Micro

Chapter 14

Manoa Valley 29 October, 4:00 a.m.

The seven students and Kinsky walked through the forest single-file, listening, watching, steeped in darkness and deep shadow, and enveloped in alien sounds. As Rick Hutter moved along, stumbling his way among leaves on the ground and scrambling under dead branches that seemed bigger than fallen redwoods, he held a homemade grass spear across his shoulder. Karen King wore the backpack, and kept her knife gripped in her hand. Peter Jansen led the group on point, peering around, trying to pick a route. Somehow, in his quiet way, Peter Jansen had become the leader. They were not using the headlamp, for they didn’t want to attract any predators. Peter couldn’t see much of the terrain in front of him. “The moon has gone down,” he said.

“Dawn must be—” Jenny Linn began.

A terrible cry drowned her out. It began as a low wail and rose into a series of throaty shrieks, coming from the depths somewhere above. It was an eerie sound, dripping with violence.

Rick spun around, holding his spear up. “What the hell was that?”

“A bird singing, I think,” Peter said. “We’re hearing sounds at a lower pitch.” He looked at his watch: 4:15 a.m. It was a digital watch. It was running normally, even when shrunk. “Dawn’s coming,” he said.

“If we could find a supply station, we could try to call Nanigen on the radio,” Jarel Kinsky suggested. “If they heard our signal, they would rescue us.”

“Drake would kill us,” Peter said.

Kinsky didn’t argue, but it was clear he didn’t agree with Peter.

Peter went on, “We have to get ourselves into the tensor generator, so that we can be restored to full size. To do that, we have to get back to Nanigen. Somehow. But I think it would be a mistake to ask Drake for help.”

“Can we call 911?” Danny broke in.

“Great idea, Danny. Just tell us how,” Rick said scornfully.

Jarel Kinsky explained that the radios in the supply stations only had a range of about a hundred feet. “If somebody from Nanigen is nearby and listening at the right frequency, they can communicate with us. Otherwise nobody will pick up our signal.” And the radios, he explained, didn’t broadcast on any frequency that the police or emergency services used, anyway. “The Nanigen micro-sized radios broadcast at around seventy gigahertz,” Kinsky explained. “That’s a very high frequency. It works well for the field teams over short distances, but it’s useless for long-distance communication.”

Jenny Linn said, “When Drake was showing us around the arboretum, he mentioned there’s a shuttle truck that goes to Nanigen from here, from Manoa Valley. We could stow away on the truck.”

Everybody fell silent. Jenny had come up with what sounded like a good idea. Indeed, as they thought about it, Vin Drake had mentioned a shuttle truck. But if the field teams had been withdrawn from the micro-world, would the shuttle still be running? Peter turned to Jarel Kinsky. “Is the shuttle truck still making runs to Nanigen, do you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“What time does the truck normally arrive at the arboretum?”

“Two o’clock,” Kinsky answered.

“Where does it stop?”

“The parking lot. Next to the greenhouse.”

Everybody absorbed that, thinking about it.

“I think Jen’s right. We should try to get on that truck,” Peter said. “Get ourselves back to Nanigen, then try to get into the tensor generator—”

“Wait—how the hell are we going to climb up onto a truck when we’re this small?” Rick Hutter demanded. He faced Peter Jansen. “It’s a crazy plan. What if there’s no truck? Nanigen is fifteen miles from here. We’re a hundred times smaller than we used to be. Think about it. It means that one mile is like a hundred miles for us. If it’s fifteen miles from here to Nanigen, that’s really like fifteen hundred miles for us. Basically we have to do what Lewis and Clark did. And we have to do it in less than four days or we’ll die of the bends. It’s a shitty bet, guys.”

“Rick’s idea is to wring his hands and give up,” Karen said.

Rick turned on her angrily. “We need to get practical—”

“You’re not being practical. You’re whining,” Karen said to him.

Peter tried to defuse the argument. He put himself between Rick and Karen, figuring he could make himself a target of their wrath rather than let them continue to pick at each other. “Please,” he said, putting his hand on Rick’s shoulder. “Arguing isn’t going to help anybody. Let’s take things one step at a time.”

The group set off again, walking in silence.

Half an inch tall on the forest floor, they had difficulty seeing much of anything, even as the sun rose. Ferns, thick and abundant, grew everywhere, and were especially difficult to deal with, for they blocked the view and created deep shadows. They lost sight of the greenhouse building, and couldn’t find any recognizable landmarks. Still, they kept moving. The sun broke forth, and beams of light slanted through the forest canopy.

In the daylight, they saw the soil more clearly. It was churning with small organisms—nematode worms, soil mites, and other little, abundant creatures. This is what Jenny Linn had felt wriggling against her feet in the dark. The soil mites were very small, spider-like creatures of many different species, crawling around or hiding in cracks in the soil. The mites would have been almost invisible to the naked eye of a normal-size person, but in relation to the micro-humans the soil mites were much larger. To the micro-humans, the mites appeared to be anywhere from the size of grains of rice up to the size of golf balls. Many of the mites had small, egg-shaped bodies covered with thick armor and spiky hairs. The mites were arachnids; Karen King, the arachnologist, kept stopping to gaze at them. She didn’t recognize a single mite; they all seemed to be unknown, a vast number of different kinds of mites. She couldn’t get over the richness of nature: here was biodiversity as far as the eye could see. The mites were everywhere. They reminded her of crabs on a rocky seashore: small and harmless, busy and scuttling, carrying on their small, hidden lives. She picked up a mite and set it down on the palm of her hand.

The creature seemed so delicate, so perfect. Karen felt her spirits lifting. What was going on? To her surprise, she realized that she felt happy in this strange new world. “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I feel like I’ve been searching all my life to find a place like this. It’s like I’m coming home.”

“Not me,” Danny said.

The mite walked up Karen’s arm, exploring it.

“Watch out, it could bite you,” Jenny Linn said.

“Not this little guy,” Karen answered. “See his mouth parts? They’re adapted for sucking up detritus—dead stuff. He eats crud.”

“How do you know it’s a he?”

Karen pointed to the mite’s abdomen. “Penis.”

“A guy’s a guy, no matter how small,” Jenny remarked.

As they hiked along Karen grew animated. “Mites are incredible. They’re highly specialized. Many mites are parasites, and they’re particular about their hosts. There’s a kind of mite that lives only on the eyeballs of a certain fruit bat—nowhere else. There’s another mite that lives only on the anus of a sloth—”

“Please, Karen!” Danny erupted.

“Get over it, Danny, it’s just nature. About half of all people on earth have mites living in their eyelashes. Many insects get mites on them, too. In fact, there are mites that live on other mites—so even mites get mites.”

Danny sat down and pulled a mite off his ankle. “Little monster chewed a hole in my sock.”

“Must be a detritus eater,” Jenny said.

“That’s not funny, Jenny.”

“Anybody want to try my natural latex skin cream?” Rick Hutter said. “Maybe it’ll keep the mites off.”

They stopped and Rick took out a plastic lab bottle, and passed it around. They rubbed small amounts of the cream on their faces, hands, and cuffs. It had a pungent smell. And it worked. It did seem to repel mites.

For Amar Singh, the reality of the micro-world seemed to assault his senses. He noted that being small even changed the sensations he felt on his skin. His first impression of the micro-world involved the feeling of air flowing over his face and hands, tugging at his shirt and ruffling his hair. The air seemed thicker, almost syrupy, and he could feel every ripple of breeze as the air coiled and flowed around his body. He waved his arm, and felt the air sliding between his fingers. Moving through the air in the micro-world was a bit like swimming. Because their bodies were so small, the friction of air passing over their bodies became more pronounced. Amar staggered a little, feeling a puff of air pushing him sideways. “We’re going to have to get our sea legs in this place,” he said to the others. “It’s like learning how to walk all over again.” The others were having similar difficulties: staggering, feeling the air tugging at them, and sometimes miscalculating the steps they took. Trying to jump up on something, they would jump too far. Their bodies were clearly stronger in the micro-world, but they hadn’t learned how to control their movements.

It felt like moonwalking.

“We don’t know our own strength,” Jenny said. She gathered herself, leaped high, and grabbed the edge of a leaf in both hands. She hung by her hands for a moment, then from only one hand—it was easy. She let go and fell back to the ground.

Rick Hutter had taken a turn wearing the backpack. Though it was loaded with gear, he discovered he could jump up and down pretty easily even with the pack on—and he got himself fairly high in the air without much effort. “Our bodies are stronger and lighter in this world, because gravity’s no big deal here.”

“Small has its advantages,” Peter remarked.

“I don’t see them,” Danny Minot said.

As for Amar Singh, a feeling of dread crept over him. What lived among these leaves? Meat-eaters. They were many-legged animals with jointed armor and unusual ways to kill prey. Amar had been raised in a devout Hindu family—his parents, immigrants from India who’d settled in New Jersey, did not eat meat. He had seen his father open a window and chase a fly out rather than kill it. Amar had always been a vegetarian; he had never been able to eat animals for protein. He believed that all animals were capable of suffering, including insects. In the laboratory, he worked with plants, not animals. Now, in the jungle, he wondered if he would have to kill an animal and eat its meat in order to survive. Or whether an animal would eat him. “We’re protein,” Amar said. “That’s all we are. Just protein.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rick asked him.

“We’re meat walking on two legs.”

“You sound kind of gloomy, Amar.”

“I’m being a realist.”

“At least…it’s interesting,” Jenny Linn remarked. Jenny noted the smell of the micro-world: it had a smell all its own. A complicated earthy scent filled her nose, and it wasn’t bad, actually quite nice, in a way. It was an odor of soil mixed with a thousand unknown scents, some sweet, some musky, drifting in the liquid air. Many of the smells were pleasant, even lovely, like exquisite perfumes.

“We’re smelling pheromones, the signaling chemicals that animals and plants use for communication,” Jenny said to the others. “It’s the invisible language of nature.” It lifted her spirits—here, she could experience the full spectrum of scents in the natural world for the first time. This revelation both thrilled her and made her feel afraid.

Jenny held a chunk of soil up to her nose and sniffed it. It was teeming with tiny nematode worms and numerous mites and several plump little creatures called water bears, and it smelled faintly like antibiotics. She knew why: the soil was full of bacteria, and many of the bacteria were different kinds of Streptomyces. “You can smell Streptomyces,” Jenny said to the others. “They’re one of the types of bacteria that make antibiotics. Modern antibiotics are derived from them.” The soil was also laced with thin threads of fungus known as hyphae. Jenny pulled a fungal thread out of the soil: it was stiff but slightly stretchy. A cubic inch of soil could hold several miles of these threads of fungus.

Something drifted past Jen’s eyes, falling downward through the thick air. It was a small nugget the size of a peppercorn, studded with knobs. “What on earth is that?” she said, stopping in her tracks to watch it. The nugget landed at her feet. Another fell slowly past. She put out her hand and caught it in her palm, then rolled it between thumb and forefinger. It was tough and hard, like a small nut. “It’s pollen,” she said with wonder. She looked up. There was a hibiscus tree overhead, bursting into a profusion of white flowers, like a cloud. For some reason she could not explain, her heart leaped at the sight of it. For a few moments, Jenny Linn felt glad to be very small.

“I think it’s kind of…wonderful here,” Jenny said, turning slowly around, looking up at the clouds of flowers, while a steady snow of pollen fell around her. “I never imagined this.”

“Jenny, we need to keep moving.” Peter Jansen had stopped to wait for her, and was shepherding people along.

As for Erika Moll, the entomologist, she did not feel happy at all. She was experiencing a growing sensation of fear. She knew enough about insects to be extremely afraid of them right now. They have armor and we don’t, Erika thought. Their armor is made of chitin. It’s bioplastic armor, light and super-tough. She ran her fingers over her arm, feeling the delicacy of her skin, the downy hair. We’re soft, she thought. We’re edible. She didn’t say anything to the others, but felt a choking sense of terror seething below the surface of her calm. She was afraid her fear would betray her, that she would lose control of herself in a panic. Erika Moll compressed her lips, and clenched her hands, and, trying to keep her fear under control, kept walking.

Peter Jansen called for a halt. They rested, sitting on the edges of leaves. Peter wanted to pick Jarel Kinsky’s brain. Kinsky knew a lot about the tensor generator, since he operated it. If they could somehow get themselves back to Nanigen, and could get themselves inside the tensor generator room, would they be able to operate the machine? How would they do it, if they were tiny? Peter asked Kinsky, “Would we need to get help from a normal-size person to run the machine?”

Kinsky looked doubtful. “I’m not sure,” he said, and poked at the ground with a grass spear. “I heard a rumor that the man who designed the tensor generator put a small-size emergency control in it that a micro-human can operate. I presume this tiny control panel is somewhere in the control room. I’ve looked for it, but I’ve never found it. There’s nothing in the engineering drawings, either. But if we could find the tiny control panel, I can operate it.”

“We’ll need your help,” Peter said.

Kinsky lifted the spear from the soil and gazed at a mite that walked along the spear, waving its forelegs. “All I want is to get home to my family,” he said softly, and shook his spear, tossing the mite away.

“Your boss couldn’t care less about your family,” Rick Hutter snapped at Kinsky.

“Rick doesn’t have a family,” Danny Minot whispered to Jenny Linn. “He doesn’t even have a girlf—”

Rick lunged at Danny, who scrambled away, shouting, “You can’t solve a problem with violence, Rick!”

“It would solve you,” Rick muttered.

Peter took Rick by the shoulder and squeezed it, restraining him, as if to say, Stay cool. To Kinsky he said, “Are there any other possibilities for getting back to Nanigen? Besides the shuttle truck, which might not exist.”

Kinsky bowed his head, thinking. After some time he said: “Well—we could try to get to Tantalus Base.”

“What’s Tantalus Base?”

“It’s a bioprospecting facility in Tantalus Crater, on the mountain ridge above this valley.” Kinsky pointed vaguely toward the mountain, which was only a green shape, barely visible through gaps in the tangled forest. “The base is somewhere up there.”

Jenny Linn said, “Vin Drake mentioned Tantalus during the tour.”

“I remember,” Karen said.

“Is the base open?” Peter asked Kinsky.

“I don’t think so. People died at Tantalus. There were predators.”

“What kind?” Karen demanded.

“Wasps, I heard. But,” Kinsky went on musingly, “there were micro-planes at Tantalus Base.”

“Micro-planes?”

“Small aircraft. Our size.”

“Could we fly to Nanigen?”

“I don’t know what the range of these aircraft is,” Kinsky answered. “I don’t know if any of them were left at the base.”

“How far above us is Tantalus Base?”

“It’s two thousand feet above Manoa Valley,” Kinsky answered.

“Two thousand feet up!” Rick Hutter exploded. “That’s…impossible for people our size.”

Kinsky shrugged. The others said nothing.

Peter Jansen took charge. “Okay, here’s what I think we should do. First, let’s try to find a supply station and take what we can from it. Then we’ll try to get to the parking lot. We’ll wait there for the shuttle truck. We have to get back there as soon as possible.”

“It’s obvious we’re going to die,” Danny Minot said, his voice cracking.

“We can’t just do nothing, Danny,” Peter said, trying to keep his voice even-sounding. He sensed Danny could break down into a panic at the drop of a hat, and that would be dangerous for the whole group.

The others went along with Peter’s plan, some of them grumbling—but nobody had a better idea. They took turns drinking water from a dewdrop on a leaf, and began moving again, looking for a trail, a tent, or any trace of human presence. Small plants near the ground arched over them, sometimes forming tunnels. They wound their way through the tunnels, and wandered past the trunks of stupendous trees. But there was no sign of a supply station.

“Okay, so we’re going to bleed to death if we don’t get the hell out of here fast,” Rick Hutter said, as they hiked along. “And we can’t find a damn supply station. Plus we’ve got a psychopathic giant looking to kill us. And I’ve got a blister. Is there anything else I need to worry about?” he asked, sounding very sarcastic.

“Ants,” Kinsky replied calmly.

“Ants?” Danny Minot broke in, his voice quavering. “What about ants?”

“Ants are a problem, I’ve heard,” Kinsky answered.

Rick Hutter stopped in front of a large yellow fruit lying on the ground. He looked up and all around. “Yes!” he said. “That’s a chinaberry tree. Melia azederach. The berry is highly poisonous, especially to insects and insect larvae. It contains around twenty-five different volatiles, principally 1-cinnamoyl compounds. This berry is absolute death to insects. It can be an ingredient for my curare.” He took off the backpack and stuffed the chinaberry into it. The berry filled much of the pack, and loomed out of the top of the pack, a bright yellow ovoid, sort of like a giant melon.

Karen glared at him. “It’s going to leak poison.”

“Nope.” Rick grinned and tapped on the yellow berry. “Tough skin.”

Karen gave Rick a skeptical look. “It’s your life,” she said curtly. The group moved on.

Danny Minot kept falling behind. His face had gotten red, and he kept wiping his forehead with his hands. Finally he took off his sport coat and threw it to the ground. His tassel loafers had gotten coated with mud. He sat on a leaf and started scratching inside his shirt, and pulled out a single pollen grain, and held it between thumb and forefinger. “Does anybody know I have serious allergies? If one of these objects gets up my nose I could go into shock.”

Karen gave a scornful laugh. “You aren’t that allergic! If you were, you’d be dead by now.”

Danny flicked it away, and the grain danced off, spinning as it drifted through the air.

Amar Singh couldn’t get over the profusion of life, the small creatures that seemed to exist in every nook and cranny of the micro-world. “Gosh! I wish we had a camera. I want to document this.”

They were young scientists, and the micro-world revealed a wonderland of unknown life. They suspected they were seeing creatures that had never been noticed or given names. “You could get a dissertation out of every square foot of this place,” Amar remarked. He began thinking he would do just that. He could get himself one incredible PhD out of this trip. If I survive, he reminded himself.

Little torpedo-shaped creatures with jointed bodies and six legs were crawling about on the ground. They were quite small and were all over the place. Some were sucking up strands of fungus as if they were eating spaghetti. As the humans walked along, every now and then one of these creatures would get startled, make a loud snapping noise, and flip high into the air, spinning end over end.

Erika Moll stopped to examine one of them; she picked it up and held it, while it struggled, snapping its tail with vigorous clicking sounds.

“What are these things?” Rick asked, pulling one out of his hair.

“They’re called springtails,” Erika Moll said. In the normal world, she explained, springtails are extremely small. “No bigger than the dot over an i on a page of text,” she said. The animal had a spring mechanism in its abdomen, she explained, that propelled it long distances, helping it escape from predators. As if on cue, the springtail flung itself off her hand, soaring into the air and out of sight beyond a fern.

Springtails kept bouncing into the air as they moved along, disturbed by their footsteps. Peter Jansen led the way. Sweat dripped from his body. He realized their bodies were losing moisture fast.

“We need to make sure we drink enough water,” he said to the others. “We could dry out really fast.” They found a clump of moss hung with droplets of dew, and they gathered around it. They drank from dewdrops, cupping the water in their hands. The surface of the water was sticky, and they had to swat the water to break the surface tension. As Peter lifted a bit of water to his mouth, it heaped up into a blob in his hands.

They came to a massive tree trunk. It soared up from a sprawling buttress of roots. As they worked their way around the roots, a sharp smell became apparent. They began to hear thrumming, tapping sounds, like rain falling. Peter, who was leading the way, climbed on top of a root and came in sight of a pair of low walls, snaking across the ground and out of sight. The walls were made of bits of dirt stuck together with some kind of dried substance.

Between the walls a column of ants was moving, streaming in both directions. The walls protected an ant highway. In one spot, the walls extended into a tunnel.

Peter crouched down and motioned to the others to stop. They moved forward cautiously, until they were lying on their stomachs and looking down on the ant column. Were the ants dangerous? Each ant was nearly as long as his forearm. Not that big, Peter thought; and he felt relieved, for somehow he had expected ants to be much larger than this. But there were certainly a lot of them. They flowed swiftly by the hundreds along their road and through the little tunnel they’d built.

Their bodies were reddish brown in color, and prickly with hair. Their heads were shining black, as black as coal. The odor of the ants drifted from the ant highway like exhaust coming from freeway traffic. The smell was tart and acidic, yet perfumed with a delicate fragrance. “That sharp smell is formic acid. It’s a defense,” Erika Moll explained, as she knelt down, watching the ants with great intensity.

Jenny Linn said, “The sweet smell is a pheromone. It’s probably the colony scent. The ants use that scent to identify each other as members of the same colony.”

Erika continued, “They’re all females. They’re all daughters of their queen.”

Some of the ants were carrying dead insects or pieces of dismembered insects. The food carriers were all traveling in the same direction along the highway, toward the left. “The nest entrance is that way. It’s where they’re carrying the food,” Erika added, pointing to the left.

“Do you know the species?” Peter asked her.

Erika searched her mind for the name. “Um…Hawaii doesn’t have any native ants. All ants in Hawaii are invading species. They’ve arrived here with humans. I’m pretty sure these ones are Pheidole megacephala.”

“Do they have a name in English?” Rick asked. “I’m just an ignorant ethnobotanist.”

“It’s called the bigheaded ant,” Erika went on. “It was found originally on the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, but it’s now spread all over the world. It’s the most common ant in Hawaii.” The bigheaded ant had turned out to be one of the most destructive invasive insects on the planet, Erika explained. “The bigheaded ants have done a lot of damage to the ecosystem of these islands,” she said. “They attack and kill native Hawaiian insects. They’ve nearly wiped out some Hawaiian insect species. They also kill nesting baby birds.”

“That doesn’t sound good for us,” Karen said. A baby bird, she realized, would be much larger than they were as micro-humans.

“I don’t see what’s big about their heads,” Danny remarked.

Erika said, “These ones are minor workers. The majors have the big heads.”

“Majors?” Danny asked nervously. “What are they?”

“The majors are soldiers,” Erika went on. “The bigheaded ant has two castes-minors and majors. The minors are workers. They’re small and plentiful. The majors are the warriors, the guards. They’re large and uncommon.”

“So what do the big-headed soldiers look like?”

Erika shrugged. “Big heads.”

There were so many ants, and each ant seemed filled with inhuman energy. One ant by itself certainly didn’t pose a danger, but thousands of them…excited…hungry…Despite the threat, the young scientists couldn’t help gazing at the ants with fascination. Two ants stopped and tapped their antennae together, and then one of the ants began wagging its rear end and making a rattling sound. The other ant obligingly vomited a droplet of liquid into the other’s mouthparts. Erika explained what was going on: “She was begging food from her nest-mate. She wagged her rear end and made those scratchy sounds to say she was hungry. It’s the ant’s version of a dog’s whine—”

Danny interrupted. “I fail to see the joy of watching an ant blow lunch into another ant’s mouth. Let’s go, please.”

The ant highway wasn’t very wide. They could have easily jumped over it, but they decided to avoid the ant column rather than risk trouble. As Peter put it, “We don’t want an ant to latch on to someone’s ankle.”

Jarel Kinsky had stopped, and he was staring up at the branches of the great buttressed tree, which soared over their heads. “I know this tree,” he said. “It’s a giant albesia tree. There’s a supply station on the other side of it, I’m pretty sure.” He clambered up onto a root, and walked along the root for a distance, and hopped down. “Yes,” he said. “I think we’re getting close.” Kinsky took over the lead from Peter, and began heading toward the left around the albesia tree, pushing his way through dead fern leaves, striking at things with a grass-stem spear, knocking leaves and plants aside.

Peter Jansen dropped back to the rear. He had not liked the look of the ants and wanted to keep an eye on them as the group moved along. Rick Hutter was the last in line, moving slowly with the pack on his back, carrying the chinaberry, and holding his spear. “Hey Rick, can I take your spear for a while? I’ll bring up the rear,” Peter said.

Rick nodded, handed him the spear, and kept walking.

Kinsky, meanwhile, dragged a leaf aside, and said loudly, “If we can get back to Nanigen, we’ll have to find the hidden console so we can operate the generator, even if Mr. Drake doesn’t want—” At that moment Jarel Kinsky froze in his tracks. Ahead in the distance, beyond the roots of the tree, stood the peak of a tent.

“A station! A station!” Kinsky shouted, and he started running toward the tent.

He didn’t see the entrance of the ant nest.

It was an artificial tunnel, fashioned from bits of glued dirt, emerging from the base of a palm tree. Kinsky ran right past the tunnel mouth. Standing around the tunnel, in guard positions, were dozens of bigheaded soldier ants. The soldiers were two to three times larger than the workers. Their bodies were dull red, covered with sparse, bristly hair. Their heads were gleaming black and massively oversized, packed with muscles and plated with armor, and fitted with mandibles designed for fighting. Their eyes were black marbles.

They spotted Kinsky as he ran toward the tent.

Instantly all the soldiers charged. Kinsky noticed the giant ants running toward him, and he swerved. But the soldiers had fanned out. They converged on Kinsky, coming from different directions, a strategy that cut off his escape. Kinsky stopped running and backed up inside a closing ring of ant soldiers, holding his grass spear over his head. “No!” he shouted. He slashed at a soldier with the spear, but the ant grabbed the spear in its mandibles and broke off its point. Several soldiers darted in and began to pull Kinsky to the ground, while one ant closed its mandibles around Kinsky’s wrist. He shouted and shook his hand, whirling the ant around, trying to make it let go. But the ant had clamped on his wrist and was shaking its head, bulldogging Kinsky. His hand came off, and the ant flew away and hit the ground running, with the hand in its mandibles. Kinsky screamed and went down on his knees, cradling his severed wrist, which spouted blood. A soldier climbed up Kinsky’s back, fastened its jaws behind his ear and began tearing off Kinsky’s scalp. Kinsky fell to the ground writhing. Within moments the soldiers had him spread-eagled and were pulling on his arms and legs from different directions; they were drawing and quartering the man, attempting to tear him limb from limb. A soldier got its mandibles fastened under his chin, and his screams ended with a guttural noise as blood spurted from his throat and drenched the ant’s head. Smaller workers joined the attack, and Kinsky seemed to disappear under a pile of frantic ants.

Peter Jansen had run forward, waving a spear, shouting at the ants, trying to drive them off Kinsky, but it was too late. Peter stopped and stood his ground before the mass of struggling soldiers, holding the spear and watching the horror. He could buy time for the others to get away, he thought, and he started advancing toward the ants. Then he noticed that Karen King stood beside him, holding her knife. “Get out of here,” Peter said to her.

“No,” she said to him. She crouched, facing the ants, holding her knife in front of her. She could delay the ants, maybe, give the others time to escape. Meanwhile, more soldiers poured out of the nest. They began hunting around, seeking enemies. A soldier raced toward Peter and Karen, its mandibles wide.

Peter thrust his spear at the ant. The ant dodged it and went for him, moving extremely fast.

“Leave me, Peter!” Karen King shouted. She backed away from the ants. Then she leaped into the air, soaring far higher than a normal human could ever jump, and landed catlike away from the ants. At the same time, she pulled from her belt the spray bottle of defensive chemicals that she’d planned to show to Vin Drake. Benzos. Ants didn’t like benzos, she was pretty sure of that. She sprayed the stuff toward an advancing ant. The ant stopped instantly, turned around…and ran away.

“Yeah!” she yelled. The spray worked. It made them run like rabbits.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the others running away from the ant nest. Good. Buying them time. She kept spraying, and the spray held the ants back, stopped their attacks. But the bottle had contained only a small amount of the liquid. And still more soldier ants were breaking out of the nest. The nest had gone into full alarm. An ant leaped up onto Karen, landing on her chest, tearing her shirt, and it began snapping at her neck.

“Hai!” she shouted and grabbed the ant behind its head, held it up in the air, and with her other hand slammed her knife into the ant’s head. The blade punched through the ant’s head, and a clear liquid squirted out—it was hemolymph, insect blood. Instantly she flung the ant away. It landed on the ground and went into convulsions, its brain destroyed. But the ants had no fear, no sense of self-preservation, and there seemed to be no end to their numbers. As the ants closed in on her, Karen jumped away, soaring head over heels backward like a circus tumbler, and again landed on her feet.

And then she ran.

Ahead of her, she saw the other humans running explosively fast, driven by fear, leaping over leaves and fern stems, dodging things, fleeing like gazelles. How can I run this fast? I’ve never run so fast in my life…Karen thought. Clearly their bodies were much stronger and faster in the micro-world. It gave Karen a feeling of superhuman power and exhilaration. She leaped over obstacles like a hurdle runner, clearing things in a series of incredible jumps. She realized she was sprinting at about fifty miles an hour, in the scale of the micro-world. I killed an ant. With a knife and my bare hands.

They soon got out of the visual range of the ants. Ahead, in the distance, stood the tent.

Worker ants continued to butcher Kinsky’s body. They bit off the arms and legs and cut the torso into chunks, making cracking sounds as they sheared through the ribs and spine, yanking out the man’s viscera. The ants drank the spilled blood, making sucking noises. A welter of torn clothing, blood, and intestines was strewn about, while the ants began transporting the meat underground.

Karen King stopped running for a moment to look back, and she saw the ants carry Kinsky’s head down the hole. The severed head stared back as it went down, pulled by workers. It seemed to hold a look of surprise.