Shrink Wrapped

It was getting late, almost 9 p.m. and Barkini was tired. In fact he would have said he was absolutely exhausted except for the fact that the experiment had proved a resounding success.

For over twenty years he had been heavily involved in molecular miniaturisation, heading up a scientific department assigned to the C.I.A.

Gradually as the years passed and no results were forthcoming his budget and staffing levels had been the only things that had actually managed to shrink, until the only person left in the entire department was himself.

That didn’t mean to say that everybody had lost faith in Barkini. It was simply economics that led to the cutbacks. But, of course, the person who had most faith in being able to achieve results was, of course, Barkini himself. He never doubted that one day he would succeed where all else had failed. And incredible as it may seem, he was eventually proved right.

For years the final part of the equation had eluded him. Every experiment he tried simply failed at the last hurdle. He could miniaturise small, inanimate objects, but when it came to larger things, especially primates, well, that was a whole new ball game. Over the years he must have lost four to five hundred animals from rats to ratatouille, pumas to pomade. Every time something was shrunk down to the size of a microscopic slide something went wrong - until today.

Quite by accident Barkini tried a slight variation on a formula that he had used a hundred times. He wasn’t quite sure what made him do it. Whether it was a hunch, an idea, or a suggestion that he had heard made on the radio, but for whatever reason he changed the basic sequence on the atomiser and set the machine in motion. Moments later a fully-grown chimpanzee found itself compressed in such a way that it needed a microscope to see it. The first successful shrinking of a primate had occurred.

Throughout the rest of the day Barkini conducted the same experiment on more than a dozen different objects starting with an apple and ending with an aardvark. He slowly placed it on the polyurethane collection tray and then reduced it to the size of a pinhead. Once reduced an electronic eye pinpointed the now miniaturised tray and this enabled Barkini to locate, collect, and place it beneath a very large magnifying glass. Each time he examined the object he found it was perfectly preserved, and in the case of the animals, perfectly alive.

But unbeknown to Barkini, he was not the only one interested in his work. For years a secret agency, not of his own government, had kept their own eye on the great man, and almost at the same moment in time that he realised what he had achieved a foreign agent was despatched to investigate his findings. Secret cameras had monitored the scientist for years and knew his every like and dislike better than he did himself. They also knew he would not contact his own government until he was one hundred percent sure that the devise would work, and that worked perfectly in their favour. And one more thing that was known about the great man was his weakness for tall, beautiful blondes. Who wouldn’t have such a weakness if they were stuck in a lab for ten years with not a soul to keep them company.

Needless to say, the foreign agent quickly found a way of meeting Barkini by getting a job as a waitress at his local diner. A place he was known to frequent every day of the week. It was also needless to say that within a few days they became firm friends and outside of his lab, almost inseparable companions.