Featured Writer: Steven Perry

BREATH OF TIME

"Doctor Cronkite! Doctor Cronkite! He's gone! The guy they found at the dump is gone."

The doctor finished buttoning his jacket and stroked his greying moustache. He followed the nurse into the empty room.

"When did you discover this, Bess?"

"When I came on duty at seven."

"Who did you take over from?"

"That's just it, Doctor. I took over from Molly, but she wasn't here either. That's not like her, Doctor.She's very conscientious. It's just not like her."

"I think this is a matter for the police," said the doctor, as he strode into the nurses’ station and reached for the phone.

"Inspector Sucher, please. Yes, Inspector? Dr. Cronkite, Allanville General Hospital. That strange fellow, Rick Breeze. Yes. Well, he's gone and if my suspicions are correct he has taken one of our nurses with him. Yes, as soon as possible, in the meantime we'll seal off the room. Please bring the complete protocol, maybe we can find some clues. And one more thing. The x-rays are back and they support his claim. There really is some sort of miniature electronic device implanted in his mastoid process."

The Protocol

Day One

My name is Rick Breeze. How I got here is probably just as much a mystery to me as it is to you, and it will be more difficult to explain where I come from, because I am from here but not from now. But I think the best thing is to start at the beginning.

They found me in the Anthropological Museum. I had always been fascinated by ancient cultures, particularly those of twentieth century Europe and North America. Since my wife and daughter had been killed by The Extinction, I escaped to the museum during my lunch breaks.

It wasn't really escape, either. Back in my military days they had implanted an ear crystal in my mastoid bone. That was standard for military intelligence. They could always find me, call me, give me commands, but I couldn't answer. I could only do what they told me.

Escape or no escape, I found consolation walking in the holoramas and enjoying the sounds and smells of ages gone by. There was a closeness of family then, an intimacy that we don't have any more. Particularly since The Extinction.

My favorite exhibit was a kitchen in a North American farmhouse in the mid-twentieth century. The mother and daughter were making candy and the son was stealing it as it cooled. The room was heavy with the odor of caramel and you could buy the candies in the gift shop. That is where I was when they found me: buying caramels.

"Dr. Breeze?" the one with the earring said and flashed his Sec. A Holo-ID.

"Would you like a caramel?" I said.

"Come with us."

One the enticements of a career in the intelligence is that they retire you young enough to start another career. You can even choose what you want to do and they pay for it. Not a bad deal, except ... Well, that's where we started. You are always there when they need you. No questions.

My second career was lungs. I was fascinated with the idea of an interface, a delicate membrane that separated life from death. I wanted to know everything about lungs: where they came from, what they looked like, how they worked. I studied and the government payed. Now I was teaching medical students and the central computer found me the job. I can't complain, but still it would be a lie to say I was happy to see them there in the Anthropological Museum. They took me to Dan Grant's office.

Of course I had heard of Grant. Who hadn't? Together with Kuchinsky and Schultz he had made time travel possible. Grant himself was the great theoretician who had worked out the principle of synchronized reciprocal oscillation that made an object move in time. The concept was simple: to move back in time you need "only" to travel faster than light. Electrons are very fast, but not as fast as light. But, since everything is relative, an electron just has to move at the speed of light relative to something else and time travel is a fact.

The trick is to get electrons of skin of your time capsule to move on the inside faster than light relative to those on the outside. Then you are off. To come back, you just had to reverse the motion. The mathematical basis of the time capsule's skin was Grant's discovery: Kuchinsky and Schultz had made theory into reality.

I'm not sure what it was, the fact Grant was a theoretician or the monumentality of his discovery. At any rate, I assumed that he had died centuries ago and when I saw his burning blue eyes and full head of elegantly waved grey hair across the desk before me, I was tempted to say, "Dr. Grant, I thought you were a textbook!"

But Grant was all else than a drab book.

"Whisky?" he said and shoved a glass of brown fluid at me. The heavy volatile aroma was familiar. Where? The Museum! Two holoramas down the hall from my farmhouse was the "Bootleg Distillery" and you could buy the whisky in the gift shop just like my caramels.

"Caramel?" I said, smiling, and offered him one. From that moment on Grant and I were friends.

"Proctor's dead," he said as if that should matter.

"Good God, man! Where have you been?" He drained his whisky glass and poured himself another, "Proctor was the head of the ETF. And don't tell me you've never heard of the ETF."

I nodded sheepishly.

"Good God, what did those idiots tell you? Didn't they brief you?"

I tried to nonchalantly sip the whisky. While I gagged and gasped, that theoretical genius just laughed.

"What idiots?" I coughed. "What briefing? They just brought me here. I've been out of touch with Intelligence for ten years."

And this is what he said.

ETF stand for Extinction Task Force. It was created five years earlier by Adrian Proctor for the sole purpose of ending The Extinction. Now I understood Grant's astonishment when I hadn't known Proctor. How can anyone possibly not know what The Extinction is? The Extinction held the world paralysed. It started as a sort of an unexplained sudden death syndrome and because it involved the respiratory system I set about to learn as much as I could. There was virtually nothing in the videos except symptoms: breathlessness, heart failure, death.

* * *

Day Two

"Miniaturize," I said and threw the black switch.

I looked to Marvelee. The tension showed in the ripple of her podgy cheeks. Her usually impish brown eyes now stared unblinkingly into the view port.

And Enfield. Enfield Garx. He saw me looking at Marvelee, but when I shifted my eyes to him, he lifted his chin and inhaled as he always did when he wanted to intimidate. Why did they have to choose him? Of all the molecular geneticists in the world, why him?

The tiny control room, every millimeter covered with lamps and green display screens, was the same as before but I knew that "The Egg"-- as we called our little ship-- would now rest easily on a pinhead.

"Deploy time drive". The pesky ear crystal. The stern voice of Dan Grant was reminding me again that I was heading up a mission that could not be repeated.

"Time drive deployed," I answered imitating Dan and threw the red switch. If the geophysicists did their homework right, we would now be in a shallow bay about two hundred meters from the shore and 356,248,371 years back in time. That would be at the beginning of the epidemic that spliced the extinction cryptovire into our DNA.

* * *

The geophysicists. Geologists. Paleontologists. Marvelee is a paleontologist and so is Adrian Proctor. Or should I say-so was Adrian Proctor. How could I forget that day?

It was in Marvelee's office and we were discussing what everybody was discussing in those days: Rhipidistian fish. It was common knowledge in security circles that Project Longshot had been approved. That had been Adrian's baby. So was Marvelee, but now I'm getting ahead of myself again.

The Extinction-- that sudden death of anyone who came in contact with sunlight-- needs no explanation. It dominated our lives. What was not so well known is that some people who had been born in The Cave and had never been exposed to natural light were coming down with the Extinction syndrome. Our race was not only damned to live in caverns, we were really facing extermination.

At the same time, the gardeners-- those totally draped and goggled heros who daily risked their lives on the surface to grow our food-- had noticed that other animals were dying. Cadavers of cattle, dogs, birds, snakes, frogs lay everywhere, engulfed by swarms of flies. The insects flourished and devastated the crops. The gardeners were helpless and our diminishing numbers were faced with a second threat: starvation.

Then they discovered the fish. They were immune. The rivers and lakes abounded with fish and this was our salvation.

Worldwide, old allies and bitter foes joined against the common enemy: The Extinction. All branches of science, from astrophysics to clinical medicine, paleontology to molecular genetics were united under the leadership of Adrian Proctor.

As I stood at Marvelee's Master's desk and discussed with her the details of Rhipdistian anatomy (and tried to follow the dancing sparks of those brown eyes), her technician burst in. Panic was written on his face.

"Dr. Masters. Proctor's dead. The Extinction..." He flailed his arms and paced the room. He ground his teeth and drummed his fists on the wall. It was pressure sensitive for writing. It turned coal black. He turned to Marvelee. "What are we going to do? My family! We're all going to die!"

But Marvelee had sunk into her chair, eyes like brown marbles, mouth frozen open. I will never forget that day.

And now she was staring open-mouthed again. Even Enfield sat transfixed, eyes riveted to the view port, where a soft yellow-green light danced.

"Status report, Rick. Rick Breeze. This is control. The is Dan, Rick. Are you there? Rick, status report. Are you there, Rick?"

I don't know how long the voice crackled and squawked in my ear before I realized it was there. And even then it took some minutes before I could bring words to my lips. I have never been one to be at a loss for words but this time I had to consciously move each muscle ----- in my tongue.

"Ah," I said. At least that is what I think I said. "Ah. Oh. OK, made. We made it, Dan."

Then my ear crystal went haywire.

A dark shape blocked the view port and The Egg rocked. Marvelee was the first to react.

"Hey, Rick," she said. "Enlarge. For God's sake enlarge before we get swallowed! It's full of Coelacanths."

I turned the dial. 10⁴ - 10^-3 - 10^-2 - 10^-1 - 10o. Natural size. A barracuda-sized fish that had moments before appeared as large as a continent glided past the port. I lifted my trembling hand from the dial and leaned back in my swivel chair. My back and shoulders were stiff and my fingers cramped. The control room smelled of sweat and fear. Only Enfield Garx was cool. He gave me his "What's all the fuss about, old boy" look and unfastened his seat belt. He strode to the port as if to the porch of his mountain retreat. The way he had done at that meeting at his cabin the Rockies.

The Extinction was at that time an unexplained disease-- a sudden death syndrome that affected so few that it was only of academic interest. I had heard of it but Enfield seemed to know everything about it.

We stood on the porch, leaned on the rough railing and breathed the cool spicy air that swept in from the blooming meadows. The last orange rays of the sun played among the spruce spires and the moon was already beginning to glow lemon yellow.

"What do you know about endemic retroviruses" he said, turning suddenly to me with an intent look. The look so disarmed me that I asked him if he was trying to lead me onto thin ice -- a question I hardly ever asked of Enfield because I knew the answer would be "No" which really meant "Yes."

I remember his answer to this day: "No." But it meant "No."

He was sweating in spite of the bracing air and he had completely abandoned his flippant, anyone-for-tennis manner. I wanted to know why he should ask me, a zoologist. He had enough molecular geneticist friends who would tell him more about endemic retroviruses that I could. All I knew was that they were pieces of viral DNA that were part of the baggage that our genome drags along: harmless but not eliminated.

He laughed cynically. "That's why I want to talk to you and to them." He nodded back to the cabin where Marvelee and Adrian sat in front of the fire. "If any of my colleagues ever found out..," he started to say.

He leaned back on the rail. Insects-- drawn by his body heat-- flashed as they hit the ion screen and vaporized.

"This student of mine... But cannot begin to appreciate the magnitude..."

I could see that he was closing up, getting second thoughts. I could hear "And you won't understand either" coming.

"You will, though," he said. "Human, rat, chicken, snake, frog, there's one endemic nerve virus, cryptovire RCV4, that is identical but in fish it's completely missing."

I started to speak but he interrupted. "Yes, even the lung fish and the coelacanth." We went in and joined the others in front of the fire.

In what turned out to be a three hour lecture about how to get a suntan, he told us how the cryptovire worked. It was somehow attached to the gene that controlled the skin's response to sunlight: the sunlight that shone back when the first fish came on land and the sunlight that had warmed us for the past five years. That creeping eruption of the sun's inner core that the astrophysicists had discovered just five years ago, was changing the sun forever and had aroused the malignancy of the cryptovire, Garx told us.

We huddled together in front of the fire in that cabin and wished that morning would dawn on yesterday.

What the gardeners know now, he knew then. That was Garx. What he knows now they won't know until tomorrow. The cryptovire was reactivated. But when would they discover that it was untreatable? Garx was always two steps ahead.

Now in the view port beside him the coelacanths thronged, attracted by our electric field. They bellied up to the ship, rotated, did headstands, totally disoriented.

"How specific is the cryptovire," said Marvelee, standing?. She bounced to Enfield's side so lightly that I caught myself staring. So did Enfield. He put his hand on her shoulder and, with a parting shot at me from those steel grey eyes, turned to the view port.

"I doubt we shall have time to test it, Marvelee", he said with a patronizing smile. "But I'm sure you will have a chance to come back" The "my dear" was implied.

So Garx was working on Marvelee. That much was obvious. But why? Always two steps ahead. Certainly not for the usual reasons. Garx was not your usual man. No, there had to be some other reason.

Now, it was obvious to all of us that Marvelee would never be able to come back to this place and time to study anything. The Kuchinsky effect precluded that. Why had he said it? Enfield Garx never said anything without a reason.

"Oh, Enfield," said Marvelee. "Even I know Kuchinsky's first law and that the same things can't occupy the same set of space-time coordinates twice. You wouldn't want me to annihilate myself, now, would you Enfield?" She smiled sweetly as she said this and touched his arm, but her dark eyes pared him to the bone. I was relieved.

He looked at his watch, lifted his chin and sniffed. "Well, Commander," he said, "isn't it about time you did something? We don't have a second to spare if we're going to save the world."

What Enfield didn't know was that he was absolutely right. While I seemed to be stupidly watching the fish and my crew go through their antics, Dan Grant's voice crackled in my right ear. Informants were afoot. The gardeners were rebelling. They were threatening to strike if the Government was tightening the thumbscrews on Grant and he had to have results.

Our goal was straightforward enough: to nip the cryptovire in the bud. Apart from the risks always involved in time travel, our job seemed like the easiest part of the whole mission. We had to avoid crossing paths on our trip back or Kuchinsky would strike. But miniaturization took care of that problem: we travelled at one ten thousandth our natural size. Even if we started and ended our trip in the same room, there was almost no chance that we would meet ourselves underway. And we had to be careful not to destroy anything. There was another reason for miniaturization: so we wouldn't crush things by mistake. Arrive small, move and expand. Stay in the water; water moves out of the way.

There was no antibiotic that could kill the cryptovire once it was established. That was why we were here. We had to see to it that we found our fish ancestors and immunized a hundred or so against the virus. They would be strong; the rest that were weakened by the virus would have no chance against them. Fish against fish and the strongest -- the ones who fought off the virus with our help -- would win the battle. They would be the ones to emerge onto the tangled shoreline, to lose their gills and walk on land. They would be our new cryptovire-free ancestors. That was the theory.

We had tested the methods and rehearsed every move in the simulator until we could do everything in our sleep. Marvelee and I would catch them. Enfield would test them for cryptovire antibodies and immunize the ones that weren't already infected. We had to move to the shore and find our Rhipidistian ancestors. They were waiting there. Hiding and waiting.

But how could we know that it all wouldn't backfire? How could we be sure that our ancestors wouldn't turn to the open water, spawn generations of mermaids and leave the land to others: that we wouldn't come home to a world populated by giant toads?

I watched Marvelee. The way she bounced that chunky little body of hers as she left Garx's side and went back to her chair. I imagined a big sticky tongue flicking out and plucking her away like a fly. I was glad for statisticians, the evolutionary theorists and all those people, including Marvelee, who had convinced me that there was no danger and hoped for her sake that they would be right.

"Duty stations," I said. The others buckled themselves into their swivel chairs. "Prepare for surfacing."

I blew the ballast tanks, slowly. Carefully. The murky green water became lime green and then the sunlight danced across the control room. The sea was calm and miniature waves gently licked at the bottom of the view port.

A dense jungle of khaki club mosses obscured the shoreline like legions of soldiers frozen in the act of storming into the sea to drive us off. The ones closest to us were small and many were broken and protruding at crazy angles from the water. Fronds of smaller club mosses formed brushlike thickets, draped with glistening beards of algae. Further back from this amphibious shoreline, the scaly tendrils of giant candelabra-like club mosses and the solitary brown minarets of horsetails thrust ten meters into the hazy, yellow sky.

The holorama painter back at Marvelee's museum, had done a good job but he had missed the sky. It was sickly, heavy like the water. I could not shake the feeling of being in the middle of some giant organ that was sweltering and heaving, breathing and creating life.

I extended the propeller and stabilizers and waited for the vibration that told me that the little propeller was biting. Slowly we approached the tangled shore and were surrounded by a forest of reed-like club mosses.

"What do you think, Marvelee?" I said.

She shook her head. "Fascinating," she breathed, "but I'm glad we don't have to stay here. Can you take us down a little, Rick, so we can see under water?"

I took in ballast through the filter tubes and water covered half the view port. It looked like pea soup. "My God," I thought, "It's no wonder our ancestors left the water," and said, "Increasing electrical field. Maybe we can attract some, like the coelacanths before."

Ghostly forms appeared on the sonar screen. The field emission scanner flickered and the loud speaker hummed and clicked. "They sense us," I said, "they're coming closer."

Enfield silently unpacked his immunization paraphernalia.

"How many," Marvelee wanted to know and peered into the murky water?

"Maybe ten, twelve."

Enfield sighed a bored sigh and went on mixing his chemicals.

"There! Look!" Marvelee pointed at the view port and turned to me with a glow in her cheeks that turned her eyes to diamonds: a little girl on her first trip to the zoo. I wanted to sit her on my knee in front of the view port as I had done with my little daughter at the Aquarium, to smooth her hair and put my hand on her shoulder, to stare at her reflection in the glass as she gaped at our ancestor of 350 million years and it gaped back.

It was bigger than I had expected. Prejudice, I suppose: an angler factor calculated in. When a fisherman says "up to one meter," he means he saw a picture of one half that size. The ones you catch are 20 cm long. I guess paleontologists aren't fishermen.

The expressionless mask-like face, glassy eyes, the unnatural stiffness of the body made the fish look like one of the mock-ups in the Museums. But the fins were different. They were more flexible -- like legs with fringed mittens instead of fingers -- and they moved in a more uncoordinated way than I had expected, as if the fish were grappling through weeds instead of swimming in the murky water.

The big fellow in the view port drifted to the surface, burped out a big bubble, grabbed a mouthful of air and swallowed it. He took three or four more gulps of air, then sank into the green depths and out of sight.

"Did you see that," asked Marvelee?

I had.

People tell me I'm dry and cool. But when I saw that fish breath air, I could feel my own lungs fill. There was something so simple but yet monumental about that elemental act: like watching the first sunrise or the first rain, the formation of the first cell or the first bubble of oxygen from a blue-green bacterium. We were witnessing the dawn of vertebrate life on land.

I wasn't cool and logical when I whispered with a catch in my throat, "It breathed." "Of course it's breathing," Grant squawked into my ear crystal. "Now stop gawking and get on with your job."

* * *

In spite of all our high tech, there was no other way. We had to go out. We could attract the fish by electronic prey mimicry without leaving the time capsule. But immobilizing a meter-long fish and then jockeying it back to the window where Enfield could take a biopsy for his immunoassay and then give it a shot, that was just too much for a time machine. The idea was to be prepared for every situation, which meant that we weren't completely outfitted for anything. There were always the annoying loose ends, and this was one of them.

So one after another, Marvelee and I put on an iron-cloth dry suit and bubble helmet, and slipped out through the airlock. The warm, green water closed around us and we were grateful for the umbilical hoses that attached us to the capsule: not so much for the air supply but for the security that we wouldn't get lost in that tepid soup.

Out there you could really understand why our fish ancestors needed such good balance and acceleration receptors to tell them which way was up and forward, lateral lines for measuring the water speed, a good nose and a way to move water through it so they could sniff without having to move, and electrical field receptors for finding prey buried in the brown ooze that was the sea bottom. They always knew where they were. We had good eyes and that was all, and we were helpless.

Well, maybe not completely helpless. Marvelee was armed with a mesmerizer -- a long pole that she extended toward the shadowy forms. It sent out deep-sleep brain patterns and within seconds the fish was putty in my hands. I brought it to the window where Enfield took his samples through the plastic shield and immunized the fish. It was demanding work. Slow motion movements in the green twilight, tripping over tangles of club moss stolons, juggling fish to the capsule. I was getting punchy and beginning to wonder if Marvelee's mesmerizer was getting too close to my own brain when Enfield's voice crackled in my helmet.

"That's a hundred, Commander. That's the minimum."

I felt like I was made of rubber, the strength was sapped from my arms and legs. I was nauseated with hunger. I looked for some sign of support from Marvelee but could hardly see her. It was then that I realized that it was nearly dark.

"What's the time, Enfield?"

"Five past three. But remember the days are shorter now because the Earth is spinning faster. Why don't you pack it in, old boy. Your blood pressure is falling. I think you're getting dehydrated."

Something nudged my side. In the reflected light from the window I could make out through her faceplate that Marvelee's dimples had deepened to furrows. "Too long in this bath water," I said pressing my helmet to hers and motioned toward the hatch.     

Then all hell broke loose. As we worked around the Egg and fumbled on its smooth side for the latch, a blinding flash of blue-green light flooded the sea. The capsule pitched violently and we lurched back into the brown ooze.

I can only guess at what happened then. The capsule went dark and Marvelee must have somehow managed to hold onto the latch with one hand and me with the other. I can only remember being shaken around like a rug at spring cleaning and then I was in the airlock hatch and somebody was helping me out of my drysuit. It was pitch black and the capsule was still rocking so much that I wouldn't have been able to stand if the airlock hadn't been so small. With two of us in it, it was twice as small, or cozy, depending on how you look at it. At any rate, when Enfield opened the inner door and the dim emergency lighting penetrated the hatch, Marvelee was in my arms.

Garx narrowed his eyes to slits. The capsule jerked and threw him against the control console. He fought back a cry of pain and fell into my chair, rubbing his arm.

"One sharp thing in the whole capsule and I hit it twice" he muttered, then caught himself.

"What happened? What's going on, Enfield?" I said, crawling on all fours toward him across the heaving floor that was strewn with plastic vials and biochemical apparatus.

"How should I know?" He tried to sound insulted, hurt that I should imply that the whole thing was his fault, but it didn't take. He tried a different tack. "It's a storm. A wave came, must have been a landslide, and I fell against the guard grid over that switch..."

"The abort switch?"

I was livid. How could he accidentally hit the abort switch guard? It was only built into the pilot's control panel. What was he doing at the pilot's duty station? But before I could find the right words his answer came.

"I wanted to take the capsule down to pick you up. Yes, to get you two before the storm hit." His expressionless grey eyes snapped back and forth between Marvelee and me.

He must have known how ridiculous that sounded. The water was only a couple of meters deep and the hatch had been at eye level. I let it ride.

"Duty stations," I said. "Let's get out of here."

I inserted my key, the accus sprang to life and we escaped to the calm sea of tomorrow.

* * *

Garx had been right. There had been a landslide. We were in an estuary. Since there were no grasses, trees and other highland plants to hold the soil, every cloudburst meant a new layer of mud for the estuary. How many of the fish that we had immunized would still be alive? How many trapped in the mud?

The sun had the same hazy glow and the water was just as clam and murky as before. Only the club mosses and horsetails seemed shorter and, close to the steep shore, they were broken and buried in the mustard-colored mud.

"OK, let's clean up this mess," I said, looking from the devastated landscape to the littered floor. "I'll check with Dan, but I'm afraid we'll have to do it all again."

Which was exactly Dan Grant's message. There had been no change. The cryptovire was still there, the gardeners were still protesting, the government was still breathing down his neck and Adrian Proctor was still dead.

"Of course Proctor was still dead," I said. But Dan put me straight on that. Proctor had never really died. He was dying of The Extinction when people from the Cryocon Unit next door found him and froze him. Just like that: zap -180°, as they had been doing on the sly with generations of poets and philosophers, millionaires and statesmen.

So Proctor was frozen. But when we left, Dan now told me, they had warmed him up to 4° and were monitoring his life signs at the most advanced medical cybernetics center in the world, updating and integrating every millisecond. His condition was still deteriorating.

What kind of a ghoulish scheme was this? Using one of the greatest scientific minds of the decade as a monitoring system! I was appalled at Grant's callousness and told him so while Enfield and Marvelee listened. The answer was for my ears only: Proctor didn't "die" accidentally, he had been murdered "because he knew too much". These had been his last words. That was why they had him on-line to our experiment and why so much more depended on us than I had realized. If we could even slow down The Extinction, they might be able to revive Proctor long enough to get to the real root of The Extinction. "But not a word to the crew," Grant made me promise.

Who was Marvelee? Who was Garx? Why had this particular crew been chosen?

Until now the official explanations had seemed logical enough: all were uniquely qualified and already possessed the highest level security clearance. That saved time. Marvelee was one of only two paleontologists to have such a clearance... the other worked on fossil bacteria. In Marvelee's case, the clearance was necessary more because of her close friendship with Proctor than because of the nature of her work. With Garx, it was his work on "disease vectors of potential defense significance" that made the difference. Of the three I was the only one with military experience, and I was told that my familiarity with command formalities and my experience in evolutionary biology had qualified me to head the mission. The commander of Operation Longshot, though, was Proctor and, after Proctor's virtual demise, Grant. Kuchinsky and Schultz-- alone had made time travel possible. Kuchinsky had accidentally annihilated himself in an early experiment. Schultz died in a plane crash and his frozen brain now occupied a cubicle in Cryocom's icy archives.

As for Grant, officially he had been activated from retirement to take over the operation, but actually he had been from the very beginning one of Proctor's closest advisors. It was not only his intimate knowledge of time machines that made him irreplaceable: he was the grandson of Charles Grant, the head of the "Fantastic Voyage" mission that had made headlines back in the last century. Because of its devastating military potential, the process of miniaturization had been banned by the MRP Treaty shortly after its use to save Jan Benes' life and the tiny submarine, the "Proteus", which now hangs in the Smithsonian next to the "Spirit of St. Louis" and the first space capsules. Miniaturization had been banned but not forgotten and Dan Grant revived it for Operation Longshot.

These reasons for selecting Dan Grant, Marvelee, Enfield and me were clear, logical and brought to my mind no questions. But in light of what Grant had just told me, in light of what must have been going on in secret at the highest levels, nothing was clear any more.

* * *

Marvelee and Enfield were staring holes in me. That had started at the mention of Proctor's name and it was interesting to see how different the reaction of the two had been.

Marvelee's head had snapped toward me, her dark eyes had widened and a quavering smile had come over her lips. Then her face had darkened and she had leaned back in her chair, let her plump, pink hands rest in her lap and sighed.

Enfield had at first stiffened as if repressing the urge to stand at attention. Then he had raised his chin and slowly swivelled his chair in my direction. He took a small notebook from his sleeve pocket and made some notations, looked at his watch and then lifted his eyes in a sidelong, snakelike stare to me.

"We failed," I said. "I'll get us over to the other side of the estuary. Enfield, you and Marvelee get organized for a new immunization action."

It was as if somebody had opened the view port and let in that pungent, yellow air, the mood was no oppressive. They swallowed their questions and protests and went to work, and I settled in at my control console and began to steer the bobbing Egg out into open water: one eye on the view port and the other on the Kuchinsky target. That is a dial about the size of a saucer with cross-hairs and a set of concentric rings: green on the outside, then yellow and in the middle, red. Get inside the red circle and you could suffer Kuchinski's fate.

My mistake had been to escape forward instead of back in time. It was a spontaneous decision, maybe dictated by some irrational instinct, like wanting to be closer to home as some will certainly later claim, but I would rather think that it was based on a sober evaluation of available data. I was exhausted and so were the others and I wanted to eliminate any chance of again immunizing the fish that later would get buried in the mud-slide. Then there was the energy problem. The low temperature plasma converter draws more energy going "uphill" from home time and our trip was only calculated for two days: here and straight back-- no excursions.

The landslide had changed the course of the rivulets in the estuary, more rain in the hills freshened the current, our little propeller was too weak. Warning lights flashed, alarms buzzed and we were swept into the red circle.

"Miniaturization!" I said.

The fish that approached us exploded to ten thousand times its normal size and the view port went black.

Day Three

The storm we had just been through was a warm day in June compared to what happened then. I was buckled in my chair but Marvelee and Enfield had it rougher. They clawed onto any immovable object as bits of biochemistry hurtled through the air and the Egg pitched and spun uncontrollably.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The floor slanted steeply so that Marvelee, her arms and legs wrapped around the steel leg of her swivel chair was almost above my head, while Enfield was spread-eagled on top of the view port, gripping its raised lip

We still rocked, but now in a regular rhythm, and the roar of the syrupy water over us came and went with the rocking. As Enfield carefully found his feet and staggered away from the view port, I could make out a dim light that became brighter as the drone of the water increased and dimmed when the sound waned.

"Are you all right?" I said.

"Are you kidding?" said Marvelee, untangling herself from the chair. "I haven't had so much fun since I was a little girl and my big brother pushed me down the cellar stairs."

We slid down to the view port, where Enfield still lay.

"What do you think, Enfield."

The regular rising-sinking rhythm stopped, started again, faster, then slowed. The dark-light rhythm kept pace faithfully.

"I should think it would be obvious to the casual observer that we are trapped in the gills, sir." He turned his face toward me and tried a cynical smile. Blood. His lips, his teeth. I should have felt pity. Should have asked him if he was in pain,, if I could help. Was his cynicism justified? Had I manoeuvred us into this mess? No. It wasn't my fault.

Keep your cool, Rick, Commander. Remember your military discipline.

"Right," I said. "How would you suggest that we get out?"

It was probably the strangest committee meeting I've ever chaired: the three of us lying there on top of the view port staring out at the pulsating gill. I could see that we were caught in mucus near the gill arch, between the bases of two gill filaments that extended like house-high fern fronds off into the pink-black vacillating twilight of the opercular cavity. I could see the blood surging toward us through the efferent filamentary artery, only to plunge into the depths of the arch at our feet. The gill lamellae extended from the filaments waving like galley oars with the pulsing flow of the water. Debris, algae, bacteria swirled past us, rushed between the lamellae and disappeared in the murky depths beyond. Dinner-plate-sized blood cells bumped against the walls of the blood channels inside the lamellae. In the thin-walled marginal channels, crimson-colored blood cells twisted and swirled against the water slowly, separated from it by a fragile gas exchange membrane.

"I wouldn't have missed this for the world."

It was Marvelee. Her voice was barely a whisper and probably not even meant for my ears. The water droned, the Kuchinsky alarm buzzed and Marvelee was ready to trade the world for a fish gill. The bridal and graceful beauty could not be denied, but the precariousness of our own situation and the people who were dying back home while we watched the fire-tinged blood cells surge past, had somehow escaped my crew.

"I think we should abort," said Garx.

"What, and kill the fish?" said Marvelee with a how-could-you-be-so-mean pout. "I think we should go back to before we were swallowed and enlarge."

Two completely illogical and impossible solutions. Were they light headed from stress, hunger, exhaustion? "Come to your senses," I said. "Don't you realise the danger, the importance...

Blank looks. It was true.

"Get back to your duty stations. Come on, Marvelee. Break the trance." I gripped her arm and dragged her up the steeply sloping floor to her chair.

"Buckle down. We're in for another ride."

What I had planned was to give the gill a jolt: 100,000 volts. The fish would cough-- pull water in backwards through its gills-- dislodge us and then push us with doubled effort back over the gills and out with the rest of the debris. A normal cleaning procedure. We would be out of the fish and the current would bring us out of the Kuchinsky danger zone. Then we could enlarge and get on with our business.

That was the plan. The reality was: I gave the shock, the fish coughed, we were thrown into wild turmoil. The last I can remember seeing in the view port was a glimpse of the sky through teeth-rimmed jaws. Then we fell into blackness and all was still.

"My God," said Marvelee, "he swallowed us."

I switched on the spectral search lights, expecting to see nothing, expecting to be surrounded by a caustic mass of half-digested insect larvae. Instead, there was a wall covered by a delicate lace-work of capillaries, their red cells dancing, fluorescing in our lights.

* * *

"Rick, what's going on?" crackled Grant's voice. "Either our readouts are haywire or you've been doing nothing but going for roller coaster rides for the past hour and now you're in on land in an atmosphere with 10% oxygen and almost 4% carbon dioxide. Why did you miniaturize? Are you on the way back? Where on earth are you?"

I looked back to the view port where blood percolated in waves through the bulging net of capillaries. The wall in which the blood vessels were embedded was lightly waved and on top of it was a broad, flat cornice that extended toward another curved wall behind it, giving off more cornices, more wall. The whole thing gave the impression of a flexible, lace-covered honeycomb. The glistening, white cornice shortened and widened, the wall in front of us straightened, the flow of blood slowed, the Egg rocked gently.

"If I'm not mistaken, Dan," I said, we're the first people to ever see the inside of a Rhipidistian lung."

Speaking of walls, I was sure Dan was going to climb one. I could imagine his response. "See that you get out of there even if you have to sacrifice the fish." We were still too close to the Kuchinsky point to enlarge. The fish probably had its territory inside the invisible red circle. "We're dying while you're sightseeing." We could go back like Marvelee said. I could ask Dan about our energy resources. There would be a way. We would finish the immunization. Don't give up on us, Dan. We won't fail you. As I prepared all of this, my ear crystal began to crackle. Dan's voice was soft and confidential. "Don't worry, Rick," he said. "Take your time. Ask your crew for suggestions. Keep their confidence. Try to complete the mission but don't rush it. Keep your eyes on your crew but don't let them know you're doing it. Don't take written notes. Have to stop."

The intercom crackled and Dan continued, "... realize the vital importance of the immunization. We're counting on you, Rick. End."

By now Marvelee was at the view port again and Garx was back trying to pick up the plastic vials, syringes, and pieces of apparatus that still littered the floor.

Marvelee - still her fresh self: childish, the way she always crowded to the window, like a tourist on a Nile cruise. Was it this I was supposed to notice? Enfield. He seemed to be doing his job. But why had be wanted to abort? Was he trying to ditch us in the Paleozone? Was his docile behaviour now just a pause for thought? The calm before the storm? What was Dan Grant getting at? Why the secrecy? Why hadn't he said all this before we started the mission?

Enfield stood up, saw my blank stare. He lifted his chin and sniffed. "Well, Commander," he said. "Looks like that one backfired. How are you going to get us out of here?"

"Oh, Enfield," said Marvelee, visibly irritated. She tore herself from the view port. Her dark eyes were narrowed and those August-apple cheeks that I wanted to bite into were now drawn and furrowed. "Stop being so cynical. Make the most of the situation. Have you ever seen the inside of a lung before, and the lung of our first air-breathing ancestor at that?"

"But, my dear, I'm not interested in fish lungs." Then, risking a fleeting glance in my direction, "I came to do a job. We are here to save the world, my dear, not to admire the scenery."

The irony was meant for me.

"By the way," he continued. "You didn't answer my question, Dr. Breeze. What do you intend to do now?"

"How about lunch," I said.

* * *

"Remember when fish tasted like fish?" said Garx with a smile that seem genuine. The cut on his lip had stopped bleeding now and he seemed almost congenial, which is the closest he ever got to jovial. For the first time since this mission had begun, we were not in a clinch.

Marvelee munched her monoclonal soybean-fish protein, synthetic beefsteak with obvious contentment, her eyes glued to the view port like a television addict's. The gentle hum of the accus could have been mistaken for her purring. I had turned off the audio of the Kuchinsky alarm, since our fish apparently had no intention of leaving the danger zone.

"I always liked fish," I said. "To eat, I mean sauteed in butter with almonds. Never thought I'd end up inside one, though."

The others laughed, the Egg settled gently. I leaned back in my chair and even relaxed. "Notice anything peculiar out there, Marvelee?" I said.

The answer was long in coming. She finished chewing. Swallowed. Took a leisurely sip of synthetic grape juice. Daintily wiped the corners of her mouth with her napkin.

"It's fascinating," she said. "Now this capillary bed. At first glance it looks stable, constant. You would probably call it an array of predominantly hexagonal polygons. But if you look closely at its surface ... it's active all the time. Almost an effervescence. Bubbles-- some tiny-- only about a millimeter, come to the surface and open. Others seem to form at the surface and disappear. Then in other places bigger bubbles-- like ping-pong balls splitting open and a syrupy liquid flowing out. And the whole surface isn't dry at all. It's all covered with the same syrupy stuff. What is it, Rick?"

"That's the surfactant," I said. Marvelee pointed out one area between capillaries right near us that was particularly active. It reminded me of boiling caramel, of making candy in the Museum kitchen. I could almost smell the heavy-sweet aroma.

"The epithelial cells release a phospholipid-protein mixture that spreads out on the surface and keeps the surface tension from getting too high."

Suddenly the ship rocked and the room-sized cubicle where we were trapped collapsed.

"He's breathing," I said. "Keep your eye on the corner of the cubicle."

As the lung inflated with each gulp of air, the fluid that was accumulated in the corner of the cubicle spread effortlessly over the surface. Some of it flowed up onto a cornice. The glistening upper surface of the cornice rippled an iridescent rainbow in the spectral lights.

"That is the way out," I said. "If we can get across this ediculae to where that trabeculae..."

"If you would speak English," said Garx, "I think we should understand you better." I looked toward him but he was checking his watch. He took out his notebook, wrote something and replaced the book with long, neat fingers in his sleeve pocket. He lifted his chin and looked at me, waiting.

"These waffle-cubicles in the lung are called ediculae," I said. "It means 'cubicle' in Latin. In some lungs they are very deep, like the cells in a honeycomb, so they are called 'favus', the Latin word for honeycomb."

Garx was still waiting. "And 'trabecula' I suppose means 'stairway to heaven' in Latin," he said.

"Close," I said. "It means 'strut', but even that's a misnomer because they aren't solid at all. They're elastic tissue and muscle. They form an elevated network at the mouths of the ediculae, and when they contract, they pull up on the edicular walls."

"Up?" Now Garx seemed interested-- or was he trying to goad me. Always two steps ahead.

"Yes," I said, because the lung is hollow and the trabeculae go around the inside of the corners. "See, up there," I said, and pointed to a shadowy niche above us. "When the trabecula there contracts, it pulls on all the others. The whole system constricts-- moves closer to the middle of the lung and the vertical walls of the ediculae get pulled straight."

To which Garx lifted his chin, turned away, and said in the effete whine that he usually reserved for basic level programmers, "..ut alia ex alia nexa et omnes inter se aptae conligataezue videantur." He did not translate.

"Quite so," I said with my sunniest smile, guessing at the meaning. (See you and raise you one, Garx). "But for us, the important thing is that these trabeculae are a conveyor belt that will take us out of the lung."

Now Marvelee, who I thought was lost in a transcendental nebula, turned from the view port. Garx was three-dimensional chess but Marvelee was cat and mouse, mountain and canyon, fire and ice.

"You're right, Rick. I've been watching the surface of the trabeculae. The ripples all flow in one direction, like a river flowing uphill, from the bottom of the whatchamacallits..."

"Ediculae."

"... ediculae up onto the big, flat trabeculae. See that stone? It was floating in the surfactant stuff at the bottom of that trabecula that comes down to the floor just a minute ago, and now it's on the trabecula and moving up."

She bounced over to me.

"Let's give it a try, Rick."

I didn't need any more encouragement. Before you could say "Kuchinsky" I had the wheels out and turning.

Do you know what a helicopter is? That's what happened when a panel of automotive and naval engineers tried to design an airplane. That helicopters can actually fly is only a coincidence. Well, that's the way I feel about our Egg, except that it can't fly and it can't navigate in water and can't drive on land either, or at least it doesn't get far on a waterbed covered with greasy saline.

So there we were: three hand-picked specialists on a mission to save the world, hopelessly trapped inside a fish lung waiting to be annihilated, while this Egg-- the prototype of the most advanced technology our civilization could create-- spun its ludicrous toy tractor tires and whipped the surfactant around us to suds.

I looked at Marvelee, she looked at Garx, he looked at me. Then Marvelee started to giggle and the ridiculousness of our situation overcame me. It must have sounded like a nut house to Grant-- he never mentioned it. The three of us hung limp in our chairs, drunk from laughter, faces red and wet with tears. Somebody would raise a feeble finger and point to the view port and the whole hilarious happening would start over again. Even if Grant had crackled something into my ear crystal, it would have triggered another laugh spasm. There was only one thing that could bring us around.

Suddenly and silently the view port flamed red. The Kuchinsky point had entered our electrical field. My hand darted out: maximum miniaturization. The red field shot over us like a meteor. For the time being, we were safe but the whole ship was now only one micron long: one thousandth of a millimeter.

"What was that?" said Marvelee. She looked drunk or sleepy, helpless anyway, and there's something about a helpless woman that makes me feel paternal. I wish I could cure that. It reminds me that we're just animals after all, and it's not fair to a competent scientist like Marvelee.

"The Kuchinsky point," I said.

"I know that," she said, unmoved by our near destruction. "I meant that bump. There it goes again."

Sure enough, the Egg was jolting and jerking. Not enough to make you lose your balance, but at irregular intervals and in unpredictable directions. I looked to the view port and saw the bubbles we had shipped up with our tiny tires, now climbing over us. We were sinking below the oily surfactant into the salt-water subphase.

"Is it the cilia?" she said.

In the powerful beams of the spectral lamps I could now see the surface of the cell beneath us: rough, know-like microvilli, here and there vesicles bursting, releasing their striped contents that immediately formed a three-dimensional hatch-work, and rose into the straw-colored sea of lung surface fluid.

"Tubular myelin," I said.

"The bumping," said Enfield, "is Brownian molecular motion." His voice still had that accusing overtone in spite of our laugh orgy and everything that we had experienced together. He said, "Our commander is ignoring you, my dear, so I'll answer your little question." His contempt of me must sit deep. What had I ever done to him?

I thought of our planning sessions, strategy meetings, crash courses, practice sessions on the simulator, drills: Garx aloof and disinterested, as if the whole exercise were irrelevant. Marvelee was just the opposite, always excited, fascinated by the adventure and the learning but-- come to think of it-- not so impressed by the practical importance of the mission either. Why had they been chosen? What was Grant trying to tell me?

"Look, Marvelee," I said, trying to hide my inner thoughts. "See that thing in front of us that looks like a net? Just a few seconds ago it was a lamellar body inside that epithelial cell. You can still see some fragments hanging from the pit down there. When it hit the watery subphase where we are now, it unfolded to this three dimensional net. In a few seconds it will reach the hyperphase and join the surfactant on the surface."

I extended the propeller and stabilizers and tried to pilot the Egg like a submarine again. We skirted the tubular myelin clump and were now over an intracellular junction. It looked like those hedgerows that they used to have in Europe in the twentieth century, but they were continually in motion, feeling, groping. And the surface of the epithelial cells themselves looked more like moorland than the plowed fields I had seen in the Anthropological Museum.

The Egg was difficult to steer. The continual buffeting of the Brownian movement and then the fact that I had to leave the wheels out and turning in case we touched down, did not make matters easier.

"Keep your eyes open for cilia," I said, banking sharply to avoid a cloud of coagulated mucus. "They're as big as trees to us now. If one of those babies hit us, it ..."

I looked at Enfield. He was slumped over his control panel, breathing loud and deep. Then to Marvelee. She hung in her chair, her head tilted back, mouth open. She snored lightly.

"OK," I said just for the record. "I'll take the first watch."

The rhythmic breathing of my crew, the steady hum of the accus, and even the jolting, rolling glide of the Egg gave me a warm feeling of purpose and accomplishment. I was in charge. I had just saved us all from destruction and I would pilot us to the trabecula. We were still in the red zone but the imminent danger was gone. When we arrived at the trabecula, I would enlarge us a hundred times: big enough not be damaged by the whipping cilia, small enough to be carried along by them. I was confident and content.

My head bobbed and shot back up. "No, Rick. They can sleep. You have the watch, carry the responsibility. They are like your family. The family you used to have."

In the view port the polygonal fields jerked by. They really did look like ancient European fields separated by hedgerows. I could even imagine a farmhouse. I moved the Egg closer to the surface. Here microvillus-bushes and furrowed fields, there something rectangular: a biocrystal or maybe a piece of dust. Certainly, it was just dust. But it looked like.... a house. With windows. A red, tile roof, a chimney. Smoke coming out of the chimney. Billowing out. Warm smoke.

There would be a fire in the wood stove and the kitchen would smell of wood smoke and beef stew. Real beef, from the cattle grazing in the dandelion speckled meadow, real potatoes and carrots and onions from the garden.

She lifts the lid of the black, cast iron kettle that she inherited from her grandmother. It is hot. She uses a pot holder that her daughter wove from strips of rags.

The little girl comes in, laughing with her clear, blue eyes. A dog follows, yapping at her heels. Outside it is raining, cold. She runs to her mother. Her hands are muddy. She wipes them on her skirt and tries to embrace her mother's legs. She is enveloped in her mother's calico skirts, comforted by her petticoats.

The woman lifts her gentle brown eyes to me and smiles.

I step onto the threshold and the house begins to shake but the woman and girl do not notice. I turn and run into a field of grain, stumble, fall. The ground is pitching the tall grain closing over me swaying in the howling wind.

"Rick!" A woman's voice. "Rick! The cilia!" Marvelee said. "Quick, enlarge!"

* * *

"OK, so I blew it. But you were asleep, too, and we're safe now."

"I'm not, Commander," said Enfield.

"Well, I'm just sorry you missed the show, Rick," said Marvelee. "They were really impressive, the way they bowed so gracefully toward us nearly touching their tips to the ground-- I mean epithelium-- and then stiffened and straightened up. Did you see them, Enfield?"

Garx had been writing in his notebook again. "I've seen it all before. Innumerable times."

Our looks must have surprised him.

"Through the microscope, of course."

"Well, now it's smooth sailing to the glottis," I said. "Then when he coughs us out, I'll just enlarge another hundred times and he'll have to spit us out because we will be too big to swallow."

I had come to expect a storm of protest. Garx would want to get on with it--- gill the fish, rush out of the danger zone, get back. Marvelee wouldn't want to miss anything. I searched their faces. Garx just lifted his eyebrows as he reinserted that notebook (I had to get my hands on that thing) into his sleeve pocket and Marvelee deftly avoided my gaze. The silence was deafening.

Had I missed more than a good cilia show? In the view port was the glistening surface of the trabecula, disturbed by the rippling beat of the cilia which, now a hundred times smaller, whispered gently against our smooth hull. Beyond, the harsh light cast long, black shadows across the ediculae. These cubicles were smaller than I had remembered, but that would be because we were now well up on the big trabecula, far above the lung floor. I walked to the port and inspected the edicular surface. I longed for those fields, the farmhouse, the woman and her daughter.

But the rough fields were now completely smooth and the hedgerows were tiny strips. This was what the cells over the bulging capillaries looked like. Between the capillaries-- in the holes in the capillary net-- they were completely different. Rough, covered with a forest of microvilli. Pits opened and exuded surfactant. There were type two alveolar epithelial cells: special surfactant secreting cells. We were no longer in a fish lung and not even in an amphibian lung, because they only have one kind of epithelial cell on their gas exchange surfaces. We must be inside a reptile. But how?

My first impulse was to turn and tell my crew. To discuss with them this strange occurrence. Instead, I put on my best poker face and went back to my chair. Before me was the answer. I had set the switch, but it now stood on hundred million years, where the "present time" digital readout should have read -356,248,370, now stood -256,248,370. Exactly one hundred million years had passed while I had been asleep.

Now I was really in trouble. First of all, of course, because somebody had been fooling with the controls again, and I didn't know who it was. Was Garx trying to sabotage the mission again? But why? He couldn't ditch Marvelee and me now. We were in the cabin with him. Or was it Marvelee who had taken the controls? Childish and wide-eyed, never revealing her real motivation. Then there was the very fact that we were still inside a lung, although the fish that we started in must have died and been buried in the mud millions of years ago. All of Grant's hours of time machine theory had not included this simple fact. We could not escape by moving forward in time. I had to assume that this fact had surprised the would-be saboteur as much as it did me, and that he or she had gotten cold feet.

The way out of my quandary came over the cabin speaker: "Come on back," said Grant. "It looks like you did it after all." Then my ear crystal crackled the all important p.s.: "Proctor is improving. He gave us the name."

"OK," I said, "let's get moving." I set the time dial for "Home", and pressed "Execute". The Egg gave a violent lurch and the view port went black and shattered, spraying us with glass and dirt.

Day Four

From the time drive issued an ear-splitting whine and the temperature of the near-zero plasma converter soared toward the self-abort level. The time readout was stuck at -65,421,346. I hit "Undo" and in seconds we were back inside our reptile in the year -256,248,370, breathing the heavy lung air that streamed in through the broken view port.

Marvelee and Enfield were stunned but curious. This time they had been strapped in so they weren't thrown about as they had been before. Still, they had eyes like saucers and were breathing very hard.

"Look," I said, "we had a close one. We went too fast and peeled off into some line that died out in the Cretaceous. Ended up in the ground." Now I was beginning to breathe hard and get light-headed.

"We're back in the late Permian now. In a reptile lung." I had to shout over the whistle of the expired air as it streamed over us and in through the broken view port. The crew breathed a little easier.

"I'm dying," said Enfield. His face was flushed, his mouth gaping, his eyes bulging. "I can't breath."

"Try to breathe in sync with the animal," I said. "When it breathes fast you breathe fast. When it stops, breathe as little as you can. The O₂ levels should be OK but we may have to deal with up to 10% CO₂ just before it takes its next breath and that can kill!"

"Just get us out of here!" Enfield gasped. I noticed that he was reaching for that damned notebook of his but he was too weak to get it out of his sleeve pocket.

I adjusted the time drive to a million years per minute, practiced my breathing and watched. Garx kept struggling with his sleeve pocket as if his life depended on it, while Marvelee - eyes closed - slouched back in her chair, her seat belt cutting a deep groove in her chest, and breathed. Slow when the animal was holding its breath, fast when it breathed. She was trying very hard to stay alert but not to let anybody know.

The lung around us did not change as we moved through the Triassic, but as we moved into the Jurassic and approached the -200 million year mark, I noticed that what had appeared to be an edicular lung was taking on a much different appearance. Our trabecula had a broader, flatter surface and the air spaces looked like deep wells. The animal was also breathing more regularly now. I also noticed that, if I managed to breathe in sync with it, inhale when it inhaled, exhale when it exhaled, I could get along quite comfortably.

Marvelee had caught on too, but Garx, who was always two steps ahead in every thing else, was lagging far behind. He was slumped over a pile of rocks and dirt on his console, the notebook in his limp hand.

Going backwards in time inside a lung is no problem because you know you will never end up in as extinct animal. But going forward is another story. It is like trying to drive through a railroad yard by setting the switches at random and hoping that the track you end up on won't be a dead end. And the chances are 99 to 1 against you. But you can increase your odds by cruising back and forth at the time when you think some modern animals originated, assuming you can recognize its lungs from the inside when you see them. If you blow it, you get to start over.

I didn't want to try turtles for fear of ending up under water and didn't want a mammal because with my luck it would turn out to be Proctor or that woman making candy in the Museum. Snakes and lizards, sun loving as they are, had become very rare because of The Extinction, but there were still a few birds around. Their feathers seemed to protect them better than did mammal's fur. Birds it was. I would go for birds.

These thoughts danced in my mind as I jockeyed back and forth in the Jurassic, breathing like a yogi, keeping one eye peeled for telltale signs of bird lungs and the other, for any suspicious movements of my crew.

We were in what must have been a tyrannosaur coasting along in a roomy secondary bronchus when a thunderous roar and a gale of foul air stirred Enfield from his torpor. He lifted a shaking hand to his head and, before the notebook he had been holding hit the floor, Marvelee had it. I had never noticed her unbuckling her harness, didn't even know she was conscious. And now she was looking at me fresh as a spring morning with a mischievous grin on her face.

"Been wondering what was in this," she said and began leafing through the book. Enfield was too wasted to do anything but look at her with pleading eyes and to hold out his hand for a few seconds. And I just kept my cool and headed back toward the Triassic.

"Oh!" She leafed faster. "Oh!"

"What is it?"

"Oh, Enfield. What's this?" She held up the book. "Look, there's nothing in here at all. It's empty. Blank pages."

"Satisfied?" groaned Enfield and held out his hand for the book.

She threw it at him.

As the secondary bronchus narrowed, I reversed directions again. Time advanced but the bronchus did not get larger. If anything, it got smaller.

Enfield was stuffing the notebook back into his sleeve pocket. He lifted his chin and sighted down his nose at the wreck of the control room, littered with gravel and broken glass.

"Well, Commander," he said, "you certainly botched this one, didn't you?"

Enfield Garx was his obnoxious self. That was the bad news. The good news was that he was revived. Why? Only moments before he had been so weak from inhaling carbon dioxide that he couldn't hold that damned notebook and now he was goading me again. Carbon dioxide!

The CO₂ level was below 1% and falling. The wind was gusting but almost always at our backs.

"We made it! Hang on, crew, the next stop is home!"

* * *

Day Five

The bird lung is unique in the animal kingdom. There was no mistaking it. When the bird breathes in, half the air goes through the lung and the other half gets stored in air sacs. When it breathes out, the stored half gets blown through the lung tubes. So the air always goes in the same direction through the lung and always had high O₂ and low CO₂ to start with. Everything fit. We were in a bird lung.

The only problem was that we were at the threshold to the fine tubes, the parabronchi, where gas exchange takes place. If we got sucked into them, the high CO₂ and low O₂ we had seen in the reptile lung would look like an officer's club social.

My crew was not only awake, they were even making themselves useful. They were scraping dirt, rocks and glass from the floor and console, throwing it by the handfuls out the broken view port.

I let them do it. Maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe that's what got us into trouble. Even so, we can't change it now. I just leaned back, pondered our predicament and watched them throw handfuls of garbage out the window.

We were in a secondary bronchus near the entrance to the parabronchi. That meant anatomically that we were at the back of the lung, a long way from the main bronchus and the way out of the bird.

Not that I really wanted to get out. I was happy right where we were. Enough oxygen, the crew seemed content (what were they cooking up?), the scenery was good. We could just sit tight until we got home, enlarge, kill the bird and wait to be rescued. One thing was sure, we wouldn't be able to just stroll from our tree or wherever the bird happened to be when it exploded back to the institute. If the extinction wasn't over, we would be.

Was it over or not? Why was my ear crystal so quiet. After all the bitching I'd done about it, still it would be good if it would just start crackling and squawking again. Would there be anybody left alive when we got back or would it be up to Garx, Marvelee and me to play Adam and Eve? Adams and Eve. Two is a company, three is a crowd, and I couldn't imagine Garx just capitulating. And Marvelee? As sweet as she could be, there was something unfathomable about her. But my farm woman. Now, there was a solid personality: steady, dependable, with a loving heart. My Eve, I would call her Eve.

With Eve on the brain, my gaze drifted to Marvelee. Her round features, how she worked, a wave on the ocean. Silent grace.

Waves on the ocean. Yes. The rocking of the Egg with each breath reminded me of being in a small boat on the ocean. We drifted along, carried on our sea of mucus, the cilia whispering gently at the hull. The wind caused by the breathing, now strong, now weak, was always in the same direction. Regular like clockwork. Maybe our bird was asleep.

Strong, weak, strong, weak like swells on the ocean. Strong, weak, in, out it breathed. In, in, in ......

"Marvelee, Enfield! Quick! Back to your stations!"

Marvelee moved. Catlike, she was in her chair and buckled up before I got the next sentence out.

"It's going to cough!"

But Enfield Garx paused to give me one of his famous looks and that was his undoing.

The blast of air lifted us from the mucous film and hurtled us down what, in the blur of the spectral lamps, looked like a bottomless well. End over end the Egg tumbled as it shot down the parabronchus. Now the honeycomb wall flashed by, then the black tunnel, then the honeycomb again. I was pressed deep into the padding of my seat by the centrifugal force and, across the console to my right, I could see that Marvelee was, too. But Enfield Garx's chair was empty. The gravel, broken glass, notebooks and papers that the two had not been able to secure or chuck out the broken port were now clinging to the walls at the pointed ends of the Egg. The end with the view port was directly across the console from me. With that strange curiosity you have when death is close, I watched as a Wheaton bottle rolled slowly along the curved wall into the port and was gone.

I fought against the ever diminishing oxygen and increasing carbon dioxide and tried to keep conscious by estimating the g-force on myself, on Marvelee, at the port. This is something I've thought about many times afterward. At a time like that, how could I just sit there and solve mathematical puzzles? That's one puzzle I'll never be able to solve, but the g-forces were about 3 for me, 2 for Marvelee because she was closer to the center of the Egg, and 5 at the port. If the forces were so great at the wall, Garx should have been there somewhere unless he had managed to wrap himself around a chair. Then I thought of the Wheaton bottle and imagined Garx stuck to the slimy wall of a parabronchus, feeling his way in the blackness around the holes that led into the atria, the infundibula and the air capillaries: holes in holes in holes. Unless he managed to stay on the surface of the parabronchus, he would be entombed in the lung. The air capillaries were only about 10 or 15 thousandths of a millimeter wide in a bird lung. At our miniaturization he would just fit. As much as I disliked the man, I didn't wish him that end.

I have to admire Marvelee, how she always comes through in a crisis. While I was wasting precious time watching bottles tumble out the view port and calculating g-forces, her mind was racing far ahead.

When we hit the wall of the parabronchus with a sickening smack, I was breathing so heard I thought my chest would burst but I was still suffocating. I didn't care about Garx or birds or whether the aborted mission failed or not. All I knew was that we only had minutes to live unless I did something fast and my hand headed for the "Miniaturize Abort" switch. So what if we ended up in a Cretaceous rock garden. If I could cope with being breathed in by a fish, then being eaten by a dinosaur would be no big deal. But to be slowly strangled inside of one of the most efficient oxygen extractors nature has ever devised, was definitely not for me.

When Marvelee slid the helmet over my head, I could have been blown away by that sweet flow of oxygen. Why hadn't I thought of that? The diving suits got their air through the umbilical cord that bound them to the Egg, but, for emergencies each had a half hour's oxygen supply built in. I knew what Dr. Garx's response would have been: "That's two, Commander. Three strikes and you're out."

"Let's go get Enfield," Marvelee said. I checked the time. We had thirty minutes and that would put us into the middle of the twentieth century. A quick sprint from home.

We wriggled into the suits and uncoupled the umbilicals. I slung an extra suit for our lost seaman across my back, tied the arms and legs together in front of me, and tucked a length of line into each boot. Marvelee handed me a portable spectral lamp, kept one for herself and we stepped out.

Arms and legs flailing, groping and clawing at any remotely solid object including each other. That was our introduction to walking inside a lung. The parabronchial surface was like a trampoline of slick rubber covered with an oily film. Our soft plastic soles that moulded perfectly to any hard surface even under water, slid like perfectly lubricated machine parts on the lung surface: a surface that writhed and rounded up with each breath and flattened between breaths. The flattening was fine. Once we had helped each other to our feet and practised walking a few steps, we could make some headway. But when the surface rounded up, we clung to each other and prayed that we would not start slipping toward one of those cavernous atria. We roped up and checked out the terrain.

We had come down a straight unbranched tube and I struck off against the wind with Marvelee in lock-step behind me.

"Stop."

"What?"

She shone her light to the right. There was another tunnel. Above was another. Back toward the Egg the ways branched yet again.

"Oh no," I said. "We're in the plane of anastomosis."

Of course I knew about the plane of anastomosis. That it was a consequence of the way a bird lung develops. That when the pipe-like parabronchi grow out from the secondary bronchi at the front of the lung and meet with their counterparts from the secondary bronchi at the back of the lung, they join up. The place where they meet is the plane of anastomosis. I knew all that, but the practical consequences of this labyrinth in the middle of the lung were not clear to me until that sinking feeling in my stomach told me, "Rick, you've got a half hour of oxygen, that's fifteen minutes each way. You're walking with round-soled shoes on a surface more treacherous than the glaciers of K2. Choose the wrong parabronchus and your conscience has to live with abandoning a man to die a slow and agonizing death. Choose the right path or none of you may get back."

Looking back I could see the Egg heaving gently with the rhythmic contractions of the lung, then toward the upwind parabronchi. Assuming that we were in the middle of one of those babies as we came hurtling down like a rifle bullet, only two could have planted the Egg where it was. I shined my light up the right hand tube. The one to its left lay a bit lower and angled slightly downward. It would be easier to get into but could present problems on the way back. I had taken a step to the right when something glinted in the other parabronchus. It was so quick and bright that it must have reflected the full strength of the spectral lamp and the after image still burned on my retina. When I tried again there was no reflection.

"Left," I said to Marvelee. She nodded and followed.

Imagine a mine shaft. A round shaft in the earth. Now imagine that the floor, the walls and the ceiling are studded with pits about two meters across and twice as deep. The walls of these pits are in turn covered with smaller pits and the smaller pits look like giant colanders. At our present size the holes in these colanders would just accommodate a man.

The mine shaft is a parabronchus, the large pits are infundibula and the small pits are the atria. The holes in the atria are the air capillaries.

My spectral lamp is trained into an atrium. I look to Marvelee as she stands frozen in awe of the miracle we are witnessing. As the light probes the depths, it reflects the pulsing blood cells as they boil up and strain at the translucent skin of blood capillaries. They flash wine-red, then dive again into the depths of the lung tissue. Further up the parabronchus in the direction we will move, they will flash crimson, reflecting the higher concentration of life-sustaining oxygen; further downwind, they will retain the shade of elderberry wine. (You could buy it in the gift shop of the Museum where I bought the candy, where the woman and little girl....)

I slipped my arms around Marvelee's waist, found the metal loop and clipped in one of the ropes. "If one of us starts slipping into one of those atria," I said, "the other one has to fall to the other side. If we both end up in one of those slimy pits we'll never get out." With painful slowness and care we inched up the parabronchus.

Marvelee walked in front now. She was so short that I could look right over her head. I held one hand firmly on her shoulder to steady her if she faltered and to steady me if I did. I steered her always to stay on the ciliated tracks. A bump could be an irritant receptor. A single hair sticking from a smooth surface could betray a submerged neuroepithelial body. Step on one of those babies and it could set off a wave of contractions that would throw us headlong into an atrium. Slowly, ever so slowly we moved against the wind toward the brilliant red ahead with no sight of the missing Enfield Garx.

Something hard hit my foot. As I looked down to check it out, Marvelee shouted. "There he is!"

I stooped and picked up Garx's notebook with the stylus tucked inside.

"Where, Marvelee?"

Then I saw him. He was back at the Egg. His hands were on his hips and he had a smug look on his face. I vowed then and there that if we survived this junket I would remove that smirk forever. I had had enough of Garx but what I didn't know was that the feelings were mutual.

Seconds after we got back to the Egg, Marvelee was out of her suit and into the craft. Then I heard the whining of the accus, the slamming of the hatch and I realized that they were leaving without me. That is when the thunder struck, I lost contact with the ship and landed in the garbage dump were you found me.

Epilogue

In a farmhouse not far from Alanville a woman stood at a wood stove stirring a pot of caramel. The fragrance filled the house. She lifted the pot from the stove and began ladling the caramel onto a second cookie sheet while the first one cooled.

"Can I help you, Mommy?"

Sure, Joanie. You can stir to keep the candy from sticking.

Helping was not what Bobby had in mind. The six-year-old sneaked on tip-toes up to the table where the cooling caramel lay.

Rick Breeze stood in the doorway, watching. He smiled, moved behind Molly and slid his arms around her waist. He kissed the back of her neck. She turned and kissed him.

"Just as I had imagined," he said. "It's like living in a dream."

"How do you think I feel," said Molly. "Poor Joe Rizzo, the dump warden, thinks he's shooting a duck and a man falls from the sky. I think an accident victim is being delivered into the ward and its a time traveller. A very sentimental and very wonderful one but still..."

"Mommy, can I stop stirring now?"

Molly ladled out the last of the caramel and filled the pot with water.

"It was hard on the kids, moving back twenty-five years, but you are right, it was the only sure way for them not to find us. And you would have gone to jail for kidnapping. It makes me dizzy just to think about it."

"Yes," said Rick, "It was really a stroke of luck that everything worked out. We ended the Extinction, Garx got what he deserved when they found out he had engineered the whole thing and sold immunities for a fortune. It really hurt to find out that Marvelee was in leagues with Garx, though. I kind of liked her. Proctor survived the frost treatment and they revived him, and that's why we're here now, my love. They were so grateful, they promised me anything I wanted. But once I laid eyes on you I knew what I wanted. So they came back in the Egg to get us and here we are.

"I know," said Molly, "But there's still one thing I don't understand. How did you talk with them and let them know where you were and when to pick us up. Everything worked out so perfectly."

Rick sighed and massaged Molly's shoulders. "You know that metal notebook with the ballpoint pen that you said was out of ink? That belonged to Garx and that is how he communicated with his assistant back in my, I mean my 'other' time. The pen is the transmitter and the notebook is the power pack. The assistant turned over all the messages and along with them, the receiver. That was always the problem with my communication because I could get messages with that receiver in my skull but could not send. Garx solved it for us. Now I can send."

"What do you have to tell them now?"

Rick Breeze reached into his pocket and produced the notebook. He wrote "Thank you, and good bye," and tossed the book and stylus into the wood stove.

Steven Perry Institut fuer Zoologie, Universitaet Bonn, Poppelsdorfer Schloss, 53115 Bonn, Germany

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