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
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.”
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.