Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1)

Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1) Page 11

    For the past two years, Arnold's job had been to get Jurassic Park up and running. As an engineer, he was accustomed to long time schedules-he often referred to "the September opening," by which he meant September of the following year-and as the September opening approached, he was unhappy with the progress that had been made. He knew from experience that it sometimes took years to work the bugs out of a single park ride-let alone get a whole park running properly.

    "You're just a worrier," Hammond said.

    "I don't think so," Arnold said. "You've got to realize that, from an engineering standpoint, Jurassic Park is by far the most ambitious theme park in history. Visitors will never think about it, but I do."

    He ticked the points off on his fingers.

    "First, Jurassic Park has all the problems of any amusement park-ride maintenance, queue control, transportation, food handling, living accommodations, trash disposal, security.

    "Second, we have all the problems of a major zoo-care of the animals; health and welfare; feeding and cleanliness; protection from insects, pests, allergies, and illnesses- maintenance of barriers; and all the rest.

    "And, finally, we have the unprecedented problems of caring for a population of animals that no one has ever tried to maintain before."

    "Oh, it's not as bad as all that," Hammond said.

    "Yes, it is. You're just not here to see it," Arnold said. "The tyrannosaurs drink the lagoon water and sometimes get sick; we aren't sure why. The triceratops females kill each other in fights for dominance and have to be separated into groups smaller than six. We don't know why. The stegosaurs frequently get blisters on their tongues and diarrhea, for reasons no one yet understands, even though we've lost two. Hypsilophodonts get skin rashes. And the veloctraptors-"

    "Let's not start on the velociraptors," Hammond said. "I'm sick of hearing about the velociraptors. How they're the most vicious creatures anyone has ever seen."

    "They are," Muldoon said, in a low voice. "They should all be destroyed."

    "You wanted to fit them with radio collars," Hammond said. "And I agreed."

    "Yes. And they promptly chewed the collars off. But even if the raptors never get free," Arnold said, "I think we have to accept that Jurassic Park is    inherently hazardous."

    "Oh balls, " Hammond said. "Whose side are you on, anyway?

    "We now have fifteen species of extinct animals, and most of them are dangerous," Arnold said. "We've been forced to delay the jungle River Ride because of the dilophosaurs; and the Pteratops Lodge in the aviary, because the pterodactyls are so unpredictable. These aren't engineering delays, Mr. Hammond. They're problems with control of the animals."

    "You've had plenty of engineering delays," Hammond said. "Don't blame it on the animals."

    "Yes, we have. In fact, it's all we could do to get the main attraction, Park Drive, working correctly, to get the CD-ROMs inside the cars to be controlled by the motion sensors. It's taken weeks of adjustment to get that working properly-and now the electric gearshifts on the cars are acting up! The gearshifts!"

    "Let's keep it in perspective," Hammond said. "You get the engineering correct and the animals will fall into place. After all, they're trainable."

    From the beginning, this had been one of the core beliefs of the planners. The animals, however exotic, would fundamentally behave like animals in zoos anywhere. They would learn the regularities of their care, and they would respond.

    "Meanwhile, how's the computer?" Hammond said. He glanced at Dennis Nedry, who was working at a terminal in the corner of the room. "This damn computer has always been a headache."

    "We're getting there," Nedry said.

    "If you had done it right in the first place," Hammond began, but Arnold put a restraining band on his arm. Arnold knew there was no point in antagonizing Nedry while he was working.

    "It's a large system," Arnold said. "There are bound to be glitches."

    In fact, the bug list now ran to more than 130 items, and included many odd aspects. For example:

    The animal-feeding program reset itself every twelve hours, not every twenty-four hours, and would not record feedings on Sundays. As a result, the staff could not accurately measure how much the animals were eating.

    The security system, which controlled all the security-card-operated doors, cut out whenever main power was lost, and did not come back on with auxiliary power. The security Program only ran with main power.

    The physical conservation program, intended to dim lights after 10:00 p.m., only worked on alternate days of the week.

    The automated fecal analysis (called Auto Poop), designed to check for parasites in the animal stools, invariably recorded all specimens as having the parasite Phagostomum venulosum, although none did. The program then automatically dispensed medication into the animals' food. If the handlers dumped the medicine out of the hoppers to prevent its being dispensed, an alarm sounded which could not be turned off.

    And so it went, page after page of errors.

    When he had arrived, Dennis Nedry had been under the impression that he could make all the fixes himself over the weekend. He had paled when he saw the full listing. Now he was calling his office in Cambridge, telling his staff programmers they were going to have to cancel their weekend plans and work overtime until Monday. And he had told John Arnold that he would need to use every telephone link between Isla Nublar and the mainland just to transfer program data back and forth to his programmers.

    While Nedry worked, Arnold punched up a new window in his own monitor. It allowed him to see what Nedry was doing at the corner console. Not that he didn't trust Nedry. But Arnold just liked to know what was going on.

    He looked at the graphics display on his right-hand console, which showed the progress of the electric Land Cruisers. They were following the river, just north of the aviary, and the ornithischian paddock.

    "If you look to your left," said the voice, "you will see the dome of the Jurassic Park aviary, which is not yet finished for visitors." Tim saw sunlight glinting off aluminum struts in the distance. "And directly below is our Mesozoic jungle river-where, if you are lucky, you just may catch a glimpse of a very rare carnivore. Keep your eyes peeled, everyone!"

    Inside the Land Cruiser, the screens showed a bird-like head topped with a flaming red crest. But everyone in Tim's car was looking out the windows. The car was driving along a high ridge, overlooking a fast-moving river below. The river was almost enclosed by dense foliage on both sides.

    "There they are now," said the voice. "The animals you see are called dilophosaurs."

    Despite what the recording said, Tim saw only one. The dilophosaur crouched on its hind legs by the river, drinking. It was built on the basic carnivore pattern, with a heavy tail, strong hind limbs, and a long neck. Its ten-foot-tall body was spotted yellow and black, like a leopard.

    But it was the head that held Tim's attention. Two broad curving crests ran along the top of the head from the eyes to the nose. The crests met in the center, making a V shape above the dinosaur's head. The crests had red and black stripes, reminiscent of a parrot or toucan. The animal gave a soft hooting cry, like an owl.

    "They're pretty," Lex said.

    "Dilophosaurus, " the tape said, "is one of the earliest carnivorous dinosaurs. Scientists thought their jaw muscles were too weak to kill prey, and imagined they were primarily scavengers. But now we know they are poisonous."

    "Hey." Tim grinned. "All right."

    Again the distinctive booting call of the dilophosaur drifted across the afternoon air toward them.

    Lex shifted uneasily in her seat. "Are they really poisonous, Mr. Regis?"

    "Don't worry about it," Ed Regis said.

    "But are they?"

    "Well, yes, Lex."

    "Along with such living reptiles as Gila monsters and rattlesnakes, Dilophosaurus secretes a hematotoxin from glands in its mouth. Unconsciousness follows within minutes of a bite. The dinosaur will then finish the victim off at its leisure-making Dilophosaurus a beautiful but deadly addition to the animals you see here at Jurassic Park."

    The Land Cruiser turned a corner, leaving the river behind. Tim looked back, hoping for a last glimpse of the dilophosaur. This was amazing! Poisonous dinosaurs! He wished he could stop the car, but everything was automatic. He bet Dr. Grant wanted to stop the car, too.

    "If you look on the bluff to the right, you'll see Les Gigantes, the site of our superb three-star dining room. Chef Alain Richard hails from the world-famous Le Beaumani��re in France. Make your reservations by dialing four from your hotel rooms."

    Tim looked up on the bluff, and saw nothing.

    "Not for a while, though," Ed Regis said. "The restaurant won't even start construction until November."

    "Continuing on our prehistoric safari, we come next to the herbivores of the ornithischian group. If you look to your right, you can probably see them now."

    Tim saw two animals, standing motionless in the shade of a large tree. Triceratops: the size and gray color of an elephant, with the truculent stance of a rhino. The horns above each eye curved five feet into the air, looking almost like inverted elephant tusks. A third, rhino-like born was located near the nose. And they had the beaky snout of a rhino.

    "Unlike other dinosaurs," the voice said, "Triceratops serratus can't see well. They're nearsighted, like the rhinos of today, and they tend to be surprised by moving objects. They'd charge our car if they were close enough to see it! But relax, folks-we're safe enough here."

    "Triceratops have a fan-shaped crest behind their heads. It's made of solid bone, and it's very strong. These animals weigh about seven tons each. Despite their appearance, they are actually quite docile. They know their handlers, and they'll allow themselves to be petted. They particularly like to be scratched in the hindquarters."

    "Why don't they move?" Lex said. She rolled down her window. "Hey! Stupid dinosaur! Move!"

    "Don't bother the animals, Lex," Ed Regis said.

    "Why? It's stupid. They just sit there like a picture in a book," Lex said.

    The voice was saying, "-easygoing monsters from a bygone world stand in sharp contrast to what we will see next. The most famous predator in the history of the world: the mighty tyrant lizard, known as Tyrannosaurus rex."

    "Good, Tyrannosaurus rex, " Tim said.

    "I hope he's better than these bozos," Lex said, turning away from the triceratops.

    The Land Cruiser rumbled forward.

    Big Rex

    "The mighty tyrannosaurs arose late in dinosaur history. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a hundred and twenty million years, but there were tyrannosaurs for only the last fifteen million years of that period."

    The Land Cruisers had stopped at the rise of a hill. They overlooked a forested area sloping down to the edge of the lagoon. The sun was falling to the west, sinking into a misty horizon. The whole landscape of Jurassic Park was bathed in soft light, with lengthening shadows. The surface of the lagoon rippled in pink crescents. Farther south, they saw the graceful necks of the camarasaurs, standing at the water's edge, their bodies mirrored in the moving surface. It was quiet, except for the soft drone of cicadas. As they stared out at that landscape, it was possible to believe that they had really been transported millions of years back in time to a vanished world.

    "It works, doesn't it?" they heard Ed Regis say, over the intercom. "I like to come here sometimes, in the evening. And just sit."

    Grant was unimpressed. "Where is T-rex?"

    "Good question. You often see the little one down in the lagoon. The lagoon's stocked, so we have fish in there. The little one has learned to catch the fish. Interesting how he does it. He doesn't use his hands, but he ducks his whole head under the water. Like a bird."

    "The little one?"

    "The little T-rex. He's a juvenile, two years old, and about a third grown now. Stands eight feet high, weighs a ton and a half. The other one's a full-grown tyrannosaur. But I don't see him at the moment."

    "Maybe he's down hunting the camarasaurs," Grant said.

    Regis laughed, his voice tinny over the radio. "He would if he could, believe me. Sometimes he stands by the lagoon and stares at those animals, and wiggles those little forearms of his in frustration. But the T-rex territory is completely enclosed with trenches and fences. They're disguised from view, but believe me, he can't go anywhere."

    "Then where is he?"

    "Hiding," Regis said. "He's a little shy."

    "Shy?" Malcolm said. "Tyrannosaurus rex is shy?"

    "Well, he conceals himself as a general rule. You almost never see him out in the open, especially in daylight."

    "Why is that?"

    "We think it's because he has sensitive skin and sunburns easily."

    Malcolm began to laugh.

    Grant sighed. "You're destroying a lot of illusions."

    "I don't think you'll be disappointed," Regis said. "Just wait."

    They heard a soft bleating sound. In the center of a field, a small cage rose up into view, lifted on hydraulics from underground. The cage bars slid down, and the goat remained tethered in the center of the field, bleating plaintively.

    "Any minute now," Regis said again. They stared out the window.

    "Look at them," Hammond said, watching the control room monitor. "Leaning out of the windows, so eager. They can't wait to see it. They have come for the danger."

    "That's what I'm afraid of," Muldoon said. He twirled the keys on his finger and watched the Land Cruisers tensely. This was the first time that visitors had toured Jurassic Park, and Muldoon shared Arnold's apprehension.

    Robert Muldoon was a big man, fifty years old, with a steel-gray mustache and deep blue eyes. Raised in Kenya, he had spent most of his life as a guide for African big-game hunters, as had his father before him. But since 1980, he had worked principally for conservation groups and zoo designers as a wildlife consultant. He had become well known; an article in the London Sunday Times had said, "What Robert Trent Jones is to golf courses, Robert Muldoon is to zoos: a designer of unsurpassed knowledge and skill."

    In 1986, he had done some work for a San Francisco company that was building a private wildlife park on an island in North America. Muldoon had laid out the boundaries for different animals, defining space and habitat requirements for lions, elephants, zebras, and hippos. Identifying which animals could be kept together, and which had to be separated. At the time, it had been a fairly routine job. He had been more interested in an Indian park called TigerWorld in southern Kashmir.

    Then, a year ago, he was offered a job as game warden of Jurassic Park. It coincided with a desire to leave Africa; the salary was excellent; Muldoon had taken it on for a year. He was astonished to discover the park was really a collection of genetically engineered prehistoric animals.

    It was of course interesting work, but during his years in Africa, Muldoon had developed an unblinking view of animals-an unromantic view-that frequently set him at odds with the Jurassic Park management in California, particularly the little martinet standing beside him in the control room. In Muldoon's opinion, cloning dinosaurs in a laboratory was one thing. Maintaining them in the wild was quite another.

    It was Muldoon's view that some dinosaurs were too dangerous to be kept in a park setting. In part, the danger existed because they still knew so little about the animals. For example, nobody even suspected the dilophosaurs were poisonous until they were observed hunting indigenous rats on the island-biting the rodents and then stepping back, to wait for them to die. And even then nobody suspected the dilophosaurs could spit until one of the handlers was almost blinded by spitting venom.

    After that, Hammond had agreed to study dilophosaur venom, which was found to contain seven different toxic enzymes. It was also discovered that the dilophosaurs could spit a distance of fifty feet. Since this raised the possibility that a guest in a car might be blinded, management decided to remove the poison sacs. The vets had tried twice, on two different animals, without success, No one knew where the poison was being secreted. And no one would ever know until an autopsy was performed on a dilophosaur and management would not allow one to be killed.

    Muldoon worried even more about the velociraptors. They were instinctive hunters, and they never passed up prey, They killed even when they 't weren't hungry. They killed for the pleasure of killing. They were swift: strong runners and astonishing jumpers. They had lethal claws on all four limbs; one swipe of a forearm would disembowel a man, spilling his guts out. And they had powerful tearing jaws that ripped flesh instead of biting it. They were far more intelligent than the other dinosaurs, and they seemed to be natural cage-breakers.

    Every zoo expert knew that certain animals were especially likely to get free of their cages. Some, like monkeys and elephants, could undo cage doors. Others, like wild pigs, were unusually intelligent and could lift gate fasteners with their snouts. But who would suspect that the giant armadillo was a notorious cage-breaker? Or the moose? Yet a moose was almost as skillful with its snout as an elephant with its trunk. Moose were always getting free; they had a talent for it.

    And so did velociraptors.

    Raptors were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees. And, like chimpanzees, they had agile hands that enabled them to open doors and manipulate objects. They could escape with ease. And when, as Muldoon had feared, one of them finally escaped, it killed two construction workers and maimed a third before being recaptured. After that episode, the visitor lodge had been reworked with heavy barred gates, a high perimeter fence, and tempered-glass windows. And the raptor holding pen was rebuilt with electronic sensors to warn of another impending escape.

    Muldoon wanted guns as well. And he wanted shoulder-mounted TOW-missile launchers. Hunters knew how difficult it was to bring down a four-ton African elephant-and some of the dinosaurs weighed ten times as much. Management was horrified, insisting there be no guns anywhere on the island. When Muldoon threatened to quit, and to take his story to the press, a compromise was reached. In the end, two specially built laser-guided missile launchers were kept in a locked room in the basement. Only Muldoon had keys to the room.

    Those were the keys Muldoon was twirling now. "I'm going downstairs," he said.

    Arnold, watching the control screens, nodded. The two Land Cruisers sat at the top of the hill, waiting for the T-rex to appear.

    "Hey," Dennis Nedry called, from the far console. "As long as you're up, get me a Coke, okay?"

    Grant waited in the car, watching quietly. The bleating of the goat became louder, more insistent. The goat tugged frantically at its tether, racing back and forth. Over the radio, Grant heard Lex say in alarm, "What's going to happen to the goat? Is she going to eat the goat?"

    "I think so," someone said to her, and then Ellie turned the radio down. Then they smelled the odor, a garbage stench of putrefaction and decay that drifted up the hillside toward them.

    Grant whispered, "He's here."

    "She," Malcolm said.

    The goat was tethered in the center of the field, thirty yards from the nearest trees. The dinosaur must be somewhere among the trees, but for a moment Grant could see nothing at all. Then he realized he was looking too low: the animal's head stood twenty feet above the ground, half concealed among the upper branches of the palm trees.

    Malcolm whispered, "Oh, my God. . . . She's as large as a bloody building. . . ."

    Grant stared at the enormous square head, five feet long, mottled reddish brown, with huge jaws and fangs. The tyrannosaur's jaws worked once, opening and closing. But the huge animal did not emerge from hiding.

    Malcolm whispered: "How long will it wait?"

    "Maybe three or four minutes. Maybe-"

    The tyrannosaur sprang silently forward, fully revealing her enormous body. In four bounding steps she covered the distance to the goat, bent down, and bit it through the neck. The bleating stopped. There was silence.

    Poised over her kill, the tyrannosaur became suddenly hesitant. Her massive head turned on the muscular neck, looking in all directions. She stared fixedly at the Land Cruiser, high above on the hill.

    Malcolm whispered, "Can she see us?"

    "Oh yes," Regis said, on the intercom. "Let's see if she's going to eat here in front of us, or if she's going to drag the prey away."

    The tyrannosaur bent down, and sniffed the carcass of the goat. A bird chirped: her head snapped up, alert, watchful. She looked back and forth, scanning in small jerking shifts.

    "Like a bird," Ellie said.

    Still the tyrannosaur hesitated. "What is she afraid of?" Malcolm whispered.

    "Probably another tyrannosaur," Grant whispered. Big carnivores like lions and tigers often became cautious after a kill, behaving as if suddenly exposed. Nineteenth-century zoologists imagined the animals felt guilty for what they had done. But contemporary scientists documented the effort behind a kill-hours of patient stalking before the final lunge-as well as the frequency of failure. The idea of "nature, red in tooth and claw" was wrong; most often the prey got away. When a carnivore finally brought down an animal, it was watchful for another predator, who might attack it and steal its prize. Thus this tyrannosaur was probably fearful of another tyrannosaur.

    The huge animal bent over the goat again. One great hind limb held the carcass in place as the jaws began to tear the flesh.

    "She's going to stay," Regis whispered. "Excellent." The tyrannosaur lifted her head again, ragged chunks of bleeding flesh in her jaws. She stared at the Land Cruiser. She began to chew. They heard the sickening crunch of bones.

    "Ewww," Lex said, over the intercom. "That's disgusting."

    And then, as if caution had finally gotten the better of her, the tyrannosaur lifted the remains of the goat in her jaws and carried it silently back among the trees.

    "Ladies and gentlemen, Tyrannosaurus rex, " the tape said. The Land Cruisers started up, and moved silently off, through the foliage.

    Malcolm sat back in his seat. "Fantastic," he said.

    Gennaro wiped his forehead. He looked pale.

    Control

    Henry Wu came into the control room to find everyone sitting in the dark, listening to the voices on the radio.

    "-Jesus, if an animal like that gets out," Gennaro was saying, his voice tinny on the speaker, "there'd be no stopping it."

    "No stopping it, no . . ."

    "Huge, with no natural enemies . . ."

    "My God, think of it . . ."

    In the control room, Hammond said, "Damn those people. They are so negative."

    Wu said, "They're still going on about an animal escaping? I don't understand. They must have seen by now that we have everything under control. We've engineered the animals and engineered the resort. . . ." He shrugged.

    It was Wu's deepest perception that the park was fundamentally sound, as he believed his paleo-DNA was fundamentally sound. Whatever problems might arise in the DNA were essentially point-problems in the code, causing a specific problem in the phenotype: an enzyme that didn't switch on, or a protein that didn't fold. Whatever the difficulty, it was always solved with a relatively minor adjustment in the next version.

    Similarly, he knew that Jurassic Park's problems were not fundamental problems. They were not control problems. Nothing as basic, or as serious, as the possibility of an animal escaping. Wu found it offensive to think that anyone would believe him capable of contributing to a system where such a thing could happen.

    "It's that Malcolm," Hammond said darkly. "He's behind it all. He was against us from the start, you know. He's got his theory that complex systems can't be controlled and nature can't be imitated. I don't know what his problem is. Hell, we're just making a zoo here. World's full of 'em, and they all work fine. But he's going to prove his theory or die trying. I just hope he doesn't panic Gennaro into trying to shut the park down."

    Wu said, "Can he do that?"

    "No," Hammond said. "But he can try. He can try and frighten the Japanese investors, and get them to withdraw funds. Or he can make a stink with the San Jose government. He can make trouble."

    Arnold stubbed out his cigarette. "Let's wait and see what happens," he said. "We believe in the park. Let's see how it plays out."

    Muldoon got off the elevator, nodded to the ground-floor guard, and went downstairs to the basement. He flicked on the lights. The basement was filled with two dozen Land Cruisers, arranged in neat rows. These were the electric cars that would eventually form an endless loop, touring the park, returning to the visitor center.

    In the corner was a Jeep with a red stripe, one of two gasoline-powered vebicles-Harding, the vet, had taken the other that morning-which could go anywhere in the park, even among the animals. The Jeeps were painted with a diagonal red stripe because for some reason it discouraged the triceratops from charging the car.

    Muldoon moved past the Jeep, toward the back. The steel door to the armaments room was unmarked. He unlocked it with his key, and swung the heavy door wide. Gun racks lined the interior. He pulled out a Randler Shoulder Launcher and a case of canisters. He tucked two gray rockets under his other arm.

    After locking the door behind him, he put the gun into the back seat of the Jeep. As he left the garage, he heard the distant rumble of thunder.

    "Looks like rain," Ed Regis said, glancing up at the sky.

    The Land Cruisers had stopped again, near the sauropod swamp. A large herd of apatosaurs was grazing at the edge of the lagoon, eating the leaves of the upper branches of the palm trees. In the same area were several duckbilled hadrosaurs, which in comparison looked much smaller.

    Of course, Tim knew the hadrosaurs weren't really small. It was only that the apatosaurs were so much larger. Their tiny heads reached fifty feet into the air, extending out on their long necks.

    "The big animals you see are commonly called Brontosaurus, " the recording said, "but they are actually Apatosaurus. They weigh more than thirty tons. That means a single animal is as big as a whole herd of modern elephants. And you may notice that their preferred area, alongside the lagoon, is not swampy. Despite what the books say, brontosaurs avoid swamps. They prefer dry land."

    "Brontosaurus is the biggest dinosaur, Lex," Ed Regis said. Tim didn't bother to contradict him. Actually, Brachiosaurus was three times as large. And some people thought Ultrasaurus and Seismosaurus were even larger than Brachiosaurus. Seismosaurus might have weighed a hundred tons!

    Alongside the apatosaurs, the smaller hadrosaurs stood on their hind legs to get at foliage. They moved gracefully for such large creatures. Several infant hadrosaurs scampered around the adults, eating the leaves that dropped from the mouths of the larger animals.

    "The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park don't breed," the recording said. "The young animals you see were introduced a few months ago, already hatched. But the adults nurture them anyway."

    There was the rolling growl of thunder. The sky was darker, lower, and menacing.

    "Yeah, looks like rain, all right," Ed Regis said.

    The car started forward, and Tim looked back at the hadrosaurs. Suddenly, off to one side, he saw a pale yellow animal moving quickly. There were brownish stripes on its back. He recognized it instantly. "Hey!" he shouted. "Stop the car!"

    :'What is it?" Ed Regis said.

    'Quick! Stop the car!"

    "We move on now to see the last of our great prehistoric animals, the stegosaurs," the recorded voice said.

    "What's the matter, Tim?"

    "I saw one! I saw one in the field out there!"

    "Saw what?"

    "A raptor! In that field!"

    "The stegosaurs are a mid-Jurassic animal, evolving about a hundred and seventy million years ago," the recording said. "Several of these remarkable herbivores live here at Jurassic Park-"

    "Oh, I don't think so, Tim," Ed Regis said. "Not a raptor."

    "I did! Stop the car!"

    There was a babble on the intercom, as the news was relayed to Grant and Malcolm. "Tim says he saw a raptor."

    "Where?"

    "Back at the field."

    "Let's go back and look."

    "We can't go back," Ed Regis said. "We can only go forward. The cars are programmed."

    "We can't go back?" Grant said.

    "No," Regis said. "Sorry, You see, it's kind of a ride-"

    "Tim, this is Professor Malcolm," said a voice cutting in on the intercom. "I have just one question for you about this raptor. How old would you say it was?"

    "Older than the baby we saw today," Tim said. "And younger than the big adults in the pen. The adults were six feet tall. This one was about half that size."

    "That's fine," Malcolm said.

    "I only saw it for a second," Tim said.

    "I'm sure it wasn't a raptor," Ed Regis said. "It couldn't possibly be a raptor. Must have been one of the othys. They're always jumping their fences. We have a hell of a time with them."

    "I know I saw a raptor," Tim said.

    "I'm hungry," Lex said. She was starting to whine.

    In the control room, Arnold turned to Wu. "What do you think the kid saw?"

    "I think it must have been an otby."

    Arnold nodded. "We have trouble tracking otbys, because they spend so much time In the trees." The otbys were an exception to the usual minute-to-minute control they maintained over the animals. The computers were constantly losing and picking up the othys, as they went into the trees and then came down again.

    "What burns me," Hammond said, "is that we have made this wonderful park, this fantastic park, and our very first visitors are going through it like accountants, just looking for problems. They aren't experiencing the wonder of it at all."

    "That's their problem," Arnold said. "We can't make them experience wonder." The intercom clicked, and Arnold heard a voice drawl, "Ah, John, this is the Anne B over at the dock. We haven't finished offloading, but I'm looking at that storm pattern south of us. I'd rather not be tied up here if this chop gets any worse."

    Arnold turned to the monitor showing the cargo vessel, which was moored at the dock on the east side of the island. He pressed the radio button. "How much left to do, Jim?"

    "Just the three final equipment containers. I haven't checked the mainfest, but I assume you can wait another two weeks for it. We're not well berthed here, you know, and we are one hundred miles offshore."

    "You requesting permission to leave?"

    "Yes, John."

    "I want that equipment," Hammond said. "That's equipment for the labs. We need it."

    "Yes," Arnold said. "But you didn't want to put money into a storm barrier to protect the pier. So we don't have a good harbor. If the storm gets worse, the ship will be pounded against the dock. I've seen ships lost that way. Then you've got all the other expenses, replacement of the vessel plus salvage to clear your dock . . . and you can't use your dock until you do. . . ."

    Hammond gave a dismissing wave. "Get them out of there."

    "Permission to leave, Anne B, " Arnold said, into the radio.

    "See you in two weeks," the voice said.

    On the video monitor, they saw the crew on the decks, casting off the lines. Arnold turned back to the main console bank. He saw the Land Cruisers moving through fields of steam.

    "Where are they now?" Hammond said.

    "It looks like the south fields," Arnold said. The southern end of the island had more volcanic activity than the north. "That means they should be almost to the stegos. I'm sure they'll stop and see what Harding is doing."

    Stegosaur

    As the Land Cruiser came to a stop, Ellie Sattler stared through the plumes of steam at the stegosaurus. It was standing quietly, not moving. A Jeep with a red stripe was parked alongside it.

    "I have to admit, that's a funny-looking animal," Malcolm said.

    The stegosaurus was twenty feet long, with a huge bulky body and vertical armor plates along its back. The tail had dangerous-looking three-foot spikes. But the neck tapered to an absurdly small head with a stupid gaze, like a very dumb horse.

    As they watched, a man walked around from behind the animal. "That's our vet, Dr. Harding," Regis said, over the radio. "He's anesthetized the stego, which is why it's not moving. It's sick."

    Grant was already getting out of the car, hurrying toward the motionless stegosaur. Ellie got out and looked back as the second Land Cruiser pulled up and the two kids jumped out. "What's he sick with?" Tim said.

    "They're not sure," Ellie said.

    The great leathery plates along the stegosaur's spine drooped slightly. It breathed slowly, laboriously, making a wet sound with each breath.

    "Is it contagious?" Lex said.