“You may breathe normally. Stand by.”

He took a breath, let it out slowly.

“Don’t move, please. Take a deep breath, and hold it!”

Another clank! Another hum. A ripple of nausea, stronger than before.

He blinked his eyes.

Now he was sure things had changed. Before, he had been looking at stripes at about the midpoint of the jaws. But now he was looking at stripes much lower down. He was shrinking. The jaws buzzed and moved closer toward him. Of course they would do that, he thought, the magnetic field would be strongest at small distances. The smaller the better.

The synthetic voice: “Take a deep breath, and hold it!”

When he looked upward again, he saw that he was really very much smaller. The top of the jaws, ten feet above, seemed now as high as a cathedral ceiling. How tall was he?

“Don’t move, please. Take a deep breath, and-”

“I know, I know…” Peter’s voice was shaking.

“Don’t speak. You risk serious injury. Now: take a deep breath and hold it!”

One final clank, a grinding sound, a final spasm of dizzying nausea-but now the jaws moved away from him, and he felt the floor beneath his feet begin to vibrate as it rose upward. He saw light from above shining down, and felt a cool breeze.

And then he was flush with the rest of the floor, and the vibration stopped. He was standing on a polished black expanse stretching away in all directions. In the distance he saw Erika and Jenny, both looking around, dazed. And still farther away, Amar and Rick, and Karen. But how far away were they, actually? Peter couldn’t be sure, because he himself was no more than half an inch tall. Dust motes and flecks of dead cellular debris rolled across the floor, came to rest against his knees, like tiny tumbleweed.

He looked down at this tumbleweed in stupefaction. He felt slow, dull-witted, stupid. The reality of the situation gradually dawned on him. He looked across the floor at Erika and Jenny. They seemed as shocked as he felt. Half an inch tall!

A crunching sound made him turn; he faced the tip of an enormous boot, the sole as tall as he was. Peter looked up and saw Vin Drake crouched down on one knee, looming above him, his face enormous, his exhalations a stiff, noxious wind. And then Peter heard a deep rumbling that reverberated throughout the room like thunder.

It was the sound of Vin Drake laughing.

It was difficult to hear, with all the echoes and reverberations from these two enormous people. The sounds made his ears ache. They seemed to move and speak slowly, almost in slow motion. Alyson Bender crouched down alongside Drake, and together they stared at Peter. Alyson said, “What-are-you-doing-Vin?” The words boomed and rolled, and seemed to slur together into a mishmash of sounds, too deep to make out without difficulty.

Vin Drake just laughed. Apparently he found the situation amusing. But the man’s laughter propelled gusts of stinking breath toward Peter, and he recoiled from the odor of garlic, red wine, and cigars.

Drake glanced at his watch. “It’s-after-hours,” he said, and smiled. “ Pau – hana ,-as-they-say-here-in-Hawaii.-Means-work-is-done.”

Alyson Bender stared at him.

Drake tipped his head from side to side, as if he had gotten something stuck in his ear; it seemed to be a habit. The students heard his voice, rolling out: “After-work-comes-play.”

Chapter 10

Nanigen Animal Facility 28 October, 9:00 p.m.

Vin Drake produced a clear plastic bag. With surprising gentleness, he picked up Peter Jansen and dropped him in the bag. Peter slid down the plastic surface, came to rest at the bottom. He got to his feet, and watched as Vin went around the room, picking up each of the graduate students in turn, dropping them in the bag. Last of all he picked up the Nanigen man from the control room. They heard the man call out, “Mr. Drake! What are you doing, sir?”

Drake didn’t seem to hear the man, and didn’t seem to care.

As each person tumbled down among the others in the bag, nobody got hurt. Apparently they now had too little mass to cause damage. “We’re almost weightless,” Amar commented. “We must weigh no more than a gram or so. Like a tiny feather.” Amar’s voice was cool, composed. But Peter thought he detected a tremor of fear.

“Well, I don’t care who knows it, I’m scared,” Rick Hutter blurted.

“We all are,” Karen King admitted.

“I think we’re in shock,” Jenny Linn said. “Look at our faces. Circum-oral pallor.” Blanched skin around the lips was a classic sign of fear.

The Nanigen man kept saying, “There’s been some mistake.” He couldn’t seem to believe what Drake had just done.

“Who are you?” someone asked him.

“My name is Jarel Kinsky. I’m an engineer. I operate the tensor generator. If Mr. Drake would just-just give me a chance to talk with him-”

“You’ve seen too much.” Rick Hutter cut him off sharply. “Whatever Drake does to us he’s going to do to you as well.”

“Let’s take an inventory,” Karen King snapped. “Quick-what weapons have we got?”

But they got no further; the bag was tossed around, throwing them into a tangle.

“Uh-oh,” Amar said, struggling to sit up. “What’s happening now?”

Alyson Bender pushed her face very close to the plastic bag; she was looking carefully at the individuals inside, apparently worried about them. Her eyelashes flicked against the plastic. The pores in the skin of her nose were alarmingly large, great pink pockmarks.

“Vin-I-don’t-want-them-harmed-Vin.”

That drew a smile from Vin Drake. Speaking slowly, he said, “I-wouldn’t-dream-of-harming-them.”

“You realize,” Karen King said, “that that man is a psychopath. He is capable of anything.”

“I realize it,” Peter said.

“That’s just not true about Mr. Drake,” Jarel Kinsky said. “There is a reason for this.”

Ignoring him, Karen said to Peter, “We should have no illusions about what Drake intends at this point. We’re witnesses to his confession, that he killed your brother. Now he’s going to kill us all.”

“Do you think so?” Danny Minot said plaintively. “We shouldn’t jump to-”

“Yes, Danny, I do think so. Maybe you’ll be first.”

“It’s just so hard to imagine-”

“Ask Peter’s brother about-”

At that moment, Vin picked up the plastic bag and walked quickly into the hallway. He was simultaneously arguing with Alyson Bender, but their words were too difficult to decipher; it just sounded like thunder rumbling.

They walked past several labs, and then Drake entered one. Even inside the plastic bag, they could immediately detect the difference in this lab.

A sharp, acrid odor.

Wood chips and feces.

Animals.

“This is an animal lab,” Amar said. And they could see, through the distortion of the plastic bag, that there were rats, hamsters, and lizards and other reptiles.

Vin Drake set the bag down on top of a glass tank. Now he was talking, apparently directing his remarks at them, but they could not understand what he was saying. They looked from one to another. “What’s he saying?” “I don’t understand.” “He’s crazy.” “I can’t make it out.”

Jenny Linn had turned her back on the group; she was entirely focused on Drake. She turned to Peter and said, “It’s you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s going to kill you first. Wait just a minute.”

“What…?”

She unzipped her belt pack, revealing a dozen slender glass tubes, with rubber bumpers at each end. “My volatiles.” It was impossible to miss the devotion; these tubes represented years of work. She pulled one out. “I’m afraid it’s the best I can do.”

Peter shook his head, not understanding. She uncorked the tube and in a single quick motion, poured it over his head and down his body. There was a pungent odor; then nothing. He said, “What is it?”