  Near the superconductor-insulator (S-I) transition, quench-condensed
ultrathin Be films show a large magnetoconductance which is highly anisotropic
in the direction of the applied field. Film conductance can drop as much as
seven orders of magnitude in a weak perpendicular field (< 1 T), but is
insensitive to a parallel field in the same field range. We believe that this
negative magnetoconductance is due to the field de-phasing of the
superconducting pair wavefunction. This idea enables us to extract the finite
superconducting phase coherence length in nearly superconducting films. Our
data indicate that this local phase coherence persists even in highly
insulating films in the vicinity of the S-I transition.
