"Fire?" Juan felt a flash of alarm. He sniffed carefully at the damp air. "... Maybe." Or it might just be something flowering in the night. Smells were a hard thing to search on and learn about.
"I smell it too, William," Miri said. "But I think things are still too wet for it to be a danger."
"Besides," said Juan, "if there was fire anywhere close, we'd see the hot air in our goggles." Maybe someone had a fire down on the beach.
William shrugged, and sniffed at the air again. Trust the Goofus to have one superior sense—and that one useless. After a moment, he sat down beside them, but as far as Juan could tell, he still wasn't paying attention to the pictures Juan was sending him. William reached into his bag and pulled out the FedEx mailer; the guy was still fascinated by the thing. He flexed the carton gently, then rested the box on his knees. Despite all Miri's warnings, it looked like the Goofus wanted to knock it back into shape. He'd carefully poise one hand above the middle of the carton, as if preparing a precise poke ... and then his hand would start shaking and he would have to start all over again.
Juan looked away from him. Geez the ground was hard. And cold. He wriggled back against the rock wall and cycled through the pictures he was getting from the breadcrumbs. They were pretty uninspiring.... But sitting here quietly, not talking ... there were sounds. Things that might have been insects. And behind it all, a faint, regular throbbing. Automobile traffic? Maybe. Then he realized that it was the sound of ocean surf, muffled by fog and the zigzag walls of the canyon. It was really kind of peaceful.
There was a popping sound very nearby. Juan looked up and saw that William had done it again, smashed the mailer. Only now, it didn't look so bent—and a little green light had replaced the warning tag.
"You fixed it, William!" said Miri.
William grinned. "Hah! Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better." He was silent for a second and his shoulders slumped a little. "Well, different anyway."
Juan looked at the gap in the canyon walls above them. There should be enough room. "Just set it on the ground and it will fly away to Jamul," he said.
"No," said William. He put the carton back in his bag.
O-kay, so the box is cool. Have a ball, William.
They sat listening to the surf, cycling through the video from the breadcrumbs. There were occasional changes in the pictures, quick blurs that might have been moths. Once, they saw something bigger, a glowing snout and a blurry leg.
"I bet that was a fox," said Miri. "But the picture was from above us. Route us more pictures from the bottom of the canyon."
"Right." There was even less action down there. Maybe her movie theories were vapor, after all. He didn't pay as much attention to the movies as most people did—and just now, he couldn't do any background research. Dumb. On the way to the park, he had cached all sorts of stuff, but almost nothing about movie rumors.
"Hey, a snake," said Miri.
The latest picture was from a breadcrumb that had landed in a bush just a few inches above the true bottom of the canyon. It was a very good viewpoint, but he didn't see any snake. There was a pine cone and, beside it, a curved pattern in the dark sand. "Oh. A dead snake." Viewed in thermal IR, the body was a barely visible as a change in texture. "Or maybe it's just a shed skin."
"There are tracks all around it," said Miri. "I think they're mouse tracks."
Juan ran the image through some filters, and pulled up a half dozen good foot prints. He had cached pictures from nature studies. He stared at them all, transforming and correlating. "They're mouse tracks, but they aren't pocket mice or white foot. The prints are too big, and the angle of the digits is wrong."
"How can you tell?" suspicion was in her voice.
Juan was not about to repeat his recent blunder: "I downloaded nature facts earlier," he said truthfully, "and some fully cool analysis programs," which was a lie.
"Okay. So what kind of mice—"
A new picture arrived from the breadcrumb in question.
"Whoa!" "Wow!"
"What is it?" said William. "I see the snake carcass now." Apparently he was a couple of pictures behind them.
"See, William? A mouse, right below our viewpoint—"
"—staring straight up at us!"
Glowing beady eyes looked into the imager.
"I bet mice can't see in the dark!" said Juan.
"Well, Foxwarner has never been strong on realism."
Juan gave top routing priority to pics from the same breadcrumb. C'mon, c'mon! Meantime, he stared at the picture they had, analyzing. In thermal IR, the mouse's pelt was dim red, shading in the shorter fur to orange. Who knew what it looked like in natural light? Ah, but the shape of the head looked—
A new picture came in. Now there were three mice looking up at them. "Maybe they're not seeing the dungball. Maybe they're smelling the stink!"
"Shhh!" William whispered.
Miri leaned forward, listening. Juan pushed up his hearing and listened, too, his fists tightening. Maybe it was just his imagination: were there little scrabbling noises from below? The gleam of the breadcrumb beacon was almost thirty feet below where they were sitting.
The breadcrumb gleam moved.
Juan heard Miri's quick, indrawn breath. "I think they're shaking the bush it's on," she said softly.
And the next picture they saw seemed to be from right on the ground. There was a blur of legs, and a very good head shot.
Juan sharpened the image, and did some more comparisons. "You know what color those mice are?"
"Of course not."
"White—maybe? I mean, lab mice would be neat."
In fact, Juan had only just saved himself. He'd been about to say: "White, of course. Their head shape matches Generic 513 lab mice." The conclusion was based on applying conventional software to his cached nature information—but no normal person could have set up the comparisons as fast as he had just done.
Fortunately, Miri had some distractions: The breadcrumb's locator gleam was moving horizontally in little jerks. A new picture came up, but it was all blurred.
"They're rolling it along. Playing with it."
"Or taking it somewhere."
Both kids bounced to their feet, and then William stood up too. Miri forced her voice down to a whisper. "Yeah, lab mice would be neat. Escaped super-mice.... This could be a re-remake of Secret of NIMH!"
"Those were rats in NIMH."
"A detail." She was already moving down the trail. "The timing would be perfect. The copyright on the second remake just lapsed. And did you see how real those things looked? Up till a few months ago, you couldn't make animatronics that good."
"Maybe they are real?" said William.
"You mean like trained mice? Maybe. At least for parts of the show."
The latest picture showed cold darkness. The imaging element must be pointing into the dirt.
They climbed down and down, trying their best not to make noise. Maybe it didn't matter; the surf sound was much louder here. In any case, the fake mice were still rolling along their stolen breadcrumb.
But while the three humans were moving mainly downward, the breadcrumb had moved horizontally almost fifteen feet. The pictures were coming less and less frequently. "Caray. It's getting out of range." Juan took three more breadcrumbs from his bag and threw them one at a time, as hard as he could. A few seconds passed, and the new crumbs registered with the net. One had landed on a ledge forward and above them. Another had fallen between the humans and the mice. The third—hah—its locator gleamed from beyond the mice. Now there were lots of good possibilities. Juan grabbed a picture off the farthest crumb. The view was looking back along the path, in the direction the mice would be coming from. Without any sense of scale, it looked like a picture from some fantasy Yosemite Valley.