of her, with her spiders, her temper, her drive in the lab. She knew she had a hot temper. Maybe it was just the way she was. Maybe she would be happier alone, the way Ben Rourke liked being a hermit. Right now her life in Cambridge seemed in another universe, almost. “What if I wanted to stay in the micro-world, Ben? Do you think I could survive?”
There was a long silence. Rick Hutter stared at her.
Rourke got up and threw another piece on the fire, and said, “Why would you want to stay here, Ms. King?”
Karen gazed into the fire. “It’s dangerous here…but it’s…so beautiful. I’ve seen…things I never dreamed of.”
Rourke got up and helped himself to more stew, and went back to his chair, and blew on the stew to cool it. After a while he said, “There is a Zen saying that a wise man can live comfortably in hell. It isn’t so bad here, actually. You just need to learn some extra skills.”
Karen was watching the smoke go up through the hole in the ceiling. She wondered where it went. She realized that Rourke must have dug the chimney himself. What a lot of work just to have a fire. What would it be like, trying to survive in the micro-world? Ben had done it. Could she?
Rick turned to Karen. “Just a reminder. Our time is running out.”
Rick was right. “Ben,” Karen said. “We need to get back to Nanigen.”
He leaned back, looking at them through narrowed eyes. “I’ve been wondering if I can trust you.”
“You can, Ben.”
“I hope so. Come along and we’ll see about getting you home. Do you have any iron on your bodies?” He made Karen leave her knife behind.
The living room had an alcove at the end of a short tunnel, closed off by a door. Rourke flung open the door. Behind it, a huge disc of gray, shiny metal lay flat on the floor, with a hole in the center, like a doughnut. “It’s a neodymium magnet, two thousand Gauss,” he explained. “Superstrong field. After Farzetti and Cowell died, I got sick. But I had a hypothesis that a strong magnetic field could stabilize the dimensional fluctuations that cause certain enzymatic reactions in the body to go wrong, like blood clotting. So I put myself inside this magnetic field and stayed there for two weeks. I was sick as hell. Nearly died. But I came out of it all right. Now I think I’m immune to micro-bends.”
“So if we stayed inside this magnet, we might survive?” Rick asked.
“Might,” Rourke emphasized.
“I’d rather get into the generator,” Rick said.
“Of course. That’s why I’m going to show you the secret of Tantalus,” Rourke said. He led them out of the magnet room, down a long tunnel, through a bend, and up a sloping tunnel. They followed him, wondering where he was taking them. Ben Rourke seemed to enjoy mysterious revelations. They entered a wide, long chamber, sunk in shadow and filled with unidentifiable shapes. Drake threw a switch, and a line of LEDs blinked on. Parked on the floor stood three airplanes. The room was an underground hangar. Wide hangar doors remained closed over the mouth of the cave.
“Oh, my gosh,” Karen said.
The airplanes sported an open cockpit, stubby, swept-back wings, twin tails, and a propeller at the rear of the aircraft. They stood on retractable wheels. “They were broken, so Drake’s people just left them here. I fixed them up, added scavenged parts. I’ve flown all over these mountains with them.” He slapped the cockpit of one of the planes. “Equipped ’em with weapons, too.”
“Where? I don’t see any machine guns,” Rick said, inspecting the wings.
Rourke reached into the cockpit and pulled out a machete. “Kind of medieval, but it’s the best I could do.” He stuffed the machete back into the cockpit.
“Could we fly them to Nanigen?” Karen asked.
“It’s a very long shot.” He explained that the top speed of a micro-plane was seven miles an hour. “The trade winds average fifteen miles an hour across Oahu. If you try to fly into the wind, you’ll go backward. If you get the wind at your back, you might get across Pearl Harbor. Or maybe not. It also depends on whether I decide to let you have my planes. These are solo-seaters, they carry only one person. There’s three of you and there’s three planes. That doesn’t leave an airplane for me, now, does it?”
“Dr. Rourke, I would pay you a very large sum of money for one of your planes,” Danny said. “I inherited a trust fund. It would be yours.”
“I have no need for money, Mr. Minot.”
“Well, what would work for you?”
“To see you bring down Vincent Drake. If you can do that, you can have my planes.”
“Absolutely, we’ll get Mr. Drake,” Danny said.
Karen remained silent. Rick glanced at her. What was going on with her? Then he asked Rourke how Rourke would survive if he didn’t have a plane.
“I’ll build another one,” Rourke said, shrugging off the question. “I collected a lot of spare parts.” Then Rourke took charge. He had them sit in the cockpits, and he explained the controls. “It’s very simple. Everything’s computer-controlled. This is the stick. If you make a mistake, the computer corrects your action. There’s a radio- here’s the headset.” They could talk to each other once they had gotten aloft. But there was no radar or navigation instrumentation.
How would they find Nanigen?
“Kalikimaki Industrial Park should be obvious from the air-it’s a group of warehouses on the Farrington Highway.” He gave them a course heading.
“Okay,” Rick said. “So we manage to get into Nanigen, then what?”
“There will be security bots guarding the tensor core.”
“Security bots?”
“Flying micro-bots. However, I don’t think you’ll have a problem. You’re too small to register on the bots’ sensors. They won’t see you. You can fly past the bots without waking them up. There’s a way to operate the generator from the micro side, if you’re very small. I designed the control myself. The control is located in the floor of the room underneath a hatch. The hatch is in the center of Hexagon Three. It’s marked with a white circle. You should see the white circle from the air.”
“Is the control complicated?”
“No. Just throw open the hatch and hit the red emergency button. You’ll get supersized-” He stopped talking and was staring at Rick. At his arm.
Rick had been leaning against a plane, his sleeve rolled up. Rourke stared at the bruises, lengthening up Rick’s arm. “You’re starting to crash,” he said.
“Crash?” Rick thought he meant the plane.
“Once the bleeding starts, you’re finished. Let’s get you into the magnet,” Rourke said to him sharply. “You’re hours from a crash.”
Karen looked at her arms. They weren’t in such great shape either. It was going to be a race against time. Wait for dawn, and hope nobody’s started bleeding by then.
Ben Rourke advised them to sleep inside the magnet. He couldn’t guarantee anything, but the magnetic field might delay the onset of symptoms. The magnet room had a fireplace in it, too, and Rourke hauled in pieces of candlenut, and started a fire. Karen and Rick climbed into the hole in the doughnut of the magnet, wrapped in blankets, and tried to settle down for the night. Neither of them felt terribly relaxed. Yet they were so incredibly tired. Time ran more swiftly in the micro-world, and a day’s rest could not come too soon.
Danny Minot refused to sleep in the magnet. He said he would prefer to sleep in the main hall, where he settled into one of Rourke’s chairs and wrapped himself in a blanket.
Rourke threw another piece of nut on the fire, and stood up. “I’m going to the hangar to get the planes ready. You will need to launch at first light.” Rourke went off down the tunnels into the hangar. He would service the micro-planes, test the instruments, and top off their electric charges, readying them for takeoff the moment daylight glimmered.
Danny Minot found himself alone in the hall, curled up in the chair. He couldn’t possibly sleep. He drank the last of the Jack Daniels, and tossed the bottle away. His arm was stirring, moving on its own, the skin bulging and making crackling noises. He lifted the blanket and looked, and he could see the grubs twitching. He couldn’t stand
