Fantastic Voyage - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,2

produced a three-dimensional image.

Well, never mind that, Michaels would say at that point. You get a picture of the entire circulatory system in three dimensions which can then be recorded two-dimensionally in as large a number of sections and projections as would be required for the job. You could get down to the smallest capillaries, if the picture were properly enlarged.

"And that leaves me just a geographer," Michaels would add. "A geographer of the human body, plotting its rivers and bays, its inlets and streams; much more complicated than anything on Earth, I assure you."

Reid looked at the chart over Michaels' shoulder and said, "Whose is that, Max?"

"No one's to speak of." Michaels tossed it aside. "I'm waiting, that's all. When someone else waits, he reads a book. I read a blood-system."

"You're waiting, too, eh? So's he." Reid's head nodded backward in the general direction of Carter's office. "Waiting for the same thing?"

"For Benes to get here. Of course. And yet, you know, I don't entirely believe it."

"Don't believe what?"

"I'm not sure the man has what he says he has. I'm a physiologist, to be sure, and not a physicist," Michaels shrugged in self-deprecatory humor, "but I like to believe the experts. They say there's no way. I hear them say that the Uncertainty Principle makes it impossible to do it for longer than a given time. And you can't argue with. the Uncertainty Principle, can you?"

"I'm no expert either, Max, but those same experts tell us that Benes is the biggest expert of them all in this field. The Other Side has had him and they've kept even with us just because of him; just because of him. They have no one else in the first rank, while we have Zaletsky, Kramer, Richtheim, Lindsay and all the rest. -And our biggest men believe he must have something, if he says he does."

"Do they? Or do they just think we can't afford not to take a chance on it? After all, even if he turns out to have nothing, we win just out of his defection. The others would no longer have the use of his service."

"Why should he lie?"

Michaels said, "Why not? It's getting him out. It's getting him here, where I suppose he wants to be. If it turns out he has nothing, we're not going to send him back, are we? Besides, he may not be lying; he may just be mistaken."

"Hmph," Reid tilted his chair back and put his feet on the desk in most un-colonel-like manner. "You've got a point there. And if he diddles us, it would serve Carter right. Serve them all right. The fools."

"You got nothing out of Carter, eh?"

"Nothing. He won't do a thing till Benes comes. He's counting the minutes and now so am I. It's forty-two minutes."

"Till when?"

"Till the plane carrying him lands at the airport. -And the bio-sciences have nothing. If Benes is just pulling off a deal to escape from the Other Side, we have nothing; and if it's legitimate, we'll still have nothing. Defense will take it all, every slice, every crumb, every smell. It will be too pretty to play with and they'll never let it go."

"Nonsense. Maybe just at first, they will hang on, but we have our pressures, too. We can turn Duval loose on them; the intense, God-fearing Peter."

A look of distaste came across Reid's face. "I would love to throw him at the military. The way I feel now, I would love to throw- him at Carter, too. If Duval were negatively charged and Carter positively charged and I could get them together and let them spark each other to death ... "

"Don't get destructive, Don. You take Duval too seriously. A surgeon is an artist; a sculptor of living tissue. A great surgeon is a great 'artist and has the temperament of one."

"Well, I have temperament, too, and I don't use it to be one large pain in the neck. What gives Duval a monopoly on the right to be offensive and arrogant?"

"If he had the monopoly, my colonel, I would be delighted. I would leave it to him with all possible gratitude, if he had it all. The trouble is there are so many other offensive, arrogant characters in the world."

"I suppose so. I suppose so," muttered Reid, but he was unmollified. "Thirty-seven minutes."

If anyone had repeated Reid's capsule description of Duval to Dr. Peter Lawrence Duval, it would have been met with the same short grunt that a