Micro - Michael Crichton [83]
They had made a fort.
Karen brought out her spray bottle. It was nearly empty—she’d used most of it during the fight with the ants. “It’s got benzoquinone in it. If anything attacks us, there’s a couple of shots left.”
“I feel much safer now,” Danny said sarcastically.
Rick Hutter took the harpoon and dipped the point in the jar of curare. He leaned the harpoon against the palisade, ready for action.
“We should stand watches,” Peter reminded them. “We’ll change shifts every two hours.”
There was the question of whether to build a fire. If you were stranded in the wilderness at night in the normal world, you would build a fire to stay warm and drive off predators. The situation was different in the micro-world. Erika Moll summed it up: “Insects are attracted to light. If we have a fire, it could draw predators from hundreds of meters away. I suggest we do not use our headlamps, either.”
It meant they would spend the night in total darkness.
As dusk turned into night, the world was drained of color, fading into grays and blacks. They began to hear a pattering, thudding noise, coming closer—a sound of many feet passing over the ground.
“What’s that?” Danny’s voice rose in a quaver.
A herd of ghostly, delicate animals appeared and wandered past the camp. They were daddy longlegs, also called harvestmen, eight-legged creatures walking on spindly legs that seemed impossibly long. From the point of view of the students, the legs spanned fifteen feet. The body of each daddy longlegs was an oval nugget perched on the legs, and the body sported two bright eyes. The creatures glided over the terrain, tapping their legs around, looking for things to eat.
“Giant spiders,” Danny hissed through his teeth.
“They’re not spiders,” Karen King said to him. “They’re Opiliones.”
“Meaning what?”
“They’re a cousin of spiders. They’re harmless.”
“Daddy longlegs are poisonous,” Danny said.
“No they aren’t!” Karen snapped at him. “They have no venom. Most of them eat fungus and decaying material, detritus. I think daddy longlegs are beautiful. To me, they’re the giraffes of the micro-world.”
“Only an arachnologist would say that,” Rick Hutter said to her.
The herd of daddy longlegs moved on, and the noises of their pattering feet faded. The darkness thickened and filled the forest like a rising tide. The sounds of the forest became different. It meant that a whole new set of creatures was coming out.
“It’s the changing of the guard,” Karen King’s voice came out of dimness. “The new shift will be hungry.” They couldn’t see one another clearly, now.
As the night advanced, the noises rose up and grew stronger, more insistent, swirling around them. From near and far came screeching, booming, wailing, tapping, whistling, stretched-out, growling, and pulsing sounds. The humans could feel vibrations running through the ground, too, for some insects communicated by tapping on the ground or on a surface. The students couldn’t understand a word of it.
They curled up next to one another, while Amar Singh took the first watch. Holding the harpoon, he climbed up on the leaf-roof of the fort, where he sat bolt upright, listening, and sniffing the air. The air was thick with pheromones. “I don’t know what I’m smelling,” he confessed. “It’s all strange to me.”
Amar began to wonder how they were able to smell anything. Their bodies had been shrunken by a factor of a hundred. Presumably this meant that the atoms in their bodies were a hundred times smaller, as well. If so, how could the tiny atoms in their bodies interact with the giant atoms of the environment? They shouldn’t be able to smell anything. In fact, they shouldn’t be able to taste anything. In fact, how could they breathe? How could the tiny hemoglobin molecules in their red blood cells capture the giant oxygen molecules that existed in the air they breathed? “There’s a paradox,” Amar said to the others. “How can the