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.
Chapter 17
Manoa Valley 29 October, 1:00 p.m.
A pickup truck, black and new, swung into the parking lot by the greenhouses at the Waipaka Arboretum. Don Makele, the security director of Nanigen, got out. He put on a knapsack and clipped a sheath knife to his belt. He knelt on the ground by a clump of white ginger plants growing along the edge of the parking lot, and drew the knife blade. The knife was a KA-BAR, a combat model with a black blade. Delicately, he pushed aside plant stems with the flat of the knife, until he found the little tent: Supply Station Alpha, hidden in the gloom of the ginger leaves. He leaned into the plants to get a better look, and, with the tip of his knife, pulled aside the tiny flap of the tent.
“Anybody home?” he said.
He knew he wouldn’t hear a response, even if a micro-human did answer. He didn’t see any micro-humans, anyway. Station Alpha had been tidied up and battened down a month ago, when it had been abandoned by the last field team to stay there.
He plunged the knife into the soil next to the station and cut a circle around the station, rocking the blade back and forth. Then he yanked the bunker out of the earth, the soil dropping off it, the tent fluttering and shaking on top of the structure. He stood up and banged the bunker on his shoe to knock off clots of dirt, and put the bunker into his knapsack.
Don Makele took out a map and studied it. Next stop, Station Bravo. He walked swiftly along a path that led into Fern Gully. After fifty feet, he plunged off the path into the forest, not reducing his speed, moving easily through the jungle environment. According to the map, Station Bravo was at the south side of a koa tree, and the tree’s trunk had been marked to make the station easy to find. A few minutes of tramping around brought him to the right tree: a reflective orange tag had been nailed to the trunk. He knelt at the spot, found the tent, and peered into it. Nobody. What about the bunker?
He straightened up and called, “Hey!” and stomped on the ground beside the tent. That would send them scurrying out if they were in the bunker. But he saw nothing, no movement, no tiny figures running. He knifed the soil and took out the bunker and put it in his pack with Station Alpha. He consulted the map again, and looked along the hillside, peering up the sloping land that rose to cliffs and eventually to the heights of Tantalus. It seemed like a waste of time to bring all the stations back to Nanigen. The micro-world had swallowed the students without a trace. Still, he had to follow Drake’s orders. It didn’t bother him to be removing the only hope of survival for the students, since the students were dead anyway, for sure. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, just cleaning up the stations.
As he hiked laterally along the hillside, he dug up Stations Foxtrot, Golf, and Hotel. He moved along quickly, at ease in the jungle. Higher on the mountainside, he located Station India and dug it up. Higher still, he found Juliet, and knocked the mud off it. But Station Kilo seemed to have disappeared. Kilo was supposed to be embedded in the ground at the base of a cliff, among a tangle of vines, by a small waterfall. Yet he simply could not find it; eventually, Don Makele decided that Kilo had probably been washed away in a rainstorm. This happened to stations occasionally. The weather was hard on them, because they were so small.
Then he doubled back, going straight downhill into the depths of Fern Gully. He was heading for Station Echo, which lay deep in Fern Gully amid a stand of albesia trees.
“H-E-Y!” The sound thundered through the bunker, waking up all the students. The room jounced, and boomed, and they were flung out of the bunks and tossed around the room, as if a major earthquake had just hit. The lights went out. Crashing sounds of chests and boxes and lab equipment filled the darkness, and the room shook. Peter Jansen understood what was happening. “Someone’s out there!” he shouted. “Get out! Go! Go!” He groped around for a headlamp by his bunk, found it, and switched it on.
The lights came on again. The batteries had been rattling on their contacts.
Rick Hutter grabbed his darts and started scrambling up the ladder, Karen King following him. The others frantically began to grab duffel bags, machetes, whatever they could carry.
Rick, leading the way, reached the top of the ladder. He put his hands on the hatch wheel, when suddenly the room felt like it was being yanked into the air, and he fell off the ladder, and everybody went sprawling. The room turned sideways, and a deafening noise, a hammering sound, made the bunker shake.
“-Ah-stupid-thing-” The words seemed to shake the bunker like artillery shells landing.
He’d cut a circle around Station Echo, gotten it out of the soil, squinted into the door of the tent. The tent had supplies scattered all around inside it. That looked unusual, so he decided to open the hatch and look inside. He pinched the hatch wheel between his thumb and forefinger, but the wheel snapped off. Now he couldn’t get the hatch open. “Shit.” He laid the station on its side on the ground, and knelt, and tapped on the hatch cover with the tip of his knife, but that didn’t work. The hatch was tightly shut and not even the tip of his knife would get it open. So he raised his knife over his head. He would split it open.
