Micro

“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.