Fantastic Voyage - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,32

said, "I agree with you, Grant."

Michaels, slightly flushed, nodded his head. "All right, Grant. I was merely making what seemed to me a legitimate point." He took his seat.

Grant said, "It was a most legitimate point, and I'm glad you raised it." He remained standing, by the window.

Cora joined him after a moment and said, quietly, "You didn't sound frightened, Grant."

Grant smiled joylessly. "Ah, but that's because I'm a good actor, Cora. If it were anyone else taking the responsibility for the decision, I would have made a terrific speech in favor of quitting. You see, I have cowardly feelings, but I try not to make cowardly decisions."

Cora watched him for a moment. "I get the notion, Mr. Grant, that you have to work awfully hard, sometimes, to make yourself sound worse than you really are."

"Oh, I don't know. I have a talen ..."

At that point, the Proteus moved convulsively, first to one side, then to the other, in great sweeps.

Lord, thought Grant, we're sloshing.

He caught Cora's elbow, and forced her toward her seat; then with difficulty took his own while Owens swayed and stumbled in an attempt to make it up the ladder, crying out, "Damn it, they might have warned us."

Grant braced himself against his chair and noted the Time Recorder reading to be 59. A long, minute, he thought. Michaels had said the time-sense slowed with miniaturization and he was obviously right. There would be more time for thought and action.

More time for second thought and panic, too.

The Proteus moved even more abruptly. Would the ship break up before the mission proper had even started?

Reid took Carter's place at the window. The ampule with its few milliliters of partially miniaturized water, in which the completely miniaturized and quite invisible Proteus was submerged, gleamed on the Zero Module, like some rare gem on a velvet cushion.

At least Reid thought the metaphor, but did not allow it to console him. Calculations had been precise and the miniaturization technique could produce sizes that would fully match the precision of the calculation. That calculation, however, had been worked out in the space of a few hurried and pressure-filled hours, by means of a system of computer programming that had not been checked out.

To be sure, if the size were slightly off, it could be corrected, but the time required to do so would have to come out of the sixty minutes-and it was going to be fifty-nine in fifteen seconds.

"Phase Four," he said.

The waldo had already moved above the ampule, the claw adjusted for horizontal holding, rather than vertical. Again the device was centered, again the arm dropped and the claws came together with infinite delicacy.

The ampule was held with the firm gentleness of a lioness' paw upon her unruly cub.

It was the nurse's turn at last. She stepped forward briskly, took a small case from her pocket and opened it. She removed a small glass rod, holding it gingerly by a flat head set upon a slightly constricted neck. She placed it vertically over the ampule and let it slide a small fraction of an inch 'into it, until air pressure held it steady. She spun it gently and said, "Plunger fits."

(From his upper view, Reid smiled in tight relief, and Carter nodded his approval.)

The nurse waited and the waldo lifted its arm slowly. Smoothly, smoothly, the ampule and plunger rose. Three inches above the Zero Module, it stopped.

As gently as she might, the nurse eased the cork base off the bottom of the ampule, revealing a small nipple centered on the otherwise flat lower surface. The tiny opening in the middle of the nipple was masked with a thin plastic sheet that would not stand up against even moderate pressure, but would hold firm against leakage as long as undisturbed.

Moving quickly again, the nurse removed a stainless steel needle from the case and adjusted it over the nipple.

"Needle fits," she said.

What had been an ampule had become a hypodermic needle.

A second set of claws swung out from the waldo and was adjusted to the head of the plunger, then clamped into place. The entire waldo, carrying the hypodermic needle in its two claws now moved smoothly toward the large double-doors that opened at its approach.

No human being could, with his unaided eyes, have detected any motions in the liquid so steadily transported by the inhumanly smooth movement of the machine. Both Carter and Reid, however, understood quite well that even microscopic motions would be nothing less than storm-tossing to