Micro: A gripping sci-fi action adventure novel

by Michael Crichton

“He’s my wife’s cousin. And nobody else would take him.”

“A hand-waver,” he said, “is somebody who hasn’t worked out his ideas and can’t defend them. So when he presents at

colloquium, and he comes to the parts he hasn’t worked out, he starts waving his hands and talking fast. Like the way someone waves their hands and says, ‘Et cetera, et cetera.’ In science, hand-waving means you don’t have the goods.”

“Oh yes, I am definitely coming. The intersection of science and commerce? The corruption of golden youth? Oh definitely—I’ll be there.”

Tell you one thing, though: extracts from the tree appear to be completely nontoxic. One day you might even be able to give this to pregnant women. Huh, look at that.”

pharmaceutical company beating you to your results.” “Hey, I’m not worried. If those guys were really in the business of developing drugs, they’d already be working on this tree,” Rick said. “But why should they take the risk? Let the American taxpayer fund the research, let some graduate student spend months to make the discovery, and then they swoop in and buy it up from the university. And then they sell our discovery back to us, at full price. Sweet deal, huh?”

The taxi driver muttered something about crazy lobsters. “Lobsters?” Peter asked. “Tourists. Way they burn.”

“That’s a superior evolutionary design. Better than ours, at least for this place,” Erika added. “Armor, jaws, chemical weaponry, and lots of legs,” Peter said.

What is it about nature that is so terrifying to

the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It’s unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn’t care. That’s intolerable to us. How can we live in a world so indifferent to us. So we redefine nature. We call it Mother Nature when it’s not a parent in any real sense of the term. We put gods in trees and air and the ocean, we put them in our households to protect us. We need these human gods for many things, luck, health, freedom, but one thing above all—one reason

stands out—we need the gods to protect us f...

were much stronger and faster in the micro-world. It gave Karen a feeling of superhuman power and exhilaration. She leaped over obstacles like a hurdle runner, clearing things in a series of incredible jumps. She realized she was sprinting at about fifty miles an hour, in the scale of the micro-world. I killed an ant. With a knife and my bare hands.

extremely surprised at how fast they had run. Danny Minot had lost his tassel loafers. The shoes blew off his feet while he’d made a jaw-dropping dash that would have shamed an Olympic sprinter. Danny stood there in muddy, bare feet, shaking his head. And they had seen Karen King fighting the ants. Her twists and leaps, soaring through the air. It was clear they could do things in the micro-world they couldn’t have dreamed of before.

The tent, stocked with various boxes, sat atop a concrete floor. In the center of the floor, there was a round steel hatch. The steel hatch was operated with a wheel lock, like a bulkhead door of a submarine. Peter Jansen spun the wheel and lifted up the hatch. A ladder went down into darkness. “I’ll check it out.” He put the headlamp on his head and switched it on, and descended the ladder. He ended up standing in the middle of a dark room. As he swung his headlamp around, the beam fell across bunks and tables. Then he spotted a

bank of power switches on the wall. He threw them, and the lights came on. The room was a concrete bunker. It contained spartan living quarters. Tiered bunks were stacked along two walls. There were laboratory benches, equipped with basic lab supplies. There was a dining area, with a table and benches and a cooking stove. A door led to the bunker’s power source: a pair of D-size flashlight batteries, looming far above their heads. Another door led to a toilet and shower. A chest held some freeze-dried meals in pouches. The bunker was

secure against predators, a sort of bomb shelter in a dangerous bi...

Erika Moll said, her voice trembling, as she sat down on a bunk. Why had she ever left the university in Munich? She longed for the safe world of European research. These Americans played with fire.

Hydrogen bombs, megapower lasers, killer drones, shrunken micro-people…Americans were demon-raisers.

Americans awakened technological demons they couldn’t control, yet they see...

You need to be more tolerant of Danny…” “Cut the crap, Amar. That guy is going to be the death of us all, with his stupid—” Peter Jansen could feel the situation spiraling out of control. The one thing that would certainly destroy them would be conflict within the group. They had to become a team, Peter thought, or they would soon be dead.

Somehow, he had to get this quarrelsome, catty group of intellectuals to understand that survival required cooperation.

Eventually they quieted down. “Are you done squabbling?” he said. “Now I have something to say. We’re not in Cambridge anymore. In the academic world, you guys got ahead by cutting down your rivals and proving you’re smarter than everybody else. In this forest, it’s not about getting ahead, it’s about staying alive. We have to ...

We survive with brains, weapons, and cooperation—teamwork.

here who gets along with everybody in the group,” Rick said, and turned to Peter. “You’re the only person who can lead us.”

Like a fine sauce, a good curare contained a variety of ingredients cooked together, a chemistry of horrors.

The afternoon rains had arrived. “Get to high ground!” Peter shouted. “This way!” They began to run, heading upslope, grabbing whatever they could carry. Karen carried Jenny on her back, while raindrops exploded around them like bombs going off.

this was the expedition Rick Hutter had always dreamed of, yet never thought possible. A journey into the hidden heart of nature, into a world of unseen wonders.

The disappearance of Station Bravo meant that they had no place to hide during the hours of darkness. The sun was setting, and night was coming on fast, as it does in the tropics.

Erika was becoming increasingly alarmed as she watched the sun go down. “Just to point out,” she said to the others, “the vast majority

of insects come out at night, not during the day. And many of them are predators.” “We need to make a bivouac,” Peter sa...

The targets hadn’t made any effort to cover their tracks. They didn’t suspect they were being followed.

But it was starting to get dark. Telius and Johnstone knew enough about the micro-world to know they needed to go to ground for the night. You did not move after dark. Not ever.

Johnstone ran an electric-shock cable in a circle around the vehicle, staking the cable into the ground chest-high, while Telius dug a foxhole directly underneath the vehicle. They energized the power cable from the capacitor—it would deliver a shock to any animal that touched it—and they hunkered down in the foxhole, sitting back to...

“This world scares the hell out of me,” Karen King said. “But somehow I’m glad to be here anyway. I must be nuts.”

“A company like that could have contracts with the government. That’s trouble.” “You know something about Nanigen?” Watanabe asked his boss. “I’m just a cop. Cops don’t know shit.”

leave. The guy was quiet and smart, one of his best detectives. Those were the

ones who created the worst trouble. The thing about trouble was that Marty Kalama kind of enjoyed it.

darker overhead, and then he saw…a shadow moving in the ferns. He stopped running. Suddenly he felt very, very small and completely powerless. He couldn’t believe how big the damned thing was.

A moment later a body was flung out, spinning through the air, and landed with a crash at Karen’s feet. She saw the man’s armor, the dart embedded in the man’s chin, the eyes bulging…the foamy tongue, thrust out… She drew in her breath. There had been two snipers. Rick had said nothing about it until now. “You killed—this man…” “Get in,” Rick said, busying himself with the controls. “We’re driving to Tantalus. And we’ve got a gun.”

“I think everybody’s dead.” “Why?” “My men were the best. Something got through their weapons and armor.” “So the students—” Makele shook his head. “Not a chance.” Drake leaned back. “So there was an accident with a predator.”

Makele sucked on his lips. “When I was in Afghanistan, I noticed something about accidents.” “What’s that?” Drake asked. “Accidents happen more often to assholes.”

A burglar and his friends had gotten themselves killed. Accidents happen more often to assholes.

They arrived at another heavy wooden door. The doors functioned like the bulkhead doors in a ship,

sealing off parts of the warren from other parts. Rourke barred the door behind them, explaining that you couldn’t be too careful with some of the predators that lived around here.

“You’re not going anywhere right now, Mr. Minot,” Rourke said, replacing his instruments in the chest. “Night is coming. At night, the wise stay underground.”

“Exactly. A drone. No pilot.” It had a wingspan of ten inches. Eric brought his arm close to the drone, letting Rick and Karen have a good look. “This is a giant prototype of a Hellstorm,” he said. “Once it’s flight-tested, it will be shrunk down to half an inch.” Instead of landing gear, the Hellstorm had four jointed legs with what looked like sticky pads on the ends, just like the feet on the hexapod trucks. Under its wings it carried missiles: two glass tubes with long steel needles at their noses, fins, and what looked like a rocket motor

“Indeed—what does it do?” Eric echoed. “It’s a military drone the size of a moth. It can be used for surveillance. It can also kill people. It can evade any security system in existence. It can fly under a door or through a crack around a window. It can cling to a person’s skin or clothing. It can also crawl, using those legs. It can fly along the electrical conduits inside a wall, then pop out and fly around inside a room. It can kill any person, anywhere, anytime. You see those

rockets under its wings? Those are toxin micro-missiles. The missile is armed with super-toxins that Nanigen has discovered and extracted from life-forms in the micro-world—poison from worms, spiders, fungi, and bacteria. The missile has a flight range of ten meters. This means the drone has standoff-attack capability: it can fire toxin missiles from a distance. If one of those super-toxin missiles embeds in your skin, you’ll die fast. One micro-drone can kill two people, since it carries two missiles.”

along the fuselage? Are they jet intakes?” Rick asked. “No. Those are air samplers. They’re used for targeting.” “How’s that?” Karen asked. “The Hellstorm can smell you. Every person gives off a unique fingerprint of scent. Each one of us smells a little different from every other person. Our DNA is unique, so naturally the combination of pheromones given off by our body is unique, too. A micro-drone can be programmed...

crowd and kill you.” “This is a nightmare,” Karen King said. “The nightmare has no end,” Eric Jansen said. “Think of a presidential inauguration. Think of a thousand Hellstorms released into the air, all of them programmed to seek out the president of the United States. If just one micro-drone gets through, the president dies. Micro-drones could take out the government of any nation—Japan, China, Britain...