Майкл Крайтон
Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода

© Беспятых Н. Г., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2018

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2018

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Introduction “The InGen Incident”

The late twentieth century has witnessed a scientific gold rush: the haste to make genetic engineering profitable. Biotechnology promises the greatest revolution in human history. By the end of this decade, it will surpass atomic power and computers in its effect on our everyday lives; it is going to transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertainment, and our bodies. Nothing will ever be the same again. It’s going to change the face of the planet.

When, in 1953, two young researchers in England, James Watson and Francis Crick, deciphered the structure of DNA, this was a triumph of the human spirit, of the centuries-old quest to understand the universe in a scientific way. It was expected that their discovery would be used to the greater benefit of mankind.

Yet thirty years later research in molecular genetics had become a vast, multibillion dollar industry.

In April 1976 Robert Swanson, a rich industrialist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California founded a commercial company to exploit Boyer’s gene-splicing techniques. Their new company, Genentech, quickly became the largest and most successful of the genetic engineering start-ups. Suddenly everyone wanted to become rich. New companies were founded almost weekly, and scientists from universities went there to exploit genetic research and make money. By 1986, at least 362 scientists, including 64 in the National Academy, sat on the boards of biotech firms.

This shift in attitude actually was very significant. In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn’t get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. So there were independent university scientists free of industry ties, who could discuss the problems at the highest levels.

But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial interests. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.

In this commercial climate, a company named International Genetic Technologies, Inc., of Palo Alto, arose and went bankrupt. It created the genetic crisis that went nearly unnoticed. After all, InGen conducted its research in secret; the actual incident occurred in the most remote region of Central America; and fewer than twenty people were there to witness it. Of those, only a handful survived, and they were willing to discuss the remarkable events that lead up to those final two days in August 1989 on a remote island off the west coast of Costa Rica.

Prologue:
The Bite of the Raptor

The tropical rain fell like wall, splashed on the ground in a torrent. Roberta Carter sighed, and stared out the window. From the clinic, she couldn’t see the beach or the ocean beyond. This wasn’t what she had expected when she decided to spend two months as a visiting physician in the village on the west coast of Costa Rica.

She had been in the village now for three weeks. And it had rained every day.

Everything else was fine. She liked the isolation of the place and the friendliness of its people. Costa Rica had one of the twenty best medical systems in the world, and even in this remote coastal village, the clinic was well maintained and supplied. Her paramedic, Manuel Aragon, was intelligent and well trained. Bobbie was able to practice a level of medicine equal to what she had practiced in Chicago.

But the rain! The constant, unending rain!

Across the examining room, Manuel cocked his head. “Listen,” he said.

“Believe me, I hear it,” Bobbie said.

“No. Listen.”

And then she caught the rhythmic thumping of a helicopter which burst low through the ocean fog and roared overhead, circled, and came back. She saw the helicopter swing back over the water, near the fishing boats. It was looking for a place to land.

Bobbie wondered what was so urgent that the helicopter would fly in this weather. The helicopter settled onto the wet sand of the beach. Uniformed men jumped out, and flung open the big side door. She heard frantic shouts in Spanish. They were calling for a doctor. She ran up to the helicopter.

“I’m Dr. Carter,” she said.

“Ed Regis. We’ve got a very sick man here, doctor.”

“Then you better take him to San Jose,” she said. San Jose was the capital, just twenty minutes away by air.

“We would, but we can’t get over the mountains in this weather. You have to treat him here.”

Bobbie trotted alongside the injured man as they carried him to the clinic. He was a kid, no older than eighteen. She lifted the blood-soaked shirt and saw a big slashing rip along his shoulder, and another on the leg.

“What happened to him?”

“Construction accident,” Ed shouted. “He fell.”

The kid was pale, unconscious. Bobbie bent to examine the wounds. A big tearing laceration ran from his shoulder down his torso. At the edge of the wound, the flesh was shredded. A second slash cut through the heavy muscles of the thigh. Her first impression was that his leg had been ripped open.

“Tell me again about this injury,” she said.

“I didn’t see it,” Ed said. “They say the backhoe dragged him.”

“Because it almost looks as if some big animal mauled him,” Bobbie Carter said. Like most emergency room physicians, she could remember in detail patients she had seen even years before. She had seen two maulings. One was a two-year-old child who had been attacked by a Rottweiler dog. The other was a circus attendant who had been attacked by a Bengal tiger. Both injuries were similar. There was a characteristic look to an animal attack.

“Mauled?” Ed said. “No, no. It was a backhoe, believe me.” Ed licked his lips as he spoke. He was acting as if he had done something wrong.

She bent lower, probed the wound with her fingertips. If an earth mover had rolled over him, there would be dirt in the wound. But there wasn’t any dirt, just a slippery, slimy foam. And the wound had a strange odor, a kind of rotten stench, a smell of death and decay. She had never smelled anything like it before.

“How long ago did this happen?”

“An hour.”

Bobbie Carter turned back to the injuries. Somehow she didn’t think she was seeing mechanical trauma. It just didn’t look right. No soil in the wound, and no crush- injury. Mechanical trauma of any sort – an auto injury, a factory accident – almost always had some component of crushing. But here there was none. Instead, the man’s skin was shredded – ripped – across his shoulder, and again across his thigh.

It really did look like a maul. On the other hand, most of the body was unmarked, which was unusual for an animal attack. She looked again at the head, the arms, the hands. She felt a chill when she looked at the kid’s hands. There were short slashing cuts on both palms, and bruises on the wrists and forearms. She had worked in Chicago long enough to know what that meant.

“All right,” she said. “Wait outside.”

“Why?” Ed said, alarmed. He didn’t like that.

“Do you want me to help him, or not?” she said, and pushed him out the door and closed it on his face. She didn’t know what was going on, but she didn’t like it. Manuel hesitated. “I continue to wash?”

“Yes,” she said. She reached for her little photo camera. She took several snapshots of the injury. It really did look like bites, she thought. Then the kid groaned, and she put her camera aside and bent toward him. His lips moved, his tongue thick.

“Raptor,” he said. “Lo sa raptor.”

At those words, Manuel froze, stepped back in horror.

“What does it mean?” Bobbie said.

Manuel shook his head. “I do not know, doctor. ‘Lo sa raptor’ – no es espanol.”

“No?” It sounded to her like Spanish. “Then please continue to wash him.”

“No, doctor.” He wrinkled his nose. “Bad smell.” And he crossed himself.

Bobbie looked again at the slippery foam streaked across the wound. She touched it, rubbing it between her fingers. It seemed almost like saliva.

The injured boy’s lips moved. “Raptor,” he whispered.

In a tone of horror, Manuel said, “It bit him.”

“What bit him?”

“Raptor.”

“What’s a raptor?”

“It means hupia.”

Bobbie frowned. The Costa Ricans were not especially superstitious, but she had heard the hupia mentioned in the village before. They were said to be night ghosts, faceless vampires who kidnapped small children. According to the belief, the hupia had once lived in the mountains of Costa Rica, but now inhabited the islands offshore.

Manuel was backing away, murmuring and crossing himself. “It is not normal, this smell,” he said. “It is the hupia.”

Suddenly the injured youth opened his eyes and sat straight up on the table. Manuel shrieked in terror. The injured boy moaned and twisted his head, looked left and right with wide open eyes, and then he vomited blood. He went immediately into convulsions, his body vibrated, and Bobbie grabbed for him but he fell off the table onto the concrete floor. He vomited again. There was blood everywhere. Ed opened the door, saying, “What the hell’s happening?” and when he saw the blood he turned away, his hand to his mouth. Bobbie was grabbing for a stick to put in the boy’s clenched jaws, but even as she did it she knew it was hopeless, and with a final spastic jerk he relaxed and lay still.

She bent to perform mouth-to-mouth, but Manuel grabbed her shoulder fiercely, pulling her back. “No,” he said. “The hupia will cross over.”

“Manuel, for God’s sake!”

“No.” He stared at her fiercely. “No. You do not understand these things.”

Bobbie looked at the body on the ground and realized that it didn’t matter; the boy was dead. Manuel called for the men, who came back into the room and took the body away. Ed appeared, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, muttering, “I’m sure you did all you could,” and then she watched as the men took the body away, back to the helicopter, and it lifted thunderously up into the sky.

“It is better,” Manuel said.

Bobbie was thinking about the boy’s hands. They had been covered with cuts and bruises, in the characteristic pattern of defense wounds. She was quite sure he had not died in a construction accident; he had been attacked, and he had held up his bands against his attacker. “Where is this island they’ve come from?” she asked.

“In the ocean. Perhaps a hundred, hundred and twenty miles offshore,”

“Pretty far for a resort,” she said.

Manuel watched the helicopter. “I hope they never come back.”

Well, she thought, at least she had pictures. But when she turned back to the table, she saw that her camera was gone.

The rain finally stopped later that night. Alone in the bedroom behind the clinic, Bobbie thumbed through her Spanish dictionary. The boy had said “raptor,” and, despite Manuel’s protests, she suspected it was a Spanish word. Sure enough, she found it in her dictionary. It meant “ravisher” or “abductor.”

That gave her pause. The sense of the word was suspiciously close to the meaning of hupia. Of course she did not believe in the superstition. And no ghost had cut those hands. What had the boy been trying to tell her?

Bobbie looked at the stars. The whole scene was quiet, so normal, she felt foolish to talk of vampires and kidnapped babies.

FIRST EPISODE

Mike Bowman drove the Land Rover through the Cabo Blanco Biological Reserve, on the west coast of Costa Rica. According to the guidebooks, Cabo Blanco was unspoiled wilderness, almost a paradise.

They had come to Costa Rica for a two-week holiday.

The Land Rover bounced in a pothole, splashing mud. Seated beside him, Ellen said, “Mike, are you sure this is the right road? We haven’t seen any other people for hours.”

“Darling, you wanted a deserted beach,” he said, “and that’s what you’re going to get.”

Ellen shook her head doubtfully. “I hope you’re right.”

“Yeah, Dad, I hope you’re right,” said Tina from the back seat. She was eight years old.

“Trust me, I’m right.” He drove in silence a moment. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Look at that view. It’s beautiful.”

The road began to descend, and Mike Bowman concentrated on driving. Suddenly a small black shape flashed across the road and Tina shrieked, “Look! Look!” Then it was gone, into the jungle.

“What was it?” Ellen asked. “A monkey?”

“Maybe a squirrel monkey,” Bowman said.

“Can I count it?” Tina said. She was keeping a list of all the animals she had seen on her trip, as a project for school.

“I don’t know,” Mike said doubtfully.

Tina consulted the pictures in the guidebook. “I don’t think it was a squirrel monkey,” she said. “I think it was just another howler.” They had seen several howler monkeys already on their trip, “Hey,” she said, more brightly. “According to this book, ‘the beaches of Cabo Blanco are full of wildlife, including howler monkeys, three-toed sloths, and coatimundis[1]. You think we’ll see a three-toed sloth, Dad?”

“I bet we do.”

The road sloped downward through the jungle, toward the ocean.

Mike Bowman felt like a hero when they finally reached the beach: two miles of white sand, utterly deserted. He parked the Land Rover in the shade of the palm trees and got out the box lunches. Ellen changed into her bathing suit; Tina was already running down the beach: “I’m going to see if there’s a sloth.”

Ellen Bowman looked around at the beach, and the trees. “You think she’s all right?”

“Honey, there’s nobody here for miles,” Mike said.

“What about snakes?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mike Bowman said. “There are no snakes on a beach.”

“Well, there might be…”

“Honey,” he said firmly. “Snakes are cold-blooded. They’re reptiles. They can’t control their body temperature. It’s ninety degrees on that sand. If a snake came out, it’d be cooked. Believe me. There are no snakes on the beach. Let her go. Let her have a good time.”

Tina ran until she was exhausted and then she looked back toward her parents and the car, to see how far she had come. She wanted to stay right here, and maybe see a sloth. Tina sat in the sand under the shade of palm trees and noticed many bird tracks in the sand. Costa Rica was famous for its birds. The guidebooks said there were three times as many birds in Costa Rica as in all of America and Canada.

In the sand, some of the three-toed bird tracks were small, and so faint they could hardly be seen. Other tracks were large, and cut deeper in the sand. Tina was looking idly at the tracks when she heard a chirping, followed by a rustling in the mangrove thicket.

Did sloths make a chirping sound? Tina didn’t think so, but she wasn’t sure. The chirping was probably some ocean bird. She waited quietly, not moving, hearing the rustling again, and finally she saw the source of the sounds. A few yards away, a lizard emerged from the mangrove roots and looked at her.

Tina held her breath. A new animal for her list! The lizard stood up on its hind legs, balancing on its thick tail, and stared at her. Standing like that, it was almost a foot tall, dark green with brown stripes along its back. Its tiny front legs ended in little lizard fingers that wiggled in the air. The lizard cocked its head as it looked at her.

Tina thought it was cute. Sort of like a big salamander. The lizard wasn’t frightened. It came toward her, walking upright on its hind legs. It was hardly bigger than a chicken, and like a chicken it bobbed its head as it walked. She noticed that the lizard left three-toed tracks that looked exactly like bird tracks. The lizard came closer to Tina. She kept her body still, not wanting to frighten the little animal. She was amazed that it would come so close. This lizard was probably tame. Slowly, Tina extended her hand, palm open.

The lizard paused, cocked his head, and chirped. And then, without warning, the lizard jumped up onto her outstretched hand. Tina could feel its little toes pinching the skin of her palm, and she felt the surprising weight of the animal’s body pressing her arm down.

And then the lizard scrambled up her arm, toward her face.

“I just wish I could see her,” Ellen Bowman said. “That’s all. Just see her.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.”

“I just wish I could see her, is all,” Ellen repeated.

Then, from down the beach they heard their daughter’s voice. She was screaming.

Puntarenas

“I think she is quite comfortable now,” Dr. Cruz said, and lowered the plastic flap of the oxygen tent around Tina as she slept. Mike Bowman sat beside the bed, close to his daughter. Chnica Santa Maria, the modern hospital in Puntarenas, was spotless and efficient.

But, even so, Mike Bowman felt nervous. His only daughter was ill, and they were far from home.

When Mike had first reached Tina, she was screaming hysterically. Her whole left arm was bloody, covered with small bites, each the size of a thumbprint. And there were flecks of sticky foam on her arm, like a foamy saliva.

He carried her back down the beach to the car. Almost immediately her arm began to redden and swell. Mike couldn’t forget the drive back to civilization while his daughter screamed in fear and pain, and her arm grew more bloated and red. By the time they reached the hospital, the swelling had spread to her neck, and then Tina began to have trouble breathing.

“She’ll be all right now?” Ellen said, staring through the plastic oxygen tent.

“I believe so,” Dr. Cruz said. “I have given her another dose of steroids, and her breathing is much easier.”

Mike Bowman said, “About those bites…”

“We have no identification yet,” the doctor said. “I myself haven’t seen bites like that before. But you’ll notice they are disappearing. It’s already quite difficult to make them out. Fortunately I have taken photographs for reference. And I have washed her arm to collect some samples of the sticky saliva – one for analysis here, a second to send to the labs in San Jose, and the third we will keep frozen in case it is needed. Do you have the picture she made?”

“Yes,” Mike Bowman said. He handed the doctor the sketch that Tina had drawn, in response to questions from the admitting officials.

“This is the animal that bit her?” Dr. Cruz said, looking at the picture.

“Yes,” Mike Bowman said. “She said it was a green lizard, the size of a chicken or a crow.”

“I don’t know of such a lizard,” the doctor said. “She has drawn it standing on its hind legs…”

“That’s right,” Mike Bowman said. “She said it walked on its hind legs.”

Dr. Cruz frowned. He stared at the picture a while longer.

“I am not an expert. I’ve asked for Dr. Guitierrez to visit us here. He is a senior researcher at the Reserva Bioldgica de Carara, which is across the bay. Perhaps he can identify the animal for us.”

Dr. Guitierrez was a bearded man wearing khaki shorts and shirt. He explained that he was a field biologist from Yale who had worked in Costa Rica for the last five years. Marty Guitierrez examined Tina thoroughly, then measured the bites with a small pocket ruler and asked several questions about the saliva. Finally he turned to Mike Bowman and his wife. “I think Tina’s going to be fine. I just want to be clear about a few details,” he said, making notes. “Your daughter says she was bitten by a green lizard, approximately one foot high, which walked upright onto the beach from the mangrove swamp?”

“That’s right, yes.”

“And the lizard made some kind of a vocalization?”

“Tina said it chirped, or squeaked.”

“Like a mouse, would you say?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” Dr. Guitierrez said, “I know this lizard.” He explained that, of the six thousand species of lizards in the world, no more than a dozen species walked upright. Of those species, only four were found in Latin America. And judging by the coloration, the lizard could be only one of the four. “I am sure this lizard was a striped basilisk lizard[2], found here in Costa Rica and also in Honduras. Standing on their hind legs, they are sometimes as tall as a foot.”

“Are they poisonous?”

“No, Mrs. Bowman. Not at all.” Guitierrez explained that the swelling in Tina’s arm was an allergic reaction. “According to the literature, fourteen percent of people are strongly allergic to reptiles,” he said, “and your daughter must be one of them.”

“She was screaming, she said it was so painful.”

“Probably it was,” Guitierrez said. “Reptile saliva contains serotonin, which causes tremendous pain.” He turned to Cruz. “Her blood pressure came down with antihistamines?”

“Yes,” Cruz said. “Promptly.”

“Serotonin,” Guitierrez said. “No question.”

Still, Ellen Bowman remained uneasy. “But why would a lizard bite her in the first place?”

“Lizard bites are very common,” Guitierrez said. “Animal handlers in zoos get bitten all the time. And just the other day I heard that a lizard had bitten an infant in her crib in Amaloya, about sixty miles from where you were. So bites do occur. I’m not sure why your daughter had so many bites. What was she doing at the time?”

“Nothing. She said she was sitting pretty still, because she didn’t want to frighten it away.”

“Sitting pretty still,” Guitierrez said, frowning. He shook his head. “Well. I don’t think we can say exactly what happened. Wild animals are unpredictable.”

Mike Bowman then showed Guitierrez the picture that Tina had drawn. Guitierrez nodded. “I would accept this as a picture of a basillsk lizard,” he said. “A few details are wrong, of course. The neck is much too long, and she has drawn the hind legs with only three toes instead of five. The tail is too thick, and raised too high. But otherwise this is the lizard.”

A day later Tina was released from the hospital. “Go on. Say thank you to Dr. Cruz,” Ellen Bowman said, and pushed Tina forward.

“Thank you, Dr. Cruz,” Tina said. “I feel much better now.”

Dr. Cruz smiled and shook the little girl’s hand gravely. “Enjoy the rest of your holiday in Costa Rica, Tina.”

“I will.”

The Bowman family had started to leave when Dr. Cruz said, “Oh, Tina, do you remember the lizard that bit you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You remember its feet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did it have any toes?”

“Yes.”

“How many toes did it have?”

“Three,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I looked,” she said. “Anyway, all the birds on the beach made marks in the sand with three toes, like this.” She held up her hand, middle three fingers spread wide. “And the lizard made those kind of marks in the sand, too.”

“The lizard made marks like a bird?”

“Uh-huh,” Tina said. “He walked like a bird, too. He jerked his head like this, up and down.” She took a few steps, bobbing her head.

After the Bowmans had departed, Dr. Cruz decided to report this conversation to Guitierrez, at the biological station.

“I must admit the girl’s story is puzzling,” Guitierrez said. “I have been doing some checking myself. I am no longer certain she was bitten by a basilisk. Not certain at all.”

“Then what could it be?”

“Well,” Guitierrez said, “let’s not speculate prematurely. By the way, have you heard of any other lizard bites at the hospital?”

“No, why?”

“Let me know, my friend, if you do.”

The next day Marty Guitierrez found the remains of a lizard sat on the beach of Cabo Blanco, near the spot where the American girl had been, two days before. Guitierrez decided to send it to the United States for final positive identification. The acknowledged expert was Edward H. Simpson, emeritus professor of zoology at Columbia University, in New York. Probably, Marty thought, he would send his lizard to Dr. Simpson.

New York

Dr. Richard Stone, head of the Tropical Diseases Laboratory of Columbia University was unprepared for what he received that morning.

The white plastic cylinder was the size of a half-gallon milk container, it had locking metal latches and a screw top. Inside he found a plastic sandwich bag, containing something green. Stone spread a surgical drape on the table and shook out the contents of the bag. A piece of frozen flesh struck the table with a dull thud.

“Huh,” the technician said. “Looks eaten.”

“Yes, it does,” Stone said. “What do they want with us?”

The technician consulted the enclosed documents. “Lizard is biting local children. They have a question about identification of the species, and a concern about diseases transmitted from the bite.” She produced a child’s picture of a lizard, signed TINA at the top. “One of the kids drew a picture of the lizard.”

Stone glanced at the picture. “Obviously we can’t verify the species,” Stone said. “But we can check diseases easily enough, if we can get any blood out of this fragment. What are they calling this animal?”

“ ‘Basiliscus amoratus with three-toed genetic anomaly,’ ” she said, reading.

“Okay,” Stone said. “Let’s get started. Do an X-ray and take Polaroids for the record. Once we have blood, start running antibody sets until we get some matches.”

Before lunchtime, the lab had its answer: the lizard blood showed no significant reactivity to any viral or bacterial antigen. They had run toxicity profiles as well, and they had found only one positive match: the blood was mildly reactive to the venom of the Indian king cobra. They faxed the answer to Dr. Martin Guitierrez that same evening.

Martin Guitierrez read the fax from the Columbia Medical Center/Tropical Diseases Laboratory.

Guitierrez made two assumptions. First, that his identification of the lizard as a basilisk had been confirmed by scientists at Columbia University. And second, that the absence of communicable disease meant the recent episodes of sporadic lizard bites implied no serious health hazards for Costa Rica.

It was nearly midnight in the clinic in Bahia Anasco when the midwife Elena Morales heard a squeaking, chirping sound. Thinking that it was a rat, she quickly put a compress on the forehead of the mother and went into the next room to check on the newborn baby. As her hand touched the doorknob, she heard the chirping again, and she relaxed. Evidently it was just a bird. Costa Ricans said that when a bird came to visit a newborn child, it brought good luck.

Elena opened the door. The infant lay in a wicker bassinet, wrapped in a light blanket, only its face exposed. Around the rim of the bassinet, three dark-green lizards crouched like gargoyles. When they saw Elena, they cocked their heads and stared curiously at her, but did not flee. In the light of her flashlight Elena saw that blood dripped from their snouts. Softly chirping, one lizard bent down and, with a quick shake of its head, tore a ragged chunk of flesh from the baby.

Elena rushed forward, screaming, and the lizards fled into the darkness. But long before she reached the bassinet, she could see what had happened to the infant’s face, and she knew the child must be dead. The lizards scattered into the rainy night, chirping and squealing, leaving behind only bloody three-toed tracks, like birds.

Elena Morales decided not to report the lizard attack: she left the baby alone in the room. So she reported the death as SIDS: sudden infant death syndrome. This was a syndrome of unexplained death among very young children.

The university lab in San Jose that analyzed the saliva sample from Tina Bowman’s arm made several remarkable discoveries. There was, as expected, a great deal of serotonin. But among the salivary proteins was a real monster, one of the largest proteins known. Biological activity was still under study, but it seemed to be a neurotoxic poison related to cobra venom, although more primitive in structure.

The lab also detected trace quantities of the enzyme that was a marker for genetic engineering, and not found in wild animals, technicians assumed it was a lab contaminant and did not report it when they called Dr. Cruz, the physician in Puntarenas.

The lizard fragment rested in the freezer at Columbia University; a technician named Alice Levin walked into the Tropical Diseases Laboratory, looked at Tina Bowman’s picture, and said, “Oh, whose kid drew the dinosaur?”

“What?” Richard Stone said, turning slowly toward her.

“The dinosaur. Isn’t that what it is? My kid draws them all the time.”

“This is a lizard,” Stone said. “From Costa Rica. Some girl down there drew a picture of it.”

“No,” Alice Levin said, shaking her head. “Look at it. It’s very clear. Big head, long neck, stands on its hind legs, thick tail. It’s a dinosaur.”

“It can’t be. It was only a foot tall.”

“So? There were little dinosaurs back then,” Alice said. “Believe me, I know. I have two boys, I’m an expert. The smallest dinosaurs were under a foot. Teenysaurus or something, I don’t know. Those names are impossible. You’ll never learn those names if you’re over the age of ten.”

“You don’t understand,” Richard Stone said. “This is a picture of a contemporary animal. They sent us a fragment of the animal. It’s in the freezer now.” Stone went and got it, and shook it out of the bag.

Alice Levin looked at the frozen piece of leg and tail, and shrugged. She didn’t touch it. “I don’t know,” she said. “But that looks like a dinosaur to me.”

Stone continued to shake his head. Alice was uninformed; she was just a technician who worked in the bacteriology lab down the hall. And she had an active imagination.

“Well, take it to the Museum of Natural History or something,” Alice Levin said. “You really should.”

“No,” Richard Stone said. “I won’t.”

He put the bag back in the freezer and slammed the door. “It’s not a dinosaur, it’s a lizard. That’s final, Alice. This lizard’s not going anywhere.”

SECOND EPISODE

The Shore of the Inland Sea

Alan Grant crouched down, his nose inches from the ground. The temperature was over a hundred degrees. His knees ached, his lungs burned from the dust. Sweat dripped off his forehead. But Grant didn’t notice it. His entire attention was focused on the six-inch square of earth in front of him.

Working patiently with a dental pick and an artist’s brush, he exposed the tiny L-shaped fragment ofjawbone. It was only an inch long, and no thicker than his little finger. There was no question that this was the jawbone from an infant carnivorous dinosaur. Its owner had died seventy-nine million years ago, at the age of about two months. With any luck, Grant might find the rest of the skeleton as well. If so, it would be the first complete skeleton of a baby carnivore.

“Hey, Alan!”

Alan Grant looked up, and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.

Visitors found the badlands depressing, but when Grant looked at this landscape, he saw something else entirely. This dry land was what remained of another, very different world, which had vanished eighty million years ago. In his mind’s eye, Grant saw himself back in the warm, swampy bayou that formed the shoreline of a great inland sea. This inland sea was a thousand miles wide, extending all the way from the Rocky Mountains to the sharp peaks of the Appalachians. All of the American West was underwater.

At that time, there were thin clouds in the sky overhead, darkened by the smoke of nearby volcanoes. The atmosphere was denser, richer in carbon dioxide. Plants grew rapidly along the shoreline. There were no fish in these waters, but there were clams and snails. A few carnivorous dinosaurs prowled the swampy shores of the lake, moving among the palm trees. There was a small island, about two acres in size. This island formed a sanctuary where herds of herbivorous dinosaurs laid their eggs in communal nests, and raised their squeaking young.

Over the millions of years the lake vanished, the island with its dinosaur eggs became the eroded hillside in northern Montana which Alan Grant was now excavating.

“Hey, Alan!”

He saw Ellie waving to him, from the shadow of the field laboratory.

“Visitor!” she called, and pointed to the east.

They didn’t get many visitors in Snakewater, and they didn’t know what a lawyer from the Environmental Protection Agency would want.

But Grant knew that paleontology, the study of extinct life, had in recent years taken on an unexpected relevance to the modern world. The modern world was changing fast, and urgent questions about the weather, global warming, or the ozone layer often seemed answerable with information from the past. Information that paleontologists could provide. He had been called as an expert witness twice in the past few years.

Grant started down the hill to meet the car.

“Bob Morris, EPA,” the visitor said. “I’m with the San Francisco office.”

Morris was in his late twenties, wearing a tie, and pants from a business suit.

“How long you been out here?”

“About sixty days. We start in June.”

“Sixty-three, to be exact,” Ellie Sattler said, as they reached the trailer. Ellie was wearing cut-offjeans and a shirt tied at her midriff. She was twenty-four and darkly tanned. Her blond hair was pulled back.

“Ellie keeps us going,” Grant said, introducing her. “She’s very good at what she does.”

“What does she do?” Morris asked.

“Paleobotany,” Ellie said. She opened the door and they went inside the laboratory trailer.

The trailer had a series of long wooden tables, with tiny bone specimens neatly laid out, tagged and labeled. Farther along were ceramic dishes and crocks. There was a strong odor of vinegar.

Morris glanced at the bones. “I thought dinosaurs were big,” he said.

“They were,” Ellie said. “But everything you see here comes from babies. Snakewater is important primarily because of the number of dinosaur nesting sites here. Until we started this work, there were hardly any infant dinosaurs known. Only one nest had ever been found, in the Gobi Desert. We’ve discovered a dozen different hadrosaur[3] nests, complete with eggs and bones of infants.”

“They look like chicken bones,” Morris said, peering into the ceramic dishes.

“Yes,” she said. “They’re very bird-like.”

“And what about those?” Morris said, pointing through the trailer window to piles of large bones outside, wrapped in heavy plastic.

“Rejects,” Ellie said. “Bones too fragmentary when we took them out of the ground, In the old days we’d just discard them, but nowadays we send them for genetic testing.”

Grant led Morris to the end of the trailer, where there was a torn couch, a sagging chair, and a battered table. Grant dropped onto the couch, leaned back and gestured for Morris to sit in the chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Grant was a professor of paleontology at the University of Denver, and one of the foremost researchers in his field, but he had never been comfortable with social niceties. He was an outdoor man, and he knew that all the important work in paleontology was done outdoors, with your hands. Grant had little patience for the academics, for the museum curators, for what he called Teacup Dinosaur Hunters.

Grant watched as Morris primly brushed off the seat of the chair before he sat down. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

Grant nodded. “It’s a long way to come, Mr. Morris.”

“Well,” Morris said, “to get right to the point, we are concerned about the activities of the Hammond Foundation. You receive some funding from them.”

“Thirty thousand dollars a year,” Grant said, nodding. “For the last five years.”

“What do you know about the foundation?” Morris said.

Grant shrugged. “The Hammond Foundation is a respected source of academic grants. They fund research all over the world, including several dinosaur researchers. I know they support Bob Kerry in Alberta, and John Weller in Alaska. Probably more.”

“Do you know why the Hammond Foundation supports so much dinosaur research?” Morris asked.

“Of course. It’s because old John Hammond is a dinosaur nut.”

“You’ve met Hammond?”

Grant shrugged. “Once or twice. He comes here for brief visits. He’s quite elderly, you know. And eccentric, the way rich people sometimes are. But always very enthusiastic. Why?”

“Well,” Morris said, “the Hammond Foundation is actually a rather mysterious organization. The Hammond Foundation only supports cold-weather digs. We’d like to know why. And there are other puzzles,” Morris said. “For example, what is the relationship of dinosaurs to amber?”

“Amber?”

“Yes. It’s the hard yellow resin of dried tree sap—”

“I know what it is,” Grant said. “But why are you asking?”

“Because,” Morris said, “over the last five years, Hammond has purchased enormous quantities of amber in America, Europe, and Asia, including many pieces of museum-quality jewelry. The foundation has spent seventeen million dollars on amber. They now possess the largest privately held stock of this material in the world.”

“I don’t get it,” Grant said.

“Neither does anybody else,” Morris said. “As far as we can tell, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Amber has no commercial or defense value. There’s no reason to stockpile it. But Hammond has done just that, over many years.”

“Amber,” Grant said, shaking his head.

“And what about his island in Costa Rica?” Morris continued. “Ten years ago, the Hammond Foundation leased an island from the government of Costa Rica. Supposedly to set up a biological preserve.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Grant said, frowning.

“I haven’t been able to find out much,” Morris said. “The island is a hundred miles off the west coast. It’s an area of ocean where the combinations of wind and current make it almost perpetually covered in fog. They used to call it Cloud Island. Isla Nublar. Apparently the Costa Ricans were amazed that anybody would want it.” Morris searched in his briefcase. “The reason I mention it,” he said, “is that, according to the records, you were paid a consultant’s fee in connection with this island.”

“I was?” Grant said.

Morris passed a sheet of paper to Grant. It was the Xerox of a check issued in March 1984 from InGen Inc., Farallon Road, Palo Alto, California to Alan Grant in the amount of twelve thousand dollars.

“Oh, sure,” Grant said. “I remember that. It was weird as hell, but I remember it. And it didn’t have anything to do with an island.”

Alan Grant had found the first dinosaur eggs in Montana in 1979, and his paper made Grant a celebrity overnight. He reported that a herd of ten thousand duckbilled dinosaurs lived along the shore of a vast inland sea, had communal nests of eggs in the mud, raised their infant dinosaurs in the herd. It was during those days that he was approached by the InGen corporation with a request for consulting services.

“Had you heard of InGen before?” Morris asked.

“No.”

“How did they contact you?”

“Telephone call. It was a man named Gennaro or Gennino, something like that.”

Morris nodded. “Donald Gennaro,” he said. “He’s the legal counsel for InGen.”

“Anyway, he wanted to know about eating habits of dinosaurs. And he offered me a fee to draw up a paper for him.” Grant drank his beer, set the can on the floor. “Gennaro was particularly interested in young dinosaurs. Infants and juveniles. What they ate. I guess he thought I would know about that.”

“Did you?”

“Not really, no. I told him that. We had found lots of skeletal material, but we had very little data on eating habits. But Gennaro said he knew we hadn’t published everything, and he wanted whatever we had. And he offered a very large fee. Fifty thousand dollars.”

Morris took out a tape recorder and set it on the table. “You mind?”

“No, go ahead.”

“So Gennaro telephoned you in 1984. What happened then?”

“Well,” Grant said. “You see our operation here. Fifty thousand would support two full summers of digging. I told him I’d do what I could.”

“So you agreed to prepare a paper for him.”

“Yes.”

“On the dietary habits of juvenile dinosaurs?”

“Yes.”

“You met Gennaro?”

“No. Just on the phone.”

“Did Gennaro say why he wanted this information?”

“Yes,” Grant said. “He was planning a museum for children, and he wanted to feature baby dinosaurs. He said he was hiring a number of academic consultants, and named them. There were paleontologists like me, and a mathematician from Texas named Ian Malcolm, and a couple of ecologists. A systems analyst. Good group.”

Morris nodded, making notes. “So you accepted the consultancy?”

“Yes. I agreed to send him a summary of our work: what we knew about the habits of the duckbilled hadrosaurs we’d found.”

“What kind of information did you send?” Morris asked.

“Everything: nesting behavior, territorial ranges, feeding behavior, social behavior. Everything.”

“And how did Gennaro respond?”

“He kept calling and calling. Sometimes in the middle of the night. Would the dinosaurs eat this? Would they eat that? Should the exhibit include this? I could never understand why he was so worked up. I mean, I think dinosaurs are important, too, but not that important. They’ve been dead sixty-five million years. You’d think his calls could wait until morning.”

“I see,” Morris said. “And the fifty thousand dollars?”

Grant shook his head. “I got tired of Gennaro and called the whole thing off. We settled up for twelve thousand. That must have been about the middle of ’85.”

Morris made a note. “And InGen? Any other contact with them?”

“Not since 1985.”

“And when did the Hammond Foundation begin to fund your research?”

“I’d have to look,” Grant said. “But it was around then. Mid-eighties.”

“And you know Hammond as just a rich dinosaur enthusiast.”

“Yes.”

Morris made another note.

“Look,” Grant said. “If the EPA is so concerned about John Hammond and what he’s doing why don’t you just ask him about it?”

“At the moment, we can’t,” Morris said.

“Why not?” Grant asked.

“Because we don’t have any evidence of wrongdoing,” Morris said. “But personally, I think it’s clear John Hammond is evading the law.”

“Besides amber, there are other questions.” Morris explained, “In the few past years the InGen shipped to Costa Rica three very powerful supercomputers and twenty-four automated gene sequencers – machines that work out the genetic code by themselves. InGen was obviously setting up one of the most powerful genetic engineering facilities in the world in an obscure Central American country. A country with no regulations. That kind of thing has happened before.”

There had already been cases of American bioengineering companies moving to another country so they could work without regulations and rules. The most scandalous, Morris explained, was the Biosyn rabies case.

In 1986, Genetic Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino tested a bioengineered rabies vaccine on a farm in Chile. They didn’t test it. Biosyn modified the virus and you could get an infection just inhaling it.

It was outrageous. It was irresponsible. It was criminally negligent. But no action was taken against Biosyn.

“So that’s why we began our investigation of InGen,” Morris said. “About three weeks ago.”

“And what have you actually found?” Grant said.

“Not much,” Morris admitted. “When I go back to San Francisco, we’ll probably have to close the investigation.”

At the far end of the trailer, the phone rang. Ellie answered it. She said, “He’s in a meeting right now. Can he call you back?”

Morris snapped his briefcase shut and stood. “Thanks for your help,” he said.

“No problem,” Grant said.

Grant walked with Morris down the trailer to the door at the far end. Morris said, “Did Hammond ever ask for any physical materials from your site? Bones, or eggs, or anything like that?”

“No,” Grant said.

“Dr. Sattler mentioned you do some genetic work here.”

“Well, not exactly,” Grant said. “When we remove fossils that are broken or for some other reason not suitable for museum preservation, we send the bones out to a lab that grinds them up and tries to extract proteins for us. The proteins are then identified and the report is sent back to us.”

“Which lab is that?” Morris asked.

“Medical Biologic Services in Salt Lake.”

“How’d you choose them?”

“Competitive bids.”

“The lab has nothing to do with InGen?” Morris asked.

“Not that I know,” Grant said.

They came to the door of the trailer. Grant opened it, and felt the rush of hot air from outside. Morris paused to put on his sunglasses.

“One last thing,” Morris said. “Suppose InGen wasn’t really making a museum exhibit. Is there anything else they could have done with the information in the report you gave them?”

Grant laughed. “Sure. They could feed a baby hadrosaur.”

Morris laughed, too. “A baby hadrosaur. That’d be something to see. How big were they?”

“About so,” Grant said, holding his hands six inches apart. “Squirrelsize.”

“And how long before they become full-grown?”

“Three years,” Grant said. “Give or take.”

Morris held out his band. “Well, thanks again for your help.”

After Morris had left, Grant asked: “By the way, who called?”

“Oh,” Ellie said, “it was a woman named Alice Levin. She works at Columbia Medical Center. You know her?”

Grant shook his head. “No.”

“Well, it was something about identifying some remains. She wants you to call her back right away.”

Skeleton

Ellie Sattler listened idly as Grant said, “Miss Levin? This is Alan Grant. What’s this about a… You have what? A what?” He began to laugh. “Oh, I doubt that very much, Miss Levin… No, I really don’t have time, I’m sorry. Well, I’d take a look at it, but I can pretty much guarantee it’s a basilisk lizard. But… yes, you can do that. All right. Send it now.” Grant hung up, and shook his head. “These people.”

Ellie said, “What’s it about?”

“Some lizard she’s trying to identify,” Grant said. “She’s going to fax me an X-ray.” He walked over to the fax and waited as the transmission came through. “Incidentally, I’ve got a new find for you. A good one.”

“Yes?”

Grant nodded. “Found it just before Morris showed up. Infant velociraptor[4]: jaw and complete dentition, so there’s no question about identity. And the site looks undisturbed. We might even get a full skeleton.”

“That’s fantastic,” Ellie said. “How young?”

“Young,” Grant said. “Two, maybe four months at most.”

“And it’s definitely a velociraptor?”

“Definitely,” Grant said. “Maybe our luck has finally turned.”

For the last two years at Snakewater, the team had excavated only duckbilled hadrosaurs. They already had evidence for vast herds of these grazing dinosaurs, roaming the plains in groups of ten or twenty thousand, as buffalo would later roam.

But increasingly the question that faced them was: where were the predators?

They expected predators to be rare, of course. Studies of predator/prey populations in the game parks of Africa and India suggested that, roughly speaking, there was one predatory carnivore for every four hundred herbivores. That meant a herd of ten thousand duckbills would support only twenty-five tyrannosaurs[5]. So it was unlikely that they would find the remains of a large predator.

But where were the smaller predators? Snakewater had dozens of nesting sites – in some places, the ground was covered with fragments of dinosaur eggshells – and many small dinosaurs ate eggs. Animals like Dromaeosaurus[6], Oviraptor,[7] Velociraptor, and Coelurus[8] – predators three to six feet tall – must have been found here in abundance.

But they had discovered none so far.

Perhaps this velociraptor skeleton did mean their luck had changed. And an infant! Ellie knew that one of Grant’s dreams was to study infant-rearing behavior in carnivorous dinosaurs, as he had already studied the behavior of herbivores. Perhaps this was the first step toward that dream. “You must be pretty excited,” Ellie said.

Grant didn’t answer.

“My God,” he said. He was staring at the fax.

Ellie looked over Grant’s shoulder at the X-ray, and breathed out slowly. “You think it’s a triassicus[9], not a lizard,” she said.

“No,” Grant said. “This is not a lizard. No three-toed lizard has walked on this planet for two hundred million years.”

Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax – a skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless.

“Could this X-ray be faked?”

“I don’t know,” Grant said. “But it’s almost impossible to fake an X-ray. And Procompsognathus[10] is an obscure animal. Even people familiar with dinosaurs have never heard of it.”

Ellie read the note. “Specimen acquired on the beach of Cabo Blanco, July 16. Apparently a howler monkey was eating the animal, and this was all that was recovered. Oh, and it says the lizard attacked a little girl.”

“I doubt that,” Grant said. “But perhaps. Procompsognathus was so small and light we assume it must be a scavenger, only feeding off dead creatures. And you can tell the size” – he measured quickly – “it’s about twenty centimeters to the hips, which means the full animal would be about a foot tall. About as big as a chicken. Even a child would look pretty fearsome to it. It might bite an infant, but not a child.”

Ellie frowned at the X-ray image. “You think this could really be a legitimate rediscovery?” she said. “Like the coelacanth[11]?”

“Maybe,” Grant said. The coelacanth was a five-foot- long fish thought to have died out sixty-five million years ago, until a specimen was pulled from the ocean in 1938. But there were other examples.

“But could it be real?” she persisted. “What about the age?”

Grant nodded. “The age is a problem.”

Most rediscovered animals were rather recent additions to the fossil record: ten or twenty thousand years old. But the specimen they were looking at was much, much older than that. Dinosaurs had died out sixty-five million years ago. They had flourished as the dominant life form on the planet in the Jurassic, 190 million years ago. And they had first appeared in the Triassic, roughly 220 million years ago.

“Well,” Ellie said. “We know animals have survived. Crocodiles are basically Triassic animals living in the present. Sharks are Triassic. So we know it has happened before.”

Grant nodded. “And the thing is,” he said, “how else do we explain it? It’s either a fake – which I doubt – or else it’s a rediscovery. What else could it be?”

The phone rang. “Alice Levin again,” Grant said. “Let’s see if she’ll send us the actual specimen.” He answered it and looked at Ellie, surprised. “Yes, I’ll hold for Mr. Hammond.”

“Hammond? What does he want?” Ellie said.

Grant shook his head, and then said into the phone, “Yes, Mr. Hammond. Yes, it’s good to hear your voice, too.” He looked at Ellie. “Oh, you did? Oh yes? Is that right?”

Grant pushed the speaker button, and Ellie heard a raspy old-man’s voice speaking rapidly: hell of an annoyance from some EPA fellow. I don’t suppose anybody came to see you way out there?”

“As a matter of fact,” Grant said, “somebody did come to see me.”

Hammond snorted. “I was afraid of that. Did he bother you? Disrupt your work?”

“No, no, he didn’t bother me.”

“Well, you know we have an island down at Costa Rica?”

“No,” Grant said, looking at Ellie, “I didn’t know.”

“Oh yes, we bought it and started our operation, oh, four or five years ago now. Called Isla Nublar – big island, hundred miles offshore. Going to be a biological preserve. Wonderful place. Tropical jungle. You know, you ought to see it, Dr. Grant.”

“Sounds interesting,” Grant said, “but actually – ”

“It’s almost finished now, you know,” Hammond said. “You really ought to go see it. As a matter of fact, I’m going to insist you see it, Dr. Grant. You’d find it fascinating.”

“I’m in the middle of Grant said.

“Say, I’ll tell you what,” Hammond said, “I’m having some of the people who consulted for us go down there this weekend. Spend a few days and look it over. At our expense, of course. It’d be terrific if you’d give us your opinion.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Grant said.

“Oh, just for a weekend,” Hammond said, “That’s all I’m talking about, Dr. Grant. I wouldn’t want to interrupt your work. But you could hop on down there this weekend, and be back on Monday.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Grant said. “I’ve just found a new skeleton and we’ve just received some evidence for a very puzzling find, a living procompsognathus.”

“A what?” Hammond said, slowing down. “I didn’t quite get that. You said a living procompsognathus?”

“That’s right,” Grant said. “It’s a biological specimen, a fragment of a living animal from a beach called Cabo Blanco.”

“You don’t say,” Hammond said. “A living animal? How extraordinary.”

“Yes,” Grant said. “We think so, too. So, you see, this isn’t the time for me to go anywhere.”

“I see.” Hammond cleared his throat, “And when did this, ah, specimen arrive in your hands?”

“Just today.”

On the speaker, Hammond coughed. “Ah, Dr. Grant. Have you told anybody about it yet?”

“No.”

“Good, that’s good. Well. Yes. I’ll tell you frankly, Dr. Grant, I’m having a little problem about this island. This EPA thing is coming at just the wrong time.”

“How’s that?” Grant said.

“Well, we’ve had our problems and some delays… Let’s just say that I’m under a little pressure here, and I’d like you to look at this island for me. I’ll be paying you the usual weekend consultant rate of twenty thousand a day. That’d be sixty thousand for three days. And if you can spare Dr. Sattler, she’ll go at the same rate. We need a botanist. What do you say?”

Ellie looked at Grant as he said, “Well, Mr. Hammond, that much money would fully finance our expeditions for the next two summers.”

“Good, good,” Hammond said politely. “Now, I’m sending the corporate jet to pick you up at that private airfield east of Choteau. It’s only about two hours’ drive from where you are. You be there at five p.m. tomorrow. Can you and Dr. Sattler make that plane?”

“I guess we can.”

“Good. Pack lightly. You don’t need passports. I’m looking forward to it. See you tomorrow,” Hammond said, and he hung up.

Cowan, Swain and Ross

In the San Francisco law firm of Cowan, Swain and Ross Donald Gennaro listened on the phone and looked at his boss, Daniel Ross.

“I understand, John,” Gennaro said. “And Grant agreed to come? Good, that sounds fine to me. My congratulations, John.” He hung up the phone and turned to Ross.

“We can’t trust Hammond any more. He’s under too much pressure. The EPA’s investigating him, he’s behind schedule on his Costa Rican resort, and the investors are getting nervous. There have been too many rumors of problems down there. Too many workmen have died. And now this business about a living procompsit – whatever on the mainland…”

“What does that mean?” Ross said.

“Maybe nothing,” Gennaro said. “But we’ve got to inspect that island right away.”

“And what does Hammond say?”

“He insists nothing is wrong on the island. Claims he has all these security precautions.”

“But you don’t believe him,” Ross said.

“No,” Gennaro said. “I don’t.”

Donald Gennaro had come to Cowan, Swain and Ross as a specialist in investment banking. One of his first assignments, back in 1982, had been to accompany John Hammond while the old man, then nearly seventy, put together the funding to start the InGen corporation. They eventually raised almost a billion dollars.

“Hammond’s a dreamer,” Gennaro said.

“A potentially dangerous dreamer,” Ross said. “In any case, I agree that an inspection is overdue. What about your site experts?”

“I’m starting with experts Hammond already hired as consultants, early in the project.” Gennaro tossed a list onto Ross’s desk. “First group is a paleontologist, a paleobotanist, and a mathematician. They go down this weekend. I’ll go with them.”

“Will they tell you the truth?” Ross said.

“I think so. None of them had much to do with the island, and one of them – the mathematician, Ian Malcolm – was openly hostile to the project from the start. Insisted it would never work, could never work.”

“And who else?”

“Just a technical person: the computer system analyst. Review the park’s computers and fix some bugs. He should be there by Friday morning.”

“Fine,” Ross said. “You’re making the arrangements?”

“Hammond asked to place the calls himself. I think he wants to pretend that he’s not in trouble, that it’s just a social invitation. Showing off his island.”

“All right,” Ross said. “But just make sure it happens. Stay on top of it. I want this Costa Rican situation resolved within a week.” Ross got up, and walked out of the room.

Plans

“This just came,” Ellie said the next day, walking to the back of the trailer with a thick manila envelope. “It’s from Hammond.”

Grant noticed the blue-and-white InGen logo as he tore open the envelope. Inside was a thick book. As he flipped open the book, a sheet of paper fell out.

Dear Alan and Ellie,

As you can imagine we don't have much in the way offormal promotional materials yet. But this should give you some idea of the Isla Nublar project. I think it's very exciting!

Looking forward to discussing this with you! Hope you can join us!

Regards, John

“I don’t get it,” Grant said. He flipped through the sheets. “These are architectural plans.” He turned to the top sheet:

VISITOR CENTER/LODGE

ISLA NUBLAR RESORT

The next page was a topographical map. It showed Isla Nublar as an inverted teardrop, bulging at the north, tapering at the south. The island was eight miles long, and the map divided it into several large sections.

The northern section was marked VISITOR AREA and it contained structures marked “Visitor Arrivals”, “Visitor Center/Administration”, “Power/Desalinization/Support”, “Hammond Res.”, and “Safari Lodge”. Grant could see the outline of a swimming pool, the rectangles of tennis courts, and the round signs that represented planting and shrubbery.

“Looks like a resort, all right,” Ellie said.

There followed detail sheets for the Safari Lodge itself: a long low building with a series of pyramid shapes on the roof. But there was little about the other buildings in the visitor area.

And the rest of the island was even more mysterious. As far as Grant could tell, it was mostly open space. A network of roads, tunnels, and outlying buildings, and a long thin lake, with concrete dams and barriers. But, for the most part, the island was divided into big curving areas with very little development at all. Each area was marked by codes.

“Is there an explanation for the codes?” she said.

Grant flipped the pages rapidly, but he couldn’t find one. He looked at the big curving divisions, separated from one another by the network of roads. There were only six divisions on the whole island. And each division was separated from the road by a concrete moat. Outside each moat was a fence with a little lightning sign alongside it. That mystified them until they were finally able to figure out that the fences were electrified.

“That’s odd,” she said. “Electrified fences at a resort?”

“Miles of them,” Grant said. “Electrified fences and moats, together. And usually with a road alongside them as well.”

“Just like a zoo,” Ellie said.

They went back to the topographical map and looked closely at the contour lines. The roads ran oddly. The main road ran north-south, right through the central hills of the island, one section of road was cut into the side of a cliff, above a river. And the roads were raised up above ground level, so you could see over the fences.

“You know,” Ellie said, “some of these dimensions are enormous. Look at this. This concrete moat is thirty feet wide. That’s like a military fortification.”

“So are these buildings,” Grant said. He had noticed that each open division had a few buildings, usually located in out-of-the-way corners. But the buildings were all concrete, with thick walls. In side-view elevations they looked like concrete bunkers with small windows. Like the Nazi pillboxes from old war movies.

At that moment, they heard a muffled explosion, and Grant put the papers aside. “Back to work,” he said.

“Fire!”

There was a slight vibration, and then yellow contour lines traced across the computer screen, and Alan Grant had a glimpse of the skeleton, beautifully defined, the long neck arched back. It was an infant velociraptor, and it looked perfect. Grant saw the complete skeleton, traced in bright yellow. It was indeed a young specimen. The outstanding characteristic of Velociraptor – the single-toed claw, which in a full-grown animal was a curved, six-inch-long weapon capable to rip open its prey, was in this infant no larger than the thorn on a rosebush. It was hardly visible at all on the screen. And Velociraptor was a lightly built dinosaur in any case, an animal as fine-boned as a bird, and presumably as intelligent.

“Doesn’t look very fearsome,” one of the technicians said.

“He wasn’t,” Grant said. “At least, not until he grew up.” Probably this baby had scavenged, feeding off carcasses killed by the adults, after the big animals had gorged themselves, and lay basking in the sun. Carnivores could eat as much as 25 percent of their body weight in a single meal, and it made them sleepy afterward. The babies would chitter and scramble over the bodies of the adults, and nip little bites from the dead animal. The babies were probably cute little animals.

But an adult velociraptor was another matter entirely. Pound for pound, a velociraptor was the most rapacious dinosaur that ever lived. Although relatively small – about two hundred pounds, the size of a leopard – velociraptors were quick, intelligent, and vicious, able to attack with sharp jaws, powerful clawed forearms, and the devastating single claw on the foot.

Velociraptors hunted in packs, and Grant thought it must have been a sight to see a dozen of these animals racing at full speed, leaping onto the back of a much larger dinosaur, tearing at the neck and slashing at the ribs and belly.

“How did the baby die?” one of the workers asked.

“I doubt we’ll know,” Grant replied. “Infant mortality in the wild is high. In African parks, it runs seventy percent among some carnivores. It could have been anything – disease, separation from the group, anything. Or even attack by an adult. We know these animals hunted in packs, but we don’t know anything about their social behavior in a group.”

The students nodded. They had all studied animal behavior, and they knew, for example, that when a new male took over a lion pride, the first thing he did was kill all the cubs. The reason was genetic: the male had evolved to disseminate his genes as widely as possible, and by killing the cubs he brought all the females into heat, so that he could impregnate them. It also prevented the females from wasting their time nurturing the offspring of another male.

Perhaps the velociraptor hunting pack was also ruled by a dominant male. They knew so little about dinosaurs, Grant thought. After 150 years of research and excavation all around the world, they still knew almost nothing about what the dinosaurs had really been like.

“We’ve got to go,” Ellie said, “if we’re going to get to Choteau by five.”

Hammond

Gennaro’s secretary ran in with a new suitcase. It still had the sales tags on it. “You know, Mr. Gennaro,” she said severely, “when you forget to pack it makes me think you don’t really want to go on this trip.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Gennaro said. “I’m missing my kid’s birthday.”

“Well, I did the best I could on short notice,” his secretary said. “There’s running shoes your size, and khaki shorts and shirts, and a shaving kit. A pair of jeans and a sweatshirt if it gets cold. The car is downstairs to take you to the airport. You have to leave now to make the flight.”

She left. Gennaro walked down the hallway, tearing the sales tags off the suitcase. As he passed the all-glass conference room, Dan Ross left the table and came outside.

“Have a good trip,” Ross said. “But let’s be very clear about one thing. I don’t know how bad this situation actually is, Donald. But if there’s a problem on that island, burn it to the ground.”

“Jesus, Dan… We’re talking about a big investment.”

“Don’t hesitate. Don’t think about it. Just do it. Hear me?”

Gennaro nodded. “I hear you,” he said. “But Hammond – ”

“Screw Hammond,” Ross said.

“My boy, my boy,” the familiar raspy voice said. “How have you been, my boy?”

“Very well, sir,” Gennaro replied. He leaned back in the padded leather chair of the Gulfstream II jet as it flew east, toward the Rocky Mountains.

“You never call me any more,” Hammond said reproachfully. “I’ve missed you, Donald. How is your lovely wife?”

“She’s fine. Elizabeth’s fine. We have a little girl now.”

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Notes

1

coatimundis – коати (лат. Nasua narica) – млекопитающее из рода носух семейства енотовых. Название «коати» происходит из местных индейских языков. Распространена в Белизе, Колумбии (залив Ураба), Коста-Рике, Сальвадоре, Гватемале, Гондурасе, Мексике, Никарагуа, Панаме, США.

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2

basilisk lizard – василиски или базилиски (лат. Basiliscus) – род ящериц из семейства Corytophanidae. Насчитывают четыре вида, распространённых в тропической Америке, в частности в Гвиане, Коста-Рике и Панаме.

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3

hadrosaur – гадрозавр – динозавр из семейства так называемых «утконосых динозавров». Время обитания – меловой период. Для семейства гадрозавров характерен гребень различных форм. В этом гребне находились носовые полости, которые, вероятно, служили для издавания громких звуков. Гадрозавры имели плоский беззубый, схожий с утиным, клюв, а в задней части челюсти находилось множество плоских зубов. Передвигались как на двух, так и на четырёх конечностях. Имели длинные задние и более короткие передние лапы. Длинный плоский хвост служил для равновесия. Гадрозавры вели стадный образ жизни, строили гнёзда, охраняли кладку и вместе заботились о потомстве.

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4

velociraptor – велоцираптор (лат. Velociraptor от лат. velox – «быстрый», rapter – «охотник») – род хищных двуногих динозавров из семейства дромеозаврид. Содержит один общепризнанный вид – Velociraptor mongoliensis. Жил в конце мелового периода 83–70 млн лет назад. Его останки обнаружены в республике Монголия и китайской Внутренней Монголии. Был меньше других представителей своего семейства – дейнониха и ахилло- батора – и обладал рядом прогрессивных анатомических черт. Велоцираптор был небольшим динозавром, до 1,8 м в длину, 60–70 см в высоту и весил – 20 кг.

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5

tyrannosaur – тираннозавр (лат. Tyrannosaurus) – род плотоядных динозавров из группы целурозавров, подотряда теропод. Вид Tyrannosaurus rex (лат. rex – «царь»), название которого сокращается по общепринятым правилам как T.rex, проживал на территории североамериканского материка, точнее, в той части, которая в те времена была островным континентом под названием Ларамидия примерно 67–65,5 млн лет назад. Тираннозавр реке был одним из самых крупных наземных хищников; самый большой из всех полных скелетов в длину достигает 12,3 метра, а в высоту – 4 метра до бедра.

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6

dromaeosaurus – дромеозавр (лат. Dromaeosaurus) – род хищных ящеротазовых динозавров семейства дромеозавридов, живших в конце мелового периода (76,5—74,8 млн лет назад) в западной и северной части Соединённых Штатов Америки и в Канаде.

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7

oviraptor – овираптор – род ящеротазовых динозавров подотряда тероподов, живших в меловом периоде в Монголии. В высоту достигал до 2 метров, весил около 400 кг. Имел длинные ноги и передние лапы. На морде имел небольшой рог.

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8

coelurus – целюр (лат. Coelurus – «полый хвост») – род динозавров из средне-позднего киммериджского яруса юрского периода.

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9

triassicus – Триамсовый перимод (триамс) – первый геологический период мезозойской эры. Следует за пермским периодом и предшествует юрскому. Начался 250 млн лет назад, кончился 200 млн лет назад. Продолжался, таким образом, около 51 млн лет. Автор имеет в виду, что на снимке не современное животное, а ящер Триасского периода.

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10

procompsognathus – прокомпсогнат – это динозавр семейства компсогнатид (Compsognathidae). Был обнаружен в Германии. Питался насекомыми и мелкими млекопитающими. Длина – 1,2 метра. Рост – 30 сантиметров. Вес – 1–2,5 кг. Значение названия: появившийся раньше изящной челюсти. Предполагается, что это предок компсогната – изящной челюсти.

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11

coelacanth – целакант. Целакантообразные (лат. Coelacanthiformes) – отряд лопастепёрых рыб. Этот отряд известен по многочисленным ископаемым представителям и единственному современному роду Латимерия (Latimeria). До открытия латимерии в 1938 году целакантообразные считались полностью вымершими.

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