Micro - Michael Crichton [91]
He couldn’t see anything. Then he silently pointed with one finger: go this way.
Johnstone toggled the joystick. The hexapod responded by walking swiftly and smoothly across the forest floor, making almost no sound, only a faint whine coming from the motors on the legs.
Telius was pointing to the base of a tree. A pandanus tree. Telius pointed upward along the trunk. “Up,” he said.
Johnstone operated a control, and claws on the vehicle’s feet were withdrawn into sheaths, revealing soft pads covered with extremely fine bristles. They were nano-bristles. The bristles, similar to the pads on a gecko’s feet, could stick to virtually any surface, even glass. The hexapod began to walk straight up the trunk of the tree. Strapped in the cockpit, the two men hardly seemed to notice that the walker had gone vertical. They could barely feel gravity anyway.
The climbers reached the top branches of the ohia tree, and Karen King led the way up the final pitch. She crawled and walked along a high branch into a cluster of leaves that stood in bright sunlight, where she broke out into a magnificent view. The others followed her, and they ended up standing on a branch among the leaves. The branch swayed in the breeze. The ohia blossoms, red and spray-like, resembled fireworks. The flowers consisted of a radiant explosion of red stamens, and they smelled impossibly sweet.
The view from among the flowers took in the Manoa Valley and the surrounding mountain ridges. Around the valley, mountain flanks, cloaked in green and sheared by cliffs, plunged down from ridges and defiles, veiled in clouds. Waterfalls threaded through rifts in the forested mountainsides. Tantalus Peak, the curving rim of a volcanic crater, looked down on the valley from the north. To the southwest beyond the narrow mouth of the valley, the buildings of Honolulu rose, revealing how close to the city the valley was. Even so, the Nanigen headquarters, on the far side of Pearl Harbor, might just as well have been a million miles away.
Off to the southeast, they saw the greenhouse and the parking lot, a dirt expanse dotted with puddles of rainwater. The parking lot was empty and deserted; no sign of people or vehicles. At the narrow mouth of the valley the access tunnel was visible, running through a cliff area. They could see the security gate. The gate was closed.
Peter took a compass reading on the parking lot. “Parking lot is on a bearing of a hundred and seventy degrees south-southeast,” he said to the others as he peered at the compass. Then he looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty in the morning. The shuttle truck wouldn’t arrive until the afternoon. If indeed it did arrive. But right now the valley looked devoid of human activity.
A thundering sound passed by overhead in the leaves. Instinctively, the humans ducked, grabbing at leaves and wedging themselves down. Peter went sprawling. “Look out!” he yelled. A butterfly zoomed past. Its wings, patterned with orange, gold, and black, made booming sounds as the creature whipped and twisted through sunlight. The insect seemed to be playing. Then it hovered, wings thundering, and landed on an ohia flower.
Droplets of nectar gleamed in the blossom. The butterfly unrolled its proboscis and sent it deep into the flower, until the tip touched a droplet. They heard sucking, squishing sounds as the butterfly pumped seemingly endless gallons of nectar into its stomach.
Peter slowly raised his head.
Karen was laughing. “You should see yourself, Peter. Frightened by a butterfly.”
“It’s, uh, impressive,” Peter said sheepishly.
The species, Erika told them, was the Kamehameha butterfly, native to Hawaii. It fed in the flower for a while, poking here and there, while the wind carried a bitter stench to the humans. The butterfly might be lovely to look at, but it gave off a nasty smell.
“It’s a chemical defense,” Erika Moll said. “Phenols, I think. The compounds are bitter enough to make a bird throw up.”
The butterfly ignored the humans. It took off from the flower and with powerful strokes caught the wind, and soared