“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
