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.
