Micro

Chapter 16

Station Echo 29 October, 10:40 a.m.

The seven graduate students gathered at the entrance of the tent. A sign over the tent’s door said, SUPPLY STATION ECHO. PROPERTY OF NANIGEN MICROTECHNOLOGIES. They were in a state of shock, filled with horror over the brutality of Kinsky’s death. They were also extremely surprised at how fast they had run. Danny Minot had lost his tassel loafers. The shoes blew off his feet while he’d made a jaw-dropping dash that would have shamed an Olympic sprinter. Danny stood there in muddy, bare feet, shaking his head. And they had seen Karen King fighting the ants. Her twists and leaps, soaring through the air.

It was clear they could do things in the micro-world they couldn’t have dreamed of before.

They investigated the supply station quickly, as a raiding column of ants could show up at any moment. The tent, stocked with various boxes, sat atop a concrete floor. In the center of the floor, there was a round steel hatch. The steel hatch was operated with a wheel lock, like a bulkhead door of a submarine. Peter Jansen spun the wheel and lifted up the hatch. A ladder went down into darkness. “I’ll check it out.” He put the headlamp on his head and switched it on, and descended the ladder.

He ended up standing in the middle of a dark room. As he swung his headlamp around, the beam fell across bunks and tables. Then he spotted a bank of power switches on the wall. He threw them, and the lights came on.

The room was a concrete bunker. It contained spartan living quarters. Tiered bunks were stacked along two walls. There were laboratory benches, equipped with basic lab supplies. There was a dining area, with a table and benches and a cooking stove. A door led to the bunker’s power source: a pair of D-size flashlight batteries, looming far above their heads. Another door led to a toilet and shower. A chest held some freeze-dried meals in pouches. The bunker was secure against predators, a sort of bomb shelter in a dangerous biological environment.

“It’s not a Disneyland ride out there,” Peter Jansen said. He sat slumped at the table in the bunker, exhausted. He felt unable to think clearly. Images of Kinsky’s death ran through his mind.

Karen King leaned against the wall. She was splashed with ant blood. The blood was gooey and clear, with a slightly yellowish color, and it dried fast.

Danny Minot sat hunched at the dining table. He had resumed picking at his face and nose with his fingertips.

A computer sat on the lab bench. “We could learn something from this,” Jenny Linn said, and switched it on. The computer booted, but a password screen came up. Of course, they didn’t know the password. And Jarel Kinsky wasn’t there to help them with things like that.

“We’re not safe here,” Rick Hutter remarked. “Drake could show up.”

Amar Singh agreed. “I propose, let’s stock up with food and gear and leave immediately.”

“I don’t want to go outdoors,” Erika Moll said, her voice trembling, as she sat down on a bunk. Why had she ever left the university in Munich? She longed for the safe world of European research. These Americans played with fire. Hydrogen bombs, megapower lasers, killer drones, shrunken micro-people…Americans were demon-raisers. Americans awakened technological demons they couldn’t control, yet they seemed to enjoy the power.

“We can’t stay here,” Karen said to her, speaking gently. She could see how frightened Erika was. “The most dangerous organism we face is not an insect. It’s human.”

It was a good point. Peter Jansen suggested that they stick to the original plan: go to the parking lot, try to get on a truck to Nanigen, get into the tensor generator somehow. “We have to get restored to normal size as soon as possible. We don’t have much time.”

“We don’t know how to operate the generator,” Jenny Linn said.

“We’ll cross that bridge later.”

Rick said, “We have some good tools for getting ourselves on the truck, including the rope ladder we found in the pack.” He had been poking around in the supply boxes, and he’d pulled out something: another pair of radio headsets. This meant they now had a total of four communication radios.

“There is only one thing to do,” Danny Minot murmured. “Call for help.” He held up a radio headset.

“You call Nanigen,” Rick said to him, “and Vin Drake will come around looking for us, and not with any magnifying glass. With the toe of his boot.”

Peter suggested that they keep radio silence except in an emergency, in case Drake was listening for them.

“I don’t see the point,” Danny said. “We need to call for help.”

Jenny Linn did not take part in the conversation. Instead, she opened all the cabinets, one by one, and went through them carefully. She found a lab notebook. She opened it and began flipping through the pages. Somebody had jotted handwritten notes on the first few pages—weather readings, logs of sample-gathering activities, mostly. It didn’t seem useful, until she came to the map.

“Look at this, guys,” Jenny said, spreading the notebook on the table.

On a page of the lab notebook, somebody had sketched a rough map of the Manoa Valley. The map showed the locations of ten supply stations, scattered through Fern Gully and partway up the mountain slopes toward Tantalus Peak, at increasing distances from the greenhouses and parking lot. The supply stations were designated by letters of the NATO alphabet, from Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie, up to Kilo. There was an arrow marked TO TANTALUS BASE—GREAT BOULDER. Tantalus Crater wasn’t shown on the map, nor was the base.

The map, as crude and incomplete as it was, still contained valuable information. It showed the basic layout of the supply stations. The location of each supply station was indicated by landmarks around the station—trees, rocks, clumps of ferns—making it possible to find the station as long as you could locate the landmarks. There was a station next to the parking lot. It was Station Alpha, and it was located under a clump of white ginger plants, according to a note on the map.

“We could head for Station Alpha,” Peter Jansen said. “Maybe not stay at Alpha, but at least we could search it for more supplies and information.”

“Why should we go anywhere?” Danny said. “Kinsky was right. We have to negotiate with Vin.”

“Don’t you dare try!” Rick was practically shouting.

“Please, stop this!” Amar Singh said. He couldn’t stand conflict. First there had been all the fighting between Rick and Karen, and now Rick was getting into a hassle with Danny. “Rick, people have different styles. You need to be more tolerant of Danny…”

“Cut the crap, Amar. That guy is going to be the death of us all, with his stupid—”

Peter Jansen could feel the situation spiraling out of control. The one thing that would certainly destroy them would be conflict within the group. They had to become a team, Peter thought, or they would soon be dead. Somehow, he had to get this quarrelsome, catty group of intellectuals to understand that survival required cooperation. He stood up and went to the head of the table, and waited for silence. Eventually they quieted down.

“Are you done squabbling?” he said. “Now I have something to say. We’re not in Cambridge anymore. In the academic world, you guys got ahead by cutting down your rivals and proving you’re smarter than everybody else. In this forest, it’s not about getting ahead, it’s about staying alive. We have to cooperate to survive. And we have to kill whatever threatens us or we will be killed.”

“Oh, it’s kill or be killed,” Danny said dismissively. “An outmoded pseudo-Darwinian philosophy dating back to Victorian times.”

“Danny, we have to do whatever it takes to survive,” Peter said. “But there’s more to survival than just killing. Think about who we are as humans. A million years ago, our ancestors survived on the plains of Africa by operating in teams. Bands is a better word for it—we were bands of humans, back then. A million years ago, we were not at the top of the food chain. All kinds of animals hunted us—lions, leopards, hyenas, wild dogs, crocodiles. But we humans have been dealing with predators for a very long time. We survive with brains, weapons, and cooperation-teamwork. I think we were built for this journey. Let’s think of it as the chance of a lifetime to see incredible things in nature no one has ever seen before. But whatever course of action we decide on, we will have to work together or we’ll die. We’re only as strong as the weakest member of our team.” Peter stopped, wondering if he’d gone too far, if he had sounded too preachy to these grad students.

There was a period of silence as they digested Peter’s speech.

Danny Minot was the first to speak. He turned to Peter. “By ‘weakest member,’ I assume you mean me.”

“I didn’t say that, Danny—”

Danny cut him off. “Excuse me, Peter. I am not a slack-lipped hominid with a beetling brow, clutching a chunk of stone in my hairy-knuckled fist and cheerfully bashing in skulls of leopards. In fact, I am an educated person used to an urban environment. It is not Harvard Square out there. It is a green hell crawling with ants the size of pit bulls. I will stay in this bunker and wait for help.” He rapped on the wall. “It’s ant-proof.”

“Nobody’s going to help you,” Karen said to Danny.

“We’ll see about that.” He went off and sat by himself.

Amar spoke to the others. “Peter is right.” He turned to Peter. “I’m on the team.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, as if he was thinking about something.

Karen said, “I’m on the team, too.”

Erika Moll finally agreed. “Peter is right.”

“I think we need a leader,” Jenny Linn said. “I think Peter should lead us.”

“Peter is the one person here who gets along with everybody in the group,” Rick said, and turned to Peter. “You’re the only person who can lead us.”

It was confirmed quickly by a vote; Danny refused to take part.

Now it was a question of getting the team’s act together.

“First we need to eat. I’m freaking starved,” Rick said.

Indeed, they all felt ravenously hungry. They had been up all night, without food. And there had been that mad dash from the ants.

“We must have burned a lot of calories,” Peter said.

“I have never been so hungry in my life,” Erika Moll said.

“Our bodies are tiny. We probably burn calories a lot faster. Like a hummingbird, you know?” Karen said.

They took out the instant food packets, tore them open, and devoured them, sitting at the table and sprawled around the room. There wasn’t much food, and it vanished in moments. They found a giant block of chocolate, and Karen hacked it up seven ways with her knife. The chocolate disappeared quickly.

Searching the bunker for anything that might be useful on their journey to the parking lot, they found a number of plastic lab bottles with screw lids, and piled them on the table. The bottles could be used as canteens for water, and to store any chemical compounds they might be able to gather. “We’re going to need chemical weapons, just like insects and plants have them,” Jenny Linn said.

“Yeah, and I’ll need a jar to hold my curare,” Rick added.

“Curare,” Karen said. “Right.”

“It’s wicked stuff,” Rick said.

“If you know how to make it.”

“I do!” Rick said huffily.

“Who taught you, Rick? A hunter?”

“I’ve read papers—”

“Papers on curare.” Karen turned to something else, while Rick fumed.

In one chest she had found three steel machetes. Each machete had a belt and holster with a diamond knife-sharpener tucked into a pocket of the belt. Peter Jansen drew a blade and touched it with his thumb. “Wow, that is sharp.” As an experiment, he tapped the blade on the edge of a wooden table, and saw the blade sink into the wood as if it were soft cheese. The machete was far sharper than a scalpel.

“It’s as sharp as a microtome,” he said. “We used one in our lab—remember—for slicing tissue.”

Peter ran the diamond sharpener over the machete, whisking it along the edge. The sharpener was obviously to keep the edge in top condition. “The edge is very fine, so it probably gets dull quickly. But we can sharpen the machete as needed.” The machetes would be useful in cutting a path through vegetation.

Karen King swung a machete around her head. “Nice balance,” she said. “Decent weapon.”

Rick Hutter had stepped backward with alarm as Karen whirled the machete. “You could cut somebody’s head off,” he said to her.

She smirked at him. “I know what I’m doing. You stick to berries and blow-darts.”

“Quit pushing me!” Rick burst out. “What’s your problem?”

Peter Jansen stepped in. Despite their promises to work as a team, it was easier said than done. “Please-Rick-Karen-we’d all appreciate it if you didn’t argue. It’s dangerous for everybody.”

Jenny Linn slapped Rick on the shoulder and said to him, “Karen’s just showing her fear.”

This didn’t sit well with Karen, but she didn’t say anything more. Jenny was right. Karen knew full well that the machetes wouldn’t stop some predators—such as birds, for example. She had been needling Rick because she was afraid. She had revealed her fear to the others, and it embarrassed her. She climbed up the ladder and opened the hatch, and went outdoors to get herself calm. Under the tent, she began investigating the chests that were stored there. She found packets of food in one chest, and many vials and scientific samples in another, probably samples that a team had left behind. She discovered a steel rod, hidden under a tarp. The rod was longer than she was tall. It had a point at one end, while the other end had been enlarged and flattened. For a moment she couldn’t figure out what this enormous metal thing was. Then the scale of the object clicked in her mind, and she knew. She climbed down the ladder and informed the others of what she’d found. “It’s a pin!” she said.

It wasn’t clear what the pin was doing in the tent. Possibly it had been used to pin something to the ground. In any case, the pin was made of steel. It could be shaped into a weapon. “We could use the diamond sharpeners to hone the pin, make it really sharp,” Karen said. “We could put a notch in the tip—that would make a barbed point. A killing point. A barb that would grab in the prey and wouldn’t come loose. A harpoon.”

They had to work on the pin inside the tent, for it was too long to be brought down the ladder. Using the diamond sharpeners, they fell to work cutting and shaping the steel. First they sawed off the flattened head of the pin, which shortened it and gave it better balance, so that a person could hold it and throw it. They took turns filing the point into a notch, to create a barb; the diamond sharpeners worked quickly on the steel. After the work had been done, Peter picked up the harpoon and hefted it. It was a steel pole—massive, gleaming, balanced—yet he handled it as if it weighed almost nothing. In the micro-world, a piece of steel that size was just about heavy enough to do some damage to an insect if you threw it hard and it was sharp enough.

Danny Minot refused to help in any of the preparations. He sat on a bed in the bunker with his arms crossed and knees drawn up, and watched. Peter Jansen felt sorry for him, and went over to him, and said quietly, “Please come with us. You’re not safe here.”

“You said I was the weakest person,” Danny replied.

“We need your help, Danny.”

“For assisted suicide,” he said bitterly, and refused to budge.

Rick Hutter had set about making blow-darts. He went a few paces outside the tent, carrying the machete for protection against ants, and cut several grass stems. Back inside the bunker, he sliced a stem lengthwise, and began stripping out the harder strands of woody material. The grass seemed as tough as bamboo. He shaped the splinters into a couple of dozen darts. The darts still needed to be hardened. He went over to the stove and switched on a coil. He carefully heated and hardened the point of a dart by holding it over the hot coil. When he was finished, he tore open a mattress and pulled out some stuffing.

He needed to fasten a “puff” of soft material to the tail of the blow-dart, so that the dart could be propelled through the tube by a person’s breath. In order to attach this tail-puff to the shaft he needed thread. “Amar—is there any more of that spider silk?”

Amar shook his head. “It got used up saving Peter from the snake.”

No problem. Rick rooted around and found a coil of rope. He cut a short length of the rope, then picked it apart into strands with his fingers. This produced a pile of very strong threads. He held a piece of fluff from the mattress against the end of the dart and wound a thread around it, lashing the tail-puff in place. Now he had a real honest-to-goodness blow-dart-hardened tip, tail-puff, the dart ready to be armed with poison.

Even so, no scientist would assume the dart worked. He would have to test the dart. One of the grass stems, full-length, made a blow tube. Rick fitted the dart into the blow tube, took aim at the wooden frame of a bunk, and blew. The dart zinged across the room, hit the bunk…and bounced off.

“Shit,” he muttered. The dart couldn’t penetrate wood. That meant it would never get through an insect’s exoskeleton, either.

“Fail,” Karen remarked.

“The dart needs a metal tip,” Rick said.

Where to find the metal?

Tableware. Stainless steel tableware. Rick took a steel fork from the kitchen area and bent back one of the fork’s tines. He cut off the tine using the edge of a diamond sharpener, then honed the tine into an exceedingly sharp point. He lashed the steel point to a grass dart, and fired the dart at the bunk. This time, the dart embedded itself in the wood of the bunk with a satisfying thwock, and stayed there, trembling. “Now that will drive into a beetle,” Rick said. One by one, he cut the tines off all the forks in the bunker, until he had created a supply of more than two dozen darts and several blow tubes. He placed the darts in a plastic box he’d found in the lab, to keep them dry and protected from damage.

Rick still had to make curare, but in order to do that he needed to collect more ingredients. Like a fine sauce, a good curare contained a variety of ingredients cooked together, a chemistry of horrors. All he had for an ingredient, at the moment, was the chinaberry, which he’d stored upstairs in the tent. Nobody wanted a toxic chinaberry to be kept inside the bunker. It might give off fumes; it might make them sick. For the same reason, he could not boil curare on the stove. He did not have the ingredients for curare, anyway, and even if he did, everybody could get poisoned if he tried to make curare inside the bunker. The fumes would probably kill them.

He would have to boil curare outdoors over an open fire.

They also turned up a pair of binoculars and two more headlamps, and packed them into the duffels. Amar Singh dug up a roll of duct tape. “We can’t possibly survive in a super-jungle without duct tape,” Amar joked.

Rick Hutter opened a chest and shouted, “A gold mine!” And he pulled out a laboratory apron, rubber gloves, and safety goggles. “This is just what I need for making curare. Excellent, excellent!” He stuffed the things in a duffel bag. He’d have to cook the curare in a vessel of some kind. In the bunker’s tiny kitchen facility, at the bottom of a shelf near the floor, he found a large aluminum pot. He lashed the pot to his duffel pack and then put the pack on his back, testing its weight. He was surprised. The pack, though enormous, felt very light. “I’m as strong as an ant,” Rick said.

Jenny Linn rooted through a supply box and discovered a military compass. The compass, battered and worn, was the type used by American soldiers ever since the Korean War. It could be used to keep them going in a straight line. But none of them could find a GPS unit anywhere at the station.

“It’s because GPS can’t tell us where we are,” Peter explained. “A GPS unit is accurate to about ten meters. At our small size, that’s equivalent to a one-kilometer accuracy. In other words, GPS can’t tell our location more precisely than a kilometer in any direction, by our measure of things. A compass is much more accurate than GPS for us.”

Suddenly, after the meal and all the work, a desire for sleep came over all of them. Peter’s watch showed that the time was just before noon.

“Let’s finish packing up our gear later,” Karen King suggested. They hadn’t slept the night before, but they were used to pulling all-nighters in the lab. Karen prided herself on her stamina, but even so, she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Why am I so tired all of a sudden? she thought. Maybe it had something to do with their small bodies, all the calories they’d burned…but she couldn’t focus…And she couldn’t resist crawling into a bunk, where she fell instantly asleep. They all slept.