Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1)

Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1) Page 16

    He tried another approach. "It must be uncomfortable in there. Cold, too. Wouldn't you like to come out?"

    She resumed banging her head against the pipe.

    "Why not?"

    "There's aminals out there."

    That threw him for a moment. She hadn't said "aminals" for years.

    "The aminals are gone," he said.

    "There's a big one. A Tyrannosaurus rex."

    "He's gone."

    "Where did he go?"

    "I don't know, but he's not around here now," Tim said, hoping it was true.

    Lex didn't move. He heard her hanging again. Tim sat down in the grass outside the pipe, where she could see him. The ground was wet where he sat. He hugged his knees and waited. He couldn't think of anything else to do. "I'm just going to sit here," he said. "And rest."

    "Is Daddy out there?"

    "No," he said, feeling strange. "He's back at home, Lex."

    "Is Mommy?"

    "No, Lex."

    "Are there any grownups out there?" Lex said.

    "Not yet. But I'm sure they'll come soon. They're probably on their way right now."

    Then he heard her moving inside the pipe, and she came out. Shivering with cold, and with dried blood on her forehead, but otherwise all right.

    She looked around in surprise and said, "Where's Dr. Grant?"

    "I don't know."

    "Well, he was here before."

    "He was? When?"

    "Before," Lex said. "I saw him when I was in the pipe."

    "Where'd he go?"

    "How am I supposed to know?" Lex said, wrinkling her nose. She began to shout: "Hellooo. Hell-oooo! Dr. Grant? Dr. Grant!"

    Tim was uneasy at the noise she was making-it might bring back the tyrannosaur-but a moment later he heard an answering shout. It was coming from the right, over toward the Land Cruiser that Tim had left a few minutes before. With his goggles, Tim saw with relief that Dr. Grant was walking toward them, He had a big tear in his shirt at the shoulder, but otherwise he looked okay.

    "Thank God," he said. "I've been looking for you."

    Shivering, Ed Regis got to his feet, and wiped the cold mud off his face and hands. He had spent a very had half hour, wedged among big boulders on the slope of a hill below the road. He knew it wasn't much of a hiding place, but he was panicked and he wasn't thinking clearly. He had lain in this muddy cold place and he had tried to get hold of himself, but he kept seeing that dinosaur in his mind. That dinosaur coming toward him. Toward the car.

    Ed Regis didn't remember exactly what had happened after that. He remembered that Lex had said something but he hadn't stopped, he couldn't stop, he had just kept running and running. Beyond the road he had lost his footing and tumbled down the hill and come to rest by some boulders, and it had seemed to him that he could crawl in among the boulders, and hide, there was enough room, so that was what he had done. Gasping and terrified, thinking of nothing except to get away from the tyrannosaur. And, finally, when he was wedged in there like a rat between the boulders, he had calmed down a little, and he had been overcome with horror and shame because he'd abandoned those kids, he had just run away, he had just saved himself. He knew he should go back up to the road, he should try to rescue them, because he had always imagined himself as brave and cool under pressure, but whenever he tried to get control of himself, to make himself go back up there-somehow he just couldn't. He started to feel panicky, and he had trouble breathing, and he didn't move.

    He told himself it was hopeless, anyway. If the kids were still up there on the road they could never survive, and certainly there was nothing Ed Regis could do for them, and he might as well stay where he was. No one was going to know what had happened except him. And there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could have done. And so Regis had remained among the boulders for half an hour, fighting off panic, carefully not thinking about whether the kids had died, or about what Hammond would have to say when he found out.

    What finally made him move was the peculiar sensation he noticed in his mouth. The side of his mouth felt funny, kind of numb and tingling, and he wondered if he had hurt it during the fall. Regis touched his face and felt swollen flesh on the side of his mouth. It was funny, but it didn't hurt at all. Then he realized the swollen flesh was a leech growing fat as it sucked his lips. It was practically in his mouth. Shivering with nausea, Regis pulled the leech away, feeling it tear from the flesh of his lips, feeling the gush of warm blood in his mouth. He spat, and flung it with disgust into the forest. He saw another leech on his forearm, and pulled it off, leaving a dark bloody streak behind. Jesus, he was probably covered with them. That fall down the hillside. These jungle hills were full of leeches. So were the dark rocky crevices. What did the workmen say? The leeches crawled up your underwear. They liked dark warm places. They liked to crawl right up your-

    "Hellooo!"

    He stopped. It was a voice, carried by the wind.

    "Helloo! Dr. Grant!"

    Jesus, that was the little girl.

    Ed Regis listened to the tone of her voice. She didn't sound frightened, or in pain. She was just calling in her insistent way. And it slowly dawned on him that something else must have happened, that the tyrannosaur must have gone away-or at least hadn't attacked-and that the other people might still be alive. Grant and Malcolm. Everybody might be alive. An the realization made him pull himself together in an instant, the way you got sober in an instant when the cops pulled you over, and he felt better, because now he knew what he had to do. And as he crawled out from the boulders he was already formulating the next step, already figuring out what he would say, how to handle things from this point.

    Regis wiped the cold mud off his face and hands, the evidence that he had been hiding. He wasn't embarrassed that he had been hiding, but now he had to take charge. He scrambled back up toward the road, but when he emerged from the foliage he had a moment of disorientation. He didn't see the cars at all. He was somehow at the bottom of the hill. The Land Cruisers must be at the top.

    He started walking up the hill, back toward the Land Cruisers. It was very quiet. His feet splashed in the muddy puddles. He couldn't bear the little girl any more. Why had she stopped calling? As he walked, he began to think that maybe something had happened to her. In that case, he shouldn't walk back there. Maybe the tyrannosaur was still hanging around. Here he was, already at the bottom of the hill. That much closer to home.

    And it was so quiet. Spooky, it was so quiet.

    Ed Regis turned around, and started walking back toward the camp.

    Alan Grant ran his hands over her limbs, squeezing the arms and legs briefly. She didn't seem to have any pain. It was amazing: aside from a cut on her head, she was fine. "I told you I was," she said.

    "Well, I had to check."

    The boy was not quite so fortunate. Tim's nose was swollen and painful; Grant suspected it was broken. His right shoulder was badly bruised and swollen. But his legs seemed to be all right. Both kids could walk. That was the important thing.

    Grant himself was all right except for a claw abrasion down his right chest, where the tyrannosaur had kicked him. It burned with every breath, but it didn't seem to be serious, and it didn't limit his movement.

    He wondered if he had been knocked unconscious, because he had only dim recollections of events immediately preceding the moment he had sat up, groaning, in the woods ten yards from the Land Cruiser. At first his chest had been bleeding, so he had stuck leaves on the wound, and after a while it clotted. Then he had started walking around, looking for Malcolm and the kids. Grant couldn't believe he was still alive, and as scattered images began to come back to him, he tried to make sense of them. The tyrannosaur should have killed them all easily. Why hadn't it?

    "I'm hungry," Lex said.

    "Me, too," Grant said. "We've got to get ourselves back to civilization. And we've got to tell them about the ship."

    "We're the only ones who know?" Tim said.

    "Yes. We've got to get back and tell them."

    "Then let's walk down the road toward the hotel," Tim said, pointing down the hill. "That way we'll meet them when they come for us."

    Grant considered that. And he kept thinking about one thing: the dark shape that had crossed between the Land Cruisers even before the attack started. What animal had that been? He could think of only one possibility-the little tyrannosaur.

    "I don't think so, Tim. The road has high fences on both sides," Grant said. "If one of the tyrannosaurs is farther down on the road, we'll he trapped."

    "Then should we wait here?" Tim said.

    "Yes," Grant said. "Let's just wait here until someone comes."

    "I'm hungry," Lex said.

    "I hope it won't be very long," Grant said.

    "I don't want to stay here," Lex said.

    Then, from the bottom of the hill, they heard the sound of a man coughing.

    "Stay here," Grant said. He ran forward, to look down the hill.

    "Stay here," Tim said, and he ran forward after him.

    Lex followed her brother. "Don't leave me, don't leave me here, you guys-"

    Grant clapped his band over her mouth. She struggled to protest. He shook his head, and pointed over the hill, for her to look.

    At the bottom of the hill, Grant saw Ed Regis, standing rigid, unmoving. The forest around them had become deadly silent. The steady background drone of cicadas and frogs had ceased abruptly. There was only the faint rustle of leaves, and the whine of the wind,

    Lex started to speak, but Grant pulled her against the trunk of the nearest tree, ducking down among the heavy gnarled roots at the base. Tim came in right after them. Grant put his hands to his lips, signaling them to be quiet, and then he slowly looked around the tree.

    The road below was dark, and as the branches of the big trees moved in the wind, the moonlight filtering through made a dappled, shifting pattern. Ed Regis was gone. It took Grant a moment to locate him. The publicist was pressed up against the trunk of a big tree, hugging it. Regis wasn't moving at all.

    The forest remained silent.

    Lex tugged impatiently at Grant's shirt; she wanted to know what was happening. Then, from somewhere very near, they heard a soft snorting exhalation, hardly louder than the wind. Lex heard it, too, because she stopped struggling.

    The sound floated toward them again, soft as a sigh. Grant thought it was almost like the breathing of a horse.

    Grant looked at Regis, and saw the moving shadows cast by the moonlight on the trunk of the tree. And then Grant realized there was another shadow, superimposed on the others, but not moving: a strong curved neck, and a square head.

    The exhalation came again.

    Tim leaned forward cautiously, to look. Lex did, too.

    They heard a crack as a branch broke, and into the path stepped a tyrannosaur. It was the juvenile: about eight feet tall, and it moved with the clumsy gait of a young animal, almost like a puppy. The juvenile tyrannosaur shuffled down the path, stopping with every step to sniff the air before moving on. It passed the tree where Regis was hiding, and gave no indication that it had seen him. Grant saw Regis's body relax slightly. Regis turned his head, trying to watch the tyrannosaur on the far side of the tree.

    The tyrannosaur was now out of view down the road. Regis started to relax, releasing his grip on the tree. But the jungle remained silent. Regis remained close to the tree trunk for another half a minute. Then the sounds of the forest returned: the first tentative croak of a tree frog, the buzz of one cicada, and then the full chorus. Regis stepped away from the tree, shaking his shoulders, releasing the tension. He walked into the middle of the road, looking in the direction of the departed tyrannosaur.

    The attack came from the left.

    The juvenile roared as it swung its head forward, knocking Regis flat to the ground. He yelled and scrambled to his feet, but the tyrannosaur pounced, and it must have pinned him with its hind leg, because suddenly Regis wasn't moving, he was sitting up in the path shouting at the dinosaur and waving his hands at it, as if he could scare it off. The young dinosaur seemed perplexed by the sounds and movement coming from its tiny prey. The juvenile bent its head over, sniffing curiously, and Regis pounded on the snout with his fists.

    "Get away! Back off! Go on, back off!" Regis was shouting at the top of his lungs, and the dinosaur backed away, allowing Regis to get to his feet. Regis was shouting "Yeah! You heard me! Back off! Get away!" as he moved away from the dinosaur. The juvenile continued to stare curiously at the odd, noisy little animal before it, but when Regis had gone a few paces, it lunged and knocked him down again.

    It's playing with him, Grant thought.

    "Hey!" Regis shouted as he fell, but the juvenile did not pursue him, allowing him to get to his feet. He jumped to his feet, and continued backing away. "You stupid-back! Back! You heard me-back!" he shouted like a lion tamer.

    The juvenile roared, but it did not attack, and Regis now edged toward the trees and high foliage to the right. In another few steps he would be in hiding. "Back! You! Back!" Regis shouted, and then, at the last moment the juvenile pounced, and knocked Regis flat on his back. "Cut that out", Regis yelled, and the juvenile ducked his head, and Regis began to scream. No words, just a high-pitched scream.

    The scream cut off abruptly, and when the juvenile lifted his head, Grant saw ragged flesh in his jaws.

    "Oh no," Lex said, softly. Beside her, Tim had turned away, suddenly nauseated. His night-vision goggles slipped from his forehead and landed on the ground with a metallic clink.

    The juvenile's head snapped up, and it looked toward the top of the hill.

    Tim picked up his goggles as Grant grabbed both the children's hands and began to run.

    Control

    In the night, the compys scurried along the side of the road. Harding's Jeep followed a short distance behind. Ellie pointed farther up the road. "Is that a light?"

    "Could be," Harding said. "Looks almost like headlights."

    The radio suddenly bummed and crackled. They heard John Arnold say,

    "-you there?"

    "Ah, there he is," Harding said. "Finally." He pressed the button. "Yes, John, we're here. We're near the river, following the compys. It's quite interesting."

    More crackling. Then: "-eed your car-"

    "What'd he say?" Gennaro said.

    "Something about a car," Ellie said. At Grant's dig in Montana, Ellie was the one who operated the radiophone. After years of experience, she had become skilled at picking up garbled transmissions. "I think he said he needs your car."

    Harding pressed the button. "John? Are you there? We can't read you very well. John?"

    There was a flash of lightning, followed by a long sizzle of radio static, then Arnold's tense voice, "-where are-ou-"

    "We're one mile north of the hypsy paddock. Near the river, following some compys."

    "No-damn well-get back here-ow!"

    "Sounds like he's got a problem," Ellie said, frowning. There was no mistaking the tension in the voice. "Maybe we should go back."

    Harding shrugged. "John's frequently got a problem. You know how engineers are. They want everything to go by the book." He pressed the button on the radio. "John? Say again, please. . . ."

    More crackling.

    More static. The loud crash of lightning. Then: "-Muldoo-need your car-ow-"

    Gennaro frowned. "Is he saying Muldoon needs our car?"

    "That's what it sounded like," Ellie said.

    "Well, that doesn't make any sense," Harding said.

    "-other-stuck-Muldoon wants-car-"

    "I get it," Ellie said. "The other cars are stuck on the road in the storm, and Muldoon wants to go get them."

    Harding shrugged. "Why doesn't Muldoon take the other car?" He pushed the radio button. "John? Tell Muldoon to take the other car. It's in the garage."

    The radio crackled. "-not-listen-crazy bastards-car-"

    Harding pressed the radio button. "I said, it's in the garage, John. The car is in the garage."

    More static. "-edry has-ssing-one-"

    "I'm afraid this isn't getting us anywhere," Harding said. "All right, John. We're coming in now." He turned the radio off, and turned the car around. "I just wish I understood what the urgency is."

    Harding put the Jeep in gear, and they rumbled down the road in the darkness. It was another ten minutes before they saw the welcoming lights of the Safari Lodge. And as Harding pulled to a stop in front of the visitor center, they saw Muldoon coming toward them. He was shouting, and waving his arms.

    "God damn it, Arnold, you son of a bitch! God damn it, get this park back on track! Now! Get my grandkids back here! Now!" John Hammond stood in the control room, screaming and stamping his little feet. He had been carrying on this way for the last two minutes, while Henry Wu stood in the corner, looking stunned.

    "Well, Mr. Hammond," Arnold said, "Muldoon's on his way out right now, to do exactly that." Arnold turned away, and lit another cigarette. Hammond was like every other management guy Arnold had ever seen. Whether it was Disney or the Navy, management guys always behaved the same. They never understood the technical issues; and they thought that screaming was the way to make things happen. And maybe it was, if you were shouting at your secretaries to get you a limousine.

    But screaming didn't make any difference at all to the problems that Arnold now faced. The computer didn't care if it was screamed at. The power network didn't care if it was screamed at. Technical systems were completely indifferent to all this explosive human emotion. If anything, screaming was counterproductive, because Arnold now faced the virtual certainty that Nedry wasn't coming back, which meant that Arnold himself had to go into the computer code and try and figure out what had gone wrong. It was going to be a painstaking job, he'd need to be calm and careful.

    "Why don't you go downstairs to the cafeteria," Arnold said, "and get a cup of coffee? We'll call you when we have more news."

    "I don't want a Malcolm Effect here," Hammond said.

    "Don't worry about a Malcolm Effect," Arnold said. "Will you let me go to work?"

    "God damn you," Hammond said.

    "I'll call you, sir, when I have news from Muldoon," Arnold said.

    He pushed buttons on his console, and saw the familiar control screens change.

    */Jurassic Park Main Modules/

    */

    */ Call Libs

    Include: biostat.sys

    Include: sysrom.vst

    Include: net.sys

    Include: pwr.mdl

     */

     */Initialize

     SetMain [42]2002/9A{total CoreSysop %4 [vig. 7*tty]}

     if ValidMeter(mH) (**mH).MeterViS return

     Term Call 909 c.lev {void MeterVis $303} Random(3#*MaxFid)

    on SetSystem(!Dn) set shp_val.obi to lim(Val{d}SumVal

    if SetMeter(mH) (**mH).ValdidMeter(Vdd) return

    on SetSystem(!Telcom) set mxcpl.obj to lim(Val{pdl}NextVal

    Arnold was no longer operating the computer. He had now gone behind the scenes to look at the code-the line-by-line instructions that told the computer how to behave. Arnold was unhappily aware that the complete Jurassic Park program contained more than half a million lines of code, most of it undocumented, without explanation.

    Wu came forward. "What are you doing, John?"

    "Checking the code."

    "By inspection? That'll take forever."

    "Tell me," Arnold said. "Tell me."

    The Road

    Muldoon took the curve very fast, the Jeep sliding on the mud. Sitting beside him, Gennaro clenched his fists. They were racing along the cliff road, high above the river, now hidden below them in darkness. Muldoon accelerated forward. His face was tense.

    "How much farther?" Gennaro said. "Two, maybe three miles."

    Ellie and Harding were back at the visitor center. Gennaro had offered to accompany Muldoon. The car swerved. "It's been an hour," Muldoon said. "An hour, with no word from the other cars."

    "But they have radios," Gennaro said.

    "We haven't been able to raise them," Muldoon said.

    Gennaro frowned. "If I was sitting in a car for an hour in the rain, I'd sure try to use the radio to call for somebody."

    "So would I," Muldoon said.

    Gennaro shook his head. "You really think something could have happened to them?"

    "Chances are," Muldoon said, "that they're perfectly fine, but I'll he happier when I finally see them. Should be any minute now."

    The road curved, and then ran up a hill. At the base of the hill Gennaro saw something white, lying among the ferns by the side of the road. "Hold it," Gennaro said, and Muldoon braked. Gennaro jumped out and ran forward in the headlights of the Jeep to see what it was. It looked like a piece of clothing, but there was-

    Gennaro stopped.

    Even from six feet away, he could see clearly what it was. He walked forward more slowly.

    Muldoon leaned out of the car and said, "What is it?"

    "It's a leg," Gennaro said.

    The flesh of the leg was pale blue-wbite, terminating in a ragged bloody stump where the knee had been. Below the calf he saw a white sock, and a brown slip-on shoe. It was the kind of sboe Ed Regis had been wearing.

    By then Muldoon was out of the car, running past him to crouch over the leg. "Jesus." He lifted the leg out of the foliage, raising it into the light of the headlamps, and blood from the stump gushed down over his band. Gennaro was still three feet away. He quickly bent over, put his hands on his knees, squeezed his eyes shut, and breathed deeply, trying not to be sick.

    "Gennaro." Muldoon's voice was sharp.

    "What?"

    "Move. You're blocking the light."

    Gennaro took a breath, and moved. When he opened his eyes he saw Muldoon peering critically at the stump. "Torn at the joint line," Muldoon said, "Didn't bite it-twisted and ripped it. Just ripped his leg off." Muldoon stood up, holding the severed leg upside down so the remaining blood dripped onto the ferns. His bloody hand smudged the white sock as fie gripped the ankle. Gennaro felt sick again.

    "No question what happened," Muldoon was saying. "The T-rex got him." Muldoon looked up the hill, then back to Gennaro. "You all right? Can you go on?"

    "Yes," Gennaro said. "I can go on."

    Muldoon was walking back toward the Jeep, carrying the leg. "I guess we better bring this along," he said. "Doesn't seem right to leave it here. Christ, it's going to make a mess of the car. See if there's anything in the back, will you? A tarp or newspaper . . ."

    Gennaro opened the back door and rummaged around in the space behind the rear seat. He felt grateful to think about something else for a moment. The problem of how to wrap the severed leg expanded to fill his mind, crowding out all other thoughts. He found a canvas bag with a tool kit, a wheel rim, a cardboard box, and-

    "Two tarps," he said. They were neatly folded plastic.

    "Give me one," Muldoon said, still standing outside the car. Muldoon wrapped the leg and passed the now shapeless bundle to Gennaro. Holding it in his hand, Gennaro was surprised at how heavy it felt. "Just put it in the back," Muldoon said. "If there's a way to wedge it, you know, so it doesn't roll around . . ."

    "Okay." Gennaro put the bundle in the back, and Muldoon got behind the wheel. He accelerated, the wheels spinning in the mud, then digging in. The Jeep rushed up the hill, and for a moment at the top the headlights still pointed upward into the foliage, and then they swung down, and Gennaro could see the road before them.

    "Jesus," Muldoon said.

    Gennaro saw a single Land Cruiser, lying on its side in the center of the road. He couldn't see the second Land Cruiser at all. "Where's the other car?"

    Muldoon looked around briefly, pointed to the left. "There." The second Land Cruiser was twenty feet away, crumpled at the foot of a tree.

    "What's it doing there?"

    "The T-rex threw it."

    "Threw it?" Gennaro said.

    Muldoon's face was grim. "Let's get this over with," he said, climbing out of the Jeep. They hurried forward to the second Land Cruiser. Their flashlights swung back and forth in the night.

    As they came closer, Gennaro saw how battered the car was. He was careful to let Muldoon look inside first.

    "I wouldn't worry," Muldoon said. "It's very unlikely we'll find anyone."

    "No?"

    "No," he said. He explained that, during his years in Africa, he had visited the scenes of a half-dozen animal attacks on humans in the bush. One leopard attack: the leopard had torn open a tent in the night and taken a three-year-old child. Then one buffalo attack in Amboseli; two lion attacks; one croc attack in the north, near Meru. In every case, there was surprisingly little evidence left behind.

    Inexperienced people imagined horrific proofs of an animal attack-torn limbs left behind in the tent, trails of dripping blood leading away into the bush, bloodstained clothing not far from the campsite. But the truth was, there was usually nothing at all, particularly if the victim was small, an infant or a young child. The person just seemed to disappear, as if he had walked out into the bush and never come back. A predator could kill a child just by shaking it, snapping the neck. Usually there wasn't any blood.

    And most of the time you never found any other remains of the victims. Sometimes a button from a shirt, or a sliver of rubber from a shoe. But most of the time, nothing.

    Predators took children-they preferred children-and they left nothing behind. So Muldoon thought it highly unlikely that they would ever find any remains of the children.

    But as he looked in now, he had a surprise. "I'll be damned," he said.

    Muldoon tried to put the scene together. The front windshield of the Land Cruiser was shattered, but there wasn't much glass nearby. He had noticed shards of glass back on the road. So the windshield must have broken back there, before the tyrannosaur picked the car up and threw it here. But the car had taken a tremendous beating. Muldoon shone his light inside.

    "Empty?" Gcnnaro said, tensely.

    "Not quite," Muldoon said. His flashlight glinted off a Crushed radio handset, and on the floor of the car he saw something else, something curved and black. The front doors were dented and jammed shut, but he climbed in through the back door and crawled over the seat to pick up the black object.

    "It's a watch," he said, peering at it in the beam of his flashlight. A cheap digital watch with a molded black rubber strap. The LCD face was shattered, He thought the boy might have been wearing it, though he wasn't sure. But it was the kind of watch a kid would have.

    "What is it, a watch?" Gennaro said.

    "Yes. And there's a radio, but it's broken."

    "Is that significant?"

    "Yes. And there's something else. . . . " Muldoon sniffed. There was a sour odor inside the car. He shone the light around until he saw the vomit dripping off the side door panel. He touched it: still fresh. "One of the kids may still be alive," Muldoon said.

    Gennaro squinted at him. "What makes you think so?"

    "The watch," Muldoon said. "The watch proves it." He banded the watch to Gennaro, who held it in the glow of the flashlight, and turned it over in his hands.

    "Crystal is cracked," Gennaro said.

    "That's right," Muldoon said. "And the band is uninjured."

    "Which means?"

    "The kid took it off,"

    "That could have happened anytime," Gennaro said. "Anytime before the attack."

    "No," Muldoon said. "Those LCD crystals are tough. It takes a powerful blow to break them. The watch face was shattered during the attack."

    "So the kid took his watch off."

    "Think about it," Muldoon said. "If you were being attacked by a tyrannosaur, would you stop to take your watch off?"

    "Maybe it was torn off."

    "It's almost impossible to tear a watch off somebody's wrist, without tearing the band off, too. Anyway, the band is intact. No," Muldoon said. "The kid took it off himself. He looked at his watch, saw it was broken, and took it off. He had the time to do that."

    "When?"