Micro - Michael Crichton [114]
Drake gave a crisp smile. “That’s barely feasible.”
“But have you done it?”
“Done what?”
“Made robots one millimeter in size.”
“We’re getting into proprietary areas.” Drake leaned back.
“Have you had any industrial accidents with your robots?”
“Accidents?” Drake frowned, and then broke into a chuckle. “Yes—frequently.”
“Anybody get hurt?”
“It’s the other way around.” Drake laughed. “People step on the robots by accident. The robots always lose.” He sighed and looked at his watch. “I have a meeting.”
“Sure. Just one thing.” Watanabe would describe what he’d seen in the microscope, but he would not show Drake a photograph of the device, because a photo was evidence, and you don’t flash evidence. So he kept things vague. “We’ve become aware of a device, pretty small, that appears to have what might be a propeller and cutting blades. It might be able to fly, or swim in somebody’s bloodstream. Is this a Nanigen product?”
Drake took a moment to reply; Watanabe thought the moment lasted a beat too long. “No,” Drake answered. “We don’t make robots like that.”
“Does anybody make them?”
Drake gave Watanabe a careful look. Where was this cop going? “I think you’re describing a theoretical device.”
“What kind?”
“Well, it would be a surgical micro-robot.”
“A what?”
“A surgical micro-bot. Also called a surgibot. It’s a very small robot used for medical procedures. In theory, a surgibot could be made small enough to circulate in a patient’s bloodstream. Equipped with scalpels, a swarm of surgibots could perform microsurgery. They could be injected into a patient, and the surgibots would swim through the bloodstream to the target tissue. Surgibots could cut arterial plaques from the inside of an artery, for example. Or a swarm of surgibots could hunt down metastasized cancer cells. The surgibots would kill the cancer cells one at a time, thus defeating the cancer. But as of now, surgibots are a dream, not a reality.”
“So you’re not actually building these…what you call…surgibots?”
“Not like that, no.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Watanabe said.
Drake sighed. “We’re getting into an area that’s very sensitive.”
“Why?”
“Nanigen is doing research…for you.”
“For me?” Watanabe said, looking mystified.
“You pay taxes?”
“Sure.”
“Nanigen is working for you.”
“Oh, so you’re doing government—?”
“We can’t go there, lieutenant.”
They were doing secret government work, classified, something with small robots. Drake was warning him off, hinting he’d have trouble with the government if he pursued this. Fine. Abruptly, Watanabe changed gears. “Why did your vice president jump off his boat?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Eric Jansen was an experienced boater. He knew to stay with his boat even in surf. He jumped into the surf for a reason. Why did he jump?”
Drake stood up, his face flushed. “I have no idea what you’re getting at. We’ve asked you to find our missing students. You haven’t found anybody. We’ve lost two key executives. You haven’t given us a damn bit of help there, either.”
Watanabe stood up. “Sir, we did find Ms. Bender. We’re still looking for Eric Jansen.” He took out his wallet and nudged out his business card.
Drake took the card and sighed as he looked at it, and an unpleasant expression flitted across his face. “To be frank, we are disappointed with the Honolulu police.” He let the card flutter down to his desk. “One wonders what you actually do.”
“Well, sir, the Honolulu Police Department is older than the New York Police Department—I didn’t know if you knew that. We’ll just keep working our cases like we always do, sir.”
“We’ve got five more of them.” Dorothy Girt laid the photographs out for Watanabe on her lab bench. They showed the same devices, each with a propeller inside a housing and a gooseneck with blades. “I found them in the Asian John Doe. A smelly job.”
“How did you find them, Dorothy? They’re really small.”
Dorothy Girt flashed him a cool smile of triumph, and opened a drawer, and held up a heavy object. It was an industrial horseshoe magnet. “I swiped it over the wounds. Darned