Micro

They were ravenously hungry but had nothing to eat. They drank water from a hole in a tree root, and moved on, Rick dragging the piece of bark. “We have strychnine and we have the chinaberry,” he said. “But it’s not enough. We need at least one more ingredient.” He kept looking around, scanning the vegetation for plants he recognized, for anything toxic. And eventually he found what he was looking for. He discovered it by scent. He recognized a sharp odor coming from a mass of vegetation.

“Oleander,” Rick said, and he went toward a mass of shrubbery with long, pointed, shiny leaves. “The sap is the wicked stuff.” Crashing through leaf litter, he arrived at the trunk of the shrub. He drew his machete, sharpened it, and hacked into the trunk. A translucent, milky sap surged forth, while Rick backed away quickly. “That liquid will kill you fast if it touches your skin. It’s got a lethal mix of cardenolides in it. It’ll stop your heart, bam. You don’t want to breathe the fumes, either. The fumes could give you a heart attack.” While the sap oozed down the bark, Rick rummaged in his duffel, and he put on the lab apron and the rubber gloves and goggles he’d found at Station Echo.

Amar grinned. “Rick, you look like a mad scientist.”

“Madness is my style,” Rick said. He opened one of the plastic lab jars and advanced toward the running sap. Holding his breath, he let the jar fill up while the sap dribbled over his gloves. He screwed on the cap, then rinsed the outside of the jar in a drop of dew. He filled a second jar the same way, and held up both jars with a triumphant smile. “Now what we need to do is cook everything into a paste. For that, we need a fire.”

But the forest was soaking wet after the rain. Nothing would burn.

“No problem,” Rick said. “All we need is Aleurites moluccana.”

“What the hell is that, Rick?” Karen King said.

“It’s a candlenut tree,” he answered. “The Hawaiians call them kukui trees. There are kukui trees growing all over this forest.” He stopped, and looked up, and turned around, staring upward. “Yeah! That’s a kukui, right there.” He pointed at a tree with large, silvery leaves. The tree stood out like a pale thunderhead, ten meters away. It was hung with greenish balls of fruit.

They pressed on toward the candlenut tree. When they reached its base, they saw pulpy fruits scattered on the ground around the tree. “Let me have a machete,” Rick said. “Now watch.”

He began hacking into a fruit, chopping off the pulp using the machete. Soon he reached a hard core, a nut. “That’s a kukui nut,” he said. “The nut is loaded with oil. The ancient Hawaiians filled stone lamps with kukui nut oil. It’s a great source of light. They also put the nuts on a stick and used it as a torch. The nut burns.”

The kukui nut, covered with a glossy hard shell, proved difficult to crack. However, they took turns chopping away at it with a machete. The weapon had a heavy blade and an exceedingly sharp edge, and it cut slowly into the nut’s shell. A few minutes of chopping revealed the oily nutmeat. They began hacking out chunks of the nut, and they made a pile of the nutmeat on the ground. They added husks of dry grass, which Peter peeled out of the center of dead grass stems, which had stayed dry despite the rain. Rick set his metal pot on top of the nut pieces and put on his chemical equipment. He adjusted his goggles and loaded the pot with strips of strychnine-root bark, chunks of the chinaberry, the two jugs of oleander sap, and water collected from the top of a leaf.

Rick lit the fire with the windproof lighter.

The tinder began to burn, and the kukui-nut fire blazed up, yellow and bright. It was a small fire by the standards of the normal world, not much bigger than a candle flame, yet to them it seemed like a bonfire. The fire heated their faces and made them blink and shy away, and it brought the water in the pot to a boil within seconds. Two minutes of boiling time was enough to reduce the contents of the pot to a tarry goo.

“Fresh curare,” Rick said. “Let’s hope, anyway.”

Working carefully with a splinter of wood, wearing rubber gloves, and holding his breath, Rick packed the curare into a plastic lab bottle. He could dip his darts in the stuff to arm them with poison. He hoped the goop was poisonous, but he wouldn’t know for certain until he used it in a hunting situation. He screwed the top on the bottle, then lifted the goggles from his eyes and parked them on his forehead.

Peter stared at Rick’s plastic bottle and the brown-colored gunk in it. “So you think that’ll take down big game? Something as big as a grasshopper?” he asked.

Rick offered him a wry smile. “It’s not finished.”

“How so?”

“We need one more ingredient.”

“Which is-?”

“Cyanide.”

“What?” Peter said, while the others gathered around, listening.

“You heard me-cyanide,” Rick said. “And I know where to get it.”

“Where?” Peter wondered.