Fantastic Voyage - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,29

briefing. He himself was at this moment made up of as many atoms as a full-sized man and not of as few as an object actually his present size would be. He was correspondingly more fragile and so was the ship. A fall from this height would smash the ship and kill the crew.

He looked at the cradle holding the ship. What they seemed to a normal man, Grant did not stop to consider. To himself, they were curved steel pillars ten feet in diameter, meshed neatly into a continuous cradle of metal. For the moment, he felt safe.

Owens called out in a voice that cracked with excitement, "Here it comes."

Grant looked quickly in various directions before making out what "it" was.

The light was glinting off the smooth transparent surfaces of a circle of glass big enough to surround a house. It rose smoothly and rapidly; and far below-directly below-was the sudden iridescent and twinkling reflection of lights upon water.

The Proteus was suspended over a lake. The glass walls of the cylinder were rising on all sides of the ship now and the surface of the lake did not appear to be more than fifty feet below them.

Grant leaned back in his chair. He had no trouble guessing what came next. He was prepared, therefore, and felt no nausea whatever when his seat seemed to drop from under him. The sensation was very much like that he had once experienced in the course of a power-dive over the ocean. The plane that had engaged in that maneuver had pulled out as it was meant to, but the Proteus, suddenly an airborne submarine, was not going to.

Grant tensed his muscles, then tried to relax them in order to let the harness rather than his bones take the blow.

They hit and the shock nearly jarred his teeth from their sockets.

What Grant expected to see through the window was spray, a wall of water shooting high. What he saw instead was a large, thick swell, smoothly rounded, speeding oilily away. Then, as they continued to sink, another and another.

The claws of the cradle unhooked and the ship jounced madly and came to a floating stop, slowly turning.

Grant let out a long breath. They were on the surface of a lake, yes, but it was like no surface he had ever seen.

Michaels said, "You expected waves, Mr. Grant?"

"Yes, I did."

"I must confess I rather did myself. The human mind, Grant, is a funny thing. It expects always to see what it had seen in the past. We are miniaturized and are put in a small container of water. It seems like a lake to us so we expect waves, foam, breakers, who knows what else. But whatever this lake appears to us to be, it is not a lake but merely a small container of water, and it has ripples and not waves. And no matter how you enlarge a ripple, it never looks like a wave."

"Interesting enough, though," said Grant. The thick rolls of fluid, which on an ordinary scale would have made tiny ripples, continued to race outward. Reflected from the distant wall, they returned and made interference patterns that broke the rolls into separate hills, while the Proteus rose and fell in drastic rhythms.

"Interesting?" said Cora, indignantly. "Is that all you can say? It's simply magnificent."

"His handiwork," added Duval, "is majestic on every scale of magnitude."

"All right," said Grant, "I'll buy that. Magnificent and majestic. -Check. Only a little nauseating, too, you know."

"Oh, Mr. Grant," said Cora, "You have a knack for deflating everything."

"Sorry," said Grant.

The wireless sounded and Grant sent back the ALL WELL signal again. He resisted the impulse to send back "All sea-sick."

Still, even Cora was beginning to look uncomfortable. Perhaps he shouldn't have put the thought into her mind.

Owens said, "We'll have to submerge manually. Grant, slip out of your harness and open valves one and two."

Grant rose unsteadily to his feet, delighted at the feeling' of even the limited freedom of walking, and moved to a butterfly valve marked ONE on the bulkhead.

"I'll take the other," said Duval. Their eyes met for a moment, and Duval, as though embarrassed by the sudden intimate awareness of another human being, smiled hesitantly. Grant smiled back and thought indignantly, Now how can she get sentimental over this mass of unawareness?

With the valves open, the surrounding fluid flowed into the appropriate chambers of the ship, and the liquid rose all about again, higher and higher.

Grant moved part-way up the ladder