“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?”
