Wilcox made a pooh-poohing sound. “There's a big safety factor before we start to grow back. Five or ten minutes at least.”
“Once the metal starts flowing, we'll finish up here fast enough.” Tomiko continued to play the beam until the gold moved like chocolate toward the copper junction. “I've done work like this before, though on a larger scale.”
While her father had gone off to shoot movies and her mother skated in glamorous traveling ice shows, Tomiko had stayed at home, making circuit boards to drive crude erector-set machines. She read Popular Electronics, wrote away for kits in the classified ads, and assembled them herself.
She had followed printed circuit patterns, using a masonite baseboard coated with copper foil, spraying it with light-sensitive resist film. She drew her own stencil patterns as the mask, then developed the boards like an amateur photographer, leaving copper lines behind. With tweezers she hand-stuffed wires into the appropriate circuit holes and soldered transistors into place.
Tomiko's parents wanted to help her become a star, just like them. Her father had even gotten her cast as a hard-fighting streetwise waif in Little Orphan Assassin, in which Tomiko played the ten-year-old daughter of a gunned-down hit man. Nolan Brad-dock had been the kindly FBI agent keeping her safe while rival mobsters tried to rub out the rest of her family.
Tomiko had stolen many hearts in that film, but though her parents loved to perform for crowds, she preferred to perform for herself and meet her own challenges. Such as being miniaturized and attempting a quickie repair job on a complicated computer chip…
Realistically, Tomiko couldn't believe it would ever be cost-effective for tiny crews to slap together repairs on an ultra-complex integrated circuit. Such chips were designed to be mass produced, and not even the most sophisticated ULSI circuit would ever warrant such tender loving care.
But this was only a test mission, practice before the team went inside an alien body. They all had to be at the peak of their capabilities.
Next, Wilcox swung his beam over to the copper wall, playing heat over the rough surface until it shimmered orange. The two rivers of metal streamed toward each other until the circuit paths collapsed together and fused into a dam. Now the electrons could flow through, and the circuit would function as designed. Almost finished.
“We have seven minutes,” Pirov said. “Please hurry.”
Tomiko raised the heat to complete her work. “Ready to get out of here?”
Wilcox relentlessly concentrated his beam on the already-molten copper. Unexpectedly, the metals began to boil.
“Hey, enough, Garrett.” Tomiko yanked her laser away and switched off the beam.
Hot globules boiled off, wavering spheres bound by liquid-metal surface tension. They sprayed upward, then drifted down in an avalanche of hardening, molten metal.
Tomiko jumped into the air, levitating with her jetpack and dodging the hot spheres that drifted around them. For a moment, it looked like a cascade of sparkling balls from the sky, as if someone were throwing metal flowers to celebrate the team's victory. Then a hot globule passed in front of her face like a comet, and Tomiko felt its blistering warmth, saw the shimmering crystallization of its cooling skin. She bent backward like a reed, out of its way.
Wilcox dove under the rain of molten metal. “Before I call a retreat, we've got to verify that the circuit works.” One of the trembling spheres crashed into the floor next to him, but the team captain dodged to the left. When it struck, the globule burst its hardened outer skin and spilled hot metal in a puddle.
With spare movements and careful precision, Wilcox dropped to his knees and removed electrical leads from his test pack. “Sending another pulse through.” He slapped down one and then another onto the gold surface. Wilcox glanced over his shoulder, raising his eyebrows at Tomiko.
With the hot spheres still raining down, Pirov crouched, trying to make himself even smaller. “We should get out of here,” he said in a tiny voice.
“Watch out, Doctor P!” Tomiko swung the laser cutter and vaporized a globule that tumbled toward the old man. The Russian ducked in surprise. The metal blob ruptured into smaller cooling spheres, which spread out like gumballs floating backward in the air, crackling as they cooled.
“Everybody clear!” Lifting his feet off the surface, Wilcox sent a test pulse into the connector. The metal walls thrummed as a surge of electrons smashed into the newly fused gold and copper microwires—and flowed through. “You bet!” He did a little victory dance. “Full connection.”
Then a shimmering ball of molten copper crashed into his right leg, splattering hot metal. He screamed.
Tomiko was already in the air, knocking him away from a second falling sphere. Wilcox writhed, grabbing at his leg and burning his fingertips on the coating of liquid metal. The fabric of his jumpsuit snapped and smoked; the flesh underneath sizzled as his skin and muscles cooked.
Tomiko held him down, shouting for Pirov. “Come on, Doctor P! Need your help here.” The splattered metal had hardened into a crust, but continued to burn. Tomiko made a snap decision and grabbed the hot crystalline edges with her fingers, blistering her hands as she pried the copper off, exposing the angry wound.
Wilcox's jumpsuit had charred entirely away, and the burn dug deep into the cocky young captain's thigh muscle. The smell of cooked meat overpowered the sharp tang of hot metal. He moaned, biting back another scream.
“Come on, be a tough guy, Garrett,” Tomiko said close to his face. “Now's the time to show off for me.” Wilcox grabbed her arm and squeezed it in a death grip.
Dr. Pirov turned his head from side to side, as if searching for miraculous outside help. He looked as if he wanted to back away. “That wound is too deep, too severe. We should wait until we return to normal size, then we can take him to the Proteus infirmary.” He nodded quickly. “They will know what to do.”
“Forget that. He needs help right away,” Tomiko said, ready to slap him across the face. “Do something for him now. Come on, you're a doctor.”
Shaken, Pirov snatched packets from his first-aid kit. “But we have less than five minutes.” He jabbed Wilcox with a morphine syringe. “I never had much of a bedside manner, you see. My instructors told me I could establish more rapport with a dissection cadaver than with living patients.” He spoke quickly, as if to calm himself rather than Wilcox. “That is why I went into anatomy rather than medical practice.”
Though dazed, Pirov wrapped the gaping burn with all the gauze he carried. Bodily fluids began to soak through the wrappings.
“See, Garrett. You just needed a little bandage.” Tomiko touched the blond hair at his temple, the streaming sweat on his grayish skin. Imminent shock. The morphine began to take effect.
“Got to head for the exit point. Doctor P, help me carry him.” She snatched up the captain's discarded laser cutter and tucked it under her arm. If she left the piece of equipment behind, it would grow back to normal size and crush the delicate chip. “No time for caution. Just get to the edge.”
She and Pirov grabbed Wilcox under each arm, then raised him with their jetpacks. The wounded captain hung like a dead weight between them. They streaked along low to the surface, trying to get enough thrust from the compressed gas to maintain stability as random air currents jolted them. They climbed higher until the convoluted circuit looked like a tiny city seen from an airplane.
But the paths beneath her began to look smaller, the lines finer. “Growing already. Keep moving.”
Tomiko could not sense the weakening miniaturization field, but she increased the outflow of gas from her jetpack nozzle. As the team members enlarged, their mass increased proportionately, and the small gas jets could not provide enough lift and propulsion. The tiny packs had been designed only for use at sizes where air resistance meant a lot and gravity counted for little.
Now, as they grew heavier, the jets couldn't keep up, and Tomiko began to fall. She and Pirov could barely keep Wilcox's boots from dragging alon
g the surface of the ULSI circuit.
Ahead, beyond the edge of the chip, Tomiko could see the bright, pulsing glow of the miniaturization room, although everything seemed light years away. She could discern no details of the technicians or equipment. Not yet.
She hoped Director Hunter had a medical team standing by. They had no time to stop and set up a transmission.
Wilcox finally ceased his writhing and dangled unconscious. “Only a few more minutes, Garrett,” she said, though he couldn't hear.
At last, jetpacks sputtering, the team members crossed the edge of the circuitry paths. To the Proteus crew outside, they were already visible, the size of small insects.
Director Hunter said into his voice pickup, unaware of the accident, “Good work, team. We've tested the circuit, and the error in the chip has been corrected.” His voice sounded deep and pervasive inside their suit radios.
“Felix, get an emergency medical tech in here, now!” she shouted into the open link. “Garrett's hurt.”
Still growing, Tomiko and Pirov dropped to the lab floor and landed heavily as the now-useless jetpacks gave out. She tried to shield Wilcox from the impact, letting him tumble on top of her.
The Russian doctor straightened beside Tomiko, looking perplexed and embarrassed by his own helpless reaction.
While the team approached normal size, two emergency medical technicians hurried toward them like lumbering giants. “Better get a stretcher, take him to the infirmary,” Tomiko called, her voice small and piping as she grew. “Let's move it here!”
Hunter rushed forward. “What happened?”
The medical techs hustled Wilcox out of the room, carrying him through the double doors. They took readings, keeping up a running chatter about the best treatment.
“Big problem, Felix.” Even shaken, Tomiko forced a no-nonsense tone into her voice. She tossed Wilcox's retrieved laser cutter to the floor. “You've got to launch a mission in a few hours—and now you don't have a pilot for the ship.”
Chapter 7
Thursday, 10:48 a.m.
Awed by the successively camouflaged fences inside the Proteus Facility, Arnold Freeth climbed out of the government sedan. Amazement blossomed on his freckled face, and his eyes grew progressively wider. “You've really got an alien body in there, don't you? My God, you want me to—”
A Marine MP in a private-security-guard uniform swung the first sallyport gate shut and padlocked it. He glanced at Devlin's badge and ID, then saluted. “We've been expecting you, sir. Director Hunter needs to see you immediately.”
“On my way.” He knew that Felix, frazzled with all the last-minute urgent preparations for the mission, probably wanted to double-check something about the Mote. Devlin gestured for Freeth to follow him into the perimeter, shoes crunching on the packed gravel.
The UFO expert stretched his neck, risking whiplash as he tried to stare everywhere at once. The high granite bluffs were streaked with black from algae and rain runoff; Ponderosa pines whispered in the breezes, releasing a sun-warmed, resiny scent.
“Not much of a secret installation, right out in the open. Not at all like Area 51.” He sounded as if he spoke from personal knowledge. “I expected soldiers with machine guns, razor-wire, motion detectors, land mines…”
Devlin clapped him on a bony shoulder. “If you weren't authorized here, Mr. Freeth, you'd be all too aware of those things.” They headed toward the cavelike entrance.
“That tunnel is big enough to drive trucks through.”
“The hard part is driving them up the winding road. Thirty-eight switchbacks. A real headache, especially in the winter. The SST from San Francisco took five hours to get here late last night with the alien body.”
“When—when can I see it?”
“Paperwork first, Mr. Freeth. This is the government, after all.”
Inside the tunnel, a guard sat in a transparent Lexan enclosure surrounded by TV monitors. “Major Devlin! Director Hunter has asked to see you immediately upon your return. There's been an unexpected change in this afternoon's mission.”
“Roger that, Sergeant.” Devlin took a clipboard the man slid through an opening in his windowed enclosure, then gave Freeth a conspiratorial wink. “There's always an unexpected change, one way or another, and I always manage to fix it.” He turned back to the guard. “I'll go see him as soon as we get Mr. Freeth processed through.”
The UFO expert stiffened with suspicion when he learned they would have to take fingerprints, retinal scans, and a badge photograph, but Devlin cut off the other man's protests about violated civil rights and privacy. “I can't show you the alien until you go through the red tape. You know bureaucrats.”
With a discouraged nod, Freeth submitted to the tedious procedures. When the processing guard finally handed him a laminated badge on a thin chain, Freeth slipped it over his head and looked unexpectedly pleased with himself.
Devlin led the way along the painted floor, following bright pools from caged fluorescent lights set into the rugged ceiling. The air in the entryway had the damp, chalky smell of caves. Deeper inside, the passages were lined with painted concrete and color-keyed power conduits and pipes. Three-wheeled white Cushman electric carts hummed along, carrying packages, supplies, or technicians.
Freeth seemed to be floating with excitement as they passed laboratories and high bays. Airlocks sealed experimental rooms with a hiss of compressed air. Though intimidated by the size of the complex, he looked as if he'd seen the culmination of his life's work. “Believe me, I knew places like this existed. I knew it. This is like the secret hangars at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.”
“Actually, the Mojave is where we grow our giant tarantulas and our mutant radioactive ants,” Devlin said with mock seriousness. “Here, we work on something… smaller.”
Big Science had always enthralled Devlin. Even during his Academy days, when he was just dating Kelli Hunter, he'd loved to tinker beyond the prescripted class experiments, often at the expense of old equipment.
Once, Devlin had modified a C02 laser and accidentally bumped a spinning mirror, which bounced a reflection around the room, scribing black streaks on the cinderblock walls. The sour-tempered professor—a civilian who was counting the years until he could move to the Bahamas and sip piña coladas all day—had banned Devlin from the optics laboratory. After waiting until the professor went off to a physics conference, Devlin had filled hundreds of plastic cups with water late one night and built an immense pyramid in front of the man's office door. He added a note, “Can I buy you a drink, Professor?”
When the professor returned from his conference, it took him and his secretary hours to dismantle the barricade, drenching themselves in the process. Lucky for young Marc Devlin, the professor had made so many enemies among the underclassmen that he'd never been able to identify the real prankster…
Now, as Devlin led Freeth past security checkpoints, the man's expression changed to barely covered anger. “It's amazing what the government keeps hidden from the taxpayers. Do they think we can't handle knowing about this?”
“Project Proteus is a collaborative effort with American and Russian scientists, a few Europeans, a few Japanese. It's too big”—he smiled at the irony— “and too important for one country to handle alone.”
Freeth continued to speculate about international conspiracies and military industrial conglomerates. “I've heard there's an engine that runs by burning distilled water, and another one that gets a hundred miles per gallon of gas. But, believe me, the oil companies don't want us to have them. Every one of those inventors was killed in a mysterious accident.”
His muddy eyes showed an edge of panic, as if he was afraid a similarly mysterious accident would befall him. “And you know that pharmaceutical companies found a simple cure for cancer a long time ago, but they'll never release it because they make too much money on all those expensive treatments.”
“Negative, Mr. Freeth.” Devlin's voice grew sudde
nly cold. He had watched the heroic efforts the oncologists had performed on Kelli, and certainly not because they wanted to keep any miracle pills hidden for their own private use. “You have been misinformed.”
Though his wife had worked as a medical technician, she was the last to suspect that something was wrong. She would have chided patients for ignoring such symptoms, but she hadn't seen a doctor until the ovarian cancer had progressed too far. From that point, she and Devlin had had very little time left together. Far too little…
A miracle cure, indeed.
Quiet now, Devlin led the UFO expert to a lift cage. He tried to focus his thoughts, get back to business. “You'll see everything with your own eyes soon enough, Mr. Freeth.”
Freeth gripped the metal bars as the caged elevator dropped into the deepest levels. Devlin ushered him into well-lit tunnels that smelled of paint, lubricants, and recycled air. “Are you ready?”
Freeth nodded vigorously, still out of his depth, but refusing to admit it.
The last set of smooth-bore tunnels looked like an underground hospital corridor. Ahead was a Class IV isolation chamber large enough to be an operating theater, complete with an observation deck at the ceiling level. Thick bullet-proof glass windows and armor-reinforced access doors surrounded the chamber. Armed Marines nodded to Devlin as he approached.
“There you go, Mr. Freeth. I hope your expertise serves us well. The team is going inside this afternoon.”
Freeth stepped gingerly forward, cautious but curious. He placed his palms against the large windows, like a child staring into a closed toy store.
In the middle of the isolation chamber, surrounded by sophisticated analytical and medical apparatus, sat a sealed cylindrical case like a coffin, or a lifesupport capsule. Its angles and curves seemed entirely wrong, and the side walls were marked with stylized hieroglyphics. It did not belong among the chrome and polished surfaces prevalent inside the Proteus Facility.
Fantastic Voyage : Microcosm Page 5