Panic starts to take
over. It dawns on you that maybe you should've had a backup plan for
shrink gun mishaps. Oh, if only you had paid the shrinking insurance!
Too late for that now, though. You've got to come up with a way to get
out of the hole you've dug for yourself. Metaphorically, that is.
Luckily, you've managed to avoid falling in any actual holes. Anyway,
there's no one in here to help you, so logically, the best place to find
help would be outside.
You set for the door. After about twenty minutes of walking (if only
you'd shrunk your watch, too), you realize that this may be a bit more
of a challenge than first it seemed. Let's see, the door was roughly
thirty feet from the table, with a flight of stairs in the middle, and
you're roughly 1/1000th your original size, so... damn, if only you'd
shrunk a calculator, you'd be able to see just how screwed you really
are. Wait, that's it: your watch also had a calculator in it! And a
pedometer, too, so you could check how many itsy-bitsy steps you've
taken in your miniature quest. More importantly, it has a fairly loud
alarm. With your reduced size, you could climb inside the watch, yank
out some of the circuitry, and wire it into the bullhorn you keep in the
lab to announce all your scientific findings. Even better, you still
have an old corded telephone on that same table (if a rival scientist
makes a big discovery, you'd a length of wire to "persuade" him to let
you take the credit for it), so you can use that curly cord as a ladder.
After twenty minutes of backtracking to the table and a grueling climb
up the cord, you're ready to put your plan into action. The work goes by
fairly quickly, and only towards the end does it occur to you that you
might be able to knock the phone off the hook and call for help. You
decide against it, as a story about rewiring will make you sound much
more creative when you tell your kids about the time you accidentally
shrunk yourself. At any rate, you complete the rewiring and prepare to
fire it up. One small step for man, you smugly think to yourself. You
hit the trigger, and it works. Boy, does it work!
You're not sure how
long the beeping went on, as the first blast deafened you, and softened
up your ribs quite a bit. Well, at least the breeze at your back is
refreshing, almost enough so to distract you from the fact that you've
just been blown off the table and are plummeting dozens of inches to
your doom. Fortunately, with a little effort, you manage to steer your
flight so that you land in a crack in the floor, hidden so that no one
will find your shrunken body and know of the terribly stupid thing that
you did.
