Micro

A herd of ghostly, delicate animals appeared and wandered past the camp. They were daddy longlegs, also called harvestmen, eight-legged creatures walking on spindly legs that seemed impossibly long. From the point of view of the students, the legs spanned fifteen feet. The body of each daddy longlegs was an oval nugget perched on the legs, and the body sported two bright eyes. The creatures glided over the terrain, tapping their legs around, looking for things to eat.

“Giant spiders,” Danny hissed through his teeth.

“They’re not spiders,” Karen King said to him. “They’re Opiliones.”

“Meaning what?”

“They’re a cousin of spiders. They’re harmless.”

“Daddy longlegs are poisonous,” Danny said.

“No they aren’t!” Karen snapped at him. “They have no venom. Most of them eat fungus and decaying material, detritus. I think daddy longlegs are beautiful. To me, they’re the giraffes of the micro-world.”

“Only an arachnologist would say that,” Rick Hutter said to her.

The herd of daddy longlegs moved on, and the noises of their pattering feet faded. The darkness thickened and filled the forest like a rising tide. The sounds of the forest became different. It meant that a whole new set of creatures was coming out.

“It’s the changing of the guard,” Karen King’s voice came out of dimness. “The new shift will be hungry.” They couldn’t see one another clearly, now.

As the night advanced, the noises rose up and grew stronger, more insistent, swirling around them. From near and far came screeching, booming, wailing, tapping, whistling, stretched-out, growling, and pulsing sounds. The humans could feel vibrations running through the ground, too, for some insects communicated by tapping on the ground or on a surface. The students couldn’t understand a word of it.

They curled up next to one another, while Amar Singh took the first watch. Holding the harpoon, he climbed up on the leaf-roof of the fort, where he sat bolt upright, listening, and sniffing the air. The air was thick with pheromones. “I don’t know what I’m smelling,” he confessed. “It’s all strange to me.”

Amar began to wonder how they were able to smell anything. Their bodies had been shrunken by a factor of a hundred. Presumably this meant that the atoms in their bodies were a hundred times smaller, as well. If so, how could the tiny atoms in their bodies interact with the giant atoms of the environment? They shouldn’t be able to smell anything. In fact, they shouldn’t be able to taste anything. In fact, how could they breathe? How could the tiny hemoglobin molecules in their red blood cells capture the giant oxygen molecules that existed in the air they breathed? “There’s a paradox,” Amar said to the others. “How can the tiny atoms in our bodies interact with the normal-size atoms of the world around us? How can we smell anything? How can we taste anything? In fact, how does our blood manage to hold oxygen? We should be dead.”

No one could figure it out. “Maybe Kinsky would have had an answer,” Rick said.

“Maybe not,” Peter said. “I get the idea Nanigen doesn’t understand their own technology very well.”

Rick had been thinking about the micro-bends. He had been secretly inspecting his arms and hands, looking for bruises. So far he hadn’t noticed anything. “Maybe the micro-bends are caused by some mismatch in the sizes of atoms,” he said. “Maybe something goes wrong in the interactions between the small atoms in our bodies and the large atoms around us.”

A mite crawled over Amar, and he plucked it off his shirt and dropped it, not wanting to hurt the creature. “What about our gut bacteria? We have trillions of gut bacteria inside us. Did they get shrunk, too?”

Nobody had any idea.

Amar went on, “What happens if our super-tiny bacteria get loose in this ecosystem?”

“Maybe they’ll die of the bends,” Rick said.

A silvery glow had brightened the forest slightly. The moon was up, and was climbing higher in the sky. Along with the moon came an eerie, booming cry, which echoed through the forest: Puuu…eee…ooo…o-o-o-…

“My God, what was that?” someone said.

“I think it’s an owl. We’re hearing it at a lower frequency.”

The hoot sounded again, coming from a tree top, and the cry sounded like a death threat wrapped in a moan. They felt the owl’s lethal presence somewhere above them.

“I’m beginning to understand what it feels like to be a mouse,” Erika said. The hooting stopped, and then a pair of sinister wings crossed the canopy in total silence. The owl had bigger prey to catch; it had no interest in anything as small as a micro-human.

A creaking, rustling tremor shook them. The ground heaved.

“There’s something under us!” Danny cried, leaping to his feet. He lost his balance as the ground began to break apart and he began staggering back and forth as if on the deck of a heaving ship.