Micro - Michael Crichton [76]
He knelt by a gnarled root, which poked from the ground. “It’s a strychnine tree,” he said to the group. With his machete he began hacking at the root, until he’d revealed a strip of inner bark, which he chopped out, working carefully with the machete. “This bark,” he explained, “contains brucine. It’s a drug that induces paralysis. I would have preferred the seeds, because they are incredibly toxic, but the bark will do.”
Handling the bark carefully, trying not to get any sap on his hands, he tied a rope to the bark and started dragging it along behind him. “We can’t put this in my pack. It would poison everything,” Rick explained.
“That bark is dangerous,” Karen said.
“You wait, Karen, it’s going to get us food. And I’m hungry.”
Erika stood aside and sniffed the air, watching, keeping alert for the warning smell of ants. The air felt slightly heavy as it went in and out of her lungs. Everywhere she looked, every crack and cranny in the soil, every blade of grass, every little ground-hugging plant, teemed with small living things—insects, mites, nematode worms. And she could actually see masses of soil bacteria, tiny dots in clumps. Everything was alive. Everything was feeding on something else. It reminded her…she had begun to feel really hungry.
They were ravenously hungry but had nothing to eat. They drank water from a hole in a tree root, and moved on, Rick dragging the piece of bark. “We have strychnine and we have the chinaberry,” he said. “But it’s not enough. We need at least one more ingredient.” He kept looking around, scanning the vegetation for plants he recognized, for anything toxic. And eventually he found what he was looking for. He discovered it by scent. He recognized a sharp odor coming from a mass of vegetation.
“Oleander,” Rick said, and he went toward a mass of shrubbery with long, pointed, shiny leaves. “The sap is the wicked stuff.” Crashing through leaf litter, he arrived at the trunk of the shrub. He drew his machete, sharpened it, and hacked into the trunk. A translucent, milky sap surged forth, while Rick backed away quickly. “That liquid will kill you fast if it touches your skin. It’s got a lethal mix of cardenolides in it. It’ll stop your heart, bam. You don’t want to breathe the fumes, either. The fumes could give you a heart attack.” While the sap oozed down the bark, Rick rummaged in his duffel, and he put on the lab apron and the rubber gloves and goggles he’d found at Station Echo.
Amar grinned. “Rick, you look like a mad scientist.”
“Madness is my style,” Rick said. He opened one of the plastic lab jars and advanced toward the running sap. Holding his breath, he let the jar fill up while the sap dribbled over his gloves. He screwed on the cap, then rinsed the outside of the jar in a drop of dew. He filled a second jar the same way, and held up both jars with a triumphant smile. “Now what we need to do is cook everything into a paste. For that, we need a fire.”
But the forest was soaking wet after the rain. Nothing would burn.
“No problem,” Rick said. “All we need is Aleurites moluccana.”
“What the hell is that, Rick?” Karen King said.
“It’s a candlenut tree,” he answered. “The Hawaiians call them kukui trees. There are kukui trees growing all over this forest.” He stopped, and looked up, and turned around, staring upward. “Yeah! That’s a kukui, right there.” He pointed at a tree with large, silvery leaves. The tree stood out like a pale thunderhead, ten meters away. It was hung with greenish balls of fruit.
They pressed on toward the candlenut tree. When they reached its base, they saw pulpy fruits scattered on the ground around the tree. “Let me have a machete,” Rick said. “Now watch.”
He began hacking into a fruit, chopping off the pulp using the machete. Soon he reached a hard core, a nut. “That’s a kukui nut,” he said. “The nut is loaded with oil. The ancient Hawaiians filled stone lamps with kukui nut oil. It’s a great source of light. They also put the nuts on a stick and used it as a torch. The nut burns.”
The kukui nut, covered