Chapter 3: The Smallest Target

Doraemon's plan was this.

"Someone needs to get inside the volcano base," he said, "find the main excavation machine, and locate the structural weakness in the equipment. The machines are drilling toward the Stone. If we know where the weak point is — the junction that holds the drill assembly to the rock — we can collapse the whole apparatus from outside. Buy time. Or bury it."

"Bury it?" Gian said.

"The meteor arrives in three days. If the equipment is collapsed and buried, and the Stone is still deep enough in the rock—" Doraemon paused. "Well. That's the plan."

"But someone needs to get inside first," Shizuka said.

"Yes."

The cave opening was on the eastern face of the volcano, low to the ground, screened by a ridge of black rock. The Chitauri used it to move equipment deeper into the mountain. They moved in groups, regularly, like trains. Between groups, the entrance was clear — but only briefly. Thirty seconds. Perhaps less.

And the interior, according to the Farscope, was thick with guards.

"I'll go," Gian said immediately. He said it the way he said most things — with the solid confidence of someone whose primary approach to problems was to be bigger than them.

"You're too big," Doraemon said.

Gian looked down at himself. He accepted this.

"I'll go," Suneo said, less immediately. More in the tone of someone who expects to be turned down.

"You're too frightened," Doraemon said.

"I'm not—"

"You are. It's all right. So is Nobita. You both are. But Suneo, last time there was a loud noise, you climbed Gian."

"That was one time."

"It was four times. Today."

Suneo did not argue further.

"I'll go," Shizuka said. Her voice was very calm. She had that kind of composure — the real sort, not performed. She said it and she meant it and everyone knew she would do it and do it well.

"Shizuka—" Nobita started.

"I'm not afraid," she said. "Not particularly. I can be quiet. I'm small enough. I could—"

"I'll go," said Nobita.

Everyone looked at him.

He looked at the cave mouth. He looked at the guards. He looked at the wall of heat that rose from the volcano's face and shimmered the air like a rumor.

His hands were shaking. They had been shaking, more or less continuously, since the tyrannosaur. He was aware of this. He was also aware that they would keep shaking, almost certainly, for the entire duration of whatever he was about to do. Hands that shook were not a problem he could solve. They were just a condition, like weather.

"I'll go," he said again, to confirm it.

Doraemon looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached into his four-dimensional pocket and produced the Small Light.

The Small Light was a flashlight-shaped device with a dial on the side: a beam of light that emerged from the lens and, when it touched something, made it smaller. The label on the side read: SMALL LIGHT — ADJUSTABLE REDUCTION — MINIMUM SIZE: 5mm — MAXIMUM USE: 6 HOURS — REVERSE: LARGE LIGHT REQUIRED.

"Six hours," Doraemon said. "That's how long you'll be small. I need the Large Light to reverse it. I'll keep the Large Light here. You come back before six hours."

"What happens if I don't come back in six hours?"

"Nothing immediately. The smallness just... persists."

"For how long?"

Doraemon made a face. "Let's say you come back in six hours."

"Right."

"I'll give you the Anywhere Door hinge — the output marker. Plant it in the deepest part of the excavation, the closest point to the Stone. That's for later. The information about the weak point is what we need first." He reached back into the pocket and produced a silver disc the diameter of a coin. "Plant this after you find the weakness. Mark the location."

"And the others?"

"We wait," Shizuka said.

"We watch the entrance and cause a distraction if they get too close to your position," Gian said. He looked more comfortable with this than with not doing anything. Causing distractions was more in his range.

"Don't cause a distraction unless you have to," Doraemon said.

"Right," Gian said, in a tone that suggested he was already thinking about exactly when it would be necessary.

Doraemon pointed the Small Light at Nobita and pressed the button.

---

The world went up.

That was the sensation — not of shrinking, but of everything else becoming incomprehensibly large. The fern fronds above became the broad leaves of a forest canopy. The ground was a landscape of pebbles and craters, each irregularity enormous. A beetle walked past and it was the size of a bus.

Nobita stood five millimeters tall in the volcanic soil of Cretaceous Japan and breathed very carefully.

His voice, at this scale, produced no sound that he could hear. He had been given a small transceiver — also shrunk — the size of a dust speck at normal scale, attached to his collar, which would carry his voice back to Doraemon's receiver.

"I'm down," he said, though down was relative.

"I can barely hear you," Doraemon's voice said, tinny and enormous and reassuring the way distant things sometimes are.

"I'm going."

The approach to the cave mouth, which had looked thirty meters away from the ridge, was now a journey of approximately several kilometers at his current scale. He rode a large beetle for part of it. This was a sentence he would not have expected to apply to himself, ever, but the beetle was moving in roughly the right direction and was faster than walking and did not seem to notice him. He held on with both hands. The beetle had a smell like earth and oil and age.

They parted ways at the base of the rock ridge. The beetle continued to wherever beetles went. Nobita continued toward the cave.

The Chitauri guards at the entrance were, at his scale, approximately the size of a five-story building. Their boots alone were the size of small apartments. When they walked, the ground shook in ways that were geological. Between patrols, Nobita ran through the gap and into the cave on legs that were moving faster than he had intended them to, because his legs were experienced with running and they were doing it again, and he was choosing not to call this bad because right now running was the right direction.

Inside the cave, the scale of the operation was different.

In the narrower spaces, the machinery was closer together and the guards moved in single file. He could move through gaps between machines that were, at his scale, wide corridors. The drilling apparatus was enormous — pillars of metal and light, descending in concentric rings toward the center of the mountain. The heat was immense. Something glowed, deep below — not lava exactly. Something more deliberate. The Power Stone, still embedded, still waiting.

He moved through the tunnels and the heat and the noise that at his scale was the low continuous roar of running water.

He found the weak point on the third level.

It was a junction — a joining of three major structural beams that held the central drilling assembly to the volcanic rock. The join was not welded. It was mechanical, because this technology was designed to be assembled and disassembled quickly. A Chitauri engineer, moving past with a light, checked it with a scanner and moved on without concern. The scanner had said it was fine.

Nobita looked at it. He was no engineer. He was a boy who had recently scored twelve on a test. But he could see that the bolts here were under more tension than the others. He could see the slight warping in the beam above. He could see that, if something stressed this particular junction from a particular direction, the whole assembly would come down.

He took out the silver disc. The output marker.

He planted it.

He turned around to go back.

The Chitauri was looking directly at him.

This particular Chitauri had set his scanner down at eye level to check a fitting, and the scanner was roughly the size of a large boulder from Nobita's perspective, and it had put the guard's head at ground level, and the guard's eyes were, at current scale, roughly the size of windows. And they were open. And they were pointed at the exact square centimeter of volcanic floor where Nobita was standing.

The guard blinked.

Nobita ran.

The sound of the alarm was, at his scale, something between a train and a thunderclap. Lights swept the tunnel floor. He ran between the wheel-struts of a machine the size of a stadium. He ran through a crack in the rock wall that was, at normal scale, a hairline fissure. He emerged on the far side in a secondary tunnel and kept running, not because he had planned this route, not because he had any idea where it led, but because running was the thing his body knew how to do and it was doing it very well.

He ran for a long time.

When he stopped, he was at the far end of a section they had not mapped. The tunnel curved away from the main dig. He was alone. The alarm sound was muffled by rock.

He breathed. He counted the breaths, a technique Shizuka had once mentioned — in, two three, out, two three. It helped slightly.

He had planted the marker.

He had found the weak point.

He knew where it was and what it would take and the information was in his head and he just needed to get out.

He moved back toward the entrance, slower now, more carefully. The guards were focused on the area where he'd been spotted. No one was looking at the floor of this tunnel. No one expected anything of importance to be five millimeters tall.

Being small isn't the same as being weak, he thought. He didn't know where the thought came from. It arrived fully formed, the way some thoughts do.

Being small meant no one looked at you.

Being small meant you fit through the gaps.

Being small meant you could go where large things couldn't go, and find things large things couldn't find.

He had run, yes. He had run again. But he had run through the gap, and through the crack, and here he was, alive, on the other side, with the information they needed.

He found the cave mouth and slipped through between boot-falls.

Outside, the jungle was dark. Hours had passed.

"Doraemon," he said into the transceiver.

"Nobita," Doraemon's voice, enormous with relief. "You're out."

"I'm out."

"Did you find it?"

"Yes. I know the weak point. I planted the marker."

A silence.

"Good," Doraemon said. Then, more quietly: "Good."

The Large Light was warm when it hit him. The world went down, or he went up — same thing, really — and suddenly he was boy-sized again, sitting on the volcanic slope in the dark, and Shizuka was handing him water and Gian was gripping his shoulder in a way that would have been painful at any other time and Suneo was saying something that was almost certainly relief disguised as complaint.

"You were gone five hours," Doraemon said.

"Was I?"

"The marker is planted. You're sure about the weakness?"

"Yes. Third level. Central junction. The seam on the left beam."

Doraemon nodded. He looked at the volcano for a long moment.

"Now we need the second part," he said.

"The Anywhere Door," Nobita said.

"Yes."

"The meteor redirection."

"Yes." Doraemon paused. "It requires someone to go in again. With the Door itself this time. All the way to the bottom."

Nobita looked at his hands. They had stopped shaking while he was small. They were shaking again now, which he supposed was the normal scale returning all its normal feelings.

"Tomorrow?" Suneo said.

"Tomorrow," Doraemon agreed. "We sleep. We plan. And tomorrow—"

He looked at Nobita.

"Tomorrow," Nobita said, "I go back in."