremendous cavity in the rear of the ship and viscous blood plasma bulged inward, held back partly by the pressure of the miniaturized air within the ship and partly by its own surface tension.

The air he had left would last him for the minute or two that would remain before de-miniaturization. Already, even as he watched, it seemed to his dizzying senses that the dendrite cables had narrowed a bit. They couldn’t really be shrinking, so he had to be expanding—very slowly just at first.

At full size, his arm could be taken care of. The others would be killed by white cells and be done with. He would say—he would say—something that would explain the broken ship. And in any case, Benes would be dead and indefinite miniaturization would die with him. There would be peace—peace …

He watched the dendrites while his body remained limply draped over the control panel. Could he move? Was he paralyzed? Was his back broken as well as his arm?

Dully, he considered the possibility. He felt his sense of comprehension and awareness slipping away as the dendrites became clouded over with a milky haze.

Milky haze?

A white cell!

Of course, it was a white cell. The ship was larger than the individuals out in the plasma, and it was the ship that was at the site of damage. The ship would be the first to attract the attention of the white cell.

The window of the
Proteus
was coated with sparkling milk. Milk invaded the plasma at the break in the ship’s
hull in the rear and struggled to break through the surface tension barrier.

The next to the last sound Michaels heard was the hull of the
Proteus
, fragile in its makeup of miniaturized atoms, strained to the breaking point with what it had already been through, cracking and splintering under the assault of the white cell.

The last sound he heard was his own laughter.

Cora saw the white cell at almost the time Michaels did.

“Look,” she cried in horror.

They stopped, turned to look back.

The white cell was tremendous. It was five times as large in diameter as the
Proteus
, perhaps larger; a mountain of milky, skinless, pulsing protoplasm in comparison to the individuals watching.

Its large, lobed nucleus, a milky shadow within its substance seemed to be a malevolent, irregular eye, and the shape of the whole creature altered and changed with every moment. A portion bulged toward the
Proteus
.

Grant started toward the
Proteus
, almost as though by reflex action.

Cora seized his arm. “What are you going to do, Grant?”

Duval said, excitedly, “There’s no way to save him. You’ll be throwing away your life.”

Grant shook his head violently, “It’s not he I’m thinking of. It’s the ship.”

Owens said, sadly, “You can’t save the ship, either.”

“But we might be able to get it out, where it can expand safely. —Listen, even if it is crushed by the white cell; even if it is separated into atoms, each miniaturized atom will de-miniaturize; it is de-miniaturizing right now. It doesn’t matter whether Benes is killed by an intact ship or by a pile of splinters.”

Cora said, “You can’t get the ship out. Oh, Grant, don’t die. Not after all this. Please.”

Grant smiled at her. “Believe me, I have every reason not to die, Cora. You three keep on going. Let me make just one college try.”

He swam back, heart beating in an almost unbearable revulsion at the monster he was approaching. There were others behind it, farther off, but he wanted this one; the one that was engulfing the
Proteus
, only this one.

At closer quarters, he could see its surface; a portion in profile showed clear, but within were granules and
vacuoles, an intricate mechanism, too intricate for biologists to understand in detail even yet, and all crammed into a single microscopic blob of living matter.

The
Proteus
was entirely within it now; a splintering dark shadow encased in a vacuole. Grant had thought that for a moment he had seen Michaels’ face in the bubble but that might have been only imagination.

Grant was at the heaving mountainous surface now, but how was he to attract the attention of such a thing? It had neither eyes nor sense; neither a mind nor purpose.

It was an automatic machine of protoplasm designed to respond in certain fashion to injury.

How? Grant didn’t know. Yet a white cell could tell when a bacterium was in its vicinity. In some cellular way, it knew. It had known when the
Proteus
was near it and it had reacted by engulfing it.

Grant was far smaller than the
Proteus
, far smaller than a bacterium, even now. Was he large enough to be noticed?

He had his knife out and sank it deeply into the material before him, slitting it downward.

Nothing happened. No gush of blood, for there is no blood in a white cell.

Then, slowly, a bulging of the inner protoplasm appeared at the site of the ruptured membrane and that portion of the membrane drew away.

Grant struck again. He didn’t want to kill it; he didn’t think he could at his present size. But was there some way of attracting its attention?

He drifted off and, with mounting excitement, noticed a bulge in the wall, a bulge pointing toward him.

He drifted further away and the bulge followed.

He had been noticed. The manner of the noticing he could not say, but the white cell with everything it contained, with the
Proteus
, was following.

He moved away faster now. The white cell followed but (Grant hoped fervently) not quickly. Grant had reasoned that it was not designed for speed; that it moved like an amoeba, bulging out a portion of its substance and then pouring itself into the bulge. Under ordinary conditions it fought with immobile objects, with bacteria and with foreign inanimate detritus. Its amoeboid motion was fast enough for that. Now it would have to deal with an object capable of darting away.

(Darting away quickly enough, Grant hoped.)

With gathering speed, he swam toward the others who were still delaying, still watching for him.

He gasped, “Get a move on. I think it’s following.”

“So are others,” said Duval, grimly.

Grant looked about. The distance was swarming with white cells. What one had noticed, all had noticed.

“How …”

Duval said, “I saw you strike at the white cell. If you damaged it, chemicals were released into the bloodstream; chemicals that attracted white cells from all the neighboring regions.”

“Then, for God’s sake,
swim!
”

The surgical team was gathered round Benes’ head, while Carter and Reid watched from above. Carter’s mood of black depression was deepening by the moment.

It was over. All for nothing. All for nothing. All for …

“General Carter! Sir!” The sound was urgent, strident. The man’s voice was cracking with excitement.

“Yes?”

“The
Proteus
, sir. It’s moving.”

Carter yelled. “Stop surgery!”

Each member of the surgical team looked up in startled wonder.

Reid plucked at Carter’s sleeve. “The motion may be the mere effect of the ship’s slowly accelerating de-miniaturization. If you don’t get them now, they will be in danger of the white cells.”

“What kind of motion?” shouted Carter. “Where’s it heading?”

“Along the optic nerve, sir.”

Carter turned fiercely on Reid. “Where does that go? What does it mean?”

Reid’s face lit up, “It means an emergency exit I hadn’t thought of. They’re heading for the eye and out through the lachrymal duct. They may make it. They might just get away with it, damaging one eye at most. —Get a microscope slide, someone. —Carter, let’s get down there.”

The optic nerve was a bundle of fibers, each like a string of sausages.

Duval paused to place his hand on the junction between two of the “sausages.”

“A node of Ranvier,” he said, wonderingly, “I’m touching it.”

“Don’t keep on touching it,” gasped Grant. “Keep on swimming.”

The white cells had to negotiate the close-packed network and did it less easily than the swimmers could. They had squeezed out into the interstitial fluid and were bulging through the spaces between the close-knit nerve fibers.

Grant watched anxiously to make sure that
the
white cell was still in pursuit. The one with the
Proteus
in it. He could not make out the
Proteus
any longer. If it existed in the white cell nearest, it had been transferred so deep into its substance that it was no longer visible. If the white cell behind was not
the
white cell, then Benes might be killed despite everything.

The nerves sparked wherever the beam from the helmet-lights struck and the sparkles moved backward in rapid progression.

“Light impulses,” muttered Duval. “Benes’ eyes aren’t entirely closed.”

Owens said, “Everything’s definitely getting smaller. Do you notice that?”

Grant nodded. “I sure do.” The white cell was only half the monster it had been only moments before; if that.

“We only have seconds to go,” said Duval.

Cora said “I can’t keep up.”

Grant veered toward her. “Sure you can. We’re in the eye now. We’re only the width of a teardrop from safety.” He put his arms around her waist, pushing her forward, then took the laser and its power unit from her.

Duval said. “Through here and we’ll be in the lachrymal duct.”

They were large enough almost to fill the interstitial space through which they were swimming. As they grew, their speed had increased and the white cells grew less fearsome.

Duval kicked open the membranous wall he had come up against. “Get through,” he said. “Miss Peterson, you first.”

Grant pushed her through, and followed her. Then Owens and finally Duval.

“We’re out,” said Duval with a controlled excitement. “We’re out of the body.”

“Wait,” said Grant. “I want that white cell out, too. Otherwise …”

He waited a moment, then let out a shout of excitement. “There it is. And, by heaven, it’s the right one.”

The white cell oozed through the opening that Duval’s boot had made, but with difficulty. The
Proteus
, or the shattered splinters of it, could be seen clearly through its substance. It had expanded until it was nearly half the size of the white cell and the poor monster was finding itself with an unexpected attack of indigestion.

It struggled on gamely, however. Once it had been stimulated to follow, it could do nothing else.

The three men and a woman drifted upward in a well of rising fluid. The white cell, barely moving, drifted up with them.

The smooth curved wall at one side was transparent. It was transparent not in the fashion of the thin capillary wall, but truly transparent. There were no signs of cell membranes of nuclei.

Duval said, “This is the cornea. The other wall is the lower eyelid. We’ve got to get far enough away to de-miniaturize fully without hurting Benes, and we only have seconds to do it in.”

Up above, many feet above (on their still tiny scale) was a horizontal crack.

“Through there,” said Duval.

“The ship’s on the surface of the eye,” came the triumphant shout.

“All right,” said Reid. “Right eye.”

A technician leaned close with the microscope slide at Benes’ closed eye. A magnifying lens was in place. Slowly, with a felted clamp, the lower eyelid was gently pinched and pulled down.

“It’s there,” said the technician in hushed tones. “Like a speck of dirt.”

Skillfully, he placed the slide to the eye and a teardrop with the speck in it squeezed on to it.

Everyone backed away.

Reid said, “Something that is large enough to see is going to get much larger very quickly. Scatter!”

The technician, torn between hurry and the necessity for gentleness, placed the slide down on the floor of the room, then backed away at a quick trot.

The nurses wheeled the operating table quickly through the large double door and with a startlingly accelerated speed, the specks on the slide grew to full size.

Three men, a woman, and a heap of metal fragments, rounded and eroded, were present where none had been a moment before.

Reid muttered, “Eight seconds to spare.”

But Carter said, “Where’s Michaels? If Michaels is still in Benes …” He started after the vanished operating table with the consciousness of defeat once again filling him.

Grant pulled off his helmet and waved him back. “It’s all right, general. That’s what’s left of the
Proteus
and somewhere in it you’ll find whatever’s left of Michaels. Maybe just an organic jelly with some fragments of bones.”

Grant still hadn’t grown used to the world as it was. He had slept, with a few breaks, for fifteen hours, and he woke in wonder at a world of light and space.

He had breakfast in bed, with Carter and Reid at his bedside, smiling.