Six Millimeter Man

by

Deuce Little O

CHAPTER ONE: THE LAB ACCIDENT

I was a student at Matheson university,
studying to get a degree in nuclear physics.
My name is Deuce O'Ryan, and I am 25 years
old. I was good friends with a professor there,
a certain professor Stiles, a theoretical
phycisist who was experimenting with a
method of perfecting cold fusion.

Professor Stiles hired me to assist him in his
laboratory after school, and he payed me
pretty well. I didn't completely understand the
professor's theory, because he kept the
details a secret, but what I knew about it was
that he had stumbled onto a unique
theory that would allow the impossibly minute
particles known as neutrinos, the particles
that compose the protons, neutrons, and
electrons of all of the atoms of a
tritium/deuterium
solution, to seperate and break away from the
center of each quark and gluon. Since
neutrinos are particles of matter that have zero
mass and can easily pass through solids at
the speed of light, when they are seperated
from the center of each quark and gluon, this
leaves empty space in the center of each
quark and gluon, forcing these particles to
collapse inwards, to fill up the gaps left by the
subtracted neutrinos. This would allow
the quarks and gluons to actually be reduced
in size and weight and volume as the matter in
the center of each quark and gluon
are subtracted. As the atoms in the center of
the deuterium/tritium solution are shrinking,
this should create a vacuum effect that would
force the surrounding atoms to collapse
inwards, generating a nuclear fusion reaction.
The part of this whole theory I was unsure of
was whether or not quarks and gluons are
composed of neutrinos, and the professor
had found a way to force these neutrinos to
seperate from the center of each quark and
gluon, or if quarks and gluons were made up
of something else entirely, and he had
discovered a way to convert the matter at the
center of each quark and gluon into neutrinos.

As far as how he did this was the biggest
secret of all. Professor Stiles simply said it
had something to do with quantum physics,
and left it at that. I wasn't interested in stealing
his theory and taking credit for it, I just wanted
a piece of the action; I wanted to be able to tell
my grandchildren some day that I was there in
professor Stiles's lab when he initiated the
first successful documented and verified cold
fusion reaction. I couldn't blame him, though.
There were alot of different people who could
profit from stealing his theories. Any company
that generates electricity for a profit could
either prevent the public from having access to
this new technology, or they could control the
patent, so they could generate electricity for a
fraction of what it costs now, while still
charging consumers the same price as
before.

I'll never forget the Friday afternoon when the
experiment was a success. All of the read-out
moniters started beeping, and the digital
power gauge L.E.D. display indicated that the
micro-reactor was generating much more
electricity than the power supply that pumped
electricity into the reactor. We had broken past
the break-even point, and the digital
thermometers indicated no rise in
temperature! The inside of the micro-fusion
reactor was the same as the room
temperature of the laboratory.

Before professor Stiles could grab a bottle
of champagne he had stashed to celebrate,
the door to the lab was kicked in by a group of
gunmen with ski-masks on, and they held us
up at gunpoint!

They specifically asked the Professor for all
C.D.-Roms and floppy disks with any and all
information pertaining to the cold fusion
experiment recorded on them. After professor
Stiles handed them what they requested, one
of the masked hoods used a semi-automatic
machine gun and opened up on the cold
fusion experiment that I was standing right
infront of!

Neither I nor the professor was injured in the
attack, thank God, but I did find myself
drenched in the mysterious tritium/deuterium
solution. The crooks had told us to count to
two-hundred before we were to even think
about moving, so after they left, and after the
professor reached what he assumed to be a
reasonable interpretation of what counting to
two-hundred should be, he left to call the cops
at a pay-phone at the student study-hall,
because the bandits had clipped the phone
line to the lab just before the robbery.

I would've went with the professor, but I told
him I'd better sit this one out, because I felt
really dizzy. Must be the tritium/deuterium
solution that got all over me.

As I sat down in a chair, alone in the lab, the
strangest sensation overtook me. I closed my
eyes hoping it would go away, but when I
opened them, I could see a layer of what
appeared to be steam rising from every part of
my body. As I looked around the lab, the
dizziness seemed to return in greater
intensity, because I had a strange sensation
similiar to vertigo as the lab seemed to
expand in all directions around me.

I blinked my eyes to make this optical
illusion go away, but that did no good,
because the walls of the lab seemed even
farther away each time I opened my eyes. . .
because this wasn't an optical illusion!

The lab seemed to fill with the steam I
mentioned before, and I decided to stand up
to catch my breath and maybe open a window
or two. It's a good thing I did, because as soon
as I stood up, the chair I had been sitting in
seemed to expand directly behind me until it
was bigger than a one-story house from my
perspective!

That was when it finally occured to me that I
just might be shrinking, but even at that point I
wasn't completely convinced yet, like a
drowning man grasping at straws, I tried to
rationalize what was happening to me by
assuming that I was suffering from previously
unknown hallucinogenic side-effects of being
drenched in the tritium/deuterium solution.

Apparently, the steam I saw was the
subtracted mass of all the quarks and gluons
of my body being simultaneously reduced in
size and forced to occupy less space. The
reaction the professor had discovered did in
fact cause miniaturization to occur in quarks
and gluons making up the atoms of the
tritium/deuterium solution before fusion was
initiated, so that was in fact exactly what was
happening to my body. . .

I was shrinking!

When I finally stopped shrinking, and the
steam finally went away, I was reduced to the
helpless size of six millimeters tall! I knew this
because I had helped the work crew that
installed the tile floor in the professor's lab
one weekend last summer, and the distance
between each two individual tiles was six
millimeters, a measurement I had to make
many times that weekend to ensure that the
tiling was installed as neatly as possible. That
was my exact height, the same distance
between two of the floor tiles!

I knew I had to escape from the lab before
the police arrived, before I could try to find a
solution to my problem. It wouldn't do me any
good if I ended up as a government
experiment at area 51 somewhere in Nevada,
now would it?

Luckily, the professor had been in such a
hurry when he left, that he'd left the door to the
lab ajar just a couple of inches, something I
hadn't even noticed before, but at my
diminished stature, it was now very obvious. At
six millimeters tall, a door that is open two
inches would be a door with a width large
enough for an elephant to go through, had the
same distance been duplicated proportionally
for a normal-sized man.

I ran outside into this brave new world of
giants that was just waiting to be explored,
where I would now try to live out a fugitive
existence in an attempt to restore myself to my
former stature. My closest family members
lived over one hundred miles away, so I had to
find another plan. Who could I trust? My
studies didn't leave much time for any kind of
a relationship, and all my spare time and
vacations were spent working for professor
Stiles in his lab, because I definitely didn't
come from a rich family, and I needed all of
the money I could get.

There was one possibility, a
seventeen-year-old chick named Jessica. She
was in love with me. She was basically the
only one I could trust besides the professor.
The only problem was, she lived about ten
miles away. So I made my decision, to set off
on a quest to find Jessica, come Hell or high
water, and damn the consequences!

Good or bad, I was willing to accept the risks,
whatever they may be, as a six millimeter
man!

CHAPTER TWO: THE JOURNEY BEGINS

It was late afternoon the day of the lab
accident that reduced me to six millimeters
tall, so it was still daylight.

It was pretty easy
making my way around campus without being
spotted. I mainly stayed in the planters,
walking among the plants and decorative tree
bark.

I was on my own in a world of giants,
so I had to be careful. Anyone was a potential predator,
and I knew I could trust nobody at all, not even Jessica.
But I knew that I had to trust
someone, so if I was going to be foolish
enough to make my condition known and
introduce myself to someone, it was going to
be Jessica. After all, she was in love with me,
and although it was stupid to trust anyone, it
seemed to me that there was the least
amount of risk involved in trusting her than
there would be in trusting anyone else.

The only problem was, Jessica lived in a
small coastal California tourist town that was
ten miles away, and getting there would be
one hell of a journey. At six millimeters tall,
one ordinary mile to me is equivalent to
between thirty and thirty-one miles. If I
averaged one mile a day, I should be able to
get to Jessica in a week and a half.

It was getting to be late afternoon, and the
sun would be setting before too long, so I
would have to wait until morning to begin my
journey. At my reduced size, my body
temperature was reduced also, making me
vulnerable to low temperatures. Even though it
doesn't get too cold in the month of May on the
central coast of California, I was going to need
a warm place to crash for the night.

I knew of a place where there was a
steam-grate that was connected to the utility
room that supplied heat to the dormitories. It
took close to an hour to get there without
being spotted, and by the time I arrived the
sun was going down. I built a little camp with
some leaves I dragged over to the edge of the
steam-grate, and I was concealed from view. I
had shelter for the night.

It took awhile to fall asleep that night,
because I hadn't eaten anything since earlier
that afternoon, and I was hungry. Sleep finally
came, and I slept peacefully.

When morning arrived, I had almost forgotten
that I was shrunk, but when I opened my eyes
the reality of it was painfully evident. I peeked
out of my camp that was constructed of
leaves, and I could see a bright blue morning
sky. It must've been early still, because I didn't
see too many students walking around, which
was good, because it would make it that much
easier to get around without being spotted
and captured by one of the giants.

Before I had fallen asleep the night before, I
had developed somewhat of a plan. I knew of
a place behind the engineering classrooms
where there was a dumpster that was used to
throw away useless electronic components. If
I could find a broken piece of a magnet from
an old speaker, maybe I could tie it to a piece
of string, and utilize it to ascend to the rear
axle of a vehicle at a gas station. Then I
wouldn't need to walk to Jessica's, I could
hitch a ride!

Progress was slow, and it took up a good
portion of the entire morning to get to the
engineering classrooms. Avoiding being
spotted was the main reason, because
several times I had no choice but to dart
across exposed areas where I had to make
absolutely certain that there was nobody
around to see me. The other reason was the
distance. To a normal sized student, the
distance from the steam grate to the dumpster
would take about five or ten minutes, walking
at a moderate pace. But when you're six
millimeters tall, it takes alot longer.

When I arrived at the dumpster, it was just as
I had hoped. In addition to several pieces of
wire, nuts and bolts on the concrete beneath
the mammoth dumpster, there was the frame
of a discarded stereo speaker, and several
chunks of the magnet that once made up the
innards of the speaker. Some of the pieces of
the magnet were larger than me, some were
the size of grains of sand, and there was a
plethora of sizes in between. I picked up a
chunk that was to me the size of a basketball.

It was kind of heavy, so I decided to look for
some string to tie it down with, so I could wear
it like a back-pack. After looking around for e
few minutes, I did eventually find a nice long
coil of string among the discarded trash at the
foot of the huge dumpster. I laid it out end to
end, then I tied it around the chunk of magnet.

There was a flat side on the magnet that I
tied several loops of string around, and before
long, I had an improvised back-pack. When
the time came, I could simply untie the string
from the magnet, unroll it, and with one end of
the string still tied to the magnet, I could swing
the chunk of magnet over my head and use
the string as a lasso to hurl the magnet to the
iron axle of a car at a nearby gas station.

I wished there had been some way to obtain
some food, but wherever there was food, there
would be people, and if I valued my freedom, I
had to completely avoid any and all people for
as long as possible. I knew that as soon as
someone spotted me, I would be through. If
someone did ever capture me, which would
be extremely easy to do, I knew escape would
be virtually impossible. Who in their right mind
would ever allow a miniaturized man to ever
have the opportunity to escape? Nobody that I
had ever met, that's for sure.

And so, with an empty stomach and a plan of
action, I set out for the nearest gas station,
where I would try to hitch a ride with my
magnet and my piece of string. The nearest
gas station was about half a mile from the
college campus, so I figured that I should be
able to make it there just before nightfall.

I experienced the greatest amount of difficulty
just getting off campus, because at that time
of day it was especially crowded, and I couldn't
take any chances. At one point, I was stuck
hiding in a planter at the bottom of a huge
bush for a good twenty minutes or more,
because two female students were standing
on a sidewalk I needed to cross. They were
making what to me seemed to be insignifigant
conversation, but maybe I just felt that way
because they were blocking my path. If I had
been foolish enough to chance it and run
across the concrete walk-way, the two women
would have easily spotted me. While I waited,
however, the view wasn't so bad. The brunette
had some pretty incredible legs, and it was
interesting to view a great pair of legs from
this new perspective. Finally, they left, and I
looked to my left and my right, and I ran across
the sidewalk to the planter on the other side
as fast as I could, and nobody saw me.

Once I was off campus, my progress was
much swifter, and before long I was more than
halfway to the nearby gas station that was
located not too far from campus. It was
amazing, I had never pondered the relatively
close distance of the gas station when I was
at my normal size, but with my reduced
stature, I was angry at myself for having taken
it for granted for so long.

It was only about half a mile from Matheson
university, but the proportionate distance to
me at my reduced size made it equivalent to a
distance of about fifteen miles. I had walked
the distance from the college town where I
went to school to the beach town where
Jessica lived many times when I was at my
normal size, so I was conditioned to make this
kind of a journey.

I ducked through back alleys and went
through apartment complexes that would have
been impossible for a normally sized person,
and I only had to cross a street once to get to
the gas station. That was the greatest
obstacle, because I had to wait for just the
right opportunity to cross when there was no
traffic and no pedestrians that could've seen
me.

When I finally arrived at the gas station, it was
late afternoon, with a couple of more hours of
daylight left. I had gotten there sooner than I
had anticipated, which was good. there was a
drainage pipe I hid inside of, where I had a
good view of the cars and trucks that came
and went.

I made a point of reading the license plates,
to see if the vehicle was local or from out of
town. Sometimes, there were bumper stickers
or some other signal that indicated the car
was local, like a familiar radio station on a
bumper sticker, or a tag that advertised a local
car dealership where the vehicle had been
purchased.

I couldn't get too picky, so when a woman
stepped out of her car to go inside and pay, I
ran out from inside of the drainage pipe where
I had been hiding, and I began to swing the
chunk of magnet around on the string that I
had prepared while I had been waiting for the
right moment.

It took a couple of tries, but eventually the
magnet connected to the differential in the
center of the rear axle, and I started climbing
up the string. Before I had even reached the
axle, the woman had returned to her car, and
closed the front door and started the ignition.

I climbed up as fast as I could, and soon I
was standing on top of the differential, and I
pulled up the length of string and coiled it up.
As the vehicle started moving, I held onto the
string like reins on a horse, and the magnet
held firm to the iron differential casing.

Soon, we were on the free-way, just as I had
hoped, but from my estimation, we were
heading in the wrong direction, North, instead
of South! Every bumper sticker and dealership
tag had indicated this was a local car, but by a
random stroke of fate, I had chosen a local car
from the North county, under the mistaken
assumption that the car dealership advertised
on the woman's car was from the South part of
the county, so therefore, the woman driving the
car was from the South county, but I had been
wrong!

And so North we went, the nearest town
being thirty miles from Matheson university,
and the next town North of that was twenty
miles still further!
 

CHAPTER THREE: THIRTY MILES OFF
COURSE!

The entire trip lasted over half an hour, and
just as I'd feared, we went up and over the
Cuesta grade, which meant the vehicle I'd
hitched a ride on was going a minimum of
thirty miles in the opposite direction I needed
to go to reach Jessica's house. The car finally
pulled into a driveway and parked, and two
doors popped open.

I heard a pair of voices, the woman who had
driven the car, and a younger female voice,
obviously the woman's daughter. When they
had gone inside, I climbed down and pulled
on the string, in an attempt to release the
magnet, but it wouldn't budge. It would be very
difficult to obtain another chunk of magnet, so I
decided it was important to retrieve the
magnet, but eventually I just gave up entirely. I
just didn't have enough strength in my
miniaturized body to accomplish this task.

After struggling with the magnet for the better
portion of a good solid hour, I began to smell
the delicious aromas of food being prepared
in the house of the people that owned the car
I'd hitched a ride on. The sun was going down,
and I hadn't eaten in over twenty-four hours, so
I was pretty hungry to say the least.

The temptation proved to be overwhelming,
and I finally decided to try to find some way
into the house, to try to obtain food. The plan
was to sneak in, grab some food, and sneak
out again, and it didn't seem too difficult at the
time. At the front of the house was an open
window, and there was a large rose bush that
would provide easy access to the three foot
high window ledge.

I began my ascent, and before too long, I
found myself standing on the window ledge.
The smell of the food was intoxicating; I could
distinguish pot roast and mashed potatoes
through the open window. I stepped inside,
and made my way across the window ledge to
the curtains on one side. The fabric of the
curtain had stitching that was just the right
size for me to use as handles to climb down
to the floor. I just hoped these people didn't
have any pets, especially the hungry kind!

My hunger won out over my fears, however,
and soon I was standing on the wooden floor
of the living room of this strange house. The
giant girl, about twelve or thirteen years old,
was paying attention to the television, so she
hadn't noticed me. She had long dark blonde
hair, and blue eyes. Her mother was in the
dining area at the other end of the room,
setting the table. She spoke to her daughter:

"Amber, it's time for dinner. Could you shut
the window, please?"

From my hiding place beneath the living
room couch, I watched in horror as Amber
walked over and slid the living room window
closed. That was my only means of escape,
so now I was trapped in the home of these
giant strangers! I didn't know whether I should
feel angry that the window had been shut,
preventing my escape, or relief that I had
managed to infiltrate the house to obtain food
before my only means of entry had been
closed off.

The girl that had been addressed as Amber
by her mother walked over to the giant dinner
table, and I watched the giant duo load down
their plates with pot roast and mashed
potatoes, corn on the cob and chocolate
pudding. I couldn't figure out how I was going
to manage to procure some of the prodigious
pot-roast, but I was so hungry that at one point
I didn't even care if I was captured, just as long
as I could get something to eat!

My dilemma was solved when the girl asked
her mother if she could finish her dinner in her
room, because she had alot of homework to
do. Her mother granted her permission, and
Amber picked up her plate and disappeared
into the hallway to the left of the dining area. I
heard her bedroom door close.

It wasn't difficult at all to make my way under
and behind furniture as I made my way
towards the hallway, and soon, I was at the
corner that seperated the dining area from the
hallway. The only problem was, the giant
woman was facing in my direction as she ate,
and I would have to cross her field of vision
momentarily in order to get across into the
hallway.

I saw the woman turn her head as she heard
somethimg interesting on the television, and I
took a chance. I ran around the door jamb
seperating the dining area and the hallway,
and I made it before the woman could spot
me. Now all I had to do was climb under the
girl's door.

Luckily for me, the door to the girl's bedroom
didn't have weather stripping, and there was
atleast half an inch of clearance between the
bottom of her bedroom door and the wood
floor. I didn't even need to duck down as I
walked under the door and into Amber's room.
I guess that's one of the advantages of being
six millimeters tall!

Once inside, I could see Amber facing away
from me, typing away on a computer. To her
left was a massive desk, and that is where I
assumed her dinner was located. There was
a digital clock radio located in one corner high
atop the desk, and the electrical cord
supplying power to the clock radio extended
from the wall outlet down to the ground before
it ascended to the top of the desk and
connected to the rear of the clock radio. It
would be easy to climb!

I began to make my way up, and soon I
reached the top of Amber's desk. She was
unaware of my presence, still typing on her
computer. I hid behind the digital clock radio,
and I could see the plate of delcious pot-roast
and the pile of mashed potatoes dripping with
butter. Every few minutes, the girl would pause
from her work, and reach over and grab her
fork and scoop up a portion of either mashed
potatoes or pot-roast, and take a bite before
resuming her work on the computer.

The lip of the plate was higher than my
height, so I was faced with still another
challenge to overcome. If I could get onto the
plate, it would be easy to eat my fill unseen by
the giant girl, then I could escape back the way
I came. But how could I get up to the plate to
begin with, without attracting the attention of
the giantess?

The girl provided me with the most obvious
solution entirely unwittingly, by placing her fork
back on the plate after taking a bite, and
leaving the handle of the massive fork
extended down to the top of the desk. With
Amber's attention diverted to the computer
screen, I quickly made my way up the length of
the fork handle, and jumped off onto the plate
of food.

The plate of food was enormous, and I'll
never forget the experience of seeing a plate
of food from my new perspective of standing
six millimeters tall. The plate seemed to me to
be nearly the size of a coliseum. The large
pieces of pot-roast were of Olympian
proportions compared to me, and I felt that I
was standing on a plate of food meant for a
gargantuan ravenous goddess, rather than an
ordinary twelve-year old girl.

I hid behind a piece of pot-roast and waited
for the giant girl to take another bite before I
did anything, to avoid being seen by her if she
glanced over to eat some more food while I
was still out in the open. After she took
another bite and resumed work on her
computer, I began tearing off strips of meat
from the pot-roast, and savored every
delicious morsel!

Before long, I had eaten my fill, so I waited for
the girl to take another bite, so I could begin
tearing off additional strips of beef to take with
me when I resumed my journey. After she took
another bite, I started collecting strips of meat,
when suddenly, the giantess broke from her
pattern, and reached over to scoop up some
more food with her fork.

In my haste, I had failed to realize there was
only one piece of pot-roast remaining on the
girl's plate, and this was the piece I was
holding onto as I tried to hide from the
giantess. Sure enough, this was the exact
piece she scooped up with her fork, and I was
scooped up along with it!

Amber wasn't really paying attention to what
was on her fork, her eyes were focused on the
report for school that she was typing out on
her computer. I knew I had only one chance to
avoid being plunged into the depths of her
colossal mouth, and my only option was to
jump!

From the time her fork left her plate until the
exact moment she plunged the bite of food
into the cavernous depths of her mouth, less
than a second went by. During that brief period
of time, I let go of the piece of meat I'd been
holding onto, and fell downwards, towards the
edge of Amber's colossal desk! I avoided
slamming into the side of the desk and
plunged downwards still further...

The top drawer of Amber's desk was open
just slightly, but since I was only six
millimeters tall, there was plenty of clearance
for my tiny body, and I fell into the drawer and
landed on the firm yet soft surface of a large
eraser.

From the light shining through the opening in
the desk, I could see that I was in a desk
drawer full of paper-clips, pencils, pens,
erasers and a pencil sharpener. The scale of
ordinary objects is quite impressive when your
stature has been reduced as significantly as
mine. At six millimeters tall, the weight of an
ordinary pencil was so immense, that it was
impossible for me even lift it. Using the
pencils for a ramp to climb up and out of the
drawer was definitely out of the question!

And so there I found myself, trapped in a
girl's desk drawer, unable to escape. The only
option seemed to be to give myself up, and
get the girl's attention. Of course, this would
mean being captured, and I knew that the girl
would never allow me to regain my freedom
once I was under her power, but what other
choice did I have?
 

CHAPTER FOUR: AMBER'S PRISONER

The sides of the desk drawer that I was
trapped in were only about six inches high, but
at my minuscule stature, they stretched
upwards to an unattainable height far above
my head. Escape was impossible.

I tried everything, but the pens and pencils
were too heavy for me to move, and I couldn't
bend the paper clips to make a grapnel hook
that I could throw to the top of the desk drawer,
because I just didn't have the strength to bend
the aluminum. I was trapped!

I realized my only choice was to make contact
with the giantess that owned the desk I was
inside of, despite the fact that I would surely
end up as her prisoner. I decided the only way
to make my presence known to her was to
make as much noise as possible, until I
attracted her attention.

I began piling the paper clips on top of each
other, which wasn't an easy task, because to
me they were very heavy. Eventually, I had
enough piled up that I threw a staple at the
pile to make some noise, but Amber didn't
hear it, because the endless clacking on her
computer keyboard drowned out the sound. I
tried again.

After about the third or fourth time, I must've
gotten her attention, because I heard her stop
typing, and she said:

"What was that?"

At this point, I climbed to the top of the pile of
paper clips and began kicking them one by
one into a second pile of paper clips, making
enough noise that the giantess decided to
investigate the source of the disturbance.

My entire universe seemed to shake all
around me as Amber opened the top drawer
of her desk, the drawer I was now imprisoned
in. Her immense face filled the space above
the drawer, and I got my first close look at this
pre-teen colossus.

Her long hair was dark blonde with strands
of lighter colored locks intermingled, and she
had beautiful blue eyes. Her eyebrows were
darker than her hair, yet they were detectably
dark-blonde in color. She had a good
complexion, with a scattering of cute freckles
across her nose, but nowhere else. All in all,
she was a cute kid.

At first, the titanic pre-teen failed to see me,
and I was worried that she would close the
desk drawer before I could make her aware of
my presence. I jumped up and down and
yelled at her, calling her name over and over
again. Her gaze soon shifted, and my heart
was momentarily paralyzed with fear as the
blue eyes of this giantess locked onto me,
and I became aware that she was observing
me for the first time. The titanic pre-teen
colossus addressed me for the first time:

"What on Earth? Who are you? How did
you get so tiny, little man?"

Amber opened the desk wider, and reached
inside to pick me up. She placed her index
finger in front of me, and said:

"Don't be afraid of me, tiny one. you can
trust me. Climb onto my finger!"

It wasn't exactly easy, because to me the girth
of her index finger was the same height as a
one story house. I climbed up onto some of
the paper clips, and onto Amber's immense
index finger. The giantess lifted me upwards,
and I felt slightly dizzy and a little terrified, but
she stopped just above the top of her desk,
and dumped me out into the palm of her other
hand.

She began to lift me still further, until I was
just below Amber's chin, so she could
examine me more closely. She said:

"Wow! What happened to you, little
guy?"

I decided to answer her, but I had to yell at
the top of my lungs to be heard by the giant
girl. Finally, when communication seemed too
difficult, I explained that maybe I could write
down what had happened to me, and she
could read it with a magnifying glass.

She agreed that this was a good idea, and
she placed her hand on her desk and
commanded me to step down, so she could
get a pencil and a piece of paper for me to
write on. I obeyed her.

She pulled out a sheet of paper from another
drawer of her gigantic desk, and pulled out a
pencil. She broke off the tip of the pencil, and
placed it in front of me. Of course, the pencil
lead was almost as big as I was, so I had to
break off a smaller chunk of it to write with.

I began writing furiously, explaining in great
detail my entire story, how I was shrunk, and
how I had arrived here up to this point. When I
was done, the giantess left the room and
returned moments later with a huge
magnifying glass, so she could read my tiny
writing. I had tried to write with very large
letters, about one foot in length and six inches
wide from my perspective, but to Amber, even
this wasn't large enough to read without the
assistance of a magnifying glass. Before she
left, she said:

"I guess you're too tiny to escape from the
top of my desk! I'll just leave you there until I
get back. Don't go anywhere!"

When she returned, she read what I had
written. When she was done, she remarked
how amazing it was that all of these things
had happened, and said she felt very fortunate
that I had ended up with her, where I would be
safe. She went on to explain that from now on,
I had no choice but to remain with her as her
prisoner, and that it was for the best, because
I would not be safe out in the perilous world by
myself at my tiny helpless size. I was too
terrified of her superior size and strength to
argue with the mighty maiden, so I kept my
mouth shut!

At this point, she took out a ruler from the
same desk drawer I had been trapped in
earlier, and measured my stature. She said:

"Be sure to stand up straight, Deuce, so I
can get an accurate measurement!"

She knew my name was Deuce, because I
had written it down when I wrote about my
adventure. When she placed the plastic ruler
vertically next to me, the first thing she said
was:

"Half a centimeter! No, wait--"

It took a second glance through the
magnifying glass for her to confirm what I
already knew:

"Exactly six millimeters tall, Deuce!"
She said.

She returned the ruler to her desk drawer,
and said:

"Oh, Deuce! We're going to have so much
fun together! Just wait and see! But I don't
want my mom to find out about you, so I'm
going to have to keep you hidden! I'll have to
take you with me wherever I go!"

Once that was established, it first dawned on
me that I might spend the rest of my days as
Amber's prisoner, with no hope of ever
knowing freedom again! Not that there was
anything to complain about, as the days went
by, she treated me quite well. She always
made sure I had plenty of food to eat, and
plenty of water to slake my thirst. As far as
Amber was concerned, I was no different to
her than a pet mouse or a hamster. It was true
that I led a virtually idyllic existance, but I just
couldn't get over the fact that I had never met
Amber before I'd been shrunk, and if I could've
had my choice, it would've been nice to have
been captured by a girl that I had known
before the lab accident, someone like
Jessica.

The days turned into weeks, and I soon
realized that my chances of escape were slim,
if there was any chance at all. The only time
there was any possibility of a chance was
when Amber would take me out into her front
yard with her when she wanted to read a
novel, and she kept me on a checkerboard, so
she could moniter my every move, to prevent
my escape. In addition to this, Amber took the
additional precaution of tying a string around
my waist, which she then tied to her wrist, to
ensure that any escape attempt would be
impossible without her immediate knowledge.

My captivity was a game to her, and she went
to great lengths to make sure I could never
have even the slightest chance of executing a
successful escape attempt. When she went to
sleep at night, Amber kept me contained
within an inescapable jar that had tiny
air-holes punched into the lid. Even had it
been possible for me to scale the slick sides
of my glass prison, it would have been quite
impossible to unscrew the heavy lid, and the
air-holes were too small for even me to climb
through.

I remember the look on Amber's face the
night she captured me, when she had first
placed me in the jar. I'll never forget the look of
satisfaction on her face as she held the tiny jar
firmly in the grip of her left hand, with me
contained inside, and she gazed at my
helplessness with child-like glee. She had
said:

"And that is that! You won't escape from
me now, tiny one!"

I knew my only opportunity to escape would
be on one of the trips out to the front yard,
when she read her novels. I had at first hoped
that she would let down her guard and
eventually she would allow me to roam
around on the checkerboard without being
tethered to her wrist, but this was not the case.

In fact, the better she got to know me, the
more elaborately she began to tie the knots of
the string that I was tied up in. If I tried to untie
even one single knot and my mistress
became aware of it, she would put down her
book and tie no less than half a dozen
additional knots to replace the knot I had
untied. As I said before, keeping me under her
power was a game to her, a game I could
never seem to win! Eventually, I began to
accept that I would probably remain as
Amber's captive for a very, very long time!

CHAPTER FIVE: THE CAR ACCIDENT

When Amber had started the seventh grade,
she had taken an algebra class, instead of
taking pre-algebra first. Because of this, she
was unprepared for it, because she had been
doing basic arithmetic in the sixth grade. She
was doing well in most of her other classes,
but she had been getting F's in algebra.

Her mother was a high school drop-out who
was unfamiliar with anything above and
beyond basic arithmetic, so she was unable
to help her own daughter with her math
homework. Now that I was there, that all
changed.

It was difficult to communicate with Amber,
because my voice was not loud enough for a
normally sized person to hear me, unless I
yelled at the top of my lungs. Therefore, I had
to use a chunk of pencil lead to explain
algebra to Amber, which was tedious. It wasn't
long before I had explained the fundamentals
of pre-algebra to Amber so that she could
understand, and I was also able to help her
comprehend the concepts of whatever
homework her algebra teacher had assigned
on a particular night.

After tutoring her the night before a surprise
pop-quiz, Amber got an A minus on a quiz that
had 10 problems. She only missed one out of
ten, and that was because of a clerical error,
not because she didn't understand how to do
the problems.

After a few weeks of this, Amber informed me
that her teacher had started asking her how
she had improved her math skills so
drastically. He never would have guessed that
Amber had a full time tutor living at home; or
that her tutor was a sophomore at Matheson
university majoring in nuclear physics, and
minoring in electrical engineering. He also
never would have guessed that I had been
reduced to six millimeters tall in a lab accident
during a cold fusion experiment, and that I
lived in a glass jar on a shelf in Amber's
bedroom.

Amber's mother also noticed her
improvement, and no explanation or alibi
could quench her mother's curiosity. After
being questioned unrelentingly by her mother
about her improved grades, Amber finally
decided to tell her mother the truth.

I was in the glass jar that Amber kept me in,
relaxing in the small clay dwelling that Amber
had sculpted for me out of clay. Amber picked
up the jar, and informed me of her desicion to
show me to her mother. Before I could protest,
Amber carried the glass jar, with me inside,
into the living room.

After being dumped out onto the coffee table
and being introduced, Amber's mother was at
first astonished, but after Amber explained my
story, her mother remembered the newspaper
articles and the television news broadcasts
about Deuce O'Ryan, the missing college
student; at that point it all made sense to her.

I had to communicate with Amber's mother in
the same inefficient way I had communicated
with Amber herself, with a chunk of pencil
lead. After explaining that I needed some
electronic components to assemble a
microphone and an amplifier so they could
hear me, her mother's first reaction was to
deny my request, fearing I would build
something that would enable me to escape. At
that point, she still wasn't sure whether she
was going to allow her daughter to keep me
indefinitely and keep my captivity a secret, or if
she was simply going to allow her daughter to
keep me temporarily, until my relatives could
be notified of my dilemma.

One thing I did discern about Amber's mother
was that she was concerned, and wanted to
make sure that no harm would come to me.
After writing down on paper the fact that I was
extremely vulnerable to cold weather because
of my drastically reduced body temperature,
the mother decided to immediately purchase
a heat lamp that Amber could place above my
jar at night, to keep me warm.

I was returned to my jar, and Amber and her
mother piled into the car, to drive thirty miles
into the main town to go to a well supplied pet
store, to purchase a heat lamp. Once in the
car, Amber kept my jar in her hand, but soon
placed it in the cup holder above the ashtray
below the dash board, so her hands would be
free to look through her many C.D.'s, to figure
out what she wanted to listen to.

The car got on the freeway, and we were on
our way to the same college town where
Matheson University was located. We went
back down over the Cuesta grade, in the
opposite direction that we had come when I
had accidentally hitched a ride in their car,
when I had mistakenly thought that that they
were heading South, instead of North.

Amber put the C.D. that she wanted to listen
to into the C.D. player, but still resumed
looking through her collection when the
accident happened. From my vantage point, I
could not see what caused it, but I assume
that someone tried to change lanes in front of
our car, and Amber's mother was cut off.
Luckily, both Amber and her mother had
seatbelts on, but the window on the
passenger side where Amber was sitting was
rolled down, so when the car went off of the
side of the road and flipped, My jar was thrown
from the car.

Amazingly, the car flipped over completely,
but Amber and her mother were unhurt. The
car was totalled, and my jar was thrown
violently from the vehicle, and rolled down the
hill and hit a boulder that was wedged
half-submerged in the ground, shattering the
glass jar I was in.

I was a little shook up, but when I stood up, I
knew that this might be my only chance to
escape from Amber and her mother. There
was a possibility that Amber's mother would
have decided to return me to my relatives, but I
couldn't count on that. So, after looking back to
make sure that the two of them were safe and
unhurt, I started off on my own.

We were almost all of the way into town when
the accident happened, so it wouldn't have
been too far for a normally sized man to reach
town, but I was six millimeters tall, so the
distance for me was significantly magnified. It
was early afternoon, and it was less than one
more mile into town, so I expected to get there
some time not long after nightfall.

During the first hour of my journey, Amber
tried to locate me, and I was worried that she
would capture me, so I walked West instead
of directly South, to throw her off of my trail,
and I was successful. At times I could see her
in the distance, calling out my name, but I was
so small that from that distance I was
undetectable to the human eye, so I wasn't
spotted.

As early afternoon became late afternoon,
Amber's voice could be heard farther and
farther away in the distance, until finally I
couldn't hear her at all. I lost alot of time on my
detour, but if I had gone South, as Amber had
assumed that I would, there would have been
no way to elude her, and I would've surely
been captured again.

After nightfall, I reached the top of a hill, and I
could see the outskirts of town below.
Although it was soon going to be the
beginning of Summer, I had to make a camp
to protect myself from the cold, because of my
reduced body temperature.

That night, before I fell asleep in my hidden
campsite, I pondered the events of the past
month. The lab accident, getting captured by
Amber, and my serendipitous escape. I
wondered if I should continue on my quest to
contact Jessica, or if I should try to get in touch
with the professor.

I had studied enough about nuclear physics
in college to know that not enough was known
about the elusive neutrino particle; that is why
the professor's theory was so revolutionary.
He had actually found a way to manipulate
these particles, and remove them from the
quarks and gluon particles that made up the
protons, neutrons, and electrons that are the
three components of all atoms.

I also knew that because so little was known
about neutrinos, there was little if any hope at
all of replacing the neutrinos that had been
subtracted from my body. This is the reason I
had first decided to contact Jessica, because I
didn't believe that the professor could do
anything to help me, and I figured that if I had
no choice but to accept my current situation, it
would be better to establish contact with
Jessica, a girl who was in love with me, than
the professor.

I knew I could trust the professor, and that if
he was to find me, he would return me to my
mother or any relative of my choice, but was
that what I really wanted? sure, I would be
safe, but my mother was so over-protective of
me, she would probably make sure that I
would remain single until I was 80 years old.

After seeing the way Amber and her mother
had decided that my freedom was an option,
not a right that was carved into granite, I now
realized that even Jessica could probably not
be trusted, either. When human beings have
unlimited power over other human beings,
there is an instinctive human weakness to
abuse that power, and I wasn't sure there
were any normal-sized human beings on
Earth that I could trust any more, even my own
relatives.

Now that I was free, I wondered if my best
option was to stay away from normal-sized
people for the rest of my life. It would be a
difficult existence, but it was probably the best
plan. I decided to wait until morning to make
my decision, so I went to sleep under the
stars on that clear June night, free for the first
time in over a month. Time would only tell
what fate had in store for me, Deuce O'Ryan,
the six millimeter man!
 

CHAPTER SIX: FREEDOM

When I woke up the next morning, I felt better
than I'd felt in a long time. For the first time in
over a month, I was free. I didn't have any food,
but I was free.

I broke off a piece of a blade of grass, and
took a few bites. Actually, it wasn't bad. I hadn't
eaten since yesterday, so I guess anything
would've tasted good. I remembered the last
time I'd gone a long time without eating, the
day after the lab accident. My hunger had
gotten the best of me that time, and I took
foolish chances that had allowed me to get
captured. I vowed to myself that I would never
allow myself to make mistakes like that again,
regardless of how hungry I got.

I decided to try to find a house on the
outskirts of town that had a garden in the yard,
so I wouldn't be forced to eat grass. I made my
way towards town, and after a couple of
hours, when I was not far from the nearest
house, I saw an ant.

To me, it was as large as an average dog,
because I was only six millimeters tall. Then, I
saw another one. Just as I was walking down
a slight incline, I saw a whole colony.

I can't remember ever being so terrified in my
entire life. There were hundreds of them that I
could see, and probably thousands more in
the
foliage and in other places where I could not
see them. My fear subsided when I realized
they had no interest in me.

There were more than just ants from one
colony, as I had at first thought. There were
several different varieties of ants, all from
different colonies. One group were large black
ants, and another group were the same size
as the black ones, but were yellowish in color.
Still another group were a combination of
black and yellow, and there were two groups
of smaller ants, each a different type.

What I marveled at as I stood there observing
them, was the fact that they all seemed to
interact peacefully with each other. There
would be a group of ants from one colony,
marching along in an ant trail, and when their
trail intersected with the trail of ants of a
different variety, for instance, black intersecting
with yellow ants, they did not attack each other.
Like cars at a stoplight, each ant took his turn,
then an ant from the other colony would move
forward.

Then I saw a different kind of insect that I
could not identify, other than saying it was not
an ant. Remember, I studied nuclear physics
in college, not entomology. When it
intersected an ant trail, a group of ants from
that trail would team up and attack the
intruder. When the beetle or whatever it was
left the ant trail, the ants left it alone, and
resumed their daily business.

Then, not long after that, the same insect
again accidentally intruded on another ant
trail, this time in a location where two trails
from two different species of ants intersected
one other. Both species attacked the intruder
as a team, and after the insect fled, the ants
returned to their trail, each variety of ant
rejoining the trail of their individual species.

I found it amazing that several different
colonies of ants could all interact peacefully,
and I wondered if the human race would ever
evolve to a similar level of understanding.
Could people of different creeds and religions
ever accept each other and live peacefully as
equals, just as these ants were able to do?
The human race could learn alot from the
wisdom of the ant.

As I sat there watching the ants, I thought
about my life. I had always been interested in
science, and from a young age I had wanted
to be an inventor, like Thomas Edison. I made
a desicion to be a nuclear phycisist as a
youngster, after being inspired by the Bruce
Banner character from "The Incredible Hulk"
comic books I had read. I wasn't sure if I
wanted to be a nuclear phycisist because I
wanted to have huge muscles like the Hulk
character, or if my love of science and
technology were the main inspiration.

I eventually put that goal on hold, when I
reached junior high school, because I
discovered body building, and I decided that
lifting weights was a more efficient way of
increasing my muscle mass than studying
about gamma radiation. I continued body
building on through my high school years, but
I had never considered going into competition.

I did have friends who were interested in
going into competition, and they were all
interested in experimenting with steroids, to
give them that extra "edge." In my junior year, I
decided that supplying them and other body
builders was a quick and easy way to make
money, so I started making trips down to
Mexico on the weekends, where steroids
could be purchased legally.

This went on for a couple of years, and it was
an easy way to pay the rent and any other bills
that I had. I didn't feel that I was really doing
anything wrong, because after all, it wasn't like
I was pushing addictive street drugs on
people or anything.

I finally decided to get an accomplice, so
more steroids could be brought over to fill the
demand brought on by an increased number
of customers. A friend of mine agreed to do it,
but he just didn't have what it took to be a
smuggler, and I never should have trusted
him to begin with.

The last time I ever tried to smuggle steroids
across the Mexican border, we got caught. I
had the 'roids stashed in a hidden pocket of
my jacket, and I had sewn it up, so everything
was concealed. An American border patrol
guard asked a simple question, and my friend
cracked up under the pressure. If he had kept
his mouth shut, we would've never gotten
caught.

My friend and I were taken to a jail in San
Diego, and we were split up. I was only 19,
and it was my first time in jail. I ended up with
a sentence of six months, but ended up doing
about four months, with time subtracted for
good behavior. It was pretty simple; you don't
fight or get into any trouble, and you only do
two thirds of your time. You screw up, and time
is added. You screw up too much, and you
end up doing your full term.

While I was in there, I was in a cell with a guy
that was an electrician. There was no
television, so we talked about his job. I'd have
to say, he was the main inspiration in my adult
life that was a major factor in my decision to
go to college. He taught me about Ohm's law,
voltage drop formulas, and equations
concerning transformer coils. He really
rekindled my childhood desire to learn about
science. When I told him that I had wanted to
be a nuclear phycisist, he didn't laugh at me,
he actually encuraged me. He told me to go
for it.

There was a nuclear power plant in Devil's
canyon less than ten miles from Matheson
University, and if I had a degree in nuclear
physics, there was a good chance I could get
hired there. I could probably make pretty
decent wages. The electrician told me that I'd
better minor in electrical engineering, also,
just in case they weren't hiring phycisists. I'll
never forget what he told me. He said that as
long as they had power flowing through
powerlines, they would always need
electricians to work on those powerlines. He
said computer programmers could be layed
off when a company downsized, and college
graduates with degrees in business
marketing or cinematography could be flipping
burgers because the jobs they were qualified
for just weren't in demand, and they couldn't
find anything else. An electrician, however,
would always find work; and any contractor
would rather hire someone with a degree in
electrical engineering than someone who had
less impressive credentials.

So when I was released from jail, I took a
Greyhound back home, and enrolled at my
local junior college. It took three years to get
my general education courses out of the way
before I could transfer to the University,
because I had alot of prerequisites to take.

During my years at junior college, my mother
moved to Oxnard, and I was left alone in the
town I had lived in since my first year of high
school. I chose to remain, because I'd had
enough moving around when I was growing
up, and I decided that I was never going to
move away again; atleast not to another part of
the state. That was also when I first met
professor Stiles.

I started doing work for him, because he
taught classes during the day at Matheson,
and worked on perfecting his cold fusion
experiment until two or three in the morning,
and he needed someone to run errands.
Sometimes he remained working in his
laboratory until the predawn hours, despite the
fact that he had classes to teach the following
day. I went to radio shack and other
electronics supply stores to purchase
materials he needed to conduct his
experiment, and I swept and mopped his lab.
He payed me pretty good money, so that I had
enough money to pay my rent and bills.

When I was done with junior college, I was
able to obtain a grant, and I enrolled at
Matheson University. It's hard to believe that
now, all these years later, professor Stiles
finally succeeded in his cold fusion
experiment, only to have his ideas stolen from
him by those masked gunmen. At that point I
made up my mind; I wanted revenge.

Revenge against the thieves that robbed
professor Stiles of a lifetime of work. Revenge
against the men who had afflicted me with a
curse that made me a potential victim to
normal-sized human-beings. Humans are by
nature social animals, and if a human-being
was cut off from others for too long, he could
lose his mind. The bandits who robbed the
lab that day took away my ability to interact
normally with other human-beings, and my
condition was terminal. There was no way to
reverse the shrinking process that subtracted
over ninety-nine point nine percent of the
neutrinos from my body, reducing me to six
millimeters tall. For that I wanted to track them
down, and make sure they were convicted for
their crime.

Professor Stiles was probably the person I
could trust the most in my unusual condition,
but I knew he would be working night and day
to duplicate his cold fusion experiment. He
just wouldn't have the time to help me track
down the bandits. Jessica was the only other
person I could trust, besides my family; I
couldn't trust them, because I knew my
overprotective mother would never allow me to
leave the house if I was under her care, so
that wasn't an option.

As I continued to observe the activity of the
ants that were not much smaller than me, I
remembered back to the time I'd first met
Jessica. It was my last year at junior college,
and I was at the top of my class in every math
class I took there. I ended up with a 3 point
zero GPA, however, because I wasn't as
fortunate in some of my other required
classes.

My grades were good enough to qualify for a
grant, and one grant that I had applied for
required me to tutor math for students K
through 12th grade, and one of my students
was Jessica. Ironically, Jessica was the
daughter of the District Attorney of Matheson
county. Fortunately, nobody knew of my
criminal record, because I had done time in
San Diego.

I wanted to make sure that she did good in
math, so that if anyone ever found out about
my criminal record, Jessica's improved
grades would vouch for my integrity. Fate dealt
me an unkind hand yet again, because
Jessica was, without a doubt, my most difficult
student. She was fourteen, yet she still had
not learned her multiplication tables. This
wasn't her fault, though. From K through the
second grade, Jessica and her family lived in
Southern California. In that school district,
multiplication wasn't taught until the third
grade, but Jessica's family moved to the
central coast of California during the Summer
between second and third grade. In the
Mathson county school district, multiplication
was taught in the second grade, and they
moved on to division in the third grade.

By not knowing her multiplication tables,
division was too far beyond her grasp, and her
grades plummeted. She became
discouraged, and her problems in math
haunted her until her mother finally decided to
hire a tutor, because as a District Attorney, she
just didn't have the time she needed to tutor
her daughter herself. That's when I came
along.

It wasn't easy to teach her, but eventually I
figured out games I'd created that helped her
memorize her multiplication tables, as well as
various pre-algebra formulas. By the time her
grades went from F's to C's, and from C's to
B's, she fell in love with me. I tried to
discourage her, but if I had dropped any of the
students I was tutoring, I was afraid I would be
denied the grant that would allow me to
transfer to Matheson University. I couldn't
qualify for a loan, because I didn't have
collateral. A grant was the only way I would be
able to attend the University.

She was really the first female in recent
memory who had claimed to be in love with
me; two other girls had been in love with me
during two seperate occasions in my
childhood, but my mother chose to relocate to
a different city, ending any possibility for
pursuing those relationships. That is why,
when I arrived in Matheson county during my
teen years, I vowed never to leave the area. I
planned on raising my children and
grandchildren here on the central coast of
California.

The last time I had seen Jessica had been
about one week before the lab accident. As
always, she proclaimed her never-ending love
for me, and reminded me that her eighteenth
birthday was in July, and that she expected a
ring from me. An engagement ring.

I knew what I had to do. It was ten miles to
Jessica's house, and I had to find her. She
was the only one I could trust to help me track
down the criminals that were responsible for
my diminished stature. I stood up, and said
goodbye to my ant friends, and started walking
South...

If I could walk one mile a day, I knew I could
reach the coast in about a week and a half. As
I mentioned before, one mile to me is
equivalent to between thirty and thirty-one
miles. So I set out, as I had done the day I had
first been miniaturized, before my unfortunate
detour. With revenge on my mind, I had a new
goal: to seek out Jessica, and enlist her help
to formulate my plan of retribution on those
responsible for transforming me into Deuce
O'Ryan, the six millimeter man!
 

CHAPTER SEVEN: DEUCE THE
SLEUTH

I continued on my journey for several hours. I
was getting very hungry, and eating blades of
grass just didn't cut it. I was hoping to find a
garden in someone's yard, but I had even
better luck than that.

As I came to the top of a hill, I looked down to
see a strawberry field, seeming to stretch out
in all directions. At six millimeters tall, to me, it
seemed much bigger than it really was. To a
normal-sized person, it was probably about
one acre. Not very big for a strawberry farm,
but much larger than an average garden.

I could actually smell the strawberries. I ran
down the incline at top speed, racing towards
the nearest plant. Once I got there, I had to
climb up one of the mounds of dirt that had
been formed in rows, where the strawberries
had been planted. To me, it was like climbing
up a small hill. To a normal-sized person, it
would've been small enough to step over in a
single stride.

A ripe strawberry was leaning against the
mound of dirt that the strawberry plant was
rooted in. I dug greedily into the juicy outer
layer of the succulent fruit, and savored
mouthful after delicious mouthful. I had
strawberry juice dripping down my chin onto
my clothes, but I didn't care, I just continued
eating until I was satisfied.

When I was done eating, I sat down to relax. I
had covered alot of ground since I'd left the
place where I saw the ants, and I needed a
break. As I sat there, it occurred to me that I
was better off staying here for a few days,
because I had a long journey ahead of me,
and I didn't know how scarce food was going
to be. I stood up to survey my surroundings.

There were strawberry plants as far as I
could see, but in the distance, I could see a
house. It was old, probably built in the 1940's
or 1950's. It wasn't in really bad shape, but
that old house had definitely seen better days.
I walked a little bit further down the length of
the elevated row I was standing on, to find a
place to set up camp.

After arriving at a point not quite half-way
between one end of the strawberry field and
the other, I decided to set up camp in a spot
where a large number of ripe strawberries
clung to the dirt, where they would be easy for
me to get to. I dug a cave into the side of the
dirt mound, and concealed the entrance with
bits of leaves from strawberry plants, and
various weeds growing in the gully between
the two raised lanes where the strawberry
plants grew.

I knew that I could only stay a couple of days
at best, because these strawberries looked
very ripe, and harvest time was probably
drawing near. But for those two days, I was
going to eat like a king! I fell asleep easily, that
night.

I woke up some time in the middle of the
night, because I heard a car engine. At my
diminished stature, I had very acute hearing,
and ordinary sounds seemed to be greatly
amplified. It was just like all of my other
senses, The smell of the strawberries, for
instance. I could smell them as though the
entire universe consisted of one smell:
strawberries. Or my sense of tase; I've failed
to mention the fact that I can taste the
difference in food, if even an insignificant
amount of spice was added. During my time
with Amber, it did no good for her to have me
taste food that she was trying to prepare,
because my taste buds were far more
sensitive than the palate of normal-sized
people.

I emerged from my shelter and stood up, to
see where the sounds of the car engine were
coming from. The car was definitely parked on
the dirt road that I had crossed on the other
side of the slight incline at the back end of the
strawberry farm. When the sounds stopped, a
group of shadowy figures emerged on the
horizon, and I could see them climbing over
the fence that I had simply walked under.

Each of them had bags with them, and they
started picking strawberries. At first I was
worried that they would find me, but they were
concentrating on an area on the other end of
the strawberry field, so I didn't have anything to
worry about. They continued picking, and this
went on for close to an hour. When their bags
were full, they left the same way they had
come, and disappeared over the fence. I
heard the car engine start up again, and they
were gone, so I went back to my hollowed out
shelter and went back to sleep.

The next morning, after I woke up, I had a
breakfast of strawberry chunks, and decided
to explore the property. I walked down the
length of the elevated row where my shelter
was located, and made my way towards the
house. It took longer than you might think.

Once I was in the front yard, it occurred to me
that the owner might be a pet lover, and I
worried about encountering a vicious dog or a
hungry cat. I didn't see any dog bowls or
plates of dry cat food, or any other evidence of
a pet, but I remained alert, just in case.

The front door of the house opened, and I
saw a very old woman step out. She slowly
made her way to the side of the house, and
gradually worked her way to the back. She
spent a good deal of time examining the
strawberry field, obviously aware of the events
of the previous night. After spending close to a
half an hour walking around the perimeter of
her farm, she returned to her house and went
back inside.

While exploring the front yard, at what I
assumed to be about just before noon, a
postal delivery truck pulled up in the driveway.
A postal worker got out, and walked towards
the front door with some letters and junk mail.
The old woman opened the front door, and the
mail man handed the mail to her.

The old woman addressed the postal
worker, "They're back at it again, Pete!
Those hooligans stole more of my
strawberries last night!"

The postal worker had a look of concern on
his face, and replied, "It's probably a bunch
of teenagers, Mrs. Chaney!"

The old woman replied, "But if they keep it
up, come harvest time, there won't even be
enough strawberries left to pay the workers
and break even! I use that money to buy
Christmas presents for the grandchildren!"

"Have you tried reporting it to the police?"
asked the postal worker.

"Oh, yes, that's the first thing I did when it
started becoming a problem, but they only
have just so many patrol cars on duty at that
hour, and whoever it is that's been doing this,
cleans me out and leaves before the police
even know what's going on!" Replied the
old woman.

The postal worker said, "It's too bad you
can't hire someone to watch your property one
of these nights, so you can catch those
bastards red-handed!"

"Not on Social Security! I'm barely getting by
as it is!" replied the old woman.

"Well, I have to get back to my rounds,
good luck on catching those thieves, Mrs.
Chaney!"

"You have yourself a nice day, too, Pete!"
said the old woman, and she went back
inside, and the postal worker left in his mail
truck.

What they didn't know was that Mrs. Chaney
did have someone to watch her property, and I
figured that I owed her atleast that much, after
enjoying her strawberries. I already had a plan
in mind!

After nightfall, I made my way to the back of
the property, and up the incline, and down the
other side to the dirt road on the other side. I
sat there and waited for the car to return. I
waited for several hours, and then one or two
hours more, but nobody arrived. If I could've
had some coffee to keep me awake, that
would've helped, but I didn't, so I started
getting really sleepy. Eventually, I finally fell
asleep.

I woke up to the sound of a car engine, just
like the night before, but this time, it was much
louder, because I was near the dirt road
where it parked. An alarmingly large portion of
the stars were blocked from my field of vision
by the immense vehicle that seemed to be as
large as a building. The two doors opened,
and a group of teenagers emerged from the
car, and slammed the doors shut. The sound
was so loud to me, that I thought I was going
to have permanent hearing loss.

When they had ascended the slight incline
and had hopped over the fence, I emerged
from my hiding place, and walked around to
the back of the car. There was just what I was
looking for, big as day. The license plate!

I didn't have anything to write with, so I had to
memorize it. The numbers and letters didn't
spell out anything in my mind right away, so if I
had less time, I wouldn't have been able to
remember the seven digit combination of
letters and numbers. Eventually, as I studied
the license plate, I began to work out a pattern
in my mind. Two of the digits, for instance,
were the same last two numbers of the year a
relative of mine was born. The remaining
number was a 7, which was easy to
remember, because I had always thought of it
as an unlucky number. The remaining letters
had no particular significance at first, but then I
worked out an acronym in my mind, so that
each letter stood for a word in a sentence that
was ridiculous enough that I knew I would
never forget it. Once I had the license plate
memorized, I high-tailed it back to the edge of
the dirt road, where the grass was tall enough
to camouflage me from the juvenile
delinquents until they left.

Close to an hour later, they returned to their
car, with plastic grocery bags stuffed full of
Mrs. Chaney's strawberries. They had no idea
that this would be the last time they would be
able to steal strawberries from this farm for a
long time!

After they drove away, I began to make my
way towards the front of Mrs. Chaney's house.
Up and over the incline, down the length of the
rows of strawberry plants, and on to the front
door. At six millimeters tall, I doubt if I could've
traversed that distance in an hour if I'd been
running as fast as I possibly could, so even
travelling at a moderate pace took the better
part of three hours, and by then it was almost
daybreak.

This worked to my advantage, however,
because I needed the light of the sun to see
what I was doing anyway. First, I dug trenches
many times wider than my body, and I dug
them many times longer than they were wide.
Eventually, I had the letters and numbers of
the license plate spelled out in the dirt in front
of Mrs. Chaney's porch. It's a good thing she
didn't take care of her yard, because the fact
that she had no grass growing in front of her
porch really helped. If I had been forced to
write the message in a planter on the side of
her porch, it might have gone unnoticed.

After the trenches were dug, I began
gathering pebbles to fill in the trenches. Of
course, to me, the pebbles were like huge
boulders, and progress was slow. The sun
had been up for over an hour, and I was barely
getting started. I had to scout and search far
and wide to gather the amount of pebbles I
needed. I had to cover an area about 20 yards
long and 20 yards wide to get enough of them,
and at six millimeters tall, that is quite a wide
area to cover!

I decided to take a break after the numbers
and letters of the license plate were spelled
out before I continued. I still wasn't done yet, I
still needed to come up with some kind of a
message, so if Mrs. Chaney read it, she would
know that these were the numbers and letters
of the license plate of the kids who had been
stealing her strawberries.

Before I had a chance, though, a paperboy
rode by on his bicycle and threw Mrs. chaney's
morning paper towards her porch and
missed; it landed right on top of the trenches
that I had dug and filled with pebbles! It was
much too large and heavy for me to even think
about moving it. I was just lucky it hadn't
landed on top of me, or I would've been
crushed beneath the tremendous weight, and
all of my problems would've been over.

Mrs. chaney must've been an early riser,
because I barely had time to get out of the way
before she opened the door to retrieve her
morning newspaper. When she picked up the
paper, she saw the numbers and letters I had
spelled out, but other than making an
inquisitive remark about it, she completely
ignored it. It wasn't until the postal worker
returned that something was done.

When he arrived shortly before noon, as he
apparently does every day, he saw the
numbers and letters of the license plate I had
spelled out in the dirt, and asked Mrs. Chaney
about it.

She replied, "I don't know who wrote that.
What do you think it means?"

The postal worker responded, "Mrs.
Chaney, I think someone is trying to help you
out, here! Maybe someone knows who's doing
this, and they're just trying to let you know
without letting their friends realize they're
being ratted out! I suggest you call the police
immediately!"

After the postal worker left, Mrs. Chaney did
as he had instructed her, and not long after
that, a patrol car arrived on the scene. Mrs.
Chaney invited them in, and awhile after that,
she took them on a tour of her farm, to show
them the areas where strawberries had been
pilferred.

The police left, and that seemed to be the
end of it, until some reporters arrived from the
local newspaper. They went inside, and came
out with the old lady, and they took some
pictures of her standing next to her strawberry
field. I figured that I had done my part in all of
this, and that it was time to move on, but I
decided to stick around for one more day, to
see the newspaper the next morning.
Besides, I loved those strawberries, and I
would've made any excuse to remain there
another day.

Sure enough, the next day, when the paper
boy threw the morning newspaper onto Mrs.
Chaney's front yard, there it was on the front
page. I could see a photograph of Mrs.
Chaney, and the title of the article had to do
with the arrest of a group of nineteen year old
delinquents, for stealing strawberries. They
probably didn't get very much jail time, but I
knew that whenever they do finally get
released, their probation officer will be a
thorn in their side for a very, very long time.

Knowing that I had made a difference in
someone's life gave me a feeling of
accomplishment. It had never occurred to me
before that a six millimeter man could make a
difference in someone's life, but I proved
myself wrong. So I set out before I lost too
much daylight, to continue my journey towards
the coast, to find Jessica. With a chunk of
strawberry strapped to my back, I made my
way South, As my quest continued!

I walked by night and hid during the day, to avoid being captured. I was making my way south, trying to avoid the center of town. Eventually I arrived at a creek at the north end of town, but it would do no good to try to float down the creek on a twig, because the creek cuts through the center of Matheson City, which would make me a sitting duck.

I made a shelter from twigs and leaves, and hid in some tall grass growing on the high bank of the creek. I had eaten sparingly from the chunk of strawberry I had brought with me, but it finally ran out. A noise woke me up in the afternoon, and I looked out from between the leaves of my shelter and saw a woman with a bicycle. A normal-sized woman, who to me, at six millimeters tall, was a towering colossus.

She was putting a patch repair kit back in the tool pouch beneath her bicycle seat. I noticed that when she zipped it back up, she had left it open enough so there was enough clearance for me to climb in and hitch a ride. That is, if I could manage to get there and climb in before she took off. She was standing there, taking a drink from her water bottle, so I made a run for it.

Her mountain bike was lying horizontally on the ground, so it was in the best position for me to climb up to the tool pouch. I ran beneath her well-muscled legs, but I knew I didn't have enough time to admire her statuesque beauty or her perfect tan if I wanted to make it to the tool pouch before she resumed her journey. I grabbed onto the zipper of the pouch just before she put her water bottle back and got on her bike. As I climbed up and into the tool pouch, we were already moving.

I fell to the bottom of the polyester tool pouch and banged my knee on a wrench, but the pain didn't even have time to register in my mind before I noticed something else: a protein bar. The last time I had eaten was when the last of the strawberry I had lugged with me on my hike was finished off some time yesterday, so I was ready to eat something real. The protein bar was a food supplement designed for athletes. I recognized the brand name from my days at the gym in my younger years. It had complex carbohydrates and protein, as well as complex-chain amino acids, which were just what I needed after eating nothing but strawberries for over a week. Not that strawberries were bad for you, but if someone tried to subsist on strawberries and never ate anything else, theoretically, they could starve to death; so I guess it's good that I had the will-power to leave that strawberry field while I had the chance. It had been very tempting to remain there.

Getting into the wrapper of the candy bar was difficult, until I figured out a way to use the wrench I had hurt my knee on as leverage to cut a corner of the wrapper. Some wrappers are difficult to open even at normal size, but at six millimeters tall, it would've been impossible without that wrench.

After eating the first nutritious meal I'd had in quite awhile, I started getting sleepy, so I curled up and fell asleep. I had gotten accustomed to sleeping during the day while I was out hiking, so to me, this was my normal sleeping period. I slept like a log, and I awoke to a jarring motion that sent me tumbling against the side of the tool pouch. Everything was tilted sideways, so I climbed to the opening of the pouch to take a look around.

I was amazed. During the time I'd been asleep, the bicyclist had pedalled over 7 miles, from the city of Matheson all the way to a small town on the coast adjacent to the tourist town where Jessica lived. I recognized some of the hillside and terrain. The bike was leaning on its side against a log, so I climbed out and leaped down onto the log. The woman was tying her shoelaces, so I climbed down on the other side of the log so I'd be out of her view when she stood up again.

After she got on her bike and pedalled up the hill into the distance, I walked around the log to the edge of the road, still hidden in the grass at the side of the road that leads towards Jessica's house, which was about a mile and a half away. As I watched the giantess pedal away on her bike, I wondered what the deal was with her. Over the years, I'd seen people like her many times before. These people who wear spandex painted-on shorts and ride bikes across the highways of America. Do these people have jobs? Does their whole life revolve around riding bicycles across the country? And if so, where exactly do they go? Do they just ride for the hell of it? How do they support their bicycling habit?

As I pondered my George Carlin style musings, I thought of the campground on the other side of the road. It was a place called Avalon hot springs. My mother and I had stayed a year before we moved to this area, when I was still a teenager. I was in such a hurry to jump down from the woman's bike before she took off that I hadn't grabbed any pieces of that protein bar she had in her tool pouch. It would take me at the very least an entire day, maybe a day and a half to reach Jessica's house, so I figured that it would be best to try to grab some food from some unsuspecting campers on the other side of the road before I continued on to the last leg of my journey.

I walked to the corner where Highway One and Avalon Creek road intersected. I probably waited about a half an hour before I decided that it was safe to cross. I ran as fast as I could, and it still took me nearly thirty seconds to get to the other side. I was lucky, too; just as I reached the other side, a long stream of traffic went by, and a few bicyclists.

The curb on my side of the road towered over my head, but it was so weather-beaten that the individual pebbles making up the side of the asphalt curb were exposed enough that I could use them to climb up on, like rungs on a ladder. I made my way up, and stood on the top of the curb. I still had a little higher to climb to reach the summit of this micro-mountain I was climbing. I made my way to the top, and stood at the summit. Strands of gold colored grass swayed in the breeze, blowing back and forth so high above me that they seemed like trees.

As I looked down to survey the campsite, I could see that the campground was filled to capacity. It was the middle of Summer, so that wasn't surprising. There were tents galore, and alot of motorhomes. No less than half a dozen people were barbecuing, and there was a volleyball game going on. The only bad news was that I saw a couple of dogs down there, so I knew raiding the camp was out of the question. Before I left, though, I stayed and watched the volleyball game. It was kind of nice to be able to watch a sporting event, even if they were just amateurs. When I was staying with Amber, I rarely had the opportunity to watch any kind of sports on TV, because she always watched those kids' shows and those stupid soap operas. Any time I asked her if I could watch a ballgame, she was usually on some kind of a power trip, and denied my request, for no other reason than because she enjoyed telling me 'no' whenever I asked her for a special privilege.

I had to cross the street again, and it took even longer to get across this time than it did before. I wasn't worried, though. There was no need to be in a hurry, because it had taken me over a month to get this far, and I was almost to Jessica's house, so minor setbacks like this weren't bothering me. After I had crossed Avalon Creek road, I made my way up the hill and onwards down the road that intersected it, southwest towards Jessica's house. I had made it a habit of sleeping during the day and walking at night to avoid capture, but I wouldn't need to hide during the day for most of the rest of my journey, because there weren't any houses for another three quarters of a mile. All I needed to do was to watch out for people in cars and an occasional bicyclist who might see me, and I'd be alright.

By nightfall, I was not quite halfway there. The entire town was built parallel to the 101 freeway, and that worked to my advantage. I was in the middle of town, but I didn't have to worry about being seen, because I had crossed the road after it had gotten dark, and I was walking on the other side of a chain link fence that was next to the freeway, on the opposite side of the street as the main street of the town I had to pass through. I continued on through the night, because I didn't think it would've made sense to stop and camp out this close to my destination.

By early dawn the next day, I had arrived in the beach town where Jessica lived. It was still early morning, so there wasn't much traffic on the street yet. That helped me cross several streets and the main road that cuts through the center of town. By the time the early morning rush was on and people were driving to work, I had made it to the front of the gated community where Jessica's upper-middle class well-to-do home was located. Jessica's mother was the District Attorney of Matheson county, so it shouldn't have been any surprise that they were this affluent, but it never ceased to amaze me that I knew people that were so upper-class.

And there it was. The familiar driveway with two cars parked there. A pink Volkswagen that had been Jessica's 16th birthday present, and the Mercedes owned by Jessica's mother. The two-story home was just as I remembered it. I walked up to the front door, wondering how I was going to get inside.

There was only one concrete step that I had to ascend to reach the front door, but to me it might as well have been a mile high. Fortunately, there was an agave plant in the planter next to Jessica's front door, and it was high enough to bring me up above the elevation of the 8 inch high concrete step. I began my climb, and after about 15 minutes, I was a couple of feet in the air. AS I looked down, I realized that the lowest leaf was too high above the step for me to jump down safely, but if I kept climbing, I could reach the living room window.

Just as I reached the living-room window, I saw a sight that made my skin crawl. It was a cat. It was a black cat that roamed freely through the neighborhood, but I knew if it spotted me, I was through. Felines, atleast in my opinion, are nature's most thorough and deadly predators.

I knew I had two choices: either stay and wait for it to leave, or pound on the window and hope someone inside was awake, and hope yet again that if they were awake, that they would open the window in time before the cat pounced on me. I chose to stay and wait.
 

I stood on the window ledge and tried to remain absolutely still. The cat hadn't seen me, and I wasn't sure if it could smell my scent or not. I knew dogs had an acute sense of smell, but I wasn't sure about cats. It just wandered around the front yard, smelling the grass. The cat seemed interested in a gopher hole in the center of the yard, and was circling the hole as it made its way around. The cat was obviously aware that a gopher made its home there.

The silence was shattered by the arrival of the paper boy, on his bicycle. When he threw the morning newspaper, it smacked the concrete not far from the cat, and scared it away. After the cat disappeared around the side of the house, and the paper boy was far enough down the street, I began pounding my fists on the window as hard as I could. One hundred men my size couldn't have knocked a hole in that window, because it was atleast twice as thick as I was tall. It was obvious that the sounds of my pounding weren't very loud to normal sized ears, but I had to try to make contact with Jessica or her mother before the cat returned.

I detected movement through the thick glass. A familiar figure went about her daily routine as she prepared to leave for work. It was Jessica's mother, known to the law-abiding citizens of Matheson county and feared by its criminals as District Attorney Susan Calypso.

As she tried to hold both her briefcase and her morning cup of coffee, a figure stirred on the couch. Covered in a blanket, Jessica had apparently fallen asleep on the living room couch watching television, which was a consistent habit for her on weekends and holidays. Mrs. Calypso had more than enough money to buy a TV and VCR for Jessica to keep in her bedroom, but Susan Calypso wouldn't allow it. Susan Calypso firmly believed that the bedroom was a place for studying.

When Mrs. Calypso opened the front door, it became apparent why my futile efforts at making contact by pounding on the window had zero effect. My tiny ear-drums were assaulted by the heavy-metal sounds of none other than Judas Priest, transmitted through the now open front door. The volume probably wasn't loud to the ears of a normal-sized person, but my six millimeter stature had endowed me with very acute hearing; the sound penetrated my ears at the deep end of the bass spectrum, minus about half of the higher-pitched sounds, but with the decibels amplified to a level equal to that of a jet engine starting up less than a foot from my ears. It had been years since I had seen a Judas Priest video on TV, and I found myself wondering if they were having one of those top-one-hundred-videos-of-all-time countdowns on one of the music video channels.

The front door opened. Jesssica's mother walked over to the driveway, and started up her Mercedes. The front door was still open, so I took a running start and leaped from the window sill to the leaf of the agave plant just below me. I made my way down the plant, sliding down and letting gravity do most of the work. Mrs. Calypso let her car idle as she returned to the house, and shut off the television. She probably wasn't as concerned about the wasted electricity used by a television that wasn't being watched so much as she was by the fact that that the lyrics of the song "Breaking the law" were being amplified to the ears of neighbors who knew Susan as the District Attorney of Matheson county.

I jumped from the bottom leaf to the door jamb, and ran in just as Mrs. Calypso turned from the TV and started walking back to the door. I ran behind a house plant just as she closed the door behind her and left. She hadn't seen me. I had made it. After all of this time, I'd finally reached Jessica's house. Now, my only problem was finding a way to get her attention without getting accidentally stepped on.

Jessica was still asleep up on the couch, far above me. I knew it was best to avoid the areas of the carpet that were walked on the most, by sticking close to furniture and the edges of the walls, because there was no way of knowing if Jessica would suddenly wake up and lumber across the center of the carpet without seeing me, and I didn't want to be in her path if that happened. The world can be a dangerous place when you're six millimeters tall.

I saw the basket that contained Susan's yarn and sewing supplies near the living room closet. It had always been there, but I had never payed attention to it when I was normal-sized, but now I saw that it was the key to making contact with Jessica.

I began to climb the wicker basket. It was about eighteen inches high, which to me seemed like the size of a building. By the time I was halfway up, the height would've made me dizzy had I been at the same proportionate height at normal size, but I knew my decreased mass protected me from falling from altitudes that would kill a normal size person if they fell from an equivalent altitude.

There was a spindle of purple yarn, and I realized it would contrast with the off-white carpet. All I had to do was unwind enough yarn and spell out Jessica's name in cursive, and she would see it. Climbing the yarn was easier than climbing up the wicker basket, and soon I found the end of the strand of yarn.

I pulled it and unwound the strand of yarn, working my way around and around the top of the spindle of yarn. I lowered what I unwound to the carpet below, and after a few minutes I had what I needed, so I climbed back down.

I stretched out the length of yarn on the carpet, and began manipulating it until I spelled out the name "Jessica" in large enough cursive letters so large that a normal sized person would be able to easily see it. I sat down by the yarn, and waited for Jessica to wake up. It had taken me a half hour to climb the wicker basket and retrieve the yarn, so another hour or two wouldn't matter.

She finally woke up about an hour later, and walked over to the bathroom. She was still sleepy, so she didn't notice the yarn. When she came out of the bathroom, she walked straight towards the kitchen, then stopped when she spotted her name spelled out in yarn.

"Deuce?" She asked.

"Deuce!" She shouted, when she realized that it was really me.

She hopped down on her knees and kneeled down to get a better look at me, and I thought she was going to collide with me and smash me into oblivion, but she stopped just in front of me. She was titanic, noticably larger than Amber had been. Her blonde hair was longer than the last time I had seen her, but she was as cute as ever. Her first reaction was to place the palm of her hand in front of me. I jumped up into her hand.

Jessica lifted me up, and I felt the same momentary fear I had felt when I had first been captured by Amber, but my fears subsided as I realized that I was safe with Jessica, because I knew she was still in love with me. I could tell by the look in her eyes. She started to cry.

"Deuce," she said, "what happened to you? Everyone thinks you're dead!"

I replied, but I had the same problem I had when I first tried to communicate with Amber. My voice was too faint; even though I could make myself understood by screaming out to her at the top of my lungs, after a few minutes my voice would be to hoarse to talk above a whisper. The only solution was to put together a microphone with an amplifier and a speaker.

"I need to build an amplifier!" I yelled. "Take me to professor Stiles, he'll have the equipment we need!"

After repeating this a couple of times, Jessica understood.

"I'll take you to the professor right after we eat breakfast, Deuce! He's just as worried about you as everyone else! Are you hungry?"

That was an understatement. I was famished. Jessica set me down on the dining room table, and cooked some oatmeal in the microwave. She scooped some up in a thimble from her mother's sewing kit, and placed it in front of me. She filled a bottle cap with water, and set in next to the oatmeal. I ate until I was stuffed, but the thimble was still half full. Just one of the economical things about being six millimeters tall.

As I ate, it ocurred to me that I was finally in the company of someone I completely trusted. I had at long last reached my goal, and I felt relieved. The world is a terrifying place when you're six millimeters tall, with cats, giant insects, and girls like Amber who thought of me as a convenient toy that could be kept in a jar, completely oblivious to the fact that I was a human being with the same rights and freedoms as her.

After breakfast, Jessica got ready, and carried me to her car and dropped me in the cup holder next to the driver's seat. She started up her Volkswagen, and drove to the university. She knew where the professor's lab was located, and because it was late August, classes hadn't started yet, so he was busy with his experiments, as usual.

Jessica kept me clenched in her fist, gently, to surprise the professor, as she walked up the path behind the physics building where his lab was located.

"Hi, professor Stiles!"

After a brief pause, I heard the unmistakable voice of the professor. "Jessica! How have you been?"

"You're never going to believe this, professor!" Said Jessica, dropping me on the table. "Look who showed up at my house today!"

I was on one of the tables in the profesor's familiar laboratory. He walked up, amazed.

"Unbelievable," said the professor, "But it verifies my theory!"

Before professor Stiles could go on, Jessica interupted, "Deuce needs you to build him some kind of amplifier thingy, so I can hear him better." Jessica couldn't care less about the professor's theories, and would tell him to his face, if he ever asked.

The professor realized that communication with me was a priority, so after only a few moments of hesitation, he dug through his cabinets and storage lockers, seeking the necessary components to construct a device that would permit my miniscule voice to be heard by normal-sized people for the first time. I had the knowledge to build one, but Amber's mother had forbidden me, because she worried that I might construct something that would allow me to escape from her daughter.

In less than 15 minutes, the microphone, amplifier and speaker were hooked up to a 9-volt battery, and it was ready to be tested out. Professor stiles placed the microphone nearby. I yelled into it, and nothing happened. The professor made a minor adjustment, and when I yelled into the microphone, my voice was as loud as a normal-sized person's voice!

"Professor," said Jessica, "you did it!"

"Amazing..." said the professor, "young man, I would appreciate it if you would explain where you've been for the past month and a half! I'm sure it must be extraordinary!"

"Yeah Deuce," said Jessica, "I think you atleast owe me an explanation...I've been worried sick about you!"

And so I began to tell them of my adventures. How I started to shrink right after the professor left to go call the police the night the lab was robbed, how I ended up in Santa Margarita and got captured by Amber, the car accident that enabled me to escape...about halfway through my story the professor went and brewed a cup of coffee, and I finished my story after he dropped a few drops in the thimble Jessica had brought with her. I continued my story, telling about the strawberry thieves I helped capture, and my trip along the El Camino Real to Jessica's house in the tool pouch under a bicyclist's seat. When my story was finished, every detail of it, both the professor and Jessica were astonished.

"It's amazing that you survived, Deuce!" Said the professor, "you should've stayed with that girl, you probably would've been safer! But everything turned out alright in the end!"

"And Deuce," said Jessica, "I remember when those strawberry thieves got busted! The newspaper tried to make it look like something supernatural happened...but it was you all along!"

"Professor," I asked, "Do you think you'll be able to duplicate the cold fusion experiment that those thieves destroyed?"

The professor began to chuckle to himself and said, "They got what they deserved, Deuce...the cold fusion experiment turned out to be a dud!"

"What do you mean, professor?" I asked.

The professor replied, "There was no nuclear fusion taking place at any time during the reaction, however, I did stumble on the theory for miniaturization, as your reduced stature illustrates!"

The professor went on to explain, "The power gauge displayed an increase in kilowatts, but it was just the atoms in the air in the vicinity of the reactor being stripped of electrons as the tritium-deuterium solution gave off neutrino particles. What I thought was an increase in wattage was actually just a side effect of the miniaturization reaction that shrunk you, Deuce!"

"So what does that mean?" Jessica asked professor Stiles. "Can you make Deuce big again?"

"It means," replied the professor, "that I failed to solve the mystery of cold fusion, but in the process, I inadvertantly discovered how to miniaturize atoms! However, I regret to inform the two of you that Deuce can never be restored to his normal stature, atleast not with existing technology. Deuce my friend, I'm afraid you'll have to get accustomed to being the world's first six millimeter man!"

"Professor," I said, "I just want one thing. Promise me that you'll testify in court when we bring those bozos who robbed the lab up on charges! I want revenge, against the bandits, and the jerk who hired them!"

"Without hesitation, Deuce my friend! It's the least I could do for you after all you've been through!"

After the professor promised to testify, Jessica took the amplifier equipment and put me back in my jar, and took me home. She was determined to help me track down whoever was responsible for robbing the lab. On her home computer, Jessica tried to figure out who might be the most likely suspect responsible for hiring the crooks who robbed professor Stiles' lab. I had spent the past month pondering this, so I immediately asked her to look up the shareholders of stock in the local electrical companies. After checking PG&E, SMUD, and Southern California Edison, one of the local companies had the name of a stockholder listed, and it was a name I recognized.

"That's him!" I yelled up to Jessica, pointing at the computer screen, and she recognized the name, too.

"He lives around here," said Jessica, "that's Doctor Nebulous, the former Cal Poly professor who got kicked out of Matheson university for gambling! Do you think he's involved, Deuce?"

"One of his associates was at the lab a few weeks before it was robbed," I replied, "I think it's a safe bet that he's a suspect!"

And so now it was coming full circle. With Jessica's mom as district attorney for Matheson county, it wouldn't be too difficult for her to secure a subpeona for doctor Nebulous to have his day in court. After all my trials and tribulations, it looked like I might finally have my chance for revenge against the man responsible for turning me into Deuce O'Ryan, the world's first six millimeter man!
 

To be Continued