Micro

by Michael Crichton

  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.

  The KA-BAR blade, as tall to the micro-humans as a ten-story building, plunged through the bunker with a roar, driving shattered blocks of concrete through the room. The blade continued down into the earth, opening a gaping hole in the room. The edge began to saw raggedly through the bunker while rocking back and forth.

  Rick clung to the bottom of the hatch, trying to spin it, trying to open it. He got the hatch open, and thrust out his duffel bag. But then the bunker began rising up into the air: he saw the ground below. The bunker turned completely sideways, until he was lying on the ladder. People were crowding behind him. He began reaching for the others. He grabbed Amar and pushed him out through the hatch, and saw him falling away. The bunker was rising higher, tilting. Peter Jansen got next to Rick. “Help me get the others out!” Peter shouted.

  They managed to get Danny out through the hatch. They heard Danny scream, and saw him falling. Erika went next.

  Inside the bunker, Jenny Linn had been pinned against the giant knife blade, her arm trapped between the blade and concrete. Karen King struggled to free Jen’s arm, while the blade moved sideways, threatening to crush them both.

  “My arm,” Jenny whimpered. “I can’t move.”

  A table slid up against Jenny, then a concrete fragment smashed the table and rammed into Karen. Karen kicked the concrete away, surprised at her strength, and worked frantically to free Jenny.

  The bunker went down again, slammed against the ground, and the knife cut it in half, spilling Jenny and Karen out, revealing the sky above. Against the sky towered a man. A man they didn’t recognize. He opened his mouth and sounds rumbled out. He raised the knife high.

  Karen picked Jenny up, and got her to her feet, watching the knife wave over them. Jen’s arm hung limply at a strange angle. “Run!” Karen screamed, as the great knife flashed downward at them.

  Chapter 18

  Fern Gully 29 October, 2:00 p.m.

  The knife entered the ground between Karen and Jenny, driving them apart, and continued down into the earth for what seemed like a vast distance. Then it was withdrawn with a rumbling sound, shaking the world. Jenny was on her knees, holding her arm and moaning.

  Karen scooped Jenny up with one hand, and began to run with her, heaving her across her back and sprinting at high speed. The knife plunged down again, but this time Karen had dived under a clump of ferns, still carrying Jenny on her back.

  The ground thumped and bounced, and the thumping receded. The man was walking away, carrying the broken halves of the station in his hands. They saw him toss the pieces into a knapsack. He moved off, and was gone.

  A silence descended. Jenny was crying.

  “My arm,” Jenny said. “It hurts…hurts so much.”

  Jen’s arm had been broken, badly. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you fixed up,” Karen said, trying to sound optimistic. Jen’s arm looked horrible, a compound fracture of the humerus, probably. Karen found a duffel bag lying on the ground nearby, and she opened it, and took out a radio headset, and began calling on it. “You guys? Anybody? I’m with Jenny. She has a broken arm. Can you hear me?”

  Peter’s voice came on. “We’re okay. Everybody’s accounted for.”

  They gathered under the fern, and placed Jenny on a leaf, using it like a bed. None of them had any medical experience. Karen opened the medical kit and found a syringe with morphine. She held it where Jenny could see it. “Do you want this?”

  Jenny shook her head. “No. Too groggy.” She might need her wits, despite the pain. Instead, Jenny accepted a couple of Tylenol tablets, while Karen ripped up a piece of cloth and fashioned a sling. They helped her sit up. Jenny swayed, her face ashen, her lips pale. “I’ll be okay,” she said.

  But she was not okay. Her arm was swelling dramatically, the skin darkening.

  Internal bleeding.

  Karen caught Peter’s eye, and she knew he was thinking the same thing she was. Remembering what Jarel Kinsky had said about the bends. You could bleed to death from a small cut. And this was not a small cut.

  Peter looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. They’d slept for two hours.

  The ground was scattered with debris. It was like a shipwreck. The duffel bags and the backpack lay in various places. Many other things had fallen out of the bunker when the knife had split it open. They found the machetes and the harpoon. Rick’s chinaberry rested on the ground nearby; it had fallen out of the tent. They had survival gear and supplies, at least, but where would they go? If Station Echo had been taken away, what had happened to the other stations? Had the man seen them? Did he work for Vin Drake?

  They had to assume the worst.

  They had been discovered. The stations had been taken away. Where to hide? Where to go? How to get back to Nanigen now?

  As they stood pondering what to do, the sky grew darker. A gust of wind tugged at the leaves of a haiwale plant nearby, revealing the fuzzy undersides of the leaves. As Peter looked up, he saw the wind catching leaves overhead, flipping them over, tossing the leaves…

  Then came a strange sound, a deep sploosh, and another sploosh. They watched in stunned surprise as a flattened sphere of water, of enormous size, fell on the ground next to them and exploded into a hundred smaller droplets flying everywhere. The afternoon rains had arrived.

  “Get to high ground!” Peter shouted. “This way!” They began to run, heading upslope, grabbing whatever they could carry. Karen carried Jenny on her back, while raindrops exploded around them like bombs going off.

  At Nanigen, Vin Drake turned away from his computer screen. He had been watching a weather-radar scan of the Ko‘olau Pali. Those trade winds were so dependable. As the winds ran up against the windward side of Oahu, they dropped their moisture on the mountains. The peaks of the Ko‘olau Pali were some of the wettest places on earth.

  Don Makele knocked on the door. The security man entered and placed the pieces of Station Echo on Drake’s desk. “The beds are rumpled, toilet’s been used. And I saw a couple of them on the ground running. I ordered them to stop. I tried to stop ’em with my knife. They scattered lik
e cockroaches.”

  “That’s disturbing,” Drake said. “Very disturbing, Don. I told you to fix this.”

  “What do you want me to do, sir?”

  Vin Drake leaned back and tapped a gold mechanical pencil on his teeth. A portrait of him hung on the wall behind him, painted by an up-and-coming Brooklyn artist, in which Drake’s face seemed to fracture into bold colors; it was an image of power, and Drake liked it. “I want you to close off the security gate at the entrance to Manoa Valley. Stop the shuttle truck. The valley is to be sealed. And bring me your two best security men.”

  “That would be Telius and Johnstone. I trained them in Kabul.”

  “They have experience in the micro-world?”

  “Plenty,” Makele answered. “What do you want them to do?”

  “Rescue the students.”

  “But you’re sealing off the valley—”

  “Just do as I say, Don.”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “I’ll meet your men outdoors. Parking lot B, twenty minutes.”

  The raindrops were pounding down, exploding, hurling gouts of water mixed with soil. Peter vanished in a cloud of spray as a raindrop hit him. The raindrop knocked Peter through the air and left him sprawled and coughing. The others ran, slipping and sliding, while more raindrops landed around them. Then came a sound like a freight train.

  It was a flash flood running down a cleft in Fern Gully. It burst around a rock and past the base of a tree fern, and hit the people with a wall of brown water, sending them swimming for their lives. Karen was carrying Jenny along, when suddenly, as the flood hit, Jenny was torn from her back with a cry.

  “Jenny!”

  The water took Karen down. She couldn’t see Jenny. She found herself clinging to a leaf, which was spinning around and around in the current. Rick was kneeling on the leaf in front of her. “Grab my hand!” he shouted to her. Rick caught Karen by one hand, and hauled her onto the leaf. She coughed and gasped. The leaf spun and ran along with the current. “I’ve lost Jenny!” Karen shouted, looking around frantically. With her broken arm, Jenny would not be able to swim.

  Danny Minot had climbed up onto a rock. It poked out of the floodwaters ripping around it.

  A drowned earthworm floated past, rolling over and over in the water. Jenny Linn struggled in the water, trying to swim, but her sling interfered and her broken arm flopped in a frightening way. Her head went under. And came up.

  Rick lay flat on the leaf. “Jenny!” he shouted. “Reach out! Jenny!”

  “Hang on, Rick!” Karen shouted, and she grabbed Rick’s feet, and held on, trying to keep him from sliding off the leaf as he reached out to try to save Jenny.

  Jenny rolled on her side, and reached out with her good hand, but she passed by Rick, her fingertips just brushing his. He lost her, couldn’t get a grip on her fingers, and he shouted in frustration.

  Jenny was approaching the rock where Danny huddled. “Danny, please!” she screamed, putting out her good hand. The current shook her body, threatening to drag her under.

  Danny Minot reached out for her. He touched her hand. Her fingers closed around his fingers. He reached farther with his other hand, and managed to get his fingers under the sling. He pulled Jenny toward him. Then he felt himself slipping off the rock.

  Jenny screamed in pain as he wrenched her broken arm. But she welcomed it. “Don’t let go of me, please!” She reached with her good hand…caught Danny’s shirt.

  A drowning person will take you down with them. Danny knew about drowning people. They were very dangerous.

  He looked around. Was anybody watching? Then he locked eyes with Jenny Linn. “Sorry,” he said. He opened his hands and let her go. He was going to be pulled into the water and drowned by her, for sure…

  Danny turned away. He couldn’t bear that expression on Jen’s face. He had done everything he could to save her. If he hadn’t let her go, she would have pulled him in, certainly…they both would have died…Jenny was doomed anyway. I’m a good person…He huddled on the rock while the water rumbled around it. Nobody had seen what he’d done. Except Jenny. That look in her eyes…

  Karen screamed as she saw Danny lose his grip on her. “No! Jenny! No!” They glimpsed Jen’s head bob once more in the current, and she went down, and they didn’t see her again.

  Chapter 19

  Nanigen Headquarters 29 October, 2:30 p.m.

  Vin Drake crossed the parking lot, moving toward Telius and Johnstone, who waited between two cars at the edge of the lot. Better to talk outdoors. Anything you said could be heard, recorded, preserved. He had to keep track of the details. Details are evidence. Evidence could escape. Evidence could fly out into the world; you could lose control of it.

  “We’ve had a breach of security,” Drake said to the two men. Telius stood with his shaved head bent, listening, a short, wiry man with fierce, restless eyes that darted over the ground as if he was searching for some small object he’d lost. Johnstone, much taller than Telius, wore sunglasses and stood at ease, with his hands behind his back. A tattoo on Johnstone’s scalp shone through a fade haircut. Drake went on. “We’re dealing with industrial spies. They could destroy Nanigen. We believe these spies are working for a foreign government. As you may know, there are certain classified activities at Nanigen that unfriendly governments would very much like to know about.”

  “We don’t know anything about that,” Telius said.

  “That’s correct,” Drake said. “You don’t.”

  Somebody drove by and parked their car, and Drake paused. He and the two men turned away, and walked along the edge of the parking lot, saying nothing for a few moments, waiting for the person to go inside the building. The trade wind rattled the seed pods of acacia shrubs growing in the empty lot nearby.

  Drake turned and gazed at the metal building. “That building doesn’t look like much. But in the near future, the business inside it will be worth at least a hundred billion dollars. A hundred billion dollars.” He paused to let the number sink in. “Incredible wealth will be created for the lucky people who own ground-floor shares in Nanigen.” He squinted into the sunlight, then looked sideways at the two men. “You know what ground-floor shares are, right? The owners of ground-floor shares can sell their shares for a spectacular profit when the company goes public in an IPO.” Did they see where he was going with this? Their faces revealed precisely nothing. No thought, no emotion, nothing to be read or inferred.

  Professional faces, he thought.

  Drake continued. “I want you to go into the micro-world on a rescue mission to find the spies. I’ll give you a full movement kit. A hexapod and weapons, anything you need. The spies were dropped…are believed to have been lost in an area about twenty-meters radius around Supply Station Echo. So I want you to begin your search at Echo. It’s possible the missing persons are following the micro-trails, looking for supply stations in order to take refuge in them. The supply stations have all been removed—all except for Station Kilo. We couldn’t find Station Kilo. You are to follow the networks of trails, moving from the site of one station to the next, searching for the spies. And…ah…” How to put this clearly, so there would be no mistake? “You will find the missing people. But here’s the point: the rescue will fail. Understand? Despite your best efforts, the spies will not be found. I don’t want to know anything about how you do it. The spies have to disappear, but I don’t want to hear any rumors about what happened to them, either. If no trace of them is found, there will be a…reward.” Drake put his hands in his pockets, and felt the wind kissing his face. “Failure,” he added softly, “is the only option.”

  He turned around and looked at the two men. He saw nothing there. The men’s faces held no expression. A small bird whipped past and landed in the acacia bushes.

  “If the rescue effort fails, the reward for each of you will be one share of Nanigen ground-floor stock. When Nanigen goes public, a single share will be worth at least a million dollars. Get it?”


  The men just looked at him with eyes as flat as the parking lot.

  But they got it. He was sure of that.

  “You’re venture capitalists now,” Drake said, slapping Telius on the shoulder as he left.

  The rain ended as quickly as it had begun. A steamy golden glow filled the forest as the clouds broke, and the water quickly receded as the rivulets emptied, and the rain ran off into the stream that drained the Manoa Valley. They had lost a lot of their gear, scattered by the water. And Jenny had disappeared. They collected themselves together in a group, and when everyone was accounted for, they spread out looking for their gear and, most of all, for Jenny. They went downhill, following the water flow, using the two headset radios to keep in touch.

  “Jenny! Are you there? Jenny!” they shouted, but there was no answer and no sign of her.

  “I found the harpoon,” Rick said. It hadn’t traveled far. His darts had been in a plastic case inside his duffel bag, and the bag turned up wedged against a stone. Even the chinaberry was found, underneath the edge of a leaf, glowing yellow.

  Karen King moved along with a sense of dread as they searched for Jenny Linn. She was shaking; she had seen the look on Jen’s face when she went down that last time.

  The worst horrors are the human ones. What had Jenny seen?

  Then Karen spotted something pale, soft, draped under a twig. A human hand. She had found Jenny. Her body was pinned under the twig, crushed and oddly twisted, and speckled with mud, with the forsaken look of the drowned, her broken arm flung akimbo and contorted like a wet rag. Jen’s eyes were open, vacant. Her body was covered with spaghetti-like threads, which crisscrossed and draped her like a veil. They were threads of fungus, already beginning to grow.