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This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the authors’ imaginations and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011 Copyright © 2011 by The John Michael Crichton Trust. Cover design by Richard Augustus Front Cover Image © Shutterstock Book Design by Lucy Albanese Illustrated Maps © 2011 by Rodica Prato Michael Crichton and Richard Preston assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks Source ISBN: 9780007350032 Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007384358 Version: 2017-05-10 MINUTE CREATURES swarm around us…objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away. A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a tree. —E. O. WILSON Contents
