Micro

The creature seemed so delicate, so perfect. Karen felt her spirits lifting. What was going on? To her surprise, she realized that she felt happy in this strange new world. “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I feel like I’ve been searching all my life to find a place like this. It’s like I’m coming home.”

“Not me,” Danny said.

The mite walked up Karen’s arm, exploring it.

“Watch out, it could bite you,” Jenny Linn said.

“Not this little guy,” Karen answered. “See his mouth parts? They’re adapted for sucking up detritus-dead stuff. He eats crud.”

“How do you know it’s a he?”

Karen pointed to the mite’s abdomen. “Penis.”

“A guy’s a guy, no matter how small,” Jenny remarked.

As they hiked along Karen grew animated. “Mites are incredible. They’re highly specialized. Many mites are parasites, and they’re particular about their hosts. There’s a kind of mite that lives only on the eyeballs of a certain fruit bat-nowhere else. There’s another mite that lives only on the anus of a sloth-”

“Please, Karen!” Danny erupted.

“Get over it, Danny, it’s just nature. About half of all people on earth have mites living in their eyelashes. Many insects get mites on them, too. In fact, there are mites that live on other mites-so even mites get mites.”

Danny sat down and pulled a mite off his ankle. “Little monster chewed a hole in my sock.”

“Must be a detritus eater,” Jenny said.

“That’s not funny, Jenny.”

“Anybody want to try my natural latex skin cream?” Rick Hutter said. “Maybe it’ll keep the mites off.”

They stopped and Rick took out a plastic lab bottle, and passed it around. They rubbed small amounts of the cream on their faces, hands, and cuffs. It had a pungent smell. And it worked. It did seem to repel mites.

For Amar Singh, the reality of the micro-world seemed to assault his senses. He noted that being small even changed the sensations he felt on his skin. His first impression of the micro-world involved the feeling of air flowing over his face and hands, tugging at his shirt and ruffling his hair. The air seemed thicker, almost syrupy, and he could feel every ripple of breeze as the air coiled and flowed around his body. He waved his arm, and felt the air sliding between his fingers. Moving through the air in the micro-world was a bit like swimming. Because their bodies were so small, the friction of air passing over their bodies became more pronounced. Amar staggered a little, feeling a puff of air pushing him sideways. “We’re going to have to get our sea legs in this place,” he said to the others. “It’s like learning how to walk all over again.” The others were having similar difficulties: staggering, feeling the air tugging at them, and sometimes miscalculating the steps they took. Trying to jump up on something, they would jump too far. Their bodies were clearly stronger in the micro-world, but they hadn’t learned how to control their movements.

It felt like moonwalking.

“We don’t know our own strength,” Jenny said. She gathered herself, leaped high, and grabbed the edge of a leaf in both hands. She hung by her hands for a moment, then from only one hand-it was easy. She let go and fell back to the ground.

Rick Hutter had taken a turn wearing the backpack. Though it was loaded with gear, he discovered he could jump up and down pretty easily even with the pack on-and he got himself fairly high in the air without much effort. “Our bodies are stronger and lighter in this world, because gravity’s no big deal here.”

“Small has its advantages,” Peter remarked.

“I don’t see them,” Danny Minot said.

As for Amar Singh, a feeling of dread crept over him. What lived among these leaves? Meat-eaters. They were many-legged animals with jointed armor and unusual ways to kill prey. Amar had been raised in a devout Hindu family-his parents, immigrants from India who’d settled in New Jersey, did not eat meat. He had seen his father open a window and chase a fly out rather than kill it. Amar had always been a vegetarian; he had never been able to eat animals for protein. He believed that all animals were capable of suffering, including insects. In the laboratory, he worked with plants, not animals. Now, in the jungle, he wondered if he would have to kill an animal and eat its meat in order to survive. Or whether an animal would eat him. “We’re protein,” Amar said. “That’s all we are. Just protein.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rick asked him.

“We’re meat walking on two legs.”

“You sound kind of gloomy, Amar.”

“I’m being a realist.”

“At least…it’s interesting,” Jenny Linn remarked. Jenny noted the smell of the micro-world: it had a smell all its own. A complicated earthy scent filled her nose, and it wasn’t bad, actually quite nice, in a way. It was an odor of soil mixed with a thousand unknown scents, some sweet, some musky, drifting in the liquid air. Many of the smells were pleasant, even lovely, like exquisite perfumes.