Micro

Chapter 12

Waipaka Arboretum 28 October, 11:00 p.m.

The students were jostled inside the paper bag, every movement of Alyson’s magnified and accompanied by a loud rasping sound as they scraped back and forth across the paper. Peter never realized that ordinary brown paper was so rough: it felt almost like sandpaper to his skin. He saw that the others had all managed to face inward, so they didn’t abrade their faces as they slid back and forth. They had been driven somewhere, and it had taken a long time, but where were they? And what would be done to them? It was hard to talk as they fell this way and that, and difficult to come up with a plan when everybody was talking at the same time. The Nanigen man, Jarel Kinsky, kept repeating that there had been some mistake. “If there was some way I could talk with Mr. Drake,” Kinsky said.

“Get over it,” Karen King snapped at him.

“But I can’t believe Mr. Drake would just…kill us,” Kinsky said.

“Oh, really?” Karen said.

Kinsky didn’t answer.

The bigger problem was that they didn’t know what Vin or Alyson were up to. They had been driven around in a car, but where had the car ended up? It made no sense. Then Vin and Alyson seemed to reach an agreement (their exact conversation was impossible to follow) and Alyson carried the bag outdoors. Into darkness.

“What’s this?” Karen King said, alarmed, as they were carried along. “What’s going on?”

They heard a booming sound. It was a snuffle. Alyson Bender.

“I have the feeling she wants to save us,” Peter Jansen said.

“Vin will never allow it,” Karen said.

“I know.”

“I think we better take things into our own hands,” Karen said. She produced her knife, unfolded it.

“Now hold on,” Danny Minot said. “This is a decision we have to reach together.”

“I don’t know about that,” Karen said. “ ’Cause I’ve got the knife.”

“Don’t be a child,” Minot said.

“Don’t be a coward. We act, or they act on us and they kill us. Which is it?” She didn’t wait for Danny to answer. She turned to Peter. “How far above ground do you think we are, right now?”

“I don’t know, maybe four and a half feet…”

“Hundred and thirty-seven centimeters,” Erika Moll said. “And what’s our mass?”

Peter laughed. “Not very much.”

“You’re laughing,” Danny Minot said, amazed. “You people are insane. Compared to our normal size, a drop of four and a half feet is the equivalent of, uh—”

“Four hundred and fifty feet,” Erika said. “Say, the height of a forty-five-story building. And no, this would not be the equivalent of a fall from a forty-five-story building.”

“Of course it would,” Danny said.

“Isn’t it great when the science studies people don’t know any science?” Erika said.

Peter explained, “It’s a little issue of air resistance.”

“No, that doesn’t matter,” Danny said through clenched teeth, clearly stung by the criticism, “because objects fall in a gravitational field at the same rate irrespective of mass. A penny and a piano fall at the same rate, hit the ground at the same time.”

“Nothing can be done for him,” Karen said. “And we have to make a decision now.”

The jostling in the bag had slowed; Alyson was making up her mind to do something.

“I don’t think the distance we fall matters very much,” Peter Jansen said. He had been trying to figure out the physics of being very small.

It was all about gravity. And inertia.

Peter said: “What’s important is Newton’s equation for—”

“Enough! I say we jump,” Karen interrupted.

“Jump,” Jenny said.

“Jump,” Amar said.

“Oh God,” Danny moaned. “But we don’t know where we are!”

“Jump,” Erika said.

“This is our only chance,” Rick Hutter said. “Jump.”

“Jump,” Peter said.

“Okay,” Karen said. “I’m going to run along this seam at the bottom, and cut it open. Try to stay close together. Imagine you’re skydivers. Arms and legs wide, a human kite. Here we gooo—”

“But just a minute—” Danny yelled.

“Too late!” Karen shouted. “Good luck!”

Peter felt her brush past him, the knife in her hand, and a moment later the paper bag tilted beneath his feet, and he fell into darkness.

The air was surprisingly cool and wet. And the night was brighter, now that he was outside the bag: he could see the trees around him, and the ground below as he fell toward it. He fell surprisingly fast—alarmingly fast—and for a moment he wondered if they had collectively made a calculation error, out of their shared dislike for Danny.

They knew, of course, that air resistance was always a factor in the speed of falling objects. In daily life, you didn’t think about it, because most things in life presented similar air resistance. A five-pound barbell and a ten-pound barbell would fall at the same rate. Same thing for a human being and an elephant. They’d fall at pretty much the same rate.

But the students were now so small that air resistance did matter, and they had collectively guessed that the effect of air resistance would overcome the effect of mass. In other words, they would not fall at their full-size speed.

They hoped.

Now, with the wind whistling in his ears, tears blurring his eyes as he fell downward, Peter clenched his teeth and wiped his eyes and tried to see where he was headed. He looked around and could not see any of the others falling through the air, though he heard a soft moan in the darkness. Looking back to the ground, he saw he was closing in on a broad-leafed plant, like a giant elephant ear. He tried to spread his arms wide and shift his position so he would hit the leaf in the center.

He hit it perfectly. He smacked into the elephant ear—cold, wet, slippery—and he felt the leaf bend beneath him, then rise back up and in a swift movement toss him back into the air, like a tumbler on a trampoline. He yelled in surprise, and when he came down again he landed near the edge of the leaf, spun, and slid on the water-slick surface down to the far tip.

And fell.

In darkness, he hit another leaf beneath, but it was hard to see down here, and he again rolled down toward the tip of the leaf. He clawed at the green surface, trying to halt his inevitable descent. It was to no avail—he fell—hit another leaf—fell—and finally landed on his back in a bed of wet moss where he lay, gasping and frightened, staring up at the canopy of leaves high above, which blotted out the sky.

“You just going to lie there?”

He looked over. It was Karen King, standing over him.

“Are you hurt?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Then get up.”

He struggled to his feet. He noticed she didn’t help him. He was unsteady standing in the wet moss, which leaked through his sneakers. His feet were cold and wet.

“Stand over here,” she said. It was as if she was talking to a child.

He moved to stand beside her, on a patch of dry ground. “Where are the others?”

“Somewhere around here. It may take some time.”

Peter nodded, looking at the jungle floor. From his new perspective half an inch above the ground, the jungle floor was incredibly rugged. Moss-covered stumps of rotted limbs rose like skyscrapers, and fallen branches—twigs, really—made ragged arcs twenty or thirty feet above the ground. Even the dead leaves on the floor were larger than he was, and whenever he took a step, they shifted, moving around him and beneath his feet. It was like trying to move through a rotten organic junkyard. And of course everything was wet; everything was slippery, and often slimy. Where, exactly, had they landed? They had been driven around for a long time. They could be anywhere on Oahu—anywhere there was a forest, at least.

Karen jumped up on a large twig, nearly fell off, got her balance, and sat on it, her legs dangling down. Then she put her fingers in her mouth and gave a piercing whistle. “They should all hear that.” She whistled again.

Just then something bulky and dark in color crunched out of the undergrowth. At first they couldn’t see what it was, but the moonlight revealed a gigantic beetle, jet black, moving past in a surefooted gait. Its compound eyes gleamed faintly. It was covered with jointed black armor, and had spiky hairs bristling from its legs.

Karen drew her legs up respectfully as the beetle crawled below the twig she was perched on.

Erika Moll pushed her way out through a spray of plant stems, dripping wet. “Well,” she said. “It’s probably a Metromenus. A ground crawler, it doesn’t fly. Don’t disturb it—it’s a carnivore, it’s got jaws, and I’m sure it’s got a nasty chemical spray, too.”

They didn’t want to get drenched with chemicals or become the beetle’s next meal. They stopped talking and became very still while the beetle poked along, evidently hunting. Suddenly the beetle charged forward, running remarkably fast, and seized something small in its jaws, which struggled, thrashing around. In the darkness they couldn’t see what the beetle had caught, but they could hear crunching sounds as it chopped up its prey. They got a whiff of something sharp and very nasty.

“We are smelling the beetle’s defensive chemicals,” Erika Moll commented. “It’s acetic acid—that’s vinegar—and maybe decyl acetate. I believe the bitter stench is benzoquinone. The chemicals are stored in sacs in the beetle’s abdomen, and may circulate in the beetle’s blood, too.”

They watched the beetle move off into the night, dragging its prey. “That’s a superior evolutionary design. Better than ours, at least for this place,” Erika added.

“Armor, jaws, chemical weaponry, and lots of legs,” Peter said.

“Yeah. Way more legs.”

Erika said, “Most animals that walk the earth have at least six legs.” As she knew, those additional appendages made maneuvering over rough terrain easier. All insects had six legs, and there were close to a million named insect species. Many scientists suspected that another thirty million insects were just waiting to be named, which made the insects the most varied life form on earth, apart from microscopic organisms such as viruses and bacteria. “Insects,” Erika said to the others, “have been incredibly successful at colonizing the land areas of the planet.”

“We think they look primitive,” Peter said. “We think fewer legs is a sign of intelligence. Because we walk on two legs, we think it makes us smarter and better than an animal that walks on four or six legs.”

Karen pointed to the underbrush. “Until we face this. And then we want more legs.”

They heard a scratching sound and a rotund shape emerged from under a leaf. It looked like a mole, and was rubbing its nose with both hands briskly. “This sucks,” it said, spitting dirt. It still wore its tweed jacket.

“Danny?”

“I never agreed to be half an inch tall. Okay, size matters. I already knew that. What are we going to do?”

“For starters, you could stop whining,” Karen said to Danny. “We have to formulate a plan. We have to take stock.”

“Take stock of what?”

“Our weapons.”

“Weapons? What’s the matter with you two? We don’t have any weapons!” Danny said, starting to shout. “We have nothing.”

“That’s not true,” Karen said calmly. She turned to Peter. “I’ve got a backpack.” She jumped off the twig and grabbed the pack on the ground, lifted it up. “I took it just before Drake shrunk us.”

“Did Rick make it?” somebody asked.

“You bet,” came a voice from the darkness, somewhere to their left. “This doesn’t faze me. And neither does the jungle at night. When I was doing research in the field, in Costa Rica—”

“That’s Rick,” Peter said. “Anyone else?”

From above, there was a thwap! and the splatter of water droplets. And Jenny Linn slid down a leaf and landed at their feet.

“You took your time,” Karen said.

“Got caught on a branch. About ten feet up. Had to work myself free.” Jenny sat cross-legged on the ground, and immediately jumped to her feet. “Whoa. Everything’s wet.”

“It’s a rain forest,” Rick Hutter said, emerging from foliage behind them. His jeans were drenched. “Everybody okay?” He grinned. “How you doing, Danny boy?”

“Fuck off,” Danny said. He was still rubbing his nose.

“Oh come on,” Rick said, “get into the spirit of the thing.” He pointed to the moonlight, streaking down through the canopy of trees overhead. “We’re talking science studies! Isn’t this the perfect Conradian moment? An existential confrontation of man facing raw nature, the real heart of darkness unfettered by false beliefs and literary conceits—”

“Somebody tell him to shut up.”

“Rick, leave the guy alone,” Peter said.

“No, no, not so fast,” Rick said, “because this is important. What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It’s unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn’t care. That’s intolerable to us. How can we live in a world so indifferent to us. So we redefine nature. We call it Mother Nature when it’s not a parent in any real sense of the term. We put gods in trees and air and the ocean, we put them in our households to protect us. We need these human gods for many things, luck, health, freedom, but one thing above all—one reason stands out—we need the gods to protect us from loneliness. But why is loneliness so intolerable? We can’t stand to be alone—why not? Because human beings are children, that’s why.

“But those are all disguises we create for nature. You know how Danny loves to tell us that the science narrative privileges the balance of power. How there’s no objective truth, except for who’s got the power. Power tells the story and everyone accepts it as truth, because power rules.” He took a breath. “But who’s got the balance of power now, Danny? Can you feel it? Take a deep breath. Feel it? No? Then I’ll tell you. The balance of power lies in the hands of the entity that always holds the balance of power—nature. Nature, Danny. Not us. All we can do is go for the ride and try to hang on.”

Peter threw his arm around Rick, and steered him away. “That’s okay for now, Rick.”

“I hate that fucking guy,” Rick said.

“We’re all a little scared.”

“Not me,” Rick said, “I’m cool. I love being half an inch tall. That’s bite size for a bird, and that’s what I am. I’m a freaking hors d’oeuvre for a mynah bird and my chances of surviving another six hours are about one in four, maybe one in five—”

“We must make a plan,” Karen said, her voice calm.

Amar Singh appeared around a log to the left, covered with mud, his shirt torn. He seemed remarkably calm. Peter asked, “Everybody okay?”

They said they were.

“The Nanigen guy,” Peter said. “Hey Kinsky! Are you around?”

“All along,” Jarel Kinsky answered softly, close by. He had been sitting underneath a leaf, his legs drawn up, motionless and saying nothing, watching and listening to the others.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked him.

“You want to keep your voices down,” Kinsky said, speaking to the students as a whole. “They can hear better than we can.”

“They?” Jenny said.

“Insects.”

Silence fell over the group.

“That’s better,” Kinsky said.

They began talking in whispers. Peter said to Kinsky, “Any idea where we are?”

“I think so,” Kinsky answered. “Look over there.”

They turned and looked. A distant light was shining in that direction, buried in the trees. The light cast a glow down along the corner of a wooden building, just visible through the foliage, and the light reflected off panes of glass.

“That’s the greenhouse,” Kinsky went on. “We’re at the Waipaka Arboretum.”

“Oh, God,” Jenny Linn said. “We’re miles from Nanigen.” She sat down on a leaf, and felt something moving under her feet. The movement went on and on, ceaselessly, nudging and bumping at her feet, and then something small crawled up her leg. She plucked it off and tossed it away. It was a soil mite, an eight-legged creature, and harmless. She realized that the soil was full of tiny organisms, all going about their business. “The ground is alive under our feet,” she said.

Peter Jansen knelt down, brushed a small worm from his knee, and faced Jarel Kinsky. “What do you know about being shrunk like this?”

“The term is ‘dimensionally changed,’ ” Kinsky answered. “I’ve never been dimensionally changed, until now. Of course I’ve talked with the field teams.”

Rick Hutter broke in, “I wouldn’t trust anything this guy says. He’s loyal to Drake.”

“Wait,” Peter said calmly. “What are the ‘field teams’?” he asked Kinsky.

“Nanigen has been sending teams into the micro-world. Three people on a team,” Kinsky answered in a whisper. He seemed very afraid of making noise. “They’re dimensionally changed, half an inch tall. They operate the digging machinery and collect samples. They live in the supply stations.”

Jenny Linn said, “You mean those tiny tents we saw?”

“Yes. The teams never stay here for more than forty-eight hours. You begin to get sick if you stay changed for much longer than that.”

“Sick? What do you mean?” Peter asked.

“You get the micro-bends,” Kinsky said.

“Micro-bends?” Peter said.

“It’s an illness that develops in people who are dimensionally changed. The first symptoms appear in about three to four days.”

“What happens?”

“Well—we have some data on the disease, not much. The safety staff began testing animals in the tensor generator. They shrank mice, at first. They kept the shrunken mice in tiny flasks and studied them with a microscope. After a few days, all the shrunken mice died. The mice were hemorrhaging. Next, they shrank rabbits and finally dogs. Again, the animals died with hemorrhages. Necropsies of the animals, after they’d been restored to normal size, showed that there was generalized bleeding at sites of injury. Small cuts bled profusely, and there was internal bleeding, as well. It was discovered that the blood of the animals lacked clotting factors. Essentially, the animals had died of hemophilia—that’s the inability of the blood to form clots. We think that the size-change disrupts enzymatic pathways in the clotting process, but we don’t really know. But we also found that an animal could live for a short while in a shrunken state, as long as the animal was brought back to normal size within a couple of days. We began calling the illness micro-bends, because it reminded us of the bends in scuba diving. As long as an animal’s time in the shrunken state was limited, the animal seemed to be healthy.

“Next, there were several human volunteers, including the man who’d designed the tensor generator. His name was Rourke, I think. Humans could live for a few days in the micro-world with no ill effects, it seemed. But then there was…an accident. The generator broke down and we lost three scientists. They got trapped in the micro-world and couldn’t be returned to normal size. One of the fatalities was the guy who designed the generator. Since then, we’ve had other…problems. If a person is stressed or suffers a major injury, the micro-bends can come on very suddenly, and sooner than usual. So we have lost…more…employees. That’s why Mr. Drake halted operations while we try to learn how to keep people from dying in the micro-world. You see, Mr. Drake really does care about safety…”

“What’s the disease like in humans?” Rick interrupted.

Kinsky went on. “It begins with bruises, especially on your arms and legs. If you have a cut you can bleed endlessly. It’s like hemophilia—you can bleed to death from a small cut. At least that’s what I’m hearing. But they’re keeping the details pretty quiet,” Kinsky said. “I just run the generator.”

“Is there any treatment?” Peter asked.

“The only treatment is decompression. Get the person restored to full size as soon as possible.”

“We’re in trouble…” Danny murmured.

“We need to do an inventory of our assets now,” Karen said decisively. She laid the backpack she’d grabbed in the generator room on top of a dead leaf. With only the moonlight to see by, she opened the pack and spread various things out on the leaf as if it were a table. They gathered around and checked the contents carefully. The backpack contained a first-aid kit, including antibiotics and basic medications; a knife; a short length of rope; a reel, rather like a fishing reel, which was attached to a belt; a windproof lighter; a silver space blanket; a thin waterproof tent; a water-backpacker’s headlamp. There was also a pair of headsets with throat mikes attached to them.

“Those are two-way radios,” Kinsky said. “For communicating with headquarters.”

There was also a very-fine-mesh ladder; and keys or starter controls for some kind of machine not present. Karen put everything but the lamp back into the pack and zipped it shut.

“Pretty useless,” Karen said, getting to her feet and putting on the headlamp. She switched it on, casting the light around, playing it over the plants and leaves. “We really need weapons.”

“Your light—please turn it off—” Kinsky muttered. “It attracts things—”

“What kind of weapons do we need?” Amar asked Karen.

“Say,” Danny interrupted, as if something had just occurred to him. “Are there poisonous snakes in Hawaii?”

“No,” Peter said. “There are no snakes at all.”

“Not many scorpions, either, certainly not in the rain forest. It’s too wet for them here,” Karen King added. “There is a Hawaiian centipede that can deliver a nasty sting to a human being. It could certainly kill us at our present dimension. In fact, a great many animals can kill us. Birds, toads, all sorts of insects, ants, wasps, and hornets—”

“You were talking about weapons, Karen,” Peter said.

“We need some kind of projectile weapon,” Karen said, “something that can kill at a distance—”

“A blowgun,” Rick broke in.

Karen shook her head. “Nah. It would be a tenth of an inch long. No good.”

“Wait, Karen. I could use a hollow piece of bamboo, I could use it full-size, half an inch long.”

Peter said, “And a wooden dart to fit in it.”

“Sure,” Rick said. “The dart sharpened by—”

“Heat,” Amar said, “as the tempering agent. But for poison—”

“Curare,” Peter said, getting up, looking around. “I bet lots of plants around here have—”

Rick interrupted, “That’s my specialty. If we could make a fire, we could boil bark and plant materials, and extract poison. And especially if we can find some piece of metal, iron…to make a dart point…”

“My belt buckle?” Amar said.

“And then what?”

“Boil the stuff. Then test it.”

“That takes a long time.”

“It’s the only way.”

“What about using the skin of a frog?” Erika Moll said. In the night, they heard the croaking of what seemed to be bullfrogs all around them.

Peter shook his head. “We don’t have the right kind here. What you’re hearing are bufos, large toads. They’re the size of your fist. Well, your old fist. They’re gray, not brightly colored. They do manufacture unpleasant skin toxins, they’re called bufotenins, not curare-based compounds of the Central American—”

“All right, for Christ’s sake!” Danny snapped.

“Just explaining…”

“We get the picture!”

Erika put her arm around Peter’s shoulder, nodded to Danny. He was still fussing with his nose, scratching at it with both hands, holding them curved as if they were little paws.

As if he were a mole.

“Cracking up?” Erika whispered fearfully.

Peter nodded.

Amar said, “To continue, the poison you recommend…”

Watching Danny, Peter said, “Bark scrapings of Strychnos toxifera tree, add oleander, sap not leaf, include Chondrodendron tomentosum if it’s available, boil the mixture for at least twenty-four hours.”

“Let’s get started,” Karen King said.

“We could find these plants a lot more easily in the morning light,” Jenny Linn said. “What’s the rush?”

“The rush,” Karen said, “is those halogen lamps back at the entrance. Right now Vin Drake could be heading here to kill us.” She swung the pack over her shoulders and tightened the straps. “So let’s get started.”