Micro

No problem. Rick rooted around and found a coil of rope. He cut a short length of the rope, then picked it apart into strands with his fingers. This produced a pile of very strong threads. He held a piece of fluff from the mattress against the end of the dart and wound a thread around it, lashing the tail-puff in place. Now he had a real honest-to-goodness blow-dart-hardened tip, tail-puff, the dart ready to be armed with poison.

Even so, no scientist would assume the dart worked. He would have to test the dart. One of the grass stems, full-length, made a blow tube. Rick fitted the dart into the blow tube, took aim at the wooden frame of a bunk, and blew. The dart zinged across the room, hit the bunk…and bounced off.

“Shit,” he muttered. The dart couldn’t penetrate wood. That meant it would never get through an insect’s exoskeleton, either.

“Fail,” Karen remarked.

“The dart needs a metal tip,” Rick said.

Where to find the metal?

Tableware. Stainless steel tableware. Rick took a steel fork from the kitchen area and bent back one of the fork’s tines. He cut off the tine using the edge of a diamond sharpener, then honed the tine into an exceedingly sharp point. He lashed the steel point to a grass dart, and fired the dart at the bunk. This time, the dart embedded itself in the wood of the bunk with a satisfying thwock, and stayed there, trembling. “Now that will drive into a beetle,” Rick said. One by one, he cut the tines off all the forks in the bunker, until he had created a supply of more than two dozen darts and several blow tubes. He placed the darts in a plastic box he’d found in the lab, to keep them dry and protected from damage.

Rick still had to make curare, but in order to do that he needed to collect more ingredients. Like a fine sauce, a good curare contained a variety of ingredients cooked together, a chemistry of horrors. All he had for an ingredient, at the moment, was the chinaberry, which he’d stored upstairs in the tent. Nobody wanted a toxic chinaberry to be kept inside the bunker. It might give off fumes; it might make them sick. For the same reason, he could not boil curare on the stove. He did not have the ingredients for curare, anyway, and even if he did, everybody could get poisoned if he tried to make curare inside the bunker. The fumes would probably kill them.

He would have to boil curare outdoors over an open fire.

They also turned up a pair of binoculars and two more headlamps, and packed them into the duffels. Amar Singh dug up a roll of duct tape. “We can’t possibly survive in a super-jungle without duct tape,” Amar joked.

Rick Hutter opened a chest and shouted, “A gold mine!” And he pulled out a laboratory apron, rubber gloves, and safety goggles. “This is just what I need for making curare. Excellent, excellent!” He stuffed the things in a duffel bag. He’d have to cook the curare in a vessel of some kind. In the bunker’s tiny kitchen facility, at the bottom of a shelf near the floor, he found a large aluminum pot. He lashed the pot to his duffel pack and then put the pack on his back, testing its weight. He was surprised. The pack, though enormous, felt very light. “I’m as strong as an ant,” Rick said.

Jenny Linn rooted through a supply box and discovered a military compass. The compass, battered and worn, was the type used by American soldiers ever since the Korean War. It could be used to keep them going in a straight line. But none of them could find a GPS unit anywhere at the station.

“It’s because GPS can’t tell us where we are,” Peter explained. “A GPS unit is accurate to about ten meters. At our small size, that’s equivalent to a one-kilometer accuracy. In other words, GPS can’t tell our location more precisely than a kilometer in any direction, by our measure of things. A compass is much more accurate than GPS for us.”

Suddenly, after the meal and all the work, a desire for sleep came over all of them. Peter’s watch showed that the time was just before noon.

“Let’s finish packing up our gear later,” Karen King suggested. They hadn’t slept the night before, but they were used to pulling all-nighters in the lab. Karen prided herself on her stamina, but even so, she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Why am I so tired all of a sudden? she thought. Maybe it had something to do with their small bodies, all the calories they’d burned…but she couldn’t focus…And she couldn’t resist crawling into a bunk, where she fell instantly asleep. They all slept.

Chapter 17

Manoa Valley 29 October, 1:00 p.m.