Micro

by Michael Crichton

  This time Karen came around. She stood up and grabbed him, and started hauling him along. “Come on Rick! Don’t fall apart on me!”

  Stumbling, choking, coughing, they ran through the smoke. It filled the ceiling.

  “Get under the smoke!” Ben shouted.

  They began crawling, keeping their heads under the swirling black smoke, while a horrifying deep roar made the ground shake. They made it to the hangar. Rick and Karen leaped into the planes, while Rourke flung open a hangar door. Just then, the door collapsed, revealing a curtain of flames blocking the mouth of the cave.

  Rourke fell back, coughing.

  “Ben!” Karen screamed. She saw him fall to his knees, then stand up, and he waved them on. “Go!”

  But there were only two planes. Ben would not be able to fly.

  Karen cried, “Ben! What about you?”

  “Get out!” He was staggering backward toward the tunnel. Smoke poured from it, now.

  Choking, her head spinning, Karen started her plane and waved at Rick. “Take off!” she screamed at him. They took off at the same time, flying side by side through the cave, while Rourke staggered backward. Karen looked back and saw him fall to his knees. He was crawling into the Redoubt. He couldn’t breathe; he would never make it.

  But now the wall of flames approached. She ducked, hunching herself in the cockpit, and the micro-plane burst through the flames and into cool night air. She looked over and saw that Rick Hutter flew next to her. He seemed okay.

  She banked gently, testing the stick, and looked back. Rourke’s Redoubt had become a sea of fire. The flames leaped up against the Great Boulder, painting its face with firelight, while the shadow of a giant man appeared outlined against the flames. The man held a red plastic gasoline container, and he was dumping it around Tantalus Base. The man stepped back, and tossed a match, and a burst of flames leaped up, revealing his face. It was Vin Drake. Bathed in the firelight, Drake’s face radiated calm. He could have been staring into a campfire and thinking peaceful thoughts. He tipped his head from side to side, as if he were shaking water out of his ear or listening for something.

  Rick lost control of his plane. He threw it into a barrel roll, and smacked into the Great Boulder. For a moment he thought he was dead, but the micro-plane bounced off the rock, corkscrewed, and stabilized, flying straight and level. These micro-planes were really tough. He looked around: he had lost sight of Karen. The trees extended upward in a tangled wall. He searched the trees but found no lights, nothing to indicate where Karen had gone. There was a radio in the cockpit, and he debated calling her on it. Just then, ahead of him, Rick saw a pair of lights wink on, green and red. Karen’s running lights.

  He switched on his running lights, then waggled his wingtips at her. She waggled back. Good: they could see each other. She flew into the crown of a tree, and Rick followed her lights. He could barely see the branches and limbs all around. He was flying through a dark maze, following Karen King.

  Rick ran up the power and caught up with her while she circled inside the tree. Then he switched on his radio. What the hell. Drake couldn’t reach them now, even if he could hear them.

  “Are you all right, Karen?”

  “I think so. What about you?”

  “Doing okay,” he answered. He realized that she had nowhere to go now except Nanigen. She couldn’t stay at Tantalus since there was nothing left. He decided not to remind her of that reality.

  They could see Drake through the branches as they circled. He walked downslope, and more flames leaped up. He was burning something else; whatever it was, he seemed determined to eradicate all traces of the base and of Rourke’s Redoubt. The fires were burning in wet forest, and would probably die without attracting attention, leaving Rourke’s Redoubt and Tantalus Base gutted ruins.

  Drake moved off into the forest, his flashlight bobbing. They heard the sound of an engine, and they saw a pickup truck bouncing on the dirt road at the lip of the crater. The vehicle’s lights vanished past the far side of the crater and darkness closed in. But the darkness wasn’t total, for the lights of Honolulu sparkled through the branches. Karen flew up out of the top of the tree and into the open.

  “Bats. Gotta land somewhere,” Rick said to her.

  “Where, Rick? We can’t land on the ground.” They would be exposed to ground-dwelling predators.

  “Follow me,” he said. He went past her and flew on ahead, while she followed. He could see branches, leaves, obstructions, and he flew around them, twisting left and right, always staying inside the crowns of the trees, where bats wouldn’t be flying. Occasionally he looked back, and saw Karen’s running lights behind him; she was staying on his tail. The light of the fires faded behind them, until they had gone down inside the depths of the crater, into a zone where the wind blew more gently, blocked by the walls and slopes of the crater. They could no longer see the fires at all.

  “I’m going to look for a landing place,” Rick said on the radio. He coasted along a branch, inspecting it: it was a wide, clean branch, free of moss, with plenty of taxi room. He settled down on the branch and came to a halt. These planes could land on a dime. Karen landed and taxied up next to him, until their planes were parked beside each other.

  The branch rocked and bobbed: the wind played with it, threatening to pluck the aircraft off the branch.

  “We need to tie these planes down,” Rick said, and climbed out. He discovered that the planes had tie-down ropes in their noses and tails; surely Ben Rourke’s invention. Rick secured both planes.

  Karen King began crying softly, hunched in her cockpit.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Ben. He was trapped. He couldn’t have survived.”

  Rick thought Ben might have stood a chance. “I wouldn’t count that guy out.” But there was no way of knowing if Ben had escaped or had died in the flames.

  Then came the wait. The clocks in the instrument panels showed the time: 1:34 a.m. Dawn would not come for many hours, but they couldn’t fly safely at night.

  The trade wind was running strong, and the branch tossed and heaved like the deck of a ship in a storm. She could see the bruises on her arms, dark stains in the moonlight. The stains were getting larger. She wondered what the rest of her body looked like.

  Rick became seasick as the branch pitched and bobbed, and he wondered if the micro-bends were getting to him. Or it might be lingering effects of spider and wasp venom. He thought about the distance they had to cover at dawn. Fifteen miles, including a long passage over Pearl Harbor, which was open water. He thought: It’s not possible. We’ll never make it.

  Chapter 47

  Tantalus Drive 1 November, 1:40 a.m.

  W hen Eric Jansen swung into the parking area by the Diamond Head Lighthouse, the place had been deserted. There was no sign of Vin Drake’s car. He had arrived too late. Or maybe too early? Maybe Drake hadn’t shown up yet. He had parked in the corner of the area and debated what to do next. Wait for Drake? But Drake might have already been here. Should he go to the police? But that might cost the survivors their lives, because Drake knew where they were, and he might be heading for Tantalus to kill them.

  Eric knew he had to go to Tantalus.

  And so he drove up the Tantalus Drive, the truck roaring and misfiring, past expensive homes on hairpin turns. The road came to a gate with a rutted dirt track beyond it; the gate wasn’t locked. He started driving up the track. It wound up the steep mountainside through guava forests, and came out at the lip of the crater, and it followed the lip down through dips and gullies, washed out in several places. This was a four-wheel-drive track only, and Eric was glad he had a fat-tire truck. Eventually he reached a turnaround; still no sign of Drake’s truck. The place was deserted.

  He did not have a flashlight; that was a problem. But he got out of the truck, leaving the headlights shining toward the Great Boulder, and stood there, listening. There was a reddish glow through the trees, and he began crashing through the u
ndergrowth toward it. When he reached the Great Boulder he saw what had happened. Embers were dying down, the soil smoking, and the ground reeked of gasoline.

  Drake had done the deed. He had killed everybody.

  Regretting that he hadn’t brought a flashlight, Eric got down on his knees and found the entrance to the rat warren: Rourke’s hideout. “Anybody there?” he called.

  It was useless. He waited for a while, though, poking his finger into the soil, wondering if there were survivors. It was too dark to see much, and they would be very small; he worried he might crush somebody by accident.

  But there weren’t any survivors, anybody could see that.

  He stumbled through the woods back to the truck.

  Rick and Karen, parked on the branch, saw the headlights of another vehicle bumping slowly around the rim of the crater. It was a truck.

  Rick watched for a while, then said to Karen, “I’m going to investigate.”

  “Don’t.”

  He ignored her. He untied his plane and started it, and taxied off. She heard it whining upward, toward the crater rim, toward the Great Boulder.

  “Damn you, Rick!” Karen yelled. She wasn’t going to be left alone, so she started her plane and followed him.

  Rick saw a man get out of the truck. He circled through the branches, listening for bats, but he didn’t hear any sonar, and he flew closer to the man. The man walked to the Great Boulder and got down on his knees in the darkness. His face wasn’t visible. The man stood up from the boulder and walked away, crashing through the underbrush, a black silhouette. Rick followed him, dodging among branches and trunks.

  The man arrived at the parked vehicle. It was a strange-looking truck with fat tires and a weird paint job. The man got in, and the dome light came on, revealing his face.

  Rick had seen the man before. Where? He circled past the window as the truck started with a roar.

  “Karen!” he called on the radio. “Who is this guy?”

  She swooped past Rick and made a steep turn by the truck. She was getting the hang of flying; it was pretty easy. “It’s Peter’s brother!”

  “I thought he was supposed to be dead. Is he in with Drake?”

  “How would I know?” Karen answered testily.

  The truck started and began rumbling off, moving along the dirt track.

  Karen ran her engine up to EMERGENCY MAXIMUM. Running at full power, their planes could barely keep up with the truck, even though it bounced slowly along the dirt road. The moment the truck arrived at a paved road it would speed up and they would never catch it, and it would be gone. They had to get Eric’s attention soon.

  He was driving with the windows rolled up. Karen flew alongside the window, close to the man’s face, and waggled her wings. No reaction. Then the truck sped up, leaving them behind in swirling dust.

  “Get in the slipstream,” Rick said. There would be a zone of dead air behind the truck’s cab, he thought, so he dove for it, watching the back of the man’s head in the glass. His plane flipped over and tumbled: the air behind the cab had gone turbulent and chaotic, and he nearly crashed on the truck’s bed.

  The truck came to a bad spot in the road, where rain had washed a gully. The man slowed, and rolled down his window and leaned out to get a better look.

  Karen flew through the window into the cab. She circled once, and the man drew his head back in. She made a slow pass in front of his eyes, and rolled the plane, its lights winking.

  He saw that. He jammed on the brakes. “Hey—!” His eyes followed her as she banked and turned and flew low over the dashboard. He held out his hand, palm upward, and she landed on his hand. She climbed out and stood on his hand, while he looked at her.

  Rick flew in and landed on the dashboard.

  “Which-ones-are-you?” he said, his voice rumbling. He held Karen delicately, and he tried not to breathe too much as he spoke. He didn’t want to blow her off his hand.

  Karen held up her radio headset and pointed to it. She remembered that Jarel Kinsky had said the radios could be used to communicate with full-size people. Maybe it would be easier to talk by radio.

  “You-bet.” He put her down on the dashboard, with her plane, and opened the glove box and took out a headset, and plugged it into a mess of electronic equipment sitting on the seat. “Go-to-seventy-one-point-two-five-gigahertz,” he said.

  Rick and Karen put on their headsets and tuned their aircraft radios.

  The man opened his mouth and spoke words that rolled out: “Can-you-understand-me-now?” An instant later the same words sounded on their headsets in Eric’s normal speaking voice: “Can you understand me now? This is a squirt radio. It collects my voice and speeds it up and squirts it at you. It also slows down your voices so I can understand you.”

  They explained to Eric what had happened. “We need to get into the generator as soon as possible,” Karen said.

  “First…about my brother.”

  They told him. As Karen described Peter’s death, Eric’s palms hit the steering wheel, throwing the micro-humans and the planes into the air. They came down amid choking dust particles, and waited. They gave him time. When he opened his eyes, his face had become set and calm. “I’m taking you into Nanigen. Then I’m going to find Vincent Drake.”

  Chapter 48

  Chinatown, Honolulu 1 November, 2:30 a.m.

  Dan Watanabe woke to the buzzing of his cell phone. He reached for it in the dark and knocked it off the bedside table, and heard it hitting the floor. He groped for the light, fearing bad family news: his seven-year-old daughter, living with his ex-wife; his mother… but the caller was the security chief of Nanigen: “Got a minute, lieutenant?”

  Watanabe ran his tongue over a sticky mouth. “Yeah.”

  “There was a fire on Tantalus tonight.”

  Watanabe grunted. “What?”

  “It was small, probably didn’t get reported. Some people died in it.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Those students—they were murdered.”

  He sat up fast, instantly full awake. Take the man into custody, get a statement. “Where are you? I’ll have a car—”

  “No. I just want to talk with you.”

  “You know the Deluxe Plate?” It was open all night.

  He was nursing a cup of coffee at a back booth, the only customer in the place, when Don Makele walked in. The man seemed…resigned. Makele eased himself into the booth.

  Watanabe didn’t waste time with chitchat. “Let’s hear about the students.”

  “They’re dead. Vin Drake has killed at least eight people. They were small people.”

  “How small?”

  Makele put his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “Really small.”

  “Tell you what,” Watanabe said. “Let’s pretend I believe you.”

  “Nanigen has a machine that’ll shrink anything. Even people.”

  A waitress came over and asked if Makele wanted breakfast. He shook his head, and waited in silence while the waitress walked away.

  “Will this machine shrink another machine?” Watanabe asked.

  “Well—sure,” Makele answered.

  “Will it shrink a pair of scissors?”

  Makele squinted. “What are you talking about?”

  “Willy Fong. Marcos Rodriguez.”

  Makele didn’t answer.

  Dan Watanabe went on: “I understand you want to tell me what happened to the missing students. But I also want to hear about the micro-bots that cut Fong’s and Rodriguez’s throats from ear to ear.”

  “How do you know about the bots?” Makele said.

  “Did you think the Honolulu Police Department doesn’t have microscopes?”

  Makele sucked on his lips. “The bots weren’t supposed to kill anybody.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “The bots were reprogrammed. To kill.”

  “By who?”

  “I think by Drake.”

  Watanab
e took that in. “So what happened to the students?”

  Makele explained about the supply stations in Manoa Valley, and about Tantalus Base. “The kids must’ve found out something bad about Drake, because he’s been pushing me to…get rid of them.”

  “Kill them?”

  “Yes. They ended up in Manoa Valley. Drake wanted to make sure they didn’t get out of the valley alive. They tried to escape. A few of them made it to Tantalus.” He explained to Watanabe about Ben Rourke. “Drake torched the place. Also, I’m pretty sure he murdered our chief financial officer and a vice president…”

  Watanabe’s head was swimming. Vin Drake seemed to have killed thirteen people. If this was true, Drake was extremely dangerous. “Tell me why I shouldn’t decide you’re a nutcase?” he said to the security man.

  Makele hunched over. “You decide what you want. I have to tell you the truth.”

  “Are you involved in these deaths?”

  “For seven million dollars.”

  In his years as a detective, Dan Watanabe had witnessed many confessions. Even so, a confession never failed to give Watanabe a sense of surprise. Why did people decide to tell the truth? It was never in their best interest. The truth doesn’t set you free, it sends you to prison.

  “Last time we talked, lieutenant,” Don Makele went on, “you said something about Moloka‘i.”

  Watanabe frowned. He didn’t remember…Oh, yes—Makele used the traditional Hawaiian pronunciation…

  “You said Moloka‘i is the best of the islands,” the security chief went on. “I think you meant the people of Moloka‘i, not the island.”