"But we must in this case, Natalya. We cannot spend hours cruising along a cell membrane. And deminiaturizing tenfold at this stage involved a very low absolute energy change."

Morrison said, "Is it that starting the deminiaturizing process might initiate an uncontrolled and explosive continuation?"

Boranova said, "There's nothing wrong with your intuition, Albert. Without knowing anything about miniaturization theory, you manage to grasp the point. Once started, it is safest to allow the deminiaturization to continue. Stopping it involves a certain risk."

"So does remaining at glucose size for hours longer than we need," said Konev.

"True," said Boranova, nodding her head.

Dezhnev said, "Shall we put it to a vote and come to a people's democratic decision?"

At this, Boranova's head snapped up and her dark eyes seemed to flash. Her heavy jaws set firmly and she said, "No, Arkady. It is my responsibility to make the decision and I will increase the size of the ship." Then, abandoning the air of majesty, she said, "Of course you can wish me well."

Dezhnev said, "And why not? It would be the same as wishing all of ourselves well."

Boranova bent over her controls and Morrison grew quickly tired of trying to watch. He couldn't actually see what she was doing, wouldn't understand that she was doing if he did see it, and there was the mundane fact that his neck was beginning to ache with the effort to keep it turned. He looked forward and found Konev peering at him over his shoulder.

"About the skeptic wave detection," said Konev.

"What about the skeptic wave detection?" said Morrison.

"When we were making our way to this cell through the collagen jungle -"

"Yes yes, what about it?"

"Did you get any - images?"

Morrison remembered that tearing vision of Sophia Kaliinin. Nothing like it existed in his mind now. Even when he thought of it as it had then been, it now roused no response. Whatever it was in his mind, it seemed to have been reached only under the intense stimulation of concentrated skeptic waves; and whatever it was, he was not going to describe it to Konev - or to anyone else, for that matter.

He temporized, "Why should I have sensed any images?"

"Because you did on occasion when you analyzed skeptic waves at normal-size intensities."

"You're assuming that analysis during miniaturization would produce greater intensities or possess greater image-producing powers."

"It's a reasonable assumption. But did you or didn't you? The question doesn't involve theorizing. I'm asking about an observation. Did you get any images?"

And Morrison sighed inwardly and said, "No."

Konev continued his sidewise peering (under which Morrison felt himself grow a little restless and rather more than a little irate), then said softly, "I did."

"You did?" Morrison's eyes widened in honest surprise. Then, more cautiously, "What did you sense?"

"Not much, but I thought you might have gotten it more clearly. You were actually holding and manipulating your detector and it is probably more adapted to your brain than mine."

"Just what was it you got? Can you can describe it at all?"

"A kind of flicker that moved into and out of awareness. It seemed to me that I saw three human figures, one larger than the others."

"And what did you make of that?"

"Well, Shapirov had a daughter whom he adored and she had two children whom he also adored. I imagine that in his coma he may have been thinking of them, or remembering them, or being under the delusion that he was seeing them. Who knows what goes on in a coma?"

"Do you know his daughter and his grandchildren? Did you recognize them?"

"I was seeing them, as it were, through translucent glass in the twilight. It was all I could do to sense three figures." He sounded disappointed. "I had hoped you would see it more clearly."

Morrison, thinking hard, said, "I neither saw, nor sensed, anything like that."

Konev said, "Of course, things should be sharper once we are inside a neuron. It is not images we must sense, in any case. We want to hear words."

"I've never heard words," said Morrison, shaking his head.

"Of course not," said Konev, "since you worked with animals who don't use words."

"True," said Morrison. "Just the same, I once managed to run some tests on a human being, though I never reported it. I sensed no words then or images either."

Konev shrugged it off.

Morrison said, "You know, under the circumstances, it might be natural for Shapirov's mind to be full of family - if we accept your interpretation of what you thought you sensed. What would the chances be that he would be thinking of some esoteric extension of miniaturization mathematics?"

"He was a physicist. Even his family came second to that. If we can sense words out of those skeptic waves, they'll be words dealing with physics."

"You think that, do you?"

"I am positive."

The two fell quiet and for a few minutes there was no sound in the ship. Then Boranova said, "I've deminiaturized the ship to protein size and I have brought the process to a halt."

A moment passed and then Dezhnev, with an unaccustomed tightness to his throaty voice, said, "Are things all right, Natasha?"

Boranova said, "The mere fact that you can ask the question, Arkady, is an answer in the positive. Deminiaturization has stopped without incident."

She smiled, but there was a definite trace of perspiration glistening at her hairline.

The surface of the glial cell still stretched out as far as the eye could see into the dimness beyond the reach of the ship's light, but it had changed in character. The domes and ridges had faded out into a fine texture. The ropes that had extended from between the domes had become threads nearly impossible to see as the ship sped along the surface.

Morrison's attention was, for the most part, on his computer, as he watched to see that the skeptic waves did not decline in intensity, but, periodically, he could not help but drift away from that and gaze at the panorama outside.

Occasionally, there would emerge from the surface of the cell the typical dendritic processes of a nerve cell - even one that was merely a subsidiary glial cell. They branched and sub-branched like a tree in winter, growing out of the cell membrane.

Even at the new and larger size of the ship, the dendrites were large when they emerged from the cell. They were like tree trunks, which, however, narrowed rapidly and were clearly flexible. Lacking the rigidity of the cartilage fibers, they swayed in the eddies set up by the ship's progress through the extracellular fluid. They swayed, indeed, at the ship's approach and Dezhnev rarely had to do anything to avoid them. They would bend out of line and the ship would pass them safely.

Collagen fibers were fewer in the immediate neighborhood of the cell and, thanks to the larger size of the ship, were much thinner and more fragile. On one occasion, Dezhnev either did not see one looming directly ahead of the ship or did not care that it was. The ship brushed past it in a way that brought it just outside Morrison's seat. He flinched at the grating collision, but the ship was in no way damaged. It was the collagen fiber that bent, then snapped and dangled free. Morrison's head turned and his eyes followed the broken fiber for the second or so that it remained in view before floating away.

Boranova must have seen it, too, and watched Morrison's reaction, for she said, "There's no reason for concern. There are trillions of those fibers scattered through the brain, so that one more or less doesn't matter. Besides, they heal - even in a brain as badly damaged as poor Shapirov's."