Something drifted past Jen’s eyes, falling downward through the thick air. It was a small nugget the size of a peppercorn, studded with knobs. “What on earth is that?” she said, stopping in her tracks to watch it. The nugget landed at her feet. Another fell slowly past. She put out her hand and caught it in her palm, then rolled it between thumb and forefinger. It was tough and hard, like a small nut. “It’s pollen,” she said with wonder. She looked up. There was a hibiscus tree overhead, bursting into a profusion of white flowers, like a cloud. For some reason she could not explain, her heart leaped at the sight of it. For a few moments, Jenny Linn felt glad to be very small.
“I think it’s kind of…wonderful here,” Jenny said, turning slowly around, looking up at the clouds of flowers, while a steady snow of pollen fell around her. “I never imagined this.”
“Jenny, we need to keep moving.” Peter Jansen had stopped to wait for her, and was shepherding people along.
As for Erika Moll, the entomologist, she did not feel happy at all. She was experiencing a growing sensation of fear. She knew enough about insects to be extremely afraid of them right now. They have armor and we don’t, Erika thought. Their armor is made of chitin. It’s bioplastic armor, light and super-tough. She ran her fingers over her arm, feeling the delicacy of her skin, the downy hair. We’re soft, she thought. We’re edible. She didn’t say anything to the others, but felt a choking sense of terror seething below the surface of her calm. She was afraid her fear would betray her, that she would lose control of herself in a panic. Erika Moll compressed her lips, and clenched her hands, and, trying to keep her fear under control, kept walking.
Peter Jansen called for a halt. They rested, sitting on the edges of leaves. Peter wanted to pick Jarel Kinsky’s brain. Kinsky knew a lot about the tensor generator, since he operated it. If they could somehow get themselves back to Nanigen, and could get themselves inside the tensor generator room, would they be able to operate the machine? How would they do it, if they were tiny? Peter asked Kinsky, “Would we need to get help from a normal-size person to run the machine?”
Kinsky looked doubtful. “I’m not sure,” he said, and poked at the ground with a grass spear. “I heard a rumor that the man who designed the tensor generator put a small-size emergency control in it that a micro-human can operate. I presume this tiny control panel is somewhere in the control room. I’ve looked for it, but I’ve never found it. There’s nothing in the engineering drawings, either. But if we could find the tiny control panel, I can operate it.”
“We’ll need your help,” Peter said.
Kinsky lifted the spear from the soil and gazed at a mite that walked along the spear, waving its forelegs. “All I want is to get home to my family,” he said softly, and shook his spear, tossing the mite away.
“Your boss couldn’t care less about your family,” Rick Hutter snapped at Kinsky.
“Rick doesn’t have a family,” Danny Minot whispered to Jenny Linn. “He doesn’t even have a girlf—”
Rick lunged at Danny, who scrambled away, shouting, “You can’t solve a problem with violence, Rick!”
“It would solve you,” Rick muttered.
Peter took Rick by the shoulder and squeezed it, restraining him, as if to say, Stay cool. To Kinsky he said, “Are there any other possibilities for getting back to Nanigen? Besides the shuttle truck, which might not exist.”
Kinsky bowed his head, thinking. After some time he said: “Well—we could try to get to Tantalus Base.”
“What’s Tantalus Base?”
“It’s a bioprospecting facility in Tantalus Crater, on the mountain ridge above this valley.” Kinsky pointed vaguely toward the mountain, which was only a green shape, barely visible through gaps in the tangled forest. “The base is somewhere up there.”
Jenny Linn said, “Vin Drake mentioned Tantalus during the tour.”
“I remember,” Karen said.
“Is the base open?” Peter asked Kinsky.
“I don’t think so. People died at Tantalus. There were predators.”
“What kind?” Karen demanded.
“Wasps, I heard. But,” Kinsky went on musingly, “there weremicro-planes at Tantalus Base.”
“Micro-planes?”
“Small aircraft. Our size.”
“Could we fly to Nanigen?”
“I don’t know what the range of these aircraft is,” Kinsky answered. “I don’t know if any of them were left at the base.”
“How far above us is Tantalus Base?”
“It’s two thousand feet above Manoa Valley,” Kinsky answered.
“Two thousand feet up!” Rick Hutter exploded. “That’s…impossible for people our size.”
Kinsky shrugged. The others said nothing.
Peter Jansen took charge. “Okay, here’s what I think we should do. First, let’s try to find a supply station and take what we can from it. Then we’ll try to get to the parking lot. We’ll wait there for the shuttle truck. We have to get back there as soon as possible.”
“It’s obvious we’re going to die,” Danny Minot said, his voice cracking.
“We can’t just do nothing, Danny,” Peter said, trying to keep his voice even-sounding. He sensed Danny could break down into a panic at the drop of a hat, and that would be dangerous for the whole group.
The others went along with Peter’s plan, some of them grumbling—but nobody had a better idea. They took turns drinking water from a dewdrop on a leaf, and began moving again, looking for a trail, a tent, or any trace of human presence. Small plants near the ground arched over them, sometimes forming tunnels. They wound their way through the tunnels, and wandered past the trunks of stupendous trees. But there was no sign of a supply station.
“Okay, so we’re going to bleed to death if we don’t get the hell out of here fast,” Rick Hutter said, as they hiked along. “And we can’t find a damn supply station. Plus we’ve got a psychopathic giant looking to kill us. And I’ve got a blister. Is there anything else I need to worry about?” he asked, sounding very sarcastic.
“Ants,” Kinsky replied calmly.
“Ants?” Danny Minot broke in, his voice quavering. “What about ants?”
“Ants are a problem, I’ve heard,” Kinsky answered.
Rick Hutter stopped in front of a large yellow fruit lying on the ground. He looked up and all around. “Yes!” he said. “That’s a chinaberry tree. Melia azederach. The berry is highly poisonous, especially to insects and insect larvae. It contains around twenty-five different volatiles, principally 1-cinnamoyl compounds. This berry is absolute death to insects. It can be an ingredient for my curare.” He took off the backpack and stuffed the chinaberry into it. The berry filled much of the pack, and loomed out of the top of the pack, a bright yellow ovoid, sort of like a giant melon.
Karen glared at him. “It’s going to leak poison.”
“Nope.” Rick grinned and tapped on the yellow berry. “Tough skin.”
Karen gave Rick a skeptical look. “It’s your life,” she said curtly. The group moved on.
Danny Minot kept falling behind. His face had gotten red, and he kept wiping his forehead with his hands. Finally he took off his sport coat and threw it to the ground. His tassel loafers had gotten coated with mud. He sat on a leaf and started scratching inside his shirt, and pulled out a single pollen grain, and held it between thumb and forefinger. “Does anybody know I have serious allergies? If one of these objects gets up my nose I could go into shock.”
Karen gave a scornful laugh. “You aren’t that allergic! If you were, you’d be dead by now.”
Danny flicked it away, and the grain danced off, spinning as it drifted through the air.
Amar Singh couldn’t get over the profusion of life, the small creatures that seemed to exist in every nook and cranny of the micro-world. “Gosh! I wish we had a camera. I want to document this.”
They were young scientists, and the micro-world revealed a wonderland of unknown life. They suspected they
were seeing creatures that had never been noticed or given names. “You could get a dissertation out of every square foot of this place,” Amar remarked. He began thinking he would do just that. He could get himself one incredible PhD out of this trip. If I survive, he reminded himself.
Little torpedo-shaped creatures with jointed bodies and six legs were crawling about on the ground. They were quite small and were all over the place. Some were sucking up strands of fungus as if they were eating spaghetti. As the humans walked along, every now and then one of these creatures would get startled, make a loud snapping noise, and flip high into the air, spinning end over end.
Erika Moll stopped to examine one of them; she picked it up and held it, while it struggled, snapping its tail with vigorous clicking sounds.
“What are these things?” Rick asked, pulling one out of his hair.
“They’re called springtails,” Erika Moll said. In the normal world, she explained, springtails are extremely small. “No bigger than the dot over an ion a page of text,” she said. The animal had a spring mechanism in its abdomen, she explained, that propelled it long distances, helping it escape from predators. As if on cue, the springtail flung itself off her hand, soaring into the air and out of sight beyond a fern.
Springtails kept bouncing into the air as they moved along, disturbed by their footsteps. Peter Jansen led the way. Sweat dripped from his body. He realized their bodies were losing moisture fast.
“We need to make sure we drink enough water,” he said to the others. “We could dry out really fast.” They found a clump of moss hung with droplets of dew, and they gathered around it. They drank from dewdrops, cupping the water in their hands. The surface of the water was sticky, and they had to swat the water to break the surface tension. As Peter lifted a bit of water to his mouth, it heaped up into a blob in his hands.
They came to a massive tree trunk. It soared up from a sprawling buttress of roots. As they worked their way around the roots, a sharp smell became apparent. They began to hear thrumming, tapping sounds, like rain falling. Peter, who was leading the way, climbed on top of a root and came in sight of a pair of low walls, snaking across the ground and out of sight. The walls were made of bits of dirt stuck together with some kind of dried substance.
Between the walls a column of ants was moving, streaming in both directions. The walls protected an ant highway. In one spot, the walls extended into a tunnel.
Peter crouched down and motioned to the others to stop. They moved forward cautiously, until they were lying on their stomachs and looking down on the ant column. Were the ants dangerous? Each ant was nearly as long as his forearm. Not thatbig, Peter thought; and he felt relieved, for somehow he had expected ants to be much larger than this. But there were certainly a lot of them. They flowed swiftly by the hundreds along their road and through the little tunnel they’d built.
Their bodies were reddish brown in color, and prickly with hair. Their heads were shining black, as black as coal. The odor of the ants drifted from the ant highway like exhaust coming from freeway traffic. The smell was tart and acidic, yet perfumed with a delicate fragrance. “That sharp smell is formic acid. It’s a defense,” Erika Moll explained, as she knelt down, watching the ants with great intensity.
Jenny Linn said, “The sweet smell is a pheromone. It’s probably the colony scent. The ants use that scent to identify each other as members of the same colony.”
Erika continued, “They’re all females. They’re all daughters of their queen.”
Some of the ants were carrying dead insects or pieces of dismembered insects. The food carriers were all traveling in the same direction along the highway, toward the left. “The nest entrance is that way. It’s where they’re carrying the food,” Erika added, pointing to the left.
“Do you know the species?” Peter asked her.
Erika searched her mind for the name. “Um…Hawaii doesn’t have any native ants. All ants in Hawaii are invading species. They’ve arrived here with humans. I’m pretty sure these ones are Pheidole megacephala.”
“Do they have a name in English?” Rick asked. “I’m just an ignorant ethnobotanist.”
“It’s called the bigheaded ant,” Erika went on. “It was found originally on the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, but it’s now spread all over the world. It’s the most common ant in Hawaii.” The bigheaded ant had turned out to be one of the most destructive invasive insects on the planet, Erika explained. “The bigheaded ants have done a lot of damage to the ecosystem of these islands,” she said. “They attack and kill native Hawaiian insects. They’ve nearly wiped out some Hawaiian insect species. They also kill nesting baby birds.”
“That doesn’t sound good for us,” Karen said. A baby bird, she realized, would be much larger than they were as micro-humans.
“I don’t see what’s big about their heads,” Danny remarked.
Erika said, “These ones are minor workers. The majors have the big heads.”
“Majors?” Danny asked nervously. “What are they?”
“The majors are soldiers,” Erika went on. “The bigheaded ant has two castes—minors and majors. The minors are workers. They’re small and plentiful. The majors are the warriors, the guards. They’re large and uncommon.”
“So what do the big-headed soldiers look like?”
Erika shrugged. “Big heads.”
There were so many ants, and each ant seemed filled with inhuman energy. One ant by itself certainly didn’t pose a danger, but thousands of them…excited…hungry…Despite the threat, the young scientists couldn’t help gazing at the ants with fascination. Two ants stopped and tapped their antennae together, and then one of the ants began wagging its rear end and making a rattling sound. The other ant obligingly vomited a droplet of liquid into the other’s mouthparts. Erika explained what was going on: “She was begging food from her nest-mate. She wagged her rear end and made those scratchy sounds to say she was hungry. It’s the ant’s version of a dog’s whine—”
Danny interrupted. “I fail to see the joy of watching an ant blow lunch into another ant’s mouth. Let’s go, please.”
The ant highway wasn’t very wide. They could have easily jumped over it, but they decided to avoid the ant column rather than risk trouble. As Peter put it, “We don’t want an ant to latch on to someone’s ankle.”
Jarel Kinsky had stopped, and he was staring up at the branches of the great buttressed tree, which soared over their heads. “I know this tree,” he said. “It’s a giant albesia tree. There’s a supply station on the other side of it, I’m pretty sure.” He clambered up onto a root, and walked along the root for a distance, and hopped down. “Yes,” he said. “I think we’re getting close.” Kinsky took over the lead from Peter, and began heading toward the left around the albesia tree, pushing his way through dead fern leaves, striking at things with a grass-stem spear, knocking leaves and plants aside.
Peter Jansen dropped back to the rear. He had not liked the look of the ants and wanted to keep an eye on them as the group moved along. Rick Hutter was the last in line, moving slowly with the pack on his back, carrying the chinaberry, and holding his spear. “Hey Rick, can I take your spear for a while? I’ll bring up the rear,” Peter said.
Rick nodded, handed him the spear, and kept walking.
Kinsky, meanwhile, dragged a leaf aside, and said loudly, “If we can get back to Nanigen, we’ll have to find the hidden console so we can operate the generator, even if Mr. Drake doesn’t want—” At that moment Jarel Kinsky froze in his tracks. Ahead in the distance, beyond the roots of the tree, stood the peak of a tent.
“A station! A station!” Kinsky shouted, and he started running toward the tent.
He didn’t see the entrance of the ant nest.
It was an artificial tunnel, fashioned from bits of glued dirt, emerging from the base of a palm tree. Kinsky ran right past the tunnel mouth. Standing around the tunnel, in guard positions, were dozens of bigheaded soldier ants. The
soldiers were two to three times larger than the workers. Their bodies were dull red, covered with sparse, bristly hair. Their heads were gleaming black and massively oversized, packed with muscles and plated with armor, and fitted with mandibles designed for fighting. Their eyes were black marbles.
They spotted Kinsky as he ran toward the tent.
Instantly all the soldiers charged. Kinsky noticed the giant ants running toward him, and he swerved. But the soldiers had fanned out. They converged on Kinsky, coming from different directions, a strategy that cut off his escape. Kinsky stopped running and backed up inside a closing ring of ant soldiers, holding his grass spear over his head. “No!” he shouted. He slashed at a soldier with the spear, but the ant grabbed the spear in its mandibles and broke off its point. Several soldiers darted in and began to pull Kinsky to the ground, while one ant closed its mandibles around Kinsky’s wrist. He shouted and shook his hand, whirling the ant around, trying to make it let go. But the ant had clamped on his wrist and was shaking its head, bulldogging Kinsky. His hand came off, and the ant flew away and hit the ground running, with the hand in its mandibles. Kinsky screamed and went down on his knees, cradling his severed wrist, which spouted blood. A soldier climbed up Kinsky’s back, fastened its jaws behind his ear and began tearing off Kinsky’s scalp. Kinsky fell to the ground writhing. Within moments the soldiers had him spread-eagled and were pulling on his arms and legs from different directions; they were drawing and quartering the man, attempting to tear him limb from limb. A soldier got its mandibles fastened under his chin, and his screams ended with a guttural noise as blood spurted from his throat and drenched the ant’s head. Smaller workers joined the attack, and Kinsky seemed to disappear under a pile of frantic ants.
Peter Jansen had run forward, waving a spear, shouting at the ants, trying to drive them off Kinsky, but it was too late. Peter stopped and stood his ground before the mass of struggling soldiers, holding the spear and watching the horror. He could buy time for the others to get away, he thought, and he started advancing toward the ants. Then he noticed that Karen King stood beside him, holding her knife. “Get out of here,” Peter said to her.