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"Yes. This is the square-cube law. It's been understood since Galileo's time."
"I know, but you haven't been thinking about it. If I were to try to lift you now, I would be lifting one eighth your normal weight and I would be doing so with my muscles at one quarter their normal strength. My muscles compared to your weight would be twice as strong as they would appear to be if we were not miniaturized."
And with that, Kaliinin thrust her hands under his armpits and, with a grunt, lifted. Up he moved from his seat.
She held him so while she gasped twice and then she lowered him. "It's not easy," she said, panting a bit, "but I could do it. And since you may be telling yourself, 'Ah yes, but this is Sophia, probably a Soviet weight lifter,' then do it to me."
Kaliinin seated herself in the seat before him and held out her arms to either side and said, "Come, stand up and lift me."
Morrison rose to his feet and into the aisle. He moved forward, turned, and faced her. The slight bending enforced on him by the low ceiling made it an uncomfortable position. For a moment, he hesitated.
Kaliinin said, "Come, seize me under the arms. I use deodorant. And you needn't be concerned about possibly touching my breasts. They have been touched before this. Come - I'm lighter than you are and you're stronger than I am. Since I have lifted you, you should have no trouble at all lifting me."
Nor did he. He couldn't lift with his full strength because of his slight, uncomfortable stoop, but he automatically applied the force he judged, through years of experience, would be suitable for an object her size. She floated upward, however, almost as though she were weightless. Despite the fact that he had been somewhat prepared for the possibility, he almost dropped her.
"Do you consider that an illusion?" Kaliinin asked. "Or are we miniaturized?"
"We are miniaturized," said Morrison. "But how did you do it? I never saw you make a move that looked as though you might be using miniaturization controls."
"I didn't. It's all done from outside. The ship is equipped with miniaturization devices of its own, but I wouldn't dare use them. That would be part of Natalya's job."
"And now the deminiaturization is being controlled from outside, too, isn't it?"
"That's right."
"And if the deminiaturization gets slightly out of hand, our brains will be damanged as Shapirov's was - or worse."
"That's not really likely," said Kaliinin, stretching her legs out into the aisle, "and it doesn't help to think about it. Why not just relax and close your eyes?"
Morrison persisted. "But damage is possible."
"Of course it's possible. Almost anything is possible. A three-meter-wide meteroite may strike two minutes from now, penetrate the mountain shell above us, flash into this room, and destroy the ship and us and perhaps the entire project in a few flaming seconds. - But it's not likely."
Morrison cradled his head in his arms and wondered whether - if the ship started warming - he could feel the heat before his brain proteins denatured.
Well over half an hour had passed before Morrison felt convinced that the objects he could see outside the ship were shrinking and were receding perceptibly toward their normal size.
Morrison said, "I am thinking of a paradox."
"What's that?" said Kaliinin, yawning. She had obviously taken her own advice about the advisability of relaxing.
"The objects outside the ship seemed to grow larger as we shrink. Ought not the wavelengths of light outside the ship also grow larger, becoming longer in wavelength, as we shrink? Should we not see everything outside turn reddish, since there can scarcely be enough ultraviolet outside to expand and replace the shorter-wave visible light?"
Kaliinin said, "If you could see the light waves outside, that would indeed be how they would appear to you. But you don't. You see the light waves only after they've entered the ship and impinged upon your retina. And as they enter the ship, they come under the influence of the miniaturization field and automatically shrink in wavelength, so that you see those wavelengths inside the ship exactly as you would see them outside."
"If they shrink in wavelength, they must gain energy."
"Yes, if Planck's constant were the same size inside the miniaturization field as it is outside. But Planck's constant decreases inside the miniaturization field - that is the essence of miniaturization. The wavelengths, in shrinking, maintain their relationship to the shrunken Planck's constant and do not gain energy. An analogous case is that of the atoms. They also shrink and yet the interrelationships among atoms and among the subatomic particles that make them up remain the same to us inside the ship as they would seem to us outside the ship."
"But gravity changes. It becomes weaker in here."
"The strong interaction and the electroweak interaction come under the umbrella of the quantum theory. They depend on Planck's constant. As for gravitation?" Kaliinin shrugged. "Despite two centuries of effort, gravitation has never been quantized. Frankly, I think the gravitational change with miniaturization is evidence enough that gravitation ca
"I can't believe that," said Morrison. "Two centuries of failure can merely mean we haven't managed to get deep enough into the problem yet. Superstring theory nearly gave us our unified field at last." (It relieved him to discuss the matter. Surely he couldn't do so if his brain were heating in the least.)
"Nearly doesn't count," said Kaliinin. "Still, Shapirov agreed with you, I think. It was his notion that once we tied Planck's constant to the speed of light, we would not only have the practical effect of miniaturizing and deminiaturizing in an essentially energy-free ma
"Maybe," said Morrison. He didn't know enough to comment beyond that.
"Shapirov would say," said Kaliinin, warming to the task, "that at ultraminiaturization, the gravitational effect would be close enough to zero to be utterly ignored and that the speed of light would be so great that it might be considered infinite. With mass virtually zero, inertia would be virtually zero and any object, like this ship, for instance, could be accelerated with virtually zero energy input to any speed. We would have, practically speaking, antigravity and faster-than-light travel. Chemical drive, he said, gave us the Solar System, ion drive would give us the nearer stars, but relativistic miniaturization would give us the whole Universe at a bound."
"It's a beautiful vision," said Morrison, ravished.
"Then you know what we're looking for now, don't you?"
Morrison nodded. "All that - if we can read Shapirov's mind. And if he really had something there and wasn't merely dreaming."
"Isn't the chance worth the risk?"
"I am on the point of believing so," said Morrison in a low voice. "You are terribly convincing. Why couldn't Natalya have used arguments of that sort, rather than those she did use?"
"Natalya is - Natalya. She is a highly practical person, not a dreamer. She gets things done."
Morrison studied Kaliinin as she sat, now in the seat to his left, looking straight ahead with an abstracted look that gave her profile the appearance of an impractical dreamer, at that - but perhaps not one who, like Shapirov, dreamed of conquering the Universe. With her, it was something closer to home perhaps.