“We’ll need your help,” Peter said.

Kinsky lifted the spear from the soil and gazed at a mite that walked along the spear, waving its forelegs. “All I want is to get home to my family,” he said softly, and shook his spear, tossing the mite away.

“Your boss couldn’t care less about your family,” Rick Hutter snapped at Kinsky.

“Rick doesn’t have a family,” Danny Minot whispered to Jenny Linn. “He doesn’t even have a girlf-”

Rick lunged at Danny, who scrambled away, shouting, “You can’t solve a problem with violence, Rick!”

“It would solve you,” Rick muttered.

Peter took Rick by the shoulder and squeezed it, restraining him, as if to say, Stay cool. To Kinsky he said, “Are there any other possibilities for getting back to Nanigen? Besides the shuttle truck, which might not exist.”

Kinsky bowed his head, thinking. After some time he said: “Well-we could try to get to Tantalus Base.”

“What’s Tantalus Base?”

“It’s a bioprospecting facility in Tantalus Crater, on the mountain ridge above this valley.” Kinsky pointed vaguely toward the mountain, which was only a green shape, barely visible through gaps in the tangled forest. “The base is somewhere up there.”

Jenny Linn said, “Vin Drake mentioned Tantalus during the tour.”

“I remember,” Karen said.

“Is the base open?” Peter asked Kinsky.

“I don’t think so. People died at Tantalus. There were predators.”

“What kind?” Karen demanded.

“Wasps, I heard. But,” Kinsky went on musingly, “there were micro-planes at Tantalus Base.”

“Micro-planes?”

“Small aircraft. Our size.”

“Could we fly to Nanigen?”

“I don’t know what the range of these aircraft is,” Kinsky answered. “I don’t know if any of them were left at the base.”

“How far above us is Tantalus Base?”

“It’s two thousand feet above Manoa Valley,” Kinsky answered.

“Two thousand feet up!” Rick Hutter exploded. “That’s…impossible for people our size.”

Kinsky shrugged. The others said nothing.

Peter Jansen took charge. “Okay, here’s what I think we should do. First, let’s try to find a supply station and take what we can from it. Then we’ll try to get to the parking lot. We’ll wait there for the shuttle truck. We have to get back there as soon as possible.”

“It’s obvious we’re going to die,” Danny Minot said, his voice cracking.

“We can’t just do nothing, Danny,” Peter said, trying to keep his voice even-sounding. He sensed Danny could break down into a panic at the drop of a hat, and that would be dangerous for the whole group.

The others went along with Peter’s plan, some of them grumbling-but nobody had a better idea. They took turns drinking water from a dewdrop on a leaf, and began moving again, looking for a trail, a tent, or any trace of human presence. Small plants near the ground arched over them, sometimes forming tunnels. They wound their way through the tunnels, and wandered past the trunks of stupendous trees. But there was no sign of a supply station.

“Okay, so we’re going to bleed to death if we don’t get the hell out of here fast,” Rick Hutter said, as they hiked along. “And we can’t find a damn supply station. Plus we’ve got a psychopathic giant looking to kill us. And I’ve got a blister. Is there anything else I need to worry about?” he asked, sounding very sarcastic.

“Ants,” Kinsky replied calmly.

“Ants?” Danny Minot broke in, his voice quavering. “What about ants?”

“Ants are a problem, I’ve heard,” Kinsky answered.

Rick Hutter stopped in front of a large yellow fruit lying on the ground. He looked up and all around. “Yes!” he said. “That’s a chinaberry tree. Melia azederach. The berry is highly poisonous, especially to insects and insect larvae. It contains around twenty-five different volatiles, principally 1-cinnamoyl compounds. This berry is absolute death to insects. It can be an ingredient for my curare.” He took off the backpack and stuffed the chinaberry into it. The berry filled much of the pack, and loomed out of the top of the pack, a bright yellow ovoid, sort of like a giant melon.

Karen glared at him. “It’s going to leak poison.”

“Nope.” Rick grinned and tapped on the yellow berry. “Tough skin.”

Karen gave Rick a skeptical look. “It’s your life,” she said curtly. The group moved on.

Danny Minot kept falling behind. His face had gotten red, and he kept wiping his forehead with his hands. Finally he took off his sport coat and threw it to the ground. His tassel loafers had gotten coated with mud. He sat on a leaf and started scratching inside his shirt, and pulled out a single pollen grain, and held it between thumb and forefinger. “Does anybody know I have serious allergies? If one of these objects gets up my nose I could go into shock.”

Karen gave a scornful laugh. “You aren’t that allergic! If you were, you’d be dead by now.”

Danny flicked it away, and the grain danced off, spinning as it drifted through the air.

Amar Singh couldn’t get over the profusion of life, the small creatures that seemed to exist in every nook and cranny of the micro-world. “Gosh! I wish we had a camera. I want to document this.”

They were young scientists, and the micro-world revealed a wonderland of unknown life. They suspected they were seeing creatures that had never been noticed or given names. “You could get a dissertation out of every square foot of this place,” Amar remarked. He began thinking he would do just that. He could get himself one incredible PhD out of this trip. If I survive, he reminded himself.

Little torpedo-shaped creatures with jointed bodies and six legs were crawling about on the ground. They were quite small and were all over the place. Some were sucking up strands of fungus as if they were eating spaghetti. As the humans walked along, every now and then one of these creatures would get startled, make a loud snapping noise, and flip high into the air, spinning end over end.

Erika Moll stopped to examine one of them; she picked it up and held it, while it struggled, snapping its tail with vigorous clicking sounds.

“What are these things?” Rick asked, pulling one out of his hair.

“They’re called springtails,” Erika Moll said. In the normal world, she explained, springtails are extremely small. “No bigger than the dot over an i on a page of text,” she said. The animal had a spring mechanism in its abdomen, she explained, that propelled it long distances, helping it escape from predators. As if on cue, the springtail flung itself off her hand, soaring into the air and out of sight beyond a fern.

Springtails kept bouncing into the air as they moved along, disturbed by their footsteps. Peter Jansen led the way. Sweat dripped from his body. He realized their bodies were losing moisture fast.

“We need to make sure we drink enough water,” he said to the others. “We could dry out really fast.” They found a clump of moss hung with droplets of dew, and they gathered around it. They drank from dewdrops, cupping the water in their hands. The surface of the water was sticky, and they had to swat the water to break the surface tension. As Peter lifted a bit of water to his mouth, it heaped up into a blob in his hands.

They came to a massive tree trunk. It soared up from a sprawling buttress of roots. As they worked their way around the roots, a sharp smell became apparent. They began to hear thrumming, tapping sounds, like rain falling. Peter, who was leading the way, climbed on top of a root and came in sight of a pair of low walls, snaking across the ground and out of sight. The walls were made of bits of dirt stuck together with some kind of dried substance.

Between the walls a column of ants was moving, streaming in both directions. The walls protected an ant highway. In one spot, the walls extended into a tunnel.

Peter crouched down and motioned to the others to stop. They moved forward cautiously, until they were lying on their stomachs and looking down on the ant column. Were the ants dangerous? Each ant was nearly as long as his forearm. Not that big, Peter thought; and he felt relieved, for somehow he had expected ants to be much larger than this. But there were certainly a lot of them. They flowed swiftly by the hundreds along their road and through the little tunnel they’d built.