" Elevate the, ship."
Chapter 7 : SUBMERGENCE
Slowly, the Zero Module began to lift from the floor, a smooth hexagonal pillar, with red top and white sides, bearing the inch-wide Proteus upon itself. When the top was four feet above the floor it stopped.
"Ready for Phase Two, sir," came the voice of one of the technicians.
Carter looked briefly at Reid, who nodded. "Phase Two," said Carter.
A panel slid open and a handling device (a gigantic "waldo"-so named by the early nuclear technicians from a character in a science fiction story of the 1940's, Carter had once been told) moved in on silent air-jets. It was fourteen feet high and consisted of pulleys on a tripod; pulleys which controlled a vertical arm, dangling down from a horizontal extensor. The arm itself was in stages, each shorter and on a smaller scale than the one above. In this case, there were three stages and the lowest one, two inches long, was fitted with steel wires a quarter-inch thick, curved to meet each other in interlocking fashion.
The base of the device carried the CMDF insigne and below it was the inscription: -MIN PRECISION HANDLING.
Three technicians had entered with the handling device and behind them a uniformed nurse waited with visible impatience. The brown hair under her nurse's cap looked overhastily adjusted as though on that one day she had other things on her mind.
Two of the technicians adjusted the arm of the waldo directly over the shrunken Proteus. For the fine adjustment, three hair-thin beams of light reached from the arm support to the surface of the Zero Module. The distance of each beam from the center of the module was translated into light intensity upon a small circular screen divided into three segments, meeting in its center.
The light intensities, clearly unequal, shifted delicately as the third technician adjusted a knob. With the skill of practice, he brought the three segments to equal intensity in a matter of seconds; equal enough to wipe out the boundaries between them. The technician then threw a switch and locked the waldo into position. The centering lines of light flicked off and the broader beam of a searchlight illuminated the Proteus by indirect reflection.
Another control was manipulated, and the arm sank toward the Proteus. Slowly and gently it came down, the technician holding his breath. He had probably handled more miniaturized objects than anyone in the country; possibly than anyone in the world (although no one knew all the details of what was going. on Over There, of course) but this was something unprecedented.
He was going to lift something with a greater normal mass by many times than he had ever done before, and what he was going to lift contained five living human beings. Even a small, barely visible tremor might be enough to kill.
The prongs below opened and slowly slipped down over the Proteus. The technician stopped them and tried to have his eyes assure himself that what his instruments told him was true. The prongs were accurately centered. Slowly, they closed, bit by bit, until they met underneath the ship and formed a close-knit, precision-adjusted cradle.
The Zero Module then dropped and left the Proteus suspended in the cradle claws.
The Zero Module did not stop at floor level, but sank below. Underneath the suspended ship was, for a few minutes, nothing but a hole.
Then, sheer glass walls began to rise upward from within the gap left by the Zero Module. When those walls, clear and cylindrical, had emerged a foot and a half, the meniscus of a clear liquid showed. When the Zero Module had emerged to floor level again, what was resting upon it was a cylinder, one foot wide and four feet tall, two-thirds filled with fluid. The cylinder rested on a circling cork base on which the lettering read: SALINE SOLUTION.
The arm of the waldo, which had not budged during this change, was now suspended over the solution. The ship was held within the upper portion of the cylinder, a foot above the solution level.
The arm was dropping now, slowly and more slowly. It stopped when the Proteus was almost at solution level, and then began moving with a velocity scaled down by a factor of ten thousand. The gears under the technician's immediate control moved rapidly while the ship lowered at a rate invisible to the eye.
Contact! The ship lowered further and further till it was half-submerged. The technician held it so for a moment, and then, as slowly as ever, he