Micro

by Michael Crichton; Richard Preston

It was a bathtub in a private space. He added some cold water to the hot water, taking it from a gravity-fed water tank.

  Rick soaked in the water. The venom was still in his system, making him feel stiff, his limbs unresponsive, and he felt a little dizzy, too. There was a lump of soap, crude and soft. It was medieval soap: Rourke had likely made it from ashes and the fat of some insect. It felt great to wash his body after crawling around for three days in the muck. But he couldn’t help noticing the dark shadows that had spread over his arms and on his lower legs. He tried to tell himself these were bruises he’d gotten from his encounter with the wasp. He felt strange, but it had to be the venom.

  Danny refused a bath, afraid that the water might somehow stimulate the grubs. He sat in the chair, drinking from Rourke’s bottle of whiskey and staring at the fire.

  Karen luxuriated next in the tub of hot water. It felt so incredible to get clean. She washed her clothes and hung them to dry, then wrapped herself in a robe that Rourke loaned her, and sat by the fire, feeling refreshed. Rick wore a pair of Rourke’s pants and a work shirt. The clothes were rough-hewn, but they were comfortable and clean.

  Rourke, meanwhile, cooked dinner for his guests. He got a pot of water boiling, and added smoked insect meat, shreds of root vegetable, some chunks of leafy greens, and salt. The stew cooked rapidly, filling the hall with a savory smell. Rourke’s insect-and-vegetable stew really was delicious, and it brought their strength back fast. They sat in Rourke’s strange chairs near the fire. And they heard his story.

  Ben Rourke had been a physicist and systems design engineer specializing in the most powerful magnetic fields. He had come across the data from the old Army experiments in Huntsville, and had decided to explore the method of shrinking matter in a tensor field. He had solved some of the seemingly impossible equations of turbulence in these fields. Vin Drake had learned of Rourke’s work, and had hired him as one of the founding engineers at Nanigen. Working with other Nanigen engineers, he had built the tensor generator out of modified but standard industrial equipment, purchased largely in Asia. Drake had raised huge amounts of capital from the Davros Consortium; Drake had a magic touch, a way of making it all seem exciting and sure to lead to enormous wealth.

  Ben Rourke had volunteered himself as the first human to be passed through the tensor generator. He had suspected it would be dangerous, and felt that he should be the first to take the risk. Living organisms were complicated and fragile. Animals that had been shrunk in the generator had frequently died, usually by exsanguination—by bleeding to death. “Drake discounted the risk,” Rourke said. “He claimed there would be no problem.”

  Rourke had only stayed in a shrunken size for a few hours before he was returned to normal size. As more people were shrunk in the generator, and as they remained small for longer periods of time, they began feeling ill, bruising easily, experiencing mysterious bleeding. They were quickly returned to normal size and examined. The studies showed unexplained degradation of the blood’s ability to form clots.

  Meanwhile, Nanigen, swimming in investor money, raced ahead with exploration of the micro-world. The company decided to concentrate on exploring Tantalus Crater first. The crater had extremely high biodiversity, and offered riches of chemistry and biological compounds. Tantalus Base was constructed in modules. “We built each module as a scale model, at a 1:10 ratio, and the modules were then shrunk in the generator to make them the right size for micro-humans.” Stocked with supplies and equipment, the modules were placed at Tantalus Crater.

  At first, the field teams were allowed to stay at Tantalus Base for no longer than thirty-six hours, after which they were returned to Nanigen and restored to normal size. Then Nanigen installed the supply stations in the Waipaka Arboretum, down in the valley, and began staffing them with people.

  It was difficult to operate the digging robots and to collect samples when the teams had to be rotated in and out so quickly. Vin Drake wanted to keep people longer in the micro-world despite the risks. Drake asked Rourke if he would agree to a longer stay at Tantalus as a test—to see if the human body could adjust to the micro-world over time. “I had faith in Vin, and I had faith in my invention,” Rourke said. “Nanigen patented my design, with money for me if it succeeded. So I was willing to accept the risks of a longer stay in order to move Nanigen forward.”

  Ben Rourke had offered to lead a team of volunteers who would attempt a one-week stay at Tantalus. “Since I had designed the tensor generator, I thought I should be the first person to try a longer stay. Take the risk myself.” Rourke was joined by two other Nanigen volunteers, an engineer named Fabrio Farzetti and a medical doctor named Amanda Cowells, who would monitor the other two for medical changes. And so they had been shrunk in the generator and placed at Tantalus Base.

  “Things went well at first,” Rourke said. “We did experiments, we tested the equipment at the base. We stayed in regular contact with Nanigen through a special communication system—a video link with an audio frequency shifter, so that we could talk with big people.” He indicated a wooden door in the living room. The door stood open, and beyond it they could see electronic equipment and a video screen. “That’s the video link. I moved it here from Tantalus Base. Maybe someday Drake won’t be in charge of Nanigen, and then I can call home. But as long as Vin Drake is running things, I don’t use the system. Drake thinks I’m dead. It would be a fatal mistake to let Drake know I exist.”

  After a few days at the base, all three volunteers began to develop symptoms of micro-bends. “We developed bruises on our arms and legs. Then Farzetti got really sick. Dr. Cowells found he had developed internal hemorrhages. So she asked for an evacuation of Farzetti.” Fabrio Farzetti needed to be hospitalized immediately or he would die.

  “That was when Drake told us it wasn’t possible to evacuate Farzetti. He said the generator had broken down,” Rourke said. “He claimed he was trying to get the generator fixed.”

  Ben Rourke knew more about the tensor generator than anyone else. He began directing repair efforts from the micro-world, using the video link, while teams of engineers at the Nanigen headquarters followed his instructions. But somehow, the machine couldn’t be fixed; it kept breaking down. And then Farzetti died, despite Dr. Amanda Cowells’s best efforts to save him.

  “I think Drake had sabotaged the generator,” Ben Rourke said.

  “Why?” Karen asked.

  “We were guinea pigs,” Rourke said. “Drake wanted to have medical data on us all the way up to the point of death.”

  Next, Dr. Cowells herself had fallen ill. Ben Rourke had cared for her, all the while begging for help on the video link. “I finally realized we were never going to get help. Vin Drake was determined to see his vile experiment through to the end—the death of all of us. He wanted to gain knowledge of the bends, but it was like a Nazi survival experiment. I tried to tell other Nanigen staff on the video link but nobody would believe me. I also think Drake enjoyed watching us die—the man takes pleasure in watching people suffer. It’s as if when people are shrunk to micro size, Drake forgets they’re still human. Nobody could believe that Drake would do this. People like Vincent Drake operate outside the bounds of normal morality. Their evil can become invisible to normal people, because normal people can’t believe anyone would commit such evil. A psychopath can go on for years without being recognized, as long as he’s a good actor,” Rourke said.

  Karen King asked Rourke if he thought Drake was working alone. “Does he have accomplices?” she asked.

  “There are people at Nanigen who suspect the truth about Drake,” Rourke said. “The Project Omicron people must know something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Project Omicron? It’s the dark part of Nanigen.”

  “The dark part?”

  “Nanigen does classified research for the U.S. government. That’s Project Omicron.”

  “What does Omicron do?”

  “Omicron deals with weapons, somehow,”
Rourke said. “But that’s all I know.”

  “So how do you know about it?”

  “Employee gossip. It’s unavoidable.” He smiled and stroked his chin, and got up and went over to the pile of candlenuts. He took a big piece and carried it over to the fire. The fire flared up.

  For a hermit, the man seemed kind of lonely, Karen thought. She stared at the fire, and found herself thinking about her life back East. She had been living like a hermit herself, in a cramped, seedy apartment in Somerville, spending long hours in the lab. All-nighters had become a regular thing. She didn’t have any close friends, didn’t go out on dates, didn’t even go to the movies by herself. She had sacrificed a normal life in order to get a PhD and become a scientist. It had been more than a year since she’d slept with a man. Men seemed afraid 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 it. He began to cry. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe the terrible state of his arm, maybe it was his general situation, but he lost it. He wept, and looked down the hall where Rourke had gone. How long would Rourke be gone?

  And that was when his arm came apart.

  There was a cracking sound, a sound like paper tearing. He didn’t feel anything, but he looked down at the noise. And saw the head of a grub pushing out through a widening split in the skin of his arm. It had a glistening head. It was huge, and it was squirming, waving its head around, lengthening as it struggled out.

  “Oh, God! It’s hatching!” he whispered.

  The larva began to do something strange and horrible. It spat liquid from its mouth, stringy, thin drools—no, actually, it was thread, it was silk. The larva, still partway inside his arm and more than halfway out, began to spin silk around itself. Rapidly waving its head around, it flung silk threads around its body, building up a covering of silk around itself, even while its rear end stayed rooted in Danny’s arm.

  What was it doing? It wasn’t going to hatch! It was just going on to another phase. It was turning into a cocoon. But it refused to leave his arm!