Micro

“But those are all disguises we create for nature. You know how Danny loves to tell us that the science narrative privileges the balance of power. How there’s no objective truth, except for who’s got the power. Power tells the story and everyone accepts it as truth, because power rules.” He took a breath. “But who’s got the balance of power now, Danny? Can you feel it? Take a deep breath. Feel it? No? Then I’ll tell you. The balance of power lies in the hands of the entity that always holds the balance of power-nature. Nature, Danny. Not us. All we can do is go for the ride and try to hang on.”

Peter threw his arm around Rick, and steered him away. “That’s okay for now, Rick.”

“I hate that fucking guy,” Rick said.

“We’re all a little scared.”

“Not me,” Rick said, “I’m cool. I love being half an inch tall. That’s bite size for a bird, and that’s what I am. I’m a freaking hors d’oeuvre for a mynah bird and my chances of surviving another six hours are about one in four, maybe one in five-”

“We must make a plan,” Karen said, her voice calm.

Amar Singh appeared around a log to the left, covered with mud, his shirt torn. He seemed remarkably calm. Peter asked, “Everybody okay?”

They said they were.

“The Nanigen guy,” Peter said. “Hey Kinsky! Are you around?”

“All along,” Jarel Kinsky answered softly, close by. He had been sitting underneath a leaf, his legs drawn up, motionless and saying nothing, watching and listening to the others.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked him.

“You want to keep your voices down,” Kinsky said, speaking to the students as a whole. “They can hear better than we can.”

“They?” Jenny said.

“Insects.”

Silence fell over the group.

“That’s better,” Kinsky said.

They began talking in whispers. Peter said to Kinsky, “Any idea where we are?”

“I think so,” Kinsky answered. “Look over there.”

They turned and looked. A distant light was shining in that direction, buried in the trees. The light cast a glow down along the corner of a wooden building, just visible through the foliage, and the light reflected off panes of glass.

“That’s the greenhouse,” Kinsky went on. “We’re at the Waipaka Arboretum.”

“Oh, God,” Jenny Linn said. “We’re miles from Nanigen.” She sat down on a leaf, and felt something moving under her feet. The movement went on and on, ceaselessly, nudging and bumping at her feet, and then something small crawled up her leg. She plucked it off and tossed it away. It was a soil mite, an eight-legged creature, and harmless. She realized that the soil was full of tiny organisms, all going about their business. “The ground is alive under our feet,” she said.

Peter Jansen knelt down, brushed a small worm from his knee, and faced Jarel Kinsky. “What do you know about being shrunk like this?”

“The term is ‘dimensionally changed,’ ” Kinsky answered. “I’ve never been dimensionally changed, until now. Of course I’ve talked with the field teams.”

Rick Hutter broke in, “I wouldn’t trust anything this guy says. He’s loyal to Drake.”

“Wait,” Peter said calmly. “What are the ‘field teams’?” he asked Kinsky.

“Nanigen has been sending teams into the micro-world. Three people on a team,” Kinsky answered in a whisper. He seemed very afraid of making noise. “They’re dimensionally changed, half an inch tall. They operate the digging machinery and collect samples. They live in the supply stations.”

Jenny Linn said, “You mean those tiny tents we saw?”

“Yes. The teams never stay here for more than forty-eight hours. You begin to get sick if you stay changed for much longer than that.”

“Sick? What do you mean?” Peter asked.

“You get the micro-bends,” Kinsky said.

“Micro-bends?” Peter said.

“It’s an illness that develops in people who are dimensionally changed. The first symptoms appear in about three to four days.”

“What happens?”

“Well-we have some data on the disease, not much. The safety staff began testing animals in the tensor generator. They shrank mice, at first. They kept the shrunken mice in tiny flasks and studied them with a microscope. After a few days, all the shrunken mice died. The mice were hemorrhaging. Next, they shrank rabbits and finally dogs. Again, the animals died with hemorrhages. Necropsies of the animals, after they’d been restored to normal size, showed that there was generalized bleeding at sites of injury. Small cuts bled profusely, and there was internal bleeding, as well. It was discovered that the blood of the animals lacked clotting factors. Essentially, the animals had died of hemophilia-that’s the inability of the blood to form clots. We think that the size-change disrupts enzymatic pathways in the clotting process, but we don’t really know. But we also found that an animal could live for a short while in a shrunken state, as long as the animal was brought back to normal size within a couple of days. We began calling the illness micro-bends, because it reminded us of the bends in scuba diving. As long as an animal’s time in the shrunken state was limited, the animal seemed to be healthy.