Micro

They took turns lead-climbing. One person, secured by another with the reel and belt down below, would lead the way up the trunk carrying the rope ladder, which he would then secure to the tree and drop down to the others to climb.

The tree was covered with furrowed bark, and the bark was densely packed with mosses and liverworts-tiny plants, some of them almost microscopic in size, though to the micro-humans the mosses and liverworts seemed as big as shrubbery. The tree was also crusted with many kinds of lichens, frilly, lacy, and knobby. The leaves were rounded and leathery and the branches snaked around.

Eventually, Danny Minot gave up. “I can’t do this,” he said, and sat down and tucked himself into a lump of lichen in a sunny, warm spot.

“Do you want to stay here while the rest of us go on?” Peter asked.

“Actually, I’d prefer to be in the Algiers Coffeehouse in Harvard Square, drinking espresso and reading Wittgenstein.” Danny grinned weakly.

Peter handed him a radio headset. “Call if you have an emergency.”

“Okay.”

Peter put his hand on Danny’s shoulder. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Obviously not.” Danny tucked himself down into a frilly lichen.

“We can’t just give up, Danny.”

Danny scowled and leaned back in the lichen, and put on the radio headset. “Testing, testing,” he said into the radio. His voice crackled in their ears.

“Hey-radio silence,” Peter warned him.

“Vin Drake! Help! S.O.S. We’re stuck in a tree!” Danny shouted into his mike.

“Knock it off.”

“I was only joking.”

“Got a transmission.” Johnstone bent over the radio locator in the cockpit of the hexapod, earphones on his head. He started laughing. “Dumb bastards-they’re calling Drake for help.” His eyes moved upward, searched the canopy. “They’re in a tree somewhere above us.”

Telius grunted. A pair of binoculars hung around his neck. Telius stood up with the binoculars and began searching through the crowns of trees all around, looking for motion, listening for voices. The spies were somewhere up there. They were not going to be easy to find.

He couldn’t see anything. Then he silently pointed with one finger: go this way.

Johnstone toggled the joystick. The hexapod responded by walking swiftly and smoothly across the forest floor, making almost no sound, only a faint whine coming from the motors on the legs.

Telius was pointing to the base of a tree. A pandanus tree. Telius pointed upward along the trunk. “Up,” he said.

Johnstone operated a control, and claws on the vehicle’s feet were withdrawn into sheaths, revealing soft pads covered with extremely fine bristles. They were nano-bristles. The bristles, similar to the pads on a gecko’s feet, could stick to virtually any surface, even glass. The hexapod began to walk straight up the trunk of the tree. Strapped in the cockpit, the two men hardly seemed to notice that the walker had gone vertical. They could barely feel gravity anyway.

The climbers reached the top branches of the ohia tree, and Karen King led the way up the final pitch. She crawled and walked along a high branch into a cluster of leaves that stood in bright sunlight, where she broke out into a magnificent view. The others followed her, and they ended up standing on a branch among the leaves. The branch swayed in the breeze. The ohia blossoms, red and spray-like, resembled fireworks. The flowers consisted of a radiant explosion of red stamens, and they smelled impossibly sweet.

The view from among the flowers took in the Manoa Valley and the surrounding mountain ridges. Around the valley, mountain flanks, cloaked in green and sheared by cliffs, plunged down from ridges and defiles, veiled in clouds. Waterfalls threaded through rifts in the forested mountainsides. Tantalus Peak, the curving rim of a volcanic crater, looked down on the valley from the north. To the southwest beyond the narrow mouth of the valley, the buildings of Honolulu rose, revealing how close to the city the valley was. Even so, the Nanigen headquarters, on the far side of Pearl Harbor, might just as well have been a million miles away.

Off to the southeast, they saw the greenhouse and the parking lot, a dirt expanse dotted with puddles of rainwater. The parking lot was empty and deserted; no sign of people or vehicles. At the narrow mouth of the valley the access tunnel was visible, running through a cliff area. They could see the security gate. The gate was closed.

Peter took a compass reading on the parking lot. “Parking lot is on a bearing of a hundred and seventy degrees south-southeast,” he said to the others as he peered at the compass. Then he looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty in the morning. The shuttle truck wouldn’t arrive until the afternoon. If indeed it did arrive. But right now the valley looked devoid of human activity.