“But we did have a hint-a clue, if you will. It came from research conducted in the 1960s by a company called Nuclear Medical Data, which studied the health of workers at nuclear facilities. The company found workers were generally in good health, but they also noted that over a ten-year period workers exposed to high magnetic fields lost a quarter of an inch in height. This conclusion was considered a statistical artifact, and ignored.”

Drake paused again, waiting to see if the assembled students understood where this was going. They didn’t yet seem to suspect. “It turns out that it was not a statistical artifact. A French study in 1970 found that French workers in a high magnetic field area lost about eight millimeters in height. But the French study also discarded the finding, calling it ‘trivial.’

“However, we now know that it was nothing of the sort. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, took an interest in these studies and apparently tested small dogs under high strength fields-the strongest that could be generated at that time, at a secret lab in Huntsville, Alabama. There are no official records of these tests, except for some faded Xeroxes of faxes, which make reference to a Pekingese dog the size of a pencil eraser.”

That caused a stir. Some of the students shifted in their chairs. They glanced at one another.

“It seems,” Drake continued, “that the dog squeaked pitifully and died after a few hours, exsanguinating with a tiny drop of blood. In general the results were unstable and inconclusive, and the project was abandoned by order of then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.”

“Why?” one of the students asked.

“He was worried about destabilizing U.S.-Soviet relations,” Drake said.

“Why would it do that?”

“That will be clear in a minute,” Drake said. “The important point is that we can now generate extremely high magnetic field strengths, these so-called tensor fields. And we now know that under the influence of a tensor field, both organic and inorganic matter undergo something analogous to a phase change. The result is that material in the field experiences rapid compression by a factor of ten to the minus one to ten to the minus three. Quantum interactions remain symmetrical and invariant, for the most part, so that shrunken matter interacts in a normal way with regular matter, at least most of the time. The transformation is metastable and reversible under inverse field conditions. Are you with me so far?”

The students were paying close attention, but their faces registered a wide range of reactions: skepticism, outright disbelief, fascination, even some confusion. Drake was talking about quantum physics-not biology.

Rick folded his arms and shook his head. “So what are you getting at?” he said quite loudly.

Unruffled, Drake answered, “It’s good you asked, Mr. Hutter. It’s time you see for yourselves.” The giant screens behind Drake went dark, then the central panel lit up. They were watching an HD video.

It showed an egg.

The egg sat on a flat black surface. Behind the egg there was a folded yellow backdrop, like a curtain.

The egg moved. It was hatching. A small beak poked through the eggshell; a crack lengthened; the top of the egg broke off. A baby chicken struggled out, cheeping, and stood up, wobbly, and flapped its little stubby wings.

The camera began to pull back.

As the scene widened, the chick’s surroundings came into view. The yellow backdrop, it turned out, was actually the huge, clawed foot of a bird. The foot of a chicken. The baby chick now tottered by a monstrously large chicken foot. As the camera drew back farther, the entire adult chicken became visible-it seemed gigantic. As the camera pulled fully back, however, the chick and the pieces of eggshell became nothing but specks of dirt under the grown bird.

“Get out…” Rick began, then stopped. He couldn’t take his eyes off the screen.

“This,” Drake said, “is Nanigen’s technology.”

“The transformation-” Amar began.

“Can be done to living organisms. Yes, we shrank that egg in a tensor field. The chicken fetus inside the egg wasn’t affected by the dimensional change. It hatched normally, as you can see. This proves that even highly complex biological systems can be compressed in a tensor field and still carry on the normal functions of life.”

“What are those other things in the picture?” Karen asked.

In the video, the floor under the giant chicken appeared to be splattered with tiny dots. Some of the dots were moving, some not.

“Those are the other chicks. We dimensionally shifted the whole brood,” Drake said. “Unfortunately they’re so small the mother has stepped on some of her babies without knowing it.”

There was a brief silence. Amar was the first to speak. “You’ve done this to other organisms?”

“Of course,” Drake answered.

“That means…people?” Amar said.

“Yes.”

“Those little robot diggers we saw in the arboretum,” Amar went on. “You’re telling us you don’t actually program intelligence into them.”

“We don’t need to.”

“Because you have human beings run them.”

“Yes.”

“Human beings who have undergone a dimensional change.”

“Holy shit,” Danny Minot burst out. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No,” Drake said.

Somebody burst out laughing. It was Rick Hutter. “Scam,” Rick muttered. “Guy’s selling worthless stock to fools.”

Karen King didn’t believe it, either. She said, “This is bullshit hype. No way. You can do anything with video.”

“It’s existing technology,” Drake said calmly.

Amar Singh said, “So you’re saying you can cause a dimensional change in a human being as great as ten to the minus three.”

“Yes.”

“Which means that someone six feet tall would be, uh, seventy-two inches…seven-hundredths of an inch tall.”

“That’s correct,” Drake said. “Slightly less than two-tenths of a millimeter.”

“Jesus,” Rick Hutter said.

“And at ten to the minus two,” Drake said, “the person is approximately half an inch tall. Twelve millimeters.”

“I would actually like to see this for real,” Danny Minot said.

“Of course,” Drake said. “And you will.”

Chapter 9

Nanigen Headquarters 28 October, 7:30 p.m.

W hile Drake was talking with the students, Peter Jansen had taken Alyson Bender aside. “Some of us brought samples and compounds to show Mr. Drake.”

“That’s good,” Alyson said to him.

“I’ve got a CD with some of my, uh, research on it,” Peter said. She nodded in response. “It’s a recording. It involves my brother,” Peter added. He hoped to start winding her up, making her nervous. She nodded again and left the conference room; did he see a flicker of alarm in her eyes?

After she’d left, while Drake was still talking, Peter slipped behind the service door and went to the audio panel. He needed some equipment; something to magnify his voice; he did not want Drake or anyone to be able to shut him up or shout him down. Behind the service door there were some drawers; he began opening them, and he found what he wanted. It was a lavalier, a wireless microphone device that would transmit his voice to a loudspeaker. The lavalier was identical to a unit Drake had used during his slide show and talk. The device consisted of a transmitter unit and a throat mike with a wire that ran to the transmitter. He slipped the transmitter into his pants pocket, stuffed the wire and mike in after it.

Drake concluded his presentation on the screens, and the lights went up in the meeting room. “Some of you have brought things to show us,” Drake said, “and we are very eager to see them. Now if-yes, what is it?”

Alyson Bender had come back into the room. She leaned close to Drake, whispered in his ear. Drake stared at Peter as he listened, then looked away. He nodded twice, but said nothing. Finally he turned back to Peter.