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By Root 371 0

with a glossy hard shell, proved difficult to crack. However, they took turns chopping away at it with a machete. The weapon had a heavy blade and an exceedingly sharp edge, and it cut slowly into the nut’s shell. A few minutes of chopping revealed the oily nutmeat. They began hacking out chunks of the nut, and they made a pile of the nutmeat on the ground. They added husks of dry grass, which Peter peeled out of the center of dead grass stems, which had stayed dry despite the rain. Rick set his metal pot on top of the nut pieces and put on his chemical equipment. He adjusted his goggles and loaded the pot with strips of strychnine-root bark, chunks of the chinaberry, the two jugs of oleander sap, and water collected from the top of a leaf.

Rick lit the fire with the windproof lighter.

The tinder began to burn, and the kukui-nut fire blazed up, yellow and bright. It was a small fire by the standards of the normal world, not much bigger than a candle flame, yet to them it seemed like a bonfire. The fire heated their faces and made them blink and shy away, and it brought the water in the pot to a boil within seconds. Two minutes of boiling time was enough to reduce the contents of the pot to a tarry goo.

“Fresh curare,” Rick said. “Let’s hope, anyway.”

Working carefully with a splinter of wood, wearing rubber gloves, and holding his breath, Rick packed the curare into a plastic lab bottle. He could dip his darts in the stuff to arm them with poison. He hoped the goop was poisonous, but he wouldn’t know for certain until he used it in a hunting situation. He screwed the top on the bottle, then lifted the goggles from his eyes and parked them on his forehead.

Peter stared at Rick’s plastic bottle and the brown-colored gunk in it. “So you think that’ll take down big game? Something as big as a grasshopper?” he asked.

Rick offered him a wry smile. “It’s not finished.”

“How so?”

“We need one more ingredient.”

“Which is—?”

“Cyanide.”

“What?” Peter said, while the others gathered around, listening.

“You heard me—cyanide,” Rick said. “And I know where to get it.”

“Where?” Peter wondered.

In answer, Rick turned his head around slowly. “I can smell it. Hydrogen cyanide. Also known as prussic acid. That whiff of bitter almonds…can you smell it? Cyanide—a universal poison, it’ll kill practically anything, and fast. Cyanide—a favorite of Cold War spies. Get this—there’s an animal around here that makes cyanide. It’s probably hiding under a leaf. Probably asleep.”

The others stared, while Rick set out through the super-jungle, stopping occasionally to sniff the air, following his nose. He started turning over leaves, dragging them with both hands. The smell grew stronger; it tickled their noses now, once Rick had pointed it out to them. He stuck his head under a leaf. “Got it!” he whispered.

Under the leaf, a brownish, oily, jointed carapace gleamed, along with many curved legs. “That’s a millipede,” Rick said. “I’m just an ignorant botanist, but I know these guys make cyanide.”

Erika moaned. “Don’t! It’s a very big animal. It’s dangerous.”

Rick chuckled. “A millipede?” He turned to Karen King. “Hey—Karen! What’s the behavior of this animal when it’s threatened?”

Karen King smiled. “Millipedes? They’re scaredy cats.”

“Wait! Are you sure it’s not a centipede?” Danny quavered, remembering that Peter had said a centipede can deliver a nasty sting.

“Nah, this baby isn’t any centipede,” Karen said, kneeling and looking under the leaf. “Centipedes are predators. A millipede doesn’t eat meat, it eats rotten leaves,” she explained. “It’s a peaceful animal. Doesn’t even have a sting.”

“What I thought.” Rick hauled the leaf off the millipede, revealing it. The millipede lay curled up and seemingly asleep. It was a cylindrical animal with segmented armor and at least a hundred legs. In relation to the micro-humans, the millipede appeared about fifteen feet long, akin to the biggest boa constrictors. It breathed gently, making whistling noises through holes in its carapace; a millipede’s version of snoring.

Rick drew his machete.