Fantastic Voyage - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,52

wind begin and heard the rushing noise. Slowly, he pulled his clinging arm loose and bent his body out into the wind. It pushed him downward and his legs came loose, too.

He was falling now, plummeting downward from a height which, on his miniaturized scale, was mountainous. From the unminiaturized point of view, he knew he must be drifting downward in feathery fashion, but as it was, what he experienced was a plummet. It was a smooth drop, non-accelerated, for the large molecules of air (almost large enough to see, Michaels had said) had to be pushed to one side as he fell and that took the energy that would otherwise have gone into acceleration.

A bacterium, no larger than he, could fall this distance safely, but he, the miniaturized human, was made up of fifty trillion miniaturized cells and that complexity made him fragile enough, perhaps, to smash apart into miniaturized dust.

Automatically, as he thought that, he threw up his hands in self-defense when the alveolar wall came whirling close. He felt the glancing contact; the wall gave soggily and he bounced off after clinging for a moment. His speed of fall had actually slowed.

Down again. Somewhere below, a speck of light, a bare pin-point had winked on as he watched. He kept his eye fixed on that with a wild hope.

Still down. He kicked his feet wildly to avoid an outcropping of dust-boulders; narrowly missed and struck a spongy area again. Again falling. He thrashed wildly in an attempt to move toward the pin-point of light as he fell and it seemed to him he might have succeeded somewhat. He wasn't sure.

He came rolling down the lower slope of the alveolar surface at length. He flung his lifeline around an outcropping and held on just barely.

The pin-point of light had become a small glare, some fifty feet away, he judged. That must be the crevice and close though it was, he couldn't possibly have found it without the guidance of the light.

He waited for the inhalation to cease. In the short interval of time before exhalation, he had to make it there.

Before inhalation had come to a complete halt, he was slipping and scrambling across the space between. The alveolar membrane stretched in the final moment of inhalation and then, hovering at that point for a couple of seconds, began to lose its tension as the first instants of gathering exhalation began.

Grant threw himself down the crevice which was ablaze with light. He kicked at the interface which rebounded in rubbery fashion. A knife slit through; a hand appeared and seized his ankle in firm grip. He felt the pull downward just as the upward draft was beginning to make itself felt about his ears.

Down he went with other hands adding to the grip on his legs and he was back in the capillary. Grant breathed in long, shuddering gasps. Finally, he said, "Thanks! I followed the light! Couldn't have made it otherwise."

Michaels said, "Couldn't reach you by radio."

Cora was smiling at him. "It was Dr. Duval's idea. He had the Proteus move up to the opening and shine its headlight directly into it. And he made the opening bigger, too.

Michaels said, "Let's get back in the ship. We've lost just about all the time we can afford to lose."
Chapter 13 : PLEURA
Reid cried out, "A message is coming through, Al."

"From the Proteus?" Carter ran to the window.

"Well, not from your wife."

Carter waved his hand impatiently. "Later. Later. Save all the jokes and we'll go over them one by one in a big heap. Okay?"

The word came through: "Sir, Proteus reports DANGEROUS AIR LOSS. REFUELING OPERATION CARRIED THROUGH SUCCESSFULLY."

"Refueling?" cried Carter.

Reid said, frowning, "I suppose they mean the lungs. They're at the lungs, after all, and that means cubic miles of air on their scale. But ..."

"But what?"

"They can't use that air. It's unminiaturized."

Carter looked at the colonel in, exasperation. He barked into the transmitter. "Repeat the last sentence of the message."

"REFUELING OPERATION CARRIED THROUGH SUCCESSFULLY."

"Is that last word `successfully'?"

"Yes, sir."

"Get in touch with them and confirm."

He said to Reid, "If they say `successfully,' I suppose they handled it."

Reid nodded his head. He looked up at the Time Recorder, which read 37, and said, "The pleural lining is a double membrane surrounding the lungs. They must be moving in the space between; a, clear road, an expressway really, right to the neck."

"And they'll be where they started half an hour ago," grated Carter. "Then what?"

"They can back into a