Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1)

Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1) Page 6

    "Well, Donald," Hammond said, "to explain that, you have to go back to the initial concept of the resort. The concept of the most advanced amusement park in the world, combining the latest electronic and biological technologies. I'm not talking about rides. Everybody has rides. Coney Island has rides. And these days everybody has animatronic environments. The haunted house, the pirate den, the wild west, the earthquake-everyone has those things. So we set out to make biological attractions. Living attractions. Attractions so astonishing they would capture the imagination of the entire world."

    Gennaro had to smile. It was almost the same speech, word for word, that he had used on the investors, so many years ago. "And we can never forget the ultimate object of the project in Costa Rica-to make money," Hammond said, staring out the windows of the jet. "Lots and lots of money.

    "I remember," Gennaro said.

    "And the secret to making money in a park," Hammond said, "is to limit your Personnel costs. The food handlers, ticket takers, cleanup crews, repair teams. To make a park that runs with minimal staff. That was why we invested in all the computer technology-we automated wherever we could."

    "I remember. . . ."

    "But the plain fact is," Hammond said, when you put together all the animals and all the computer systems, you run into snags. Who ever got a major computer system up and running on schedule? Nobody I know."

    "So you've just had normal start-up delays?"

    "Yes, that's right," Hammond said. "Normal delays."

    "I heard there were accidents during construction," Gennaro said. "Some workmen died. . . ."

    "Yes, there were several accidents," Hammond said. "And a total of three deaths. Two workers died building the cliff road. One other died as a result of an earth-mover accident in January. But we haven't had any accidents for months now." He put his band on the younger man's arm. "Donald," he said, "believe me when I tell you that everything on the island is going forward as planned. Everything on that island is perfectly fine."

    The intercom clicked. The pilot said, "Seat belts, please. We're landing in Choteau."

    Choteau

    Dry plains stretched away toward distant black buttes. The afternoon wind blew dust and tumbleweed across the cracked concrete. Grant stood with Ellie near the Jeep and waited while the sleek Grumman jet circled for a landing.

    "I hate to wait on the money men," Grant grumbled.

    Ellie shrugged."Goes with the job."

    Although many fields of science, such as physics and chemistry, had become federally funded, paleontology remained strongly dependent on private patrons. Quite apart from his own curiosity about the island in Costa Rica, Grant understood that, if John Hammond asked for his help, he would give it. That was how patronage worked-how it had always worked.

    The little jet landed and rolled quickly toward them. Ellie shouldered her bag. The iet came to a stop and a stewardess in a blue uniform opened the door.

    Inside, he was surprised at how cramped it was, despite the luxurious appointments. Grant had to hunch over as he went to shake Hammond's hand.

    "Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler," Hammond said. "It's good of you to join us. Allow me to introduce my associate, Donald Gennaro."

    Gennaro was a stocky, muscular man in his mid-thirties wearing an Armani suit and wire-frame glasses. Grant disliked him on sight. He shook hands quickly. When Ellie shook hands, Gennaro said in surprise, "You're a woman."

    "These things happen," she said, and Grant thought: She doesn't like him, either-

    Hammond turned to Gennaro. "You know, of course, what Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler do. They are paleontologists. They dig up dinosaurs." And then he began to laugh, as if he found the idea very funny.

    "Take your seats, please," the stewardess said, closing the door. Immediately the plane began to move.

    "You'll have to excuse us," Hammond said, "but we are in a bit of a rush. Donald thinks it's important we get right down there."

    The pilot announced four hours' flying time to Dallas, where they would refuel, and then go on to Costa Rica, arriving the following morning.

    "And how long will we be in Costa Rica?" Grant asked.

    "Well, that really depends," Gennaro said. "We have a few things to clear up."

    "Take my word for it," Hammond said, turning to Grant. "We'll be down there no more than forty-eight hours."

    Grant buckled his seat belt. "This island of yours that we're going to-I haven't heard anything about it before. Is it some kind of secret?"

    "In a way," Hammond said. "We have been very, very careful about making sure nobody knows about it, until the day we finally open that island to a surprised and delighted public."

    Target of Opportunity

    The Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino, California, had never called an emergency meeting of its board of directors. The ten directors now sitting in the conference room were irritable and impatient. It was 8:00 p.m. They had been talking among themselves for the last ten minutes, but slowly had fallen silent. Shuffling papers. Looking pointedly at their watches.

    "What are we waiting for?" one asked.

    "One more," Lewis Dodgson said. "We need one more." He glanced at his watch. Ron Meyer's office had said he was coming up on the six o'clock plane from San Diego. He should be here by now, even allowing for traffic from the airport.

    "You need a quorum?" another director asked.

    "Yes," Dodgson said. "We do."

    That shut them up for a moment. A quorum meant that they were going to be asked to make an important decision. And God knows they were, although Dodgson would have preferred not to call a meeting at all. But Steingarten, the head of Biosyn, was adamant. "You'll have to get their agreement for this one, Lew," he had said.

    Depending on who you talked to, Lewis Dodgson was famous as the most aggressive geneticist of his generation, or the most reckless. Thirty-four, balding, hawk-faced, and intense, he had been dismissed by Johns Hopkins as a graduate student, for planning gene therapy on human patients without obtaining the proper FDA protocols. Hired by Biosyn, he had conducted the controversial rabies vaccine test in Chile. Now he was the head of product development at Biosyn, which supposedly consisted of "reverse engineering": taking a competitor's product, tearing it apart, learning how it worked, and then making your own version. In practice, it involved industrial espionage, much of it directed toward the InGen corporation.

    In the 1980s, a few genetic engineering companies began to ask, "What is the biological equivalent of a Sony Walkman?" These companies weren't interested in pharmaceuticals or health; they were interested in entertainment, sports, leisure activities, cosmetics, and pets. The perceived demand for "consumer biologicals" in the 1990s was high. InGen and Biosyn were both at work in this field.

    Biosyn had already achieved some success, engineering a new, pale trout under contract to the Department of Fish and Game of the State of Idaho. This trout was easier to spot in streams, and was said to represent a step forward in angling. (At least, it eliminated complaints to the Fish and Came Department that there were no trout in the streams.) The fact that the pale trout sometimes died of sunburn, and that its flesh was soggy and tasteless, was not discussed. Biosyn was still working on that, and-

    The door opened and Ron Meyer entered the room, slipped into a seat. Dodgson now had his quorum. He immediately stood.

    "Gentlemen," he said, "we're here tonight to consider a target of opportunity: InGen."

    Dodgson quickly reviewed the background. InGen's start-up in 1983, with Japanese investors. The purchase of three Cray XMP supercomputers. The purchase of Isla Nublar in Costa Rica. The stockpiling of amber. The unusual donations to zoos around the world, from the New York Zoological Society to the Rantbapur Wildlife Park in India.

    "Despite all these clues," Dodgson said, "we still had no idea where InGen might be going. The company seemed obviously focused on animals; and they had hired researchers with an interest in the past-paleoblologists, DNA phylogeneticists, and so on.

    "Then, in 1987, InGen bought an obscure company called Millipore Plastic Products in Nashville, Tennessee. This was an agribusiness company that had recently patented a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell. This plastic could be shaped into an egg and used to grow chick embryos. Starting the following year, InGen took the entire output of this millipore plastic for its own use."

    "Dr. Dodgson, this is all very interesting-"

    "At the same time," Dodgson continued, "construction was begun on Isla Nublar, This involved massive earthworks, including a shallow lake two miles long, in the center of the island. Plans for resort facilities were let out with a high degree of confidentiality, but it appears that InGen has built a private zoo of large dimensions on the island."

    One of the directors leaned forward and said, "Dr. Dodgson. So what?"

    "It's not an ordinary zoo," Dodgson said. "This zoo is unique in the world. It seems that InGen has done something quite extraordinary. They have managed to clone extinct animals from the past."

    "What animals?"  

    "Animals that hatch from eggs, and that require a lot of room in a zoo."

    "What animals?"

    "Dinosaurs," Dodgson said. "They are cloning dinosaurs."

    The consternation that followed was entirely misplaced, in Dodgson's view. The trouble with money men was that they didn't keep up: they had invested in a field, but they didn't know what was possible.

    In fact, there had been discussion of cloning dinosaurs in the technical literature as far back as 1982. With each passing year, the manipulation of DNA had grown easier. Genetic material had already been extracted from Egyptian mummies, and from the hide of a quagga, a zebra-like African animal that had become extinct in the 1880s. By 1985, it seemed possible that quagga DNA might be reconstituted, and a new animal grown. If so, it would be the first creature brought back from extinction solely by reconstruction of its DNA. If that was possible, what else was also possible? The mastodon? The saber-toothed tiger? The dodo?

    Or even a dinosaur?

    Of course, no dinosaur DNA was known to exist anywhere in the world. But by grinding up large quantities of dinosaur bones it might be possible to extract fragments of DNA. Formerly it was thought that fossilization eliminated all DNA. Now that was recognized as untrue. If enough DNA fragments were recovered, it might be possible to clone a living animal.

    Back in 1982, the technical problems had seemed daunting. But there was no theoretical barrier. It was merely difficult, expensive, and unlikely to work, Yet it was certainly possible, if anyone cared to try.

    InGen had apparently decided to try.

    "What they have done," Dodgson said, "is build the greatest single tourist attraction in the history of the world. As you know, zoos are extremely popular. Last year, more Americans visited zoos than all professional baseball and football games combined. And the Japanese love zoos-there are fifty zoos in Japan, and more being built. And for this zoo, InGen can charge whatever they want, Two thousand dollars a day, ten thousand dollars a day . . . And then there is the merchandising. The picture books, T-shirts, video games, caps, stuffed toys, comic books, and pets."

    "Pets?"

    "Of course. If InGen can make full-size dinosaurs, they can also make pygmy dinosaurs as household pets. What child won't want a little dinosaur as a pet? A little patented animal for their very own. InGen will sell millions of them. And InGen will engineer them so that these pet dinosaurs can only eat InGen pet food. . . ."

     "Jesus," somebody said.

    "Exactly," Dodgson said. "The zoo is the centerpiece of an enormous enterprise."

    "You said these dinosaurs will be patented?"

    "Yes. Genetically engineered animals can now be patented. The Supreme Court ruled on that in favor of Harvard in 1987. InGen will own its dinosaurs, and no one else can legally make them."

    "What prevents us from creating our own dinosaurs?" someone said.

    "Nothing, except that they have a five-year start. It'll be almost impossible to catch up before the end of the century."

    He paused. "Of course, if we could obtain examples of their dinosaurs, we could reverse engineer them and make our own, with enough modifications in the DNA to evade their patents."

    "Can we obtain examples of their dinosaurs?"

    Dodgson paused. "I believe we can, yes."

    Somebody cleared his throat. "There wouldn't be anything illegal about it. . . ."

    "Oh no," Dodgson said quickly. "Nothing illegal. I'm talking about a legitimate source of their DNA. A disgruntled employee, or some trash improperly disposed of, something like that."

    "Do you have a legitimate source, Dr. Dodgson?"

    "I do," Dodgson said. "But I'm afraid there is some urgency to the decision, because InGen is experiencing a small crisis, and my source will have to act within the next twenty-four hours."

    A long silence descended over the room. The men looked at the secretary, taking notes, and the tape recorder on the table in front of her.

    "I don't see the need for a formal resolution on this," Dodgson said. "Just a sense of the room, as to whether you feel I should proceed. . . ."

    Slowly the heads nodded.

    Nobody spoke. Nobody went on record. They just nodded silently.

    "Thank you for coming, gentlemen," Dodgson said. "I'll take it from here."

    Airport

    Lewis Dodgson entered the coffee shop in the departure building of the San Francisco airport and looked around quickly. His man was already there, waiting at the counter. Dodgson sat down next to him and placed the briefcase on the floor between them.

    "You're late, pal," the man said. He looked at the straw hat Dodgson was wearing and laughed. "What is this supposed to be, a disguise?"

    "You never know," Dodgson said, suppressing his anger. For six months, Dodgson had patiently cultivated this man, who had grown more obnoxious and arrogant with each meeting. But there was nothing Dodgson could do about tbat-both men knew exactly what the stakes were.

    Bioengineered DNA was, weight for weight, the most valuable material in the world. A single microscopic bacterium, too small to see with the naked eye, but containing the genes for a heart-attack enzyme, streptokinase, or for "ice-minus," which prevented frost damage to crops, might be worth five billion dollars to the right buyer.

    And that fact of life had created a bizarre new world of industrial espionage. Dodgson was especially skilled at it. In 1987, he convinced a disgruntled geneticist to quit Cetus for Biosyn, and take five strains of engineered bacteria with her. The geneticist simply put a drop of each on the fingernails of one hand, and walked out the door.

    But InGen presented a tougher challenge. Dodgson wanted more than bacterial DNA; he wanted frozen embryos, and he knew InGen guarded its embryos with the most elaborate security measures. To obtain them, he needed an InGen employee who had access to the embryos, who was willing to steal them, and who could defeat the security. Such a person was not easy to find.

    Dodgson had finally located a susceptible InGen employee earlier in the year. Although this particular person had no access to genetic material, Dodgson kept up the contact, meeting the man monthly at Carlos and Charlie's in Silicon Valley, helping him in small ways. And now that InGen was inviting contractors and advisers to visit the island, it was the moment that Dodgson had been waiting for-because it meant his man would have access to embryos.

    "Let's get down to it," the man said. "I've got ten minutes before my flight,"

    "You want to go over it again?" Dodgson said.

    "Hell no, Dr. Dodgson," the man said. "I want to see the damn money."

    Dodgson flipped the latch on the briefcase and opened it a few inches. The man glanced down casually. "That's all of it?"

    "That's half of it. Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars."

    "Okay. Fine." The man turned away, drank his coffee. "That's fine, Dr. Dodgson."

    Dodgson quickly locked the briefcase. "That's for all fifteen species, you remember."

    "I remember. Fifteen species, frozen embryos. And how am I going to transport them?"

    Dodgson handed the man a large can of Gillette Foamy shaving cream.

    "That's it?"

    "That's it."

    "They may check my luggage. . . ."

    Dodgson shrugged. "Press the top," he said.

    The man pressed it, and white shaving cream puffed into his hand. "Not bad." He wiped the foam on the edge of his plate. "Not bad."

    "The can's a little heavier than usual, is all." Dodgson's technical team had been assembling it around the clock for the last two days. Quickly he showed him how it worked.

    "How much coolant gas is inside?"

    "Enough for thirty-six hours. The embryos have to be back in San Jose by then."

    "That's up to your guy in the boat," the man said. "Better make sure he has a portable cooler on board."

    "I'll do that," Dodgson said.

    "And let's just review the bidding. . . ."

    "The deal is the same," Dodgson said. "Fifty thousand on delivery of each embryo. If they're viable, an additional fifty thousand each."

    "That's fine. Just make sure you have the boat waiting at the east dock of the island, Friday night. Not the north dock, Where the big supply boats arrive. The east dock. It's a small utility dock. You got that?"

    "I got it," Dodgson said. "When will you be back in San Jose?"

    "Probably Sunday." The man pushed away from the counter.

    Dodgson fretted. "You're sure you know how to work the-"

    "I know," the man said. "Believe me, I know."

    "Also," Dodgson said, "we think the island maintains constant radio contact with InGen corporate headquarters in California, so-"

    "Look, I've got it covered," the man said. "Just relax, and get the money ready. I want it all Sunday morning, in San Jose airport, in cash."

    "It'll be waiting for you," Dodgson said. "Don't worry."

    Malcolm

    Shortly before midnight, be stepped on the plane at the Dallas airport, a tall, thin, balding man of thirty-five, dressed entirely in black: black shirt, black trousers, black socks, black sneakers.

    "Ah, Dr. Malcolm," Hammond said, smiling with forced graciousness.

    Malcolm grinned. "Hello, John. Yes, I am afraid your old nemesis is here."

    Malcolm shook bands with everyone, saying quickly, "Ian Malcolm, how do you do? I do maths." He struck Grant as being more amused by the outing than anything else.

    Certainly Grant recognized his name. Ian Malcolm was one of the most famous of the new generation of mathematicians who were openly interested in "how the real world works." These scholars broke with the cloistered tradition of mathematics in several important ways. For one thing, they used computers constantly, a practice traditional mathematicians frowned on. For another, they worked almost exclusively with nonlinear equations, in the emerging field called chaos theory. For a third, they appeared to care that their mathematics described something that actually existed in the real world. And finally, as if to emphasize their emergence from academia into the world, they dressed and spoke with what one senior mathematician called "a deplorable excess of personality." In fact, they often behaved like rock stars.

    Malcolm sat in one of the padded chairs. The stewardess asked him if he wanted a drink. He said, "Diet Coke, shaken not stirred."

    Humid Dallas air drifted through the open door. Ellie said, "Isn't it a little warm for black?"

    "You're extremely pretty, Dr. Sattler," he said. "I could look at your legs all day. But no, as a matter of fact, black is an excellent Color for heat. If you remember your black-body radiation, black is actually best in heat. Efficient radiation. In any case, I wear only two colors, black and gray."

    Ellie was staring at him, her mouth open. "These colors are appropriate for any occasion," Malcolm continued, and they go well together, should I mistakenly put on a pair of gray socks with my black trousers."

    "But don't you find it boring to wear only two colors?"

    "Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing," Malcolm said. "I don't want to think about what I will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports."

    "Dr. Malcolm," Hammond explained, "is a man of strong opinions."

    "And mad as a hatter," Malcolm said cheerfully. "But you must admit, these are nontrivial issues. We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought."

    Hammond turned to Gennaro and raised his hands. "You invited him."

    "And a lucky thing, too," Malcolm said. "Because it sounds as if you have a serious problem."

    "We have no problem," Hammond said quickly.

    "I always maintained this island would be unworkable," Malcolm said. "I predicted it from the beginning." He reached into a soft leather briefcase. "And I trust by now we all know what the eventual outcome is going to be. You're going to have to shut the thing down."

    "Shut it down!" Hammond stood angrily. "This is ridiculous."

    Malcolm shrugged, indifferent to Hammond's outburst. "I've brought copies of my original paper for you to took at," he said. "The original consultancy paper I did for InGen. The mathematics are a bit sticky, but I can walk you through it. Are you leaving now?"

    "I have some phone calls to make," Hammond said, and went into the adjoining cabin.

    "Well, it's a long flight," Malcolm said to the others. "At least my paper will give you something to do."

    The plane flew through the night.

    Grant knew that Ian Malcolm had his share of detractors, and he could understand why some found his style too abrasive, and his applications of chaos theory too glib. Grant thumbed through the paper, glancing at the equations.

    Gennaro said, "Your paper concludes that Hammond's island is bound to fail?"

    "Correct."

    "Because of chaos theory?"

    "Correct. To be more precise, because of the behavior of the system in phase space."

    Gennaro tossed the paper aside and said, "Can you explain this in English?"

    "Surely," Malcolm said. "Let's see where we have to start.You know what a nonlinear equation is?"

    "No."

    "Strange attractors?"

    "No."

    "All right," Malcolm said. "Let's go back to the beginning." He paused, staring at the ceiling. "Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for hundreds of years."

    "Okay," Gennaro said.

    "But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They're bard to solve-in fact, they're usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory.

    "Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in the 1960s. Weather is a big complicated system, namely the earth's atmosphere as it interacts with the land and the sun. The behavior of this big complicated system always defied understanding. So naturally we couldn't predict weather. But what the early researchers learned from computer models was that, even if you could understand it, you still couldn't predict it. Weather prediction is absolutely impossible. The reason is that the behavior of the system is sensitively dependent on initial conditions."

    "You lost me," Gennaro said.

    use a cannon to fire a shell of a certain weight, at a certain speed, and a certain angle of inclination-and if I then fire a second shell with almost the same weight, speed, and angle-what well happen?"

    "The two shells will land at almost the same spot."

    "Right," Malcolm said. "That's linear dynamics."

    "Okay."

    "But if I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity-and if I then repeat it with almost the same temperature, wind, and humidity-the second system will not behave almost the same. It'll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first. Thunderstorms instead of sunshine. That's nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified."

    "I think I see," Gennaro said.

    "The shorthand is the 'butterfly effect.' A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and weather in New York is different."

    "So chaos is all just random and unpredictable?" Gennaro said. "Is that it?"

    "No," Malcolm said. "We actually find bidden regularities within the complex variety of a system's behavior. That's why chaos has now become a very broad theory that's used to study everything from the stock market, to rioting crowds, to brain waves during epilepsy. Any sort of complex system where there is confusion and unpredictability. We can find an underlying order. Okay?"

    "Okay," Gennaro said. "But what is this underlying order?"

    "It's essentially characterized by the movement of the system within phase space," Malcolm said.

    "Jesus," Gennaro said. "All I want to know is why you think Hammond's island can't work."

    "I understand," Malcolm said. "I'll get there. Chaos theory says two things. First, that complex systems like weather have an underlying order. Second, the reverse of that-that simple systems can produce complex behavior. For example, pool balls. You hit a pool ball, and it starts to carom off the sides of the table. In theory, that's a fairly simple system, almost a Newtonian system. Since you can know the force imparted to the ball, and the mass of the ball, and you can calculate the angles at which it will strike the walls, you can predict the future behavior of the ball. In theory, you could predict the behavior of the ball far into the future, as it keeps bouncing from side to side. You could predict where it will end up three hours from now, in theory."

    "Okay." Gennaro nodded.

    But in fact," Malcolm said, "it turns out you can't predict more than a few seconds into the future. Because almost immediately very small effects-imperfections in the surface of the ball, tiny indentations in the wood of the table-start to make a difference. And it doesn't take long before they overpower your careful calculations. So it turns out that this simple system of a pool ball on a table has unpredictable behavior."

    " Okay."

    "And Hammond's project," Malcolm said, "is another apparently simple system-animals within a zoo environment-that will eventually show unpredictable behavior."

    "You know this because of . . ."

    "Theory," Malcolm said.

    "But hadn't you better see the island, to see what he's actually done?"

    "No. That is quite unnecessary. The details don't matter. Theory tells me that the island will quickly proceed to behave in unpredictable fashion.

    "And you're confident of your theory."

    "Ob, yes," Malcolm said. "Totally confident." He sat back in the chair. "There is a problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen."

    Isla Nublar

    With a whine, the rotors began to swing in circles overhead, casting shadows on the runway of San Jose airport. Grant listened to the crackle in his earphones as the pilot talked to the tower.

    They had picked up another passenger in San Jose, a man named Dennis Nedry, who had flown In to meet them. He was fat and sloppy, eating a candy bar, and there was sticky chocolate on his fingers, and flecks of aluminum foil on his shirt. Nedry had mumbled something about doing computers on the island, and hadn't offered to shake hands.

    Through the Plexi bubble Grant watched the airport concrete drop away beneath his feet, and he saw the shadow of the helicopter racing along as they went west, toward the mountains.

    "It's about a forty-minute trip," Hammond said, from one of the rear seats.

    Grant watched the low hills rise up, and then they were passing through intermittent clouds, breaking out into sunshine. The mountains were rugged, though he was surprised at the amount of deforestation, acre after acre of denuded, eroded hills. "Costa Rica," Hammond said, "has better population control than other countries in Central America. But, even so, the land is badly deforested. Most of this is within the last ten years."

    They came down out of the clouds on the other side of the mountains, and Grant saw the beaches of the west coast. They flashed over a small coastal village.

    "Bah��a Anasco," the pilot said. "Fishing village." He pointed north. "Up the coast there, you see the Cabo Blanco preserve. They have beautiful beaches." The pilot headed straight out over the ocean. The water turned green, and then deep aquamarine. The sun shone on the water. It was about ten in the morning.

    "Just a few minutes now," Hammond said, "and we should be seeing Isla Nublar."

    Isla Nublar, Hammond explained, was not a true island. Rather, it was a seamount, a volcanic upthrusting of rock from the ocean floor. "Its volcanic origins can be seen all over the island," Hammond said. "There are steam vents in many places, and the ground is often hot underfoot. Because of this, and also because of prevailing currents, Isla Nublar lies in a foggy area. As we get there you will see-ah, there we are."

    The helicopter rushed forward, low to the water. Ahead Grant saw an island, rugged and craggy, rising sharply from the ocean.

    "Christ, it looks like Alcatraz," Malcolm said.

    Its forested slopes were wreathed in fog, giving the island a mysterious appearance.

    "Much larger, of course," Hammond said. "Eight miles long and three miles wide at the widest point, in total some twenty-two square Miles. Making it the largest private animal preserve in North America."

    The helicopter began to climb, and headed toward the north end of the island. Grant was trying to see through the dense fog.

    "It's not usually this thick," Hammond said. He sounded worried.

    At the north end of the island, the hills were highest, rising more than two thousand feet above the ocean. The tops of the hills were in fog, but Grant saw rugged cliffs and crashing ocean below. The helicopter climbed above the hills, "Unfortunately," Hammond said, "we have to land on the island. I don't like to do it, because it disturbs the animals. And it's sometimes a bit thrilling-"

    Hammond's voice cut off as the pilot said, "Starting our descent now. Hang on, folks." The helicopter started down, and immediately they were blanketed in fog. Grant heard a repetitive electronic beeping through his earphones, but he could see nothing at all; then he began dimly to discern the green branches of pine trees, reaching through the mist. Some of the branches were close.

    "How the hell is he doing this?" Malcolm said, but nobody answered.

    The pilot swung his gaze left, then right, looking at the pine forest. The trees were still close. The helicopter descended rapidly.

    "Jesus," Malcolm said.

    The beeping was louder. Grant looked at the pilot. He was concentrating. Grant glanced down and saw a giant glowing fluorescent cross beneath the Plexi bubble at his feet. There were flashing lights at the corners of the cross. The pilot corrected slightly and touched down on a helipad. The sound of the rotors faded, and died.

    Grant sighed, and released his seat belt.

    "We have to come down fast, that way," Hammond said, "because of the wind shear. There is often had wind shear on this peak, and . . . well, we're safe."