Micro. Michael Crichton

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СКАЧАТЬ are you doing?” Alyson said to Drake.

      Drake didn’t answer.

      They came to a heavy door marked TENSOR CORE. Drake punched a keypad and the door swung open. “This way, come on now…”

      The students entered a large space with hexagonal tiles on the floor. The floor was almost transparent; they could see machinery below, complex machinery, going deep into the ground. “All right, everyone,” Drake said, “I want you all to stand in the center of one of the hexagons. Each hexagon is a safety spot. It’s robot-proof. Do it now, that’s it—hurry, hurry—we don’t have much time.” Drake touched a security pad and they heard bolts slamming home. They were locked inside the room.

      Erika Moll had gotten extremely frightened. She uttered a cry, and made a run for the exit door.

      “Don’t!” Danny Minot screamed after her.

      The exit door was locked, and Erika couldn’t get out.

      Drake had shut himself in a control room, where he looked in on the students through a window. An instant later, he went out of sight. The control room door opened, and a man, a stranger, was flung into the big room; he was a Nanigen employee. “Get in there and help them!” Drake’s voice roared after the man.

      The man followed Drake’s order. Looking shocked, he stood in the center of a hexagon among the students.

      The students were all positioning themselves; Erika had come back. Peter Jansen toppled and fell to his knees; Rick Hutter grabbed him and tried to support him but Peter stayed on his knees. Karen King noticed a row of backpacks hanging along the wall, and she ran and grabbed one and slung it over her shoulder. Meanwhile Drake had become visible in the window again, and they saw him punching buttons in a rapid sequence. Alyson was by his side.

      “Vin, for God’s sake,” Alyson said, standing beside him.

      “No choice,” Vin Drake said, and he hit the final button.

      For Peter Jansen, groggy from his beating, everything happened fast. The hexagonal floor sank beneath him, and he descended some ten feet into the multiple jaws of some huge electronic apparatus that was all around him, and very close, almost touching his skin. The jaws were actually wired armatures, painted at intervals with red and white stripes. The air smelled strongly of ozone and there was a loud electronic hum. The hairs on his skin were raised up. A synthesized voice said, “Don’t move, please. Take a deep breath…and hold it!” There was a loud clank!, unnerving and mechanical, and then that electronic hum returned. A brief wave of nausea. He sensed he had shifted somehow, within the apparatus.

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ