Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1)

Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1) Page 15

    The sign said ELECTRIFIED FENCE 10,000 VOLTS DO NOT TOUCH, but Nedry opened it with his bare band, and unlocked the gate, swinging it wide. He went back to the Jeep, drove through the gate, and then walked back to close it behind him.

    Now he was inside the park itself, no more than a mile from the east dock. He stepped on the accelerator and bunched forward over the steering wheel, peering through the rain-slashed windshield as he drove the Jeep down the narrow road. He was driving fast-too fast-but he had to keep to his timetable. He was surrounded on all sides by black jungle, but soon he should be able to see the beach and the ocean off to his left.

    This damned storm, he thought. It might screw up everything. Because if Dodgson's boat wasn't waiting for him at the east dock when Nedry got there, the whole plan would be ruined. Nedry couldn't wait very long, or he would be missed back at the control room. The whole idea behind the plan was that he could drive to the east dock, drop off the embryos, and be back in a few minutes, before anyone noticed. It was a good plan, a clever plan. Nedry'd worked on it carefully, refining every detail. This plan was going to make him a million and a half dollars, one point five meg. That was ten years of income in a single tax-free shot, and it was going to change his life. Nedry'd been damned careful, even to the point of making Dodgson meet him in the San Francisco airport at the last minute with an excuse about wanting to see the money, Actually, Nedry wanted to record his conversation with Dodgson, and mention him by name on the tape. Just so that Dodgson wouldn't forget he owed the rest of the money, Nedry was including a copy of the tape with the embryos. In short, Nedry had thought of everything.

    Except this damned storm.

    Something dashed across the road, a white flash in his headlights. It looked like a large rat. It scurried into the underbrush, dragging a fat tail. Possum. Amazing that a possum could survive here. You'd think the dinosaurs would get an animal like that.

    Where was the damned dock?

    He was driving fast, and he'd already been gone five minutes. He should have reached the east dock by now. Had he taken a wrong turn? He didn't think so. He hadn't seen any forks in the road at all.

    Then where was the dock?

    It was a shock when he came around a corner and saw that the road terminated in a gray concrete barrier, six feet tall and streaked dark with rain. He slammed on the brakes, and the Jeep fishtailed, losing traction in an end-to-end spin, and for a horrified moment he thought he was going to smash into the barrier-he knew he was going to smash-and he spun the wheel frantically, and the Jeep slid to a stop, the headlamps just a foot from the concrete wall.

    He paused there, listening to the rhythmic flick of the wipers. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He looked back down the road. He'd obviously taken a wrong turn somewhere. He could retrace his steps, but that would take too long.

    He'd better try and find out where the hell he was.

    He got out of the Jeep, feeling heavy raindrops spatter his head. It was a real tropical storm, raining so hard that it hurt. He glanced at his watch, pushing the button to illuminate the digital dial. Six minutes gone. Where the hell was he? He walked around the concrete barrier and on the other side, along with the rain, he heard the sound of gurgling water. Could it be the ocean? Nedry hurried forward, his eyes adjusting to the darkness as he went. Dense jungle on all sides. Raindrops slapping on the leaves.

    The gurgling sound became louder, drawing him forward, and suddenly he came out of the foliage and felt his feet sink into soft earth and saw the dark currents of the river. The river! He was at the jungle river!

    Damn, he thought. At the river where? The river ran for miles through the island. He looked at his watch again. Seven minutes gone. "You have a problem, Dennis," he said aloud.

    As if in reply, there was a soft hooting cry of an owl in the forest.

    Nedry hardly noticed; he was worrying about his plan. The plain fact was that time had run out. There wasn't a choice any more. He had to abandon his original plan. All he could do was go back to the control room, restore the computer, and somehow try to contact Dodgson, to set up the drop at the east dock for the following night. Nedry would have to scramble to make that work, but he thought he could pull it off. The computer automatically logged all calls; after Nedry got through to Dodgson, he'd have to go back into the computer and erase the record of the call. But one thing was sure-he couldn't stay out in the park any longer, or his absence would be noticed.

    Nedry started back, heading toward the glow of the car's headlights. He was drenched and miserable. He heard the soft booting cry once more, and this time he paused. That hadn't really sounded like an owl. And it seemed to be close by, in the jungle somewhere off to his right.

    As he listened, he heard a crashing sound in the underbrush. Then silence. He waited, and heard it again. It sounded distinctly like something big, moving slowly through the jungle toward him.

    Something big. Something near. A big dinosaur.

    Get out of here.

    Nedry began to run. He made a lot of noise as he ran, but even so he could hear the animal crashing through the foliage. And hooting.

    It was coming closer.

    Stumbling over tree roots in the darkness, clawing his way past dripping branches, he saw the Jeep ahead, and the lights shining around the vertical wall of the barrier made him feel better. In a moment he'd be in the car and then he'd get the hell out of here. He scrambled around the barrier and then he froze.

    The animal was already there.

    But it wasn't close. The dinosaur stood forty feet away, at the edge of the illumination from the headlamps. Nedry hadn't taken the tour, so he hadn't seen the different types of dinosaurs, but this one was strange-looking. The ten-foot-tall body was yellow with black spots, and along the head ran a pair of red V-shaped crests. The dinosaur didn't move, but again gave its soft hooting cry.

    Nedry waited to see if it would attack. It didn't. Perhaps the headlights from the Jeep frightened it, forcing it to keep its distance, like a fire.

    The dinosaur stared at him and then snapped its head in a single swift motion. Nedry felt something smack wetly against his chest. He looked down and saw a dripping glob of foam on his rain-soaked shirt. He touched it curiously, not comprehending. . . .

    It was spit.

    The dinosaur had spit on him.

    It was creepy, he thought. He looked back at the dinosaur and saw the head snap again, and immediately felt another wet smack against his neck, just above the shirt collar. He wiped it away with his hand.

    Jesus, it was disgusting. But the skin of his neck was already starting to tingle and burn. And his hand was tingling, too. It was almost like he had been touched with acid.

    Nedry opened the car door, glancing back at the dinosaur to make sure it wasn't going to attack, and felt a sudden, excruciating pain in his eyes, stabbing like spikes into the back of his skull, and he squeezed his eyes shut and gasped with the intensity of it and threw up his hands to cover his eyes and felt the slippery foam trickling down both sides of his nose.

    Spit.

    The dinosaur had spit in his eyes.

    Even as he realized it, the pain overwhelmed him, and he dropped to his knees, disoriented, wheezing. He collapsed onto his side, his cheek pressed to the wet ground, his breath coming in thin whistles through the constant, ever-screaming pain that caused flashing spots of light to appear behind his tightly shut eyelids.

    The earth shook beneath him and Nedry knew the dinosaur was moving, he could hear its soft hooting cry, and despite the pain he forced his eyes open and still he saw nothing but flashing spots against black. Slowly the realization came to him.

    He was blind.

    The hooting was louder as Nedry scrambled to his feet and staggered back against the side panel of the car, as a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over him. The dinosaur was close now, he could feel it coming close, he was dimly aware of its snorting breath.

    But he couldn't see.

    He couldn't see anything, and his terror was extreme.

    He stretched out his hands, waving them wildly in the air to ward off the attack he knew was coming.

    And then there was a new, searing pain, like a fiery knife in his belly, and Nedry stumbled, reaching blindly down to touch the ragged edge of his shirt, and then a thick, slippery mass that was surprisingly warm, and with horror he suddenly knew he was holding his own intestines in his hands. The dinosaur had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.

    Nedry fell to the ground and landed on something scaly and cold, it was the animal's foot, and then there was new pain on both sides of his head. The pain grew worse, and as he was lifted to his feet he knew the dinosaur had his head in its jaws, and the horror of that realization was followed by a final wish, that it would all be ended soon.

    Bungalow

    "More coffee?" Hammond asked politely.

    "No, thank you," Henry Wu said, leaning back in his chair. "I couldn't eat anything more." They were sitting in the dining room of Hammond's bungalow, in a secluded corner of the park not far from the labs. Wu had to admit that the bungalow Hammond had built for himself was elegant, with sparse, almost Japanese lines. And the dinner had been excellent, considering the dining room wasn't fully staffed yet.

    But there was something about Hammond that Wu found troubling. The old man was different in some way . . . subtly different. All during dinner, Wu had tried to decide what it was. In part, a tendency to ramble, to repeat himself, to retell old stories. In part, it was an emotional lability, flaring anger one moment, maudlin sentimentality the next. But all that could be understood as a natural concomitant of age. John Hammond was, after all, almost seventy-seven.

    But there was something else. A stubborn evasiveness. An insistence on having his way. And, in the end, a complete refusal to deal with the situation that now faced the park.

    Wu had been stunned by the evidence (he did not yet allow himself to believe the case was proved) that the dinosaurs were breeding. After Grant had asked about amphibian DNA, Wu had intended to go directly to his laboratory and check the computer records of the various DNA assemblies. Because, if the dinosaurs were in fact breeding, then everything about Jurassic Park was called into question-their genetic development methods, their genetic control methods, everything. Even the lysine dependency might be suspect. And if these animals could truly breed, and could also survive in the wild . . .

    Henry Wu wanted to check the data at once. But Hammond had stubbornly insisted Wu accompany him at dinner.

    "Now then, Henry, you must save room for ice cream," Hammond said, pushing back from the table. "Maria makes the most wonderful ginger ice cream."

    "All right." Wu looked at the beautiful, silent serving girl. His eyes followed her out of the room, and then he glanced up at the single video monitor mounted in the wall. The monitor was dark. "Your monitor's out," Wu said.

    "Is it?" Hammond glanced over. "Must be the storm." He reached behind him for the telephone. "I'll just check with John in control."

    Wu could hear the static crackle on the telephone line. Hammond shrugged, and set the receiver back in its cradle. "Lines must be down," he said. "Or maybe Nedry's still doing data transmission. He has quite a few bugs to fix this weekend. Nedry's a genius in his way, but we had to press him quite hard, toward the end, to make sure he got things right."

    "Perhaps I should go to the control room and check," Wu said.

    "No, no," Hammond said, "There's no reason. If there were any problem, we'd hear about it. Ah."

    Maria came back into the room, with two plates of ice cream.

    "You must have just a little, Henry," Hammond said. "It's made with fresh ginger, from the eastern part of the island. It's an old man's vice, ice cream. But still . . ."

    Dutifully, Wu dipped his spoon. Outside, lightning flashed, and there was the sharp crack of thunder. "That was close," Wu said. "I hope the storm isn't frightening the children."

    "I shouldn't think so," Hammond said. He tasted the ice cream. "But I can't help but hold some fears about this park, Henry."

    Inwardly, Wu felt relieved. Perhaps the old man was going to face the facts, after all. "What kind of fears?"

    "You know, Jurassic Park's really made for children. The children of the world love dinosaurs, and the children are going to delight-just delight-in this place. Their little faces will shine with the joy of finally seeing these wonderful animals. But I am afraid . . . I may not live to see it, Henry. I may not live to see the joy on their faces."

    "I think there are other problems, too," Wu said, frowning.

    "But none so pressing on my mind as this," Hammond said, "that I may not live to see their shining, delighted faces. This is our triumph, this park. We have done what we set out to do. And, you remember, our original intent was to use the newly emerging technology of genetic engineering to make money. A lot of money."

    Wu knew Hammond was about to launch into one of his old speeches. He held up his hand. "I'm familiar with this, John-"

    "If you were going to start a bioengineering company, Henry, what would you do? Would you make products to help mankind, to fight illness and disease? Dear me, no. That's a terrible idea. A very poor use of new technology."

    Hammond shook his head sadly. "Yet, you'll remember," he said, "the original genetic engineering companies, like Genentech and Cetus, were all started to make pharmaceuticals. New drugs for mankind. Noble, noble purpose. Unfortunately, drugs face all kinds of barriers. FDA testing alone takes five to eight years-if you're lucky. Even worse, there are forces at work in the marketplace. Suppose you make a miracle drug for cancer or heart disease-as Genentech did. Suppose you now want to charge a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a dose. You might imagine that is your privilege. After all, you invented the drug, you paid to develop and test it; you should be able to charge whatever you wish. But do you really think that the government will let you do that? No, Henry, they will not. Sick people aren't going to pay a thousand dollars a dose for needed medication-they won't be grateful, they'll be outraged. Blue Cross isn't going to pay it. They'll scream highway robbery. So something will happen. Your patent application will be denied. Your permits will be delayed. Something will force you to see reason-and to sell your drug at a lower cost. From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind."

    Wu had heard the argument before. And he knew Hammond was right, some new bioengineered pharmaceuticals had indeed suffered inexplicable delays and patent problems.

    "Now," Hammond said, "think how different it is when you're making entertainment, Nobody needs entertainment. That's not a matter for government intervention. If I charge five thousand dollars a day for my park, who is going to stop me? After all, nobody needs to come here. And, far from being highway robbery, a costly price tag actually increases the appeal of the park. A visit becomes a status symbol, and all Americans love that. So do the Japanese, and of course they have far more money."

    Hammond finished his ice cream, and Maria silently took the dish away. "She's not from here, you know," he said. "She's Haitian. Her mother is French. But in any case, Henry, you will recall that the original purpose behind pointing my company in this direction in the first place-was to have freedom from government intervention, anywhere in the world."

    "Speaking of the rest of the world . . ."

    Hammond smiled. "We have already leased a large tract in the Azores, for Jurassic Park Europe. And you know we long ago obtained an island near Guam, for Jurassic Park Japan. Construction on the next two Jurassic Parks will begin early next year. They will all be open within four years. At that time, direct revenues will exceed ten billion dollars a year, and merchandising, television, and ancillary rights should double that. I see no reason to bother with children's pets, which I'm told Lew Dodgson thinks we're planning to make."

    "Twenty billion dollars a year," Wu said softly, shaking his head.

    "That's speaking conservatively," Hammond said. He smiled. "There's no reason to speculate wildly. More ice cream, Henry?"

    "Did you find him?" Arnold snapped, when the guard walked into the control room.

    "No, Mr. Arnold."

    "Find him."

    "I don't think he's in the building, Mr. Arnold."

    "Then look in the lodge," Arnold said, "look in the maintenance buildIng, look in the utility shed, look everywhere, but just find him."

    "The thing is . . ." The guard hesitated. "Mr. Nedry's the fat man, is that right?"

    "That's right," Arnold said. "He's fat. A fat slob."

    "Well, Jimmy down in the main lobby said he saw the fat man go into the garage."

    Muldoon spun around. "Into the garage? When?"

    "About ten, fifteen minutes ago."

    "Jesus," Muldoon said.

    The Jeep screeched to a stop. "Sorry," Harding said.

    In the headlamps, Ellie saw a herd of apatosaurs lumbering across the road. There were six animals, each the size of a house, and a baby as large as a full-grown horse. The apatosaurs moved in unhurried silence, never looking toward the Jeep and its glowing headlamps. At one point, the baby stopped to lap water from a puddle in the road, then moved on.

    A comparable herd of elephants would have been startled by the arrival of a car, would have trumpeted and circled to protect the baby. But these animals showed no fear. "Don't they see us?" she said.

    "Not exactly, no," Harding said. "Of course, in a literal sense they do see us, but we don't really mean anything to them. We hardly ever take cars out at night, and so they have no experience of them. We are just a strange, smelly object in their environment. Representing no threat, and therefore no interest. I've occasionally been out at night, visiting a sick animal, and on my way back these fellows blocked the road for an hour or more.

    "What do you do?"

    Harding grinned. "Play a recorded tyrannosaur roar. That gets them moving. Not that they care much about tyrannosaurs. These apatosaurs are so big they don't really have any predators. They can break a tyrannosaur's neck with a swipe of their tail. And they know it. So does the tyrannosaur."

    "But they do see us. I mean, if we were to get out of the car . . ."

    Harding shrugged. "They probably wouldn't react. Dinosaurs have excellent visual acuity, but they have a basic amphibian visual system: it's attuned to movement. They don't see unmoving things well at all."

    The animals moved on, their skin glistening in the rain. Harding put the car in gear. "I think we can continue now," he said.

    Wu said, "I suspect you may find there are pressures on your park, just as there are pressures on Genentech's drugs." He and Hammond had moved to the living room, and they were now watching the storm lash the big glass windows.

    "I can't see how," Hammond said.

    "The scientists may wish to constrain you. Even to stop you.

    "Well, they can't do that, " Hammond said. He shook his finger at Wu. "You know why the scientists would try to do that? It's because they want to do research, of course. That's all they ever want to do, is research. Not to accomplish anything. Not to make any progress. Just do research. Well, they have a surprise coming to them."

    "I wasn't thinking of that," Wu said.

    Hammond sighed. "I'm sure it would be interesting for the scientists, to do research. But you arrive at the point where these animals are simply too expensive to be used for research. This is wonderful technology, Henry, but it's also frightfully expensive technology. The fact is, it can only be supported as entertainment." Hammond shrugged. "That's just the way it is."

    "But if there are attempts to close down-"

    "Face the damn facts, Henry," Hammond said irritably. "This isn't America. This isn't even Costa Rica. This is my island. I own it. And nothing is going to stop me from opening Jurassic Park to all the children of the world." He chuckled. "Or, at least, to the rich ones. And I tell you, they'll love it."

    In the back seat of the Jeep, Ellie Sattler stared out the window. They had been driving through rain-drenched jungle for the last twenty minutes, and had seen nothing since the apatosaurs crossed the road.

    "We're near the jungle river now," Harding said, as he drove. "It's off there somewhere to our left."

    Abruptly he slammed on the brakes again, The car skidded to a stop in front of a flock of small green animals. "Well, you're getting quite a show tonight," he said. "Those are compys."

    Procompsognathids, Ellie thought, wishing that Grant were here to see them. This was the animal they had seen in the fax, back in Montana. The little dark green procompsognathids scurried to the other side of the road, then squatted on their hind legs to look at the car, chattering briefly, before hurrying onward into the night.

    "Odd," Harding said. "Wonder where they're off to? Compys don't usually move at night, you know. They climb up in a tree and wait for daylight."

    "Then why are they out now?" Ellie said.

    "I can't imagine. You know compys are scavengers, like buzzards. They're attracted to a dying animal, and they have tremendously sensitive smell. They can smell a dying animal for miles."

    "Then they're going to a dying animal?"

    "Dying, or already dead."

    "Should we follow them?" Ellie said.

    "I'd be curious," Harding said. "Yes, why not? Let's go see where they're going.

    He turned the car around, and headed back toward the compys.

    Tim

    Tim Murphy lay in the Land Cruiser, his cheek pressed against the car door handle. He drifted slowly back to consciousness. He wanted only to sleep. He shifted his position, and felt the pain in his cheekbone where it lay against the metal door. His whole body ached. His arms and his legs and most of all his head-there was a terrible pounding pain in his head. All the pain made him want to go back to sleep.

    He pushed himself up on one elbow, opened his eyes, and retched, vomiting all over his shirt. He tasted sour bile and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His head throbbed; he felt dizzy and seasick, as if the world were moving, as if he were rocking back and forth on a boat.

    Tim groaned, and rolled onto his back, turning away from the puddle of vomit. The pain in his head made him breathe in short, shallow gasps. And he still felt sick, as if everything were moving. He opened his eyes and looked around, trying to get his bearings.

    He was inside the Land Cruiser. But the car must have flipped over on its side, because he was lying on his back against the passenger door, looking up at the steering wheel and beyond, at the branches of a tree, moving in the wind. The rain had nearly stopped, but water drops still fell on him through the broken front windshield.

    He stared curiously at the fragments of glass. He couldn't remember how the windshield had broken. He couldn't remember anything except that they had been parked on the road and he had been talking to Dr. Grant when the tyrannosaur came toward them. That was the last thing he remembered.

    He felt sick again, and closed his eyes until the nausea passed. He was aware of a rhythmic creaking sound, like the rigging of a boat. Dizzy and sick to his stomach, he really felt as if the whole car were moving beneath him. But when he opened his eyes again, he saw it was true-the Land Cruiser was moving, lying on its side, swaying back and forth.

    The whole car was moving.

    Tentatively, Tim rose to his feet. Standing on the passenger door, he peered over the dashboard, looking out through the shattered windshield. At first he saw only dense foliage, moving in the wind. But here and there he could see gaps, and beyond the foliage, the ground was-

    The ground was twenty feet below him.

    He stared uncomprehendingly. The Land Cruiser was lying on its side in the branches of a large tree, twenty feet above the ground, swaying back and forth in the wind.

    "Oh shit," he said. What was he going to do? He stood on his tiptoes and peered out, trying to see better, grabbing the steering wheel for support. The wheel spun free in his hand, and with a loud crack the Land Cruiser shifted position, dropping a few feet in the branches of the tree. He looked down through the shattered glass of the passenger-door window at the ground below.

    "Oh shit. Oh shit." He kept repeating it. "Oh shit. Oh shit."

    Another loud crack-the Land Cruiser jolted down another foot.

    He had to get out of here.

    He looked down at his feet. He was standing on the door handle. He crouched back down on his bands and knees to look at the handle. He couldn't see very well in the dark, but he could tell that the door was dented outward so the handle couldn't turn. He'd never get the door open. He tried to roll the window down, but the window was stuck, too. Then he thought of the back door. Maybe he could open that. He leaned over the front seat, and the Land Cruiser lurched with the shift in weight.

    Carefully, Tim reached back and twisted the handle on the rear door.

    It was stuck, too.

    How was he going to get out?

    He heard a snorting sound and looked down. A dark shape passed below him. It wasn't the tyrannosaur. This shape was tubby and it made a kind of snuffling as it waddled along. The tail flopped back and forth, and Tim could see the long spikes.

    It was the stegosaur, apparently recovered from its illness. Tim wondered where the other people were: Gennaro and Sattler and the vet. He had last seen them near the stegosaur. How long ago was that? He looked at his watch, but the face was cracked; he couldn't see the numbers. He took the watch off and tossed it aside.

    The stegosaur snuffled and moved on. Now the only sound was the wind in the trees, and the creaking of the Land Cruiser as it shifted back and forth.

    He had to get out of here.

    Tim grabbed the handle, tried to force it, but it was stuck solid. It wouldn't move at all. Then he realized what was wrong: the rear door was locked! Tim pulled up the pin and twisted the handle. The rear door swung open, downward-and came to rest against the branch a few feet below.

    The opening was narrow, but Tim thought he could wriggle through it. Holding his breath, he crawled slowly back into the rear seat. The Land Cruiser creaked, but held its position. Gripping the doorposts on both sides, Tim slowly lowered himself down, through the narrow angled opening of the door. Soon he was lying flat on his stomach on the slanted door, his legs sticking out of the car. He kicked in the air-his feet touched something solid-a branch-and he rested his weight on it.

    As soon as he did, the branch bent down and the door swung wider, spilling him out of the Land Cruiser, and he fell-leaves scratching his face-his body bouncing from branch to branch-a jolt-searing pain, bright light in his head-

    He slammed to a stop, the wind knocked from him. Tim lay doubled over a large branch, his stomach burning pain.

    Tim heard another crack and looked up at the Land Cruiser, a big dark shape five feet above him.

    Another crack. The car shifted.

    Tim forced himself to move, to climb down. He used to like to climb trees. He was a good tree-climber. And this was a good tree to climb, the branches spaced close together, almost like a staircase. . . .

    Crackkkk . . .

    The car was definitely moving.

    Tim scrambled downward, slipping over the wet branches, feeling sticky sap on his hands, hurrying. He had not descended more than a few feet when the Land Cruiser creaked a final time, and then slowly, very slowly, nosed over. Tim could see the big green grille and the front headlights swinging down at him, and then the Land Cruiser fell free, gaining momentum as it rushed toward him, slamming against the branch where Tim had just been-

    And it stopped.

    His face just inches from the dented grille, bent inward like an evil mouth, headlamps for eyes. Oil dripped on Tim's face.

    He was still twelve feet above the ground. He reached down, found another branch, and moved down. Above, he saw the branch bending under the weight of the Land Cruiser, and then it cracked, and the Land Cruiser came rushing down toward him and he knew he could never escape it, he could never get down fast enough, so Tim just let go.

    He fell the rest of the way.

    Tumbling, banging, feeling pain in every part of his body, hearing the Land Cruiser smashing down through the branches after him like a pursuing animal, and then Tim's shoulder hit the soft ground, and he rolled as hard as he could, and pressed his body against the trunk of the tree as the Land Cruiser tumbled down with a loud metallic crash and a sudden hot burst of electrical sparks that stung his skin and sputtered and sizzled on the wet ground around him.

    Slowly, Tim got to his feet. In the darkness he heard the snuffling, and saw the stegosaur coming back, apparently attracted by the crash of the Land Cruiser. The dinosaur moved dumbly, the low head thrust forward, and the big cartilaginous plates running in two rows along the bump of the back. It behaved like an overgrown tortoise. Stupid like that. And slow.

    Tim picked up a rock and threw it. "Get away!"

    The rock tbunked dully off the plates. The stegosaur kept coming. "Go on! Co!"

    He threw another rock, and hit the stegosaur in the head. The animal grunted, turned slowly away, and shuffled off in the direction it had come.

    Tim leaned against the crumpled Land Cruiser and looked around in the darkness. He had to get back to the others, but he didn't want to get lost. He knew he was somewhere in the park, probably not far from the main road. If he could only get his hearings. He couldn't see much in the dark, but-

    Then he remembered the goggles.

    He climbed through the shattered front windshield into the Land Cruiser and found the night-vision goggles, and the radio. The radio was broken and silent, so he left it behind. But the goggles still worked. He flicked them on, saw the reassuringly familiar phosphorescent green image.

    Wearing the goggles, he saw the battered fence off to his left, and walked toward it. The fence was twelve feet high, but the tyrannosaur had flattened it easily. Tim hurried across it, moved through an area of dense foliage, and came out onto the main road.

    Through his goggles, he saw the other Land Cruiser turned on its side. He ran toward it, took a breath, and looked inside. The car was empty. No sign of Dr. Grant and Dr. Malcolm.

    Where had they gone?

    Where had everybody gone?

    He felt sudden panic, standing alone in the jungle road at night with that empty car, and turned quickly in circles, seeing the bright green world in the goggles swirl. Something pale by the side of the road caught his eye. It was Lex's baseball. He wiped the mud off it.

    "Lex!"

    Tim shouted as loud as he could, not caring if the animals heard him. He listened, but there was only the wind, and the plink of raindrops falling from the trees.

    " Lex!

    He vaguely remembered that she had been in the Land Cruiser when the tyrannosaur attacked. Had she stayed there? Or had she gotten away? The events of the attack were confused in his mind. He wasn't exactly sure what had happened, just to think of it made him uneasy. He stood in the road, gasping with panic.

    "Lex!"

    The night seemed to close in around him. Feeling sorry for himself, he sat in a cold rainy puddle in the road and whimpered for a while. When he finally stopped, he still heard whimpering. It was faint, and it was coming from somewhere farther up the road.

    "How long has it been?" Muldoon said, coming back into the control room. He was carrying a black metal case.

    "Half an hour."

    "Harding's Jeep should he back here by now."

    Arnold stubbed out his cigarette. "I'm sure they'll arrive any minute now.

    "Still no sign of Nedry?" Muldoon said.

    "No. Not yet."

    Muldoon opened the case, which contained six portable radios. "I'm going to distribute these to people in the building." He handed one to Arnold. "Take the charger, too. These are our emergency radios, but nobody had them plugged in, naturally. Let it charge about twenty minutes, and then try and raise the cars."

    Henry Wu opened the door marked FERTILIZATION and entered the darkened lab. There was nobody here; apparently all the technicians were still at dinner. Wu went directly to the computer terminal and punched up the DNA logbooks. The logbooks had to be kept on computer. DNA was such a large molecule that each species required ten gigabytes of optical disk space to store details of all the iterations. He was going to have to check all fifteen species. That was a tremendous amount of information to search through.

    He still wasn't clear about why Grant thought frog DNA was important. Wu himself didn't often distinguish one kind of DNA from another. After all, most DNA in living creatures was exactly the same. DNA was an incredibly ancient substance. Human beings, walking around in the streets of the modern world, bouncing their pink new babies, hardly stopped to think that the substance at the center of it all-the substance that began the dance of life-was a chemical almost as old as the earth itself. The DNA molecule was so old that its evolution had essentially finished more than two billion years ago. There had been little new since that time. Just a few recent combinations of the old genes-and not much of that.

    When you compared the DNA of man and the DNA of a lowly bacterium, you found that only about 10 percent of the strands were different. This innate conservatism of DNA emboldened Wu to use whatever DNA he wished. In making his dinosaurs, Wu had manipulated the DNA as a sculptor might clay or marble. He had created freely.

    He started the computer search program, knowing it would take two or three minutes to run. He got up and walked around the lab, checking instruments out of long-standing habit. He noted the recorder outside the freezer door, which tracked the freezer temperature. He saw there was a spike in the graph. That was odd, he thought. It meant somebody had been in the freezer. Recently, too-witbin the last half-hour. But who would go in there at night?

    The computer beeped, signaling that the first of the data searches was complete. Wu went over to see what it had found, and when he saw the screen, he forgot all about the freezer and the graph spike.

    LEITZKE DNA SEARCH ALGORITHM

    Jurassic Park

    DNA:  Version Search Criteria: RANA (all, fragment len > 0)

    DNA Incorporating RANA Fragments                                  Versions

    Maiasaurs                           2.1-2.9

    Procompsognathids                       3.0-3.7

    Othnielia                           3.1-3.3

    Velociraptors                            1.0-3.0

    Hypsilopbodontids                       2.4-2.7

    The result was clear: all breeding dinosaurs incorporated rana, or frog, DNA. None of the other animals did. Wu still did not understand why this had caused them to breed. But he could no longer deny that Grant was right. The dinosaurs were breeding.

    He hurried up to the control room.

    Lex

    She was curled up inside a big one-meter drainage pipe that ran under the road. She had her baseball glove in her mouth and she was rocking back and forth, banging her head repeatedly against the back of the pipe. It was dark in there, but he could see her clearly with his goggles. She seemed unhurt, and he felt a great burst of relief.

    "Lex, it's me. Tim."

    She didn't answer. She continued to bang her head on the pipe. "Come on out."

    She shook her head no. He could see she was badly frightened.

    "Lex," he said, "if you come out, I'll let you wear these night goggles."

    She just shook her head.

    "Look what I have," he said, holding up his band. She stared uncomprehendingly. It was probably too dark for her to see. "It's your ball, Lex. I found your ball."

    "So what."