When they are first born, most people find the world afascinating, magical place. It is a place full of colours and sounds andwonderful things that they have never seen before. There are metal boxes thatmove up and down the street, bags of sweet powder that fill your mouth withexplosions of delight, soft barky things that jump up and lick your hand, tallgiants with rustling leaves and little feathery objects that fly around in themsinging songs.

Everything is new and exciting.

But as time passes, people come to believe that these extraordinary magicalthings are not really magic at all, but just ordinary things with ordinary, dullnames like car, sherbet, dog, tree and bird.So after a while, they stop noticing them.They forget how to look.Which is why the grey speck on the corner of Sam Palmer?sbedpost would have gone unnoticed by most people. Most people would be too busylooking at televisions, magazines or each other.They would never notice something so small and colourless.Sam, however, was an exception. He had never grown out ofhis fascination with the world, and what interested him most were the smallthings that most people never see.Ever since learning to crawl, Sam had followed woodlice tothe cracks in the skirting board, knelt by ants as they cleaned up spilt sugarand watched bumblebees bouncing from foxglove to forget-me-not. Where mostchildren ran away from wasps, Sam ran after them, watching them hunt among thelong grass and listening to the faint scrape and scratch of their jaws on thewooden window-frame as they chewed it into a pulp for their papery nests.But just recently, he had noticed something else.At first he had thought that it was just his imagination.But the more he looked around him, the more he began to believe that it wastrue.The insects were starting to follow him.

It seemed that wherever he went, the wasps went too. Notgreat swarms of them ? just one or two, following him everywhere. Yesterday,walking up the lane on his way home from school, he had seen several of themhovering above his head like small helicopters. It was getting more noticeable,and since moving out here into the country, he had found himself becomingobsessed with insects.He glanced up at his bedroom walls, covered with thepictures of flies he had carefully copied from illustrations and photographs.Strewn across the floor were the books about insects that he had borrowed fromthe library and on his desk was an unfinished diagram that he was sketching,showing the mouthparts of a mosquito. He stared at the pictures with a mixtureof fascination and disgust.What was happening to him?

The sun edged its way up over the horizon and in the earlymorning light Sam sensed the silence and stillness of the air that hangs overfields and woods before an unusually hot summer?s day. In the distance, a woodpigeon called softly from the trees at the edge of the meadow that lay behindthe house. A gentle breeze stirred the hedgerows and Sam briefly caught thescent of wild honeysuckle before the air was still once more.He stared out of the window at the dry, parched lawn andthought of the Saturdays he used to have before they moved: riding his bike intotown, buying drinks and gum from the shop and then cycling off to meet hisfriends by the bandstand in the park. They used to play Russian roulettetogether ? shaking up a can of fizzy drink, mixing it up with all the othercans and then taking it in turns to open one up next to their heads. Heremembered how Chrissy Johnson had been practically blown off the bandstand andBobby?s sister Kayleigh had laughed so much that she?d had to run home tochange.Good times.But now they were gone.Sam sighed and turned back towards his bedside table, whereThe Field Guide to European Insects & Spiders lay open at the ?Bees, Ants& Wasps? section.

Somewhere in Aurobon, deep beneath the city of Vermia,General Hekken stood in the middle of a white, brightly lit laboratory andlooked at the clear liquid that filled the glass tank in front of him. His long,black leather overcoat and peaked cap contrasted sharply with the sterile glareof his surroundings and his boots creaked as he leant forward to get a betterview. Suspended inside the tank was a translucent bag filled with a dark liquid.Within the bag he could make out the movements of many small, yellow objects.

Hekken grimaced. Watching deadly viruses swim around insidethe detached stomach of a mosquito was not his idea of a good time. But, hesupposed, these