Micro - Michael Crichton [84]
No one could figure it out. “Maybe Kinsky would have had an answer,” Rick said.
“Maybe not,” Peter said. “I get the idea Nanigen doesn’t understand their own technology very well.”
Rick had been thinking about the micro-bends. He had been secretly inspecting his arms and hands, looking for bruises. So far he hadn’t noticed anything. “Maybe the micro-bends are caused by some mismatch in the sizes of atoms,” he said. “Maybe something goes wrong in the interactions between the small atoms in our bodies and the large atoms around us.”
A mite crawled over Amar, and he plucked it off his shirt and dropped it, not wanting to hurt the creature. “What about our gut bacteria? We have trillions of gut bacteria inside us. Did they get shrunk, too?”
Nobody had any idea.
Amar went on, “What happens if our super-tiny bacteria get loose in this ecosystem?”
“Maybe they’ll die of the bends,” Rick said.
A silvery glow had brightened the forest slightly. The moon was up, and was climbing higher in the sky. Along with the moon came an eerie, booming cry, which echoed through the forest: Puuu…eee…ooo…o-o-o-…
“My God, what was that?” someone said.
“I think it’s an owl. We’re hearing it at a lower frequency.”
The hoot sounded again, coming from a tree top, and the cry sounded like a death threat wrapped in a moan. They felt the owl’s lethal presence somewhere above them.
“I’m beginning to understand what it feels like to be a mouse,” Erika said. The hooting stopped, and then a pair of sinister wings crossed the canopy in total silence. The owl had bigger prey to catch; it had no interest in anything as small as a micro-human.
A creaking, rustling tremor shook them. The ground heaved.
“There’s something under us!” Danny cried, leaping to his feet. He lost his balance as the ground began to break apart and he began staggering back and forth as if on the deck of a heaving ship.
The others scrambled up off the bed of leaves, pulling out their machetes, while the earth under them groaned and trembled. Amar took up the harpoon, raised it over his head, his heart hammering in his chest. He was ready to kill. He knew it. The humans scattered, running up against the palisade, wondering if they should flee outside or wait and see the threat materialize.
And then it appeared, a pinkish-brown cylinder of stunning size, rising up from the bowels of the earth, thrusting the dirt before it. Danny screamed. Amar almost threw the harpoon, but checked the thrust at the last moment.
“It’s just an earthworm, guys,” Amar said, putting down the harpoon. He wasn’t going to stab an earthworm if he could help it; the gentle animal was just trying to make a living in the dirt, and was a threat to nobody.
The earthworm didn’t like what it found. It withdrew, sliding back down into the earth, and it traveled on, crunching like a bulldozer, while the palisade wall jiggled and shook.
As the moon climbed, the bats came out. The students began to hear whistling cries, staccato sounds, and whooshing roars, crisscrossing the treetops and gulfs above them: the bats’ sonar. The noise was eerie, the sound of flying predators using beams of ultrasound to probe the air for prey. A bat’s sonar is too high-pitched for human hearing. But in the micro-world, the bats sounded like submarines pinging the deep.
They heard a bat zeroing in on a moth and killing it.
The kill began with a lazy chain of pings. The bat was directing pulses of sound toward a moth, identifying the prey and ranging the moth, getting its distance and the direction it was flying. Next, the bat’s pings sped up and grew louder. Erika Moll explained what was happening. “The bat is ‘painting’ the moth with sonar. It is firing a beam of ultrasound at the moth and hearing the echoes that come back. The echoes tell the moth’s location, its size and shape, and the direction it’s flying. The pings