Micro

The others scrambled up off the bed of leaves, pulling out their machetes, while the earth under them groaned and trembled. Amar took up the harpoon, raised it over his head, his heart hammering in his chest. He was ready to kill. He knew it. The humans scattered, running up against the palisade, wondering if they should flee outside or wait and see the threat materialize.

And then it appeared, a pinkish-brown cylinder of stunning size, rising up from the bowels of the earth, thrusting the dirt before it. Danny screamed. Amar almost threw the harpoon, but checked the thrust at the last moment.

“It’s just an earthworm, guys,” Amar said, putting down the harpoon. He wasn’t going to stab an earthworm if he could help it; the gentle animal was just trying to make a living in the dirt, and was a threat to nobody.

The earthworm didn’t like what it found. It withdrew, sliding back down into the earth, and it traveled on, crunching like a bulldozer, while the palisade wall jiggled and shook.

As the moon climbed, the bats came out. The students began to hear whistling cries, staccato sounds, and whooshing roars, crisscrossing the treetops and gulfs above them: the bats’ sonar. The noise was eerie, the sound of flying predators using beams of ultrasound to probe the air for prey. A bat’s sonar is too high-pitched for human hearing. But in the micro-world, the bats sounded like submarines pinging the deep.

They heard a bat zeroing in on a moth and killing it.

The kill began with a lazy chain of pings. The bat was directing pulses of sound toward a moth, identifying the prey and ranging the moth, getting its distance and the direction it was flying. Next, the bat’s pings sped up and grew louder. Erika Moll explained what was happening. “The bat is ‘painting’ the moth with sonar. It is firing a beam of ultrasound at the moth and hearing the echoes that come back. The echoes tell the moth’s location, its size and shape, and the direction it’s flying. The pings get faster as the bat zeroes in on the moth.”

Often, as a bat was pinging a moth, the moth would defend itself with a loud drumming noise. “Moths have very good hearing,” Erika explained. The moth had heard the bat’s sonar, and the moth was starting up its defensive noisemakers. The banging sounds were coming from drums on the moth’s abdomen. The sounds could jam the bat’s sonar, confusing the bat, making the moth invisible to the bat. As a bat closed in on a moth, there would be a crescendo of bat pings, mixed with a rising drumming sound as the moth tried to jam the bat’s sonar. Ping, ping, ping, went a bat. Pom-pom-pom-pom, went a moth, trying to jam the bat’s sonar. Sometimes a moth’s drumming would end abruptly. “The bat ate the moth,” Erika informed them.

They listened, almost hypnotized, as the bat-sounds played over their heads. And then a bat passed right over their fort, with a whoomp of velvet wings. The sound of the animal’s sonar as it passed almost deafened them, and left their ears ringing.

“This world scares the hell out of me,” Karen King said. “But somehow I’m glad to be here anyway. I must be nuts.”

“At least it’s interesting,” Rick commented.

“I do wish we had a fire,” Erika muttered.

“Can’t do it. It would advertise us to every predator out there,” said Peter.

Erika Moll was the person who had advised them not to build a fire. But even so, the ancient human in her longed for a fire. A simple fire, warm and bright and comforting. A fire meant safety, food, home. But only darkness and chill and weird noises surrounded her. She began to notice the sound of her heart thudding in her throat. Her mouth had gone dry, and Erika realized that she was terrified, more frightened than she had ever been in her life. The primitive part of her mind wanted to scream and run, even when the rational part of her mind knew it would be certain death to run blindly through this super-jungle at night. The rational thing was to stay silent and not move, yet her primitive fear of darkness threatened to overwhelm her.

The darkness seemed to coil around the humans and watch them.

“What I’d give for a light,” Erika whispered. “Just a small light. I would feel better.”

She felt Peter’s hand close around her hand. “Don’t be afraid, Erika,” he said.

Erika began to cry silently, gripping Peter’s hand.

Amar Singh sat with the harpoon across his knees. He smeared more curare on the point, working by sense of touch and hoping he wouldn’t cut himself. Peter began to sharpen his machete with the diamond sharpener. They heard a whisk, cling sound as Peter passed the sharpener back and forth over his machete. The others slept, or tried to sleep.

The sounds changed. A blanket of quiet dropped around them. The quiet woke the sleepers. They listened, straining their ears. The quiet seemed worse than any noise.

“What’s going on?” Rick Hutter said.

“Take up your weapons,” Peter whispered urgently.

There were clinking sounds-machetes being grappled, held, poised.