Fantastic Voyage - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,35

as though faceted with diamond slivers.

Duval said, "The color is not quite true. If it were possible to de-miniaturize the light-waves as they leave the ship and miniaturize the returning reflection, we would be far better off. It is important to obtain an accurate reflection."

Owens said, "You're quite right, doctor, and the work done by Johnson and Antoniani indicates that this might actually be possible. Unfortunately, the technique is not yet practical and even if it were, we couldn't have adapted the ship for the purpose in a single night."

"I suppose not," said Duval.

"But even if it's not an accurate reflection," said Cora in an awed tone, "surely it has a beauty all its own. They're like soft, squashed balloons that have trapped a millions stars apiece."

"Actually, they're red blood corpuscles," said Michaels to Grant. "Red in the mass, but straw-colored individually. Those, you see are fresh from the heart, carrying their load of oxygen to the head and, particularly, the brain."

Grant continued to stare about in wonder. In addition to the corpuscles, there were smaller objects; flattened plate-like affairs were rather common, for instance. (Platelets, thought Grant, as the shapes of the objects brought up brightening memories of physiology courses in college.)

One of the platelets moved gently against the ship, so closely that Grant almost had the impulse to reach out and seize it. It flattened slowly, remained in contact for a moment, then moved away, leaving particles of itself clinging to the window-a smear that slowly washed away.

"It didn't break," said Grant.

"No," said Michaels. "Had it broken, a small clot might have formed about it. Not enough to do any damage, I hope. If we were larger, though, we might run into trouble. See that!"

Grant looked off in the direction of the pointing finger.

He saw small rod-like objects, shapeless fragments and detritus and, above all, red corpuscles, red corpuscles, red corpuscles. Then he made out the object at which Michaels was pointing.

It was huge, milky and pulsating. It was granular and inside its milkiness there were black twinkles-flashing bits of black so intense as to glow with a blinding non-light of their own.

Within the mass was a darker area, dim through the surrounding milkiness, and maintaining a steady, unwinking shape. The outlines of the whole could not be clearly made out but a milky bay suddenly extended in toward the artery wall and the mass seemed to flow into it. It faded out now, obscured by the closer objects, lost in the swirl ...

"What was that?" asked Grant.

"A white blood-cell, of course. There aren't many of those; at least, not compared to the red corpuscles. There are about 650 reds for every white. The whites are much bigger, though, and they can move independently. Some of them can even work their way out of the blood-vessels altogether. They're frightening objects, seen on this scale of size. That's about as close as I want to be to one."

"They're the body's scavengers, aren't they?"

"Yes. We're bacterial-sized but we have a metal skin and not a mucopolysaccharide cell-wall. I trust the white cells can tell the difference and that as long as we do no damage to the surrounding tissues, they won't react to us."

Grant tried to withdraw his too-particular attention from individual objects and attempted to absorb the panorama as a whole. He stepped back and narrowed his eyes.

It was a. dance! Each object quivered in its position. The smaller the object, the more pronounced the quiver. It was like a colossal and unruly ballet in which the choreographer had gone mad and the dancers were caught in the grip of an eternally insane tarantella.

Grant closed his eyes. "Feel it? The Brownian motion, I mean."

Owens answered, "Yes, I feel it. It's not as bad as I thought it would be. The blood-stream is viscous, much more viscous than the saline solution we were in; and the high viscosity damps out the motion."

Grant felt the ship move under his feet, first this way, then that, but only soggily, not sharply as had been true while they were still in the hypodermic. The protein content of the fluid portion of the blood, the "plasma proteins" (the phrase came swimming to Grant out of the past) cushioned the ship.

Not bad at all. He felt cheered. Perhaps all would be well yet.

Owens said, "I suggest you all return to your seats now. We will be approaching a branch in the artery soon and I am going to move over to one side."

The others settled