Micro

by Michael Crichton

  Drake stayed back, watching her car. She went past Makapu‘u Point and through Waimanalo, and Kailua. But then she turned and picked up the freeway and headed back toward Honolulu. Where in hell was his CFO going, he wondered.

  Having driven around the eastern edge of Oahu and doubled back into Honolulu, Alyson finally found herself following the Manoa Valley Road, winding up into the rain-forested valley among the mountains.

  She arrived at the steel gates and the tunnel. The gates were locked. She punched the security code and went through. The tunnel emerged into a velvet dark valley.

  The place was deserted, the greenhouses glinting faintly in the moonlight. She opened her purse and took the bag out of it, and got out of the car. She didn’t dare open the bag. They were probably dead by now, crushed or suffocated. But what if they weren’t, what if they started pleading with her? That would be worse than if they were dead. She stood in the parking lot.

  Headlights. Coming out of the tunnel.

  Somebody had followed her.

  She stood there, holding the bag, frozen in terror, caught in the headlights of the corporate Bentley.

  Chapter 11

  Waipaka Arboretum 28 October, 10:45 p.m.

  W hat are you doing here, Alyson?” Drake said, getting out of the Bentley. He kept the headlights burning on her.

  She blinked in the glare. “Why did you follow me?”

  “I’m worried about you, Alyson. Very worried.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We have a lot to do.” Approaching her.

  “What?” She shrank back.

  “We have to protect ourselves.”

  Sharp intake of breath. “What are you planning?”

  He couldn’t allow the blame to fall on himself. On her, but not on himself. He had begun to form an idea. There was a way to get this done. “There is a reason for their disappearance, you know,” he said to her.

  “What are you talking about, Vin?”

  “A plausible reason why they vanish. A reason other than you and me.”

  “What’s the reason?”

  “Alcohol.”

  “What?”

  He grabbed her hand and dragged her toward the greenhouse, saying, “They’re penurious students. No money. Always trying to save their pennies. They want to have a party, get wasted, but they don’t have any money. So where do poor science students go when they want to get wasted for free?”

  “Where?”

  “The lab, of course.” He unlocked the door, flicked on the lights. The bulbs came on in banks overhead, one after another, down the long expanse of the lab, revealing benches of exotic plants, potted orchids beneath hanging mist-makers; and in the corner, shelf after shelf of bottles and jugs full of reagents. He pulled out a plastic gallon jug labeled 98% ETHANOL.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Lab alcohol,” he said.

  “Is that your idea?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You buy vodka or tequila at a store, you get seventy, eighty, ninety proof. This stuff here is double that: it’s a hundred and ninety-six proof. It’s almost pure alcohol.”

  “And?”

  Vin was picking up plastic cups, handing them to her. “Alcohol causes car accidents. Especially among young people.”

  She groaned. “Uhh, Vin…”

  He was watching her carefully. “Okay, let’s call a spade a spade,” he said. “You don’t have the stomach for it.”

  “Well, no—”

  “And neither do I. That’s the truth.”

  She blinked, confused. “You don’t?”

  “No, I don’t. I can’t stand this, Alyson. I don’t want to go through with this,” he said. “I don’t want this on my conscience.”

  “Then…What will we do?” she said.

  He allowed a look of doubt, of uncertainty, to fill his face. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head mournfully. “Probably we never should have started this, and now…I just don’t know.” He hoped his expression of uncertainty was convincing. He knew he could be convincing. He paused, then reached down and took her hand, and held it up to the light; in her hand was the paper bag, rolled up. “They’re in there, aren’t they?”

  “What do you want me to do?” Her hand was shaking.

  “Go outside and wait for me,” he said. “I need a few minutes to think. We have to come up with a solution to this, Alyson. No more killing.”

  Let Alyson kill them. Even if she doesn’t know she’s killing them.

  She nodded silently.

  “I need your help, Alyson.”

  “I will,” she said. “I’ll help you. I will.”

  “Thank you.” Heartfelt.

  She went outside.

  He entered the greenhouse and went to a storage cabinet, where he found a box of nitrile safety gloves. Tough lab gloves, stronger than rubber. He pulled out two gloves and stuffed them in his pocket. Then he hurried into a side office, and turned on the surveillance monitor overlooking the parking lot. It was a night-vision camera, flaring green and black. Of course everything was recorded. He watched as Alyson went outside and stood near the cars.

  Looking at the bag and pacing.

  He could almost see the idea forming in her mind.

  “Do it,” Vin whispered.

  The field teams had had horrendous problems. Four employees had died in Fern Gully alone. And they had been heavily armed…And there was the problem of the bends. These kids wouldn’t last an hour in this biological hell. After that, it would be a matter of getting Alyson on his side—temporarily.

  She was walking away from the cars.

  Yes.

  Toward the forest.

  Yes.

  She went downhill, following the trail down into Fern Gully.

  Good. Keep going.

  On the monitor, her shape faded into the blackness. She was going downslope, down into the depths of the forest. He lost track of her.

  Then a starlike point of light came on.

  She had a flashlight; she’d turned it on. Now he watched the light as it went back and forth, getting fainter. She was zigzagging on a switchback trail.

  The deeper into biological hell the better.

  Suddenly, he heard a scream. Panicked shrieks coming from the darkness of the forest.

  “Christ.”

  He turned away from the monitor and ran outdoors.

  Even though the moon was up, in the depths of the rain forest it was so dark it was hard to see her. He hurried down the trail, stumbling and slipping, heading toward her flashlight, and heard her saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” her voice soft in the gloom. She was shining the beam around.

  “Alyson.” He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust. “What don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  She was a dark shape holding the bag out in front of her. As if it was an offering from a dark god. “I don’t know how they got away. Here: look.”

  She shone the flashlight on the bag. He saw a jagged cut running along the bottom of the bag. It was a fine cut.

  “One of them had a knife,” he said.

  “I guess.”

  “And they jumped. Or fell.”

  “I guess, yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Right around here. I first noticed it here. I haven’t moved since. I didn’t want to step on them.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that. They’re probably dead already.” He took her flashlight, crouched down, swung it along the tops of the ferns. He was looking for disturbances in the shimmering dew that coated the ferns. He saw nothing.

  She started to cry.

  “It’s not your fault, Alyson.”

  “I know.” Sobbing. “I was going to let them go.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’m sorry, but I was going to do it.”

  Vin put his arm around her. “Not your fault, Alyson. That’s what matters.”

  “Did you see any sign of them?
With the flashlight?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “It’s a big fall, and they don’t have much mass. They could have been blown a considerable distance.”

  “Then they might still be…”

  “They might, yes. But it’s doubtful.”

  “We should look for them!”

  “But at night, Alyson, we might step on them by accident…”

  “We can’t just leave them here.”

  “You know, the fall almost certainly killed them. Now, I believe you, Alyson, when you tell me that you didn’t cut the bag open and dump them out—”

  “What are you saying—?”

  “But the police may not believe your story so readily. You could already be implicated in Eric’s death, and now this—dumping those kids in the most dangerous place—intentionally. That’s murder, Alyson.”

  “Well, you’ll tell the police the truth!”

  “Of course,” he said, “but why should they believe me, either? The fact is, Alyson, we have only one way to go here, and that is to continue on the plan we started. Their disappearance has to be explained as an accident. Then if they reappear miraculously later on-well, Hawaii is a magical place, wonderful place. Miracles happen here.”

  She stood very still in the darkness. “We should just leave them?”

  “We can look tomorrow, in daylight.” He squeezed her shoulder, pulled her close to him. He shone the flashlight down. “Here. Let’s follow the path, we can see what’s ahead, and we can leave safely. Then we’ll come back tomorrow. But right now we have to deal with the car. Okay? One thing at a time, Alyson.”

  Still sobbing, she allowed herself to be led out of the forest, back to the parking lot. Vin Drake checked his watch: it was 11:14 p.m. There was still time to carry out the next stage of his plan.

  Chapter 12

  Waipaka Arboretum 28 October, 11:00 p.m.

  The students were jostled inside the paper bag, every movement of Alyson’s magnified and accompanied by a loud rasping sound as they scraped back and forth across the paper. Peter never realized that ordinary brown paper was so rough: it felt almost like sandpaper to his skin. He saw that the others had all managed to face inward, so they didn’t abrade their faces as they slid back and forth. They had been driven somewhere, and it had taken a long time, but where were they? And what would be done to them? It was hard to talk as they fell this way and that, and difficult to come up with a plan when everybody was talking at the same time. The Nanigen man, Jarel Kinsky, kept repeating that there had been some mistake. “If there was some way I could talk with Mr. Drake,” Kinsky said.

  “Get over it,” Karen King snapped at him.

  “But I can’t believe Mr. Drake would just…kill us,” Kinsky said.

  “Oh, really?” Karen said.

  Kinsky didn’t answer.

  The bigger problem was that they didn’t know what Vin or Alyson were up to. They had been driven around in a car, but where had the car ended up? It made no sense. Then Vin and Alyson seemed to reach an agreement (their exact conversation was impossible to follow) and Alyson carried the bag outdoors. Into darkness.

  “What’s this?” Karen King said, alarmed, as they were carried along. “What’s going on?”

  They heard a booming sound. It was a snuffle. Alyson Bender.

  “I have the feeling she wants to save us,” Peter Jansen said.

  “Vin will never allow it,” Karen said.

  “I know.”

  “I think we better take things into our own hands,” Karen said. She produced her knife, unfolded it.

  “Now hold on,” Danny Minot said. “This is a decision we have to reach together.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Karen said. “ ’Cause I’ve got the knife.”

  “Don’t be a child,” Minot said.

  “Don’t be a coward. We act, or they act on us and they kill us. Which is it?” She didn’t wait for Danny to answer. She turned to Peter. “How far above ground do you think we are, right now?”

  “I don’t know, maybe four and a half feet…”

  “Hundred and thirty-seven centimeters,” Erika Moll said. “And what’s our mass?”

  Peter laughed. “Not very much.”

  “You’re laughing,” Danny Minot said, amazed. “You people are insane. Compared to our normal size, a drop of four and a half feet is the equivalent of, uh—”

  “Four hundred and fifty feet,” Erika said. “Say, the height of a forty-five-story building. And no, this would not be the equivalent of a fall from a forty-five-story building.”

  “Of course it would,” Danny said.

  “Isn’t it great when the science studies people don’t know any science?” Erika said.

  Peter explained, “It’s a little issue of air resistance.”

  “No, that doesn’t matter,” Danny said through clenched teeth, clearly stung by the criticism, “because objects fall in a gravitational field at the same rate irrespective of mass. A penny and a piano fall at the same rate, hit the ground at the same time.”

  “Nothing can be done for him,” Karen said. “And we have to make a decision now.”

  The jostling in the bag had slowed; Alyson was making up her mind to do something.

  “I don’t think the distance we fall matters very much,” Peter Jansen said. He had been trying to figure out the physics of being very small.

  It was all about gravity. And inertia.

  Peter said: “What’s important is Newton’s equation for—”

  “Enough! I say we jump,” Karen interrupted.

  “Jump,” Jenny said.

  “Jump,” Amar said.

  “Oh God,” Danny moaned. “But we don’t know where we are!”

  “Jump,” Erika said.

  “This is our only chance,” Rick Hutter said. “Jump.”

  “Jump,” Peter said.

  “Okay,” Karen said. “I’m going to run along this seam at the bottom, and cut it open. Try to stay close together. Imagine you’re skydivers. Arms and legs wide, a human kite. Here we gooo—”

  “But just a minute—” Danny yelled.

  “Too late!” Karen shouted. “Good luck!”

  Peter felt her brush past him, the knife in her hand, and a moment later the paper bag tilted beneath his feet, and he fell into darkness.

  The air was surprisingly cool and wet. And the night was brighter, now that he was outside the bag: he could see the trees around him, and the ground below as he fell toward it. He fell surprisingly fast—alarmingly fast—and for a moment he wondered if they had collectively made a calculation error, out of their shared dislike for Danny.

  They knew, of course, that air resistance was always a factor in the speed of falling objects. In daily life, you didn’t think about it, because most things in life presented similar air resistance. A five-pound barbell and a ten-pound barbell would fall at the same rate. Same thing for a human being and an elephant. They’d fall at pretty much the same rate.

  But the students were now so small that air resistance did matter, and they had collectively guessed that the effect of air resistance would overcome the effect of mass. In other words, they would not fall at their full-size speed.

  They hoped.

  Now, with the wind whistling in his ears, tears blurring his eyes as he fell downward, Peter clenched his teeth and wiped his eyes and tried to see where he was headed. He looked around and could not see any of the others falling through the air, though he heard a soft moan in the darkness. Looking back to the ground, he saw he was closing in on a broad-leafed plant, like a giant elephant ear. He tried to spread his arms wide and shift his position so he would hit the leaf in the center.

  He hit it perfectly. He smacked into the elephant ear—cold, wet, slippery—and he felt the leaf bend beneath him, then rise back up and in a swift movement toss him back into the air, like a tumbler on a trampoline. He yelled in surprise, and when he came down again he landed near the edge of the leaf, spun, and slid on th
e water-slick surface down to the far tip.

  And fell.

  In darkness, he hit another leaf beneath, but it was hard to see down here, and he again rolled down toward the tip of the leaf. He clawed at the green surface, trying to halt his inevitable descent. It was to no avail—he fell—hit another leaf—fell—and finally landed on his back in a bed of wet moss where he lay, gasping and frightened, staring up at the canopy of leaves high above, which blotted out the sky.

  “You just going to lie there?”

  He looked over. It was Karen King, standing over him.

  “Are you hurt?” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then get up.”

  He struggled to his feet. He noticed she didn’t help him. He was unsteady standing in the wet moss, which leaked through his sneakers. His feet were cold and wet.

  “Stand over here,” she said. It was as if she was talking to a child.

  He moved to stand beside her, on a patch of dry ground. “Where are the others?”

  “Somewhere around here. It may take some time.”

  Peter nodded, looking at the jungle floor. From his new perspective half an inch above the ground, the jungle floor was incredibly rugged. Moss-covered stumps of rotted limbs rose like skyscrapers, and fallen branches—twigs, really—made ragged arcs twenty or thirty feet above the ground. Even the dead leaves on the floor were larger than he was, and whenever he took a step, they shifted, moving around him and beneath his feet. It was like trying to move through a rotten organic junkyard. And of course everything was wet; everything was slippery, and often slimy. Where, exactly, had they landed? They had been driven around for a long time. They could be anywhere on Oahu—anywhere there was a forest, at least.

  Karen jumped up on a large twig, nearly fell off, got her balance, and sat on it, her legs dangling down. Then she put her fingers in her mouth and gave a piercing whistle. “They should all hear that.” She whistled again.

  Just then something bulky and dark in color crunched out of the undergrowth. At first they couldn’t see what it was, but the moonlight revealed a gigantic beetle, jet black, moving past in a surefooted gait. Its compound eyes gleamed faintly. It was covered with jointed black armor, and had spiky hairs bristling from its legs.