“We must make a plan,” Karen said, her voice calm.

Amar Singh appeared around a log to the left, covered with mud, his shirt torn. He seemed remarkably calm. Peter asked, “Everybody okay?”

They said they were.

“The Nanigen guy,” Peter said. “Hey Kinsky! Are you around?”

“All along,” Jarel Kinsky answered softly, close by. He had been sitting underneath a leaf, his legs drawn up, motionless and saying nothing, watching and listening to the others.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked him.

“You want to keep your voices down,” Kinsky said, speaking to the students as a whole. “They can hear better than we can.”

“They?” Jenny said.

“Insects.”

Silence fell over the group.

“That’s better,” Kinsky said.

They began talking in whispers. Peter said to Kinsky, “Any idea where we are?”

“I think so,” Kinsky answered. “Look over there.”

They turned and looked. A distant light was shining in that direction, buried in the trees. The light cast a glow down along the corner of a wooden building, just visible through the foliage, and the light reflected off panes of glass.

“That’s the greenhouse,” Kinsky went on. “We’re at the Waipaka Arboretum.”

“Oh, God,” Jenny Linn said. “We’re miles from Nanigen.” She sat down on a leaf, and felt something moving under her feet. The movement went on and on, ceaselessly, nudging and bumping at her feet, and then something small crawled up her leg. She plucked it off and tossed it away. It was a soil mite, an eight-legged creature, and harmless. She realized that the soil was full of tiny organisms, all going about their business. “The ground is alive under our feet,” she said.

Peter Jansen knelt down, brushed a small worm from his knee, and faced Jarel Kinsky. “What do you know about being shrunk like this?”

“The term is ‘dimensionally changed,’ ” Kinsky answered. “I’ve never been dimensionally changed, until now. Of course I’ve talked with the field teams.”

Rick Hutter broke in, “I wouldn’t trust anything this guy says. He’s loyal to Drake.”

“Wait,” Peter said calmly. “What are the ‘field teams’?” he asked Kinsky.

“Nanigen has been sending teams into the micro-world. Three people on a team,” Kinsky answered in a whisper. He seemed very afraid of making noise. “They’re dimensionally changed, half an inch tall. They operate the digging machinery and collect samples. They live in the supply stations.”

Jenny Linn said, “You mean those tiny tents we saw?”

“Yes. The teams never stay here for more than forty-eight hours. You begin to get sick if you stay changed for much longer than that.”

“Sick? What do you mean?” Peter asked.

“You get the micro-bends,” Kinsky said.

“Micro-bends?” Peter said.

“It’s an illness that develops in people who are dimensionally changed. The first symptoms appear in about three to four days.”

“What happens?”

“Well-we have some data on the disease, not much. The safety staff began testing animals in the tensor generator. They shrank mice, at first. They kept the shrunken mice in tiny flasks and studied them with a microscope. After a few days, all the shrunken mice died. The mice were hemorrhaging. Next, they shrank rabbits and finally dogs. Again, the animals died with hemorrhages. Necropsies of the animals, after they’d been restored to normal size, showed that there was generalized bleeding at sites of injury. Small cuts bled profusely, and there was internal bleeding, as well. It was discovered that the blood of the animals lacked clotting factors. Essentially, the animals had died of hemophilia-that’s the inability of the blood to form clots. We think that the size-change disrupts enzymatic pathways in the clotting process, but we don’t really know. But we also found that an animal could live for a short while in a shrunken state, as long as the animal was brought back to normal size within a couple of days. We began calling the illness micro-bends, because it reminded us of the bends in scuba diving. As long as an animal’s time in the shrunken state was limited, the animal seemed to be healthy.

“Next, there were several human volunteers, including the man who’d designed the tensor generator. His name was Rourke, I think. Humans could live for a few days in the micro-world with no ill effects, it seemed. But then there was…an accident. The generator broke down and we lost three scientists. They got trapped in the micro-world and couldn’t be returned to normal size. One of the fatalities was the guy who designed the generator. Since then, we’ve had other…problems. If a person is stressed or suffers a major injury, the micro-bends can come on very suddenly, and sooner than usual. So we have lost…more…employees. That’s why Mr. Drake halted operations while we try to learn how to keep people from dying in the micro-world. You see, Mr. Drake really does care about safety…”

“What’s the disease like in humans?” Rick interrupted.

Kinsky went on. “It begins with bruises, especially on your arms and legs. If you have a cut you can bleed endlessly. It’s like hemophilia-you can bleed to death from a small cut. At least that’s what I’m hearing. But they’re keeping the details pretty quiet,” Kinsky said. “I just run the generator.”

“Is there any treatment?” Peter asked.

“The only treatment is decompression. Get the person restored to full size as soon as possible.”

“We’re in trouble…” Danny murmured.

“We need to do an inventory of our assets now,” Karen said decisively. She laid the backpack she’d grabbed in the generator room on top of a dead leaf. With only the moonlight to see by, she opened the pack and spread various things out on the leaf as if it were a table. They gathered around and checked the contents carefully. The backpack contained a first-aid kit, including antibiotics and basic medications; a knife; a short length of rope; a reel, rather like a fishing reel, which was attached to a belt; a windproof lighter; a silver space blanket; a thin waterproof tent; a water-backpacker’s headlamp. There was also a pair of headsets with throat mikes attached to them.

“Those are two-way radios,” Kinsky said. “For communicating with headquarters.”

There was also a very-fine-mesh ladder; and keys or starter controls for some kind of machine not present. Karen put everything but the lamp back into the pack and zipped it shut.

“Pretty useless,” Karen said, getting to her feet and putting on the headlamp. She switched it on, casting the light around, playing it over the plants and leaves. “We really need weapons.”

“Your light-please turn it off-” Kinsky muttered. “It attracts things-”

“What kind of weapons do we need?” Amar asked Karen.

“Say,” Danny interrupted, as if something had just occurred to him. “Are there poisonous snakes in Hawaii?”

“No,” Peter said. “There are no snakes at all.”

“Not many scorpions, either, certainly not in the rain forest. It’s too wet for them here,” Karen King added. “There is a Hawaiian centipede that can deliver a nasty sting to a human being. It could certainly kill us at our present dimension. In fact, a great many animals can kill us. Birds, toads, all sorts of insects, ants, wasps, and hornets-”

“You were talking about weapons, Karen,” Peter said.

“We need some kind of projectile weapon,” Karen said, “something that can kill at a distance-”

“A blowgun,” Rick broke in.

Karen shook her head. “Nah. It would be a tenth of an inch long. No good.”

“Wait, Karen. I could use a hollow piece of bamboo, I could use it full-size, half an inch long.”

Peter said, “And a wooden dart to fit in it.”

“Sure,” Rick said. “The dart sharpened by-”

“Heat,” Amar said, “as the tempering agent. But for poison-”

“Curare,” Peter said, getting up, looking around. “I bet lots of plants around here have-”

Rick interrupted, “That’s my specialty. If we could make a fire, we could boil bark and plant materials, and extract poison. And especially if we can find some piece of metal, iron…to make a dart point…”