“Uh-huh,” Grant said.
“Are you divorced?”
“No,” Grant said. “My wife died a long time ago.”
“And now you’re with Dr. Sattler?”
Grant smiled in the darkness. “No. She’s my student.”
“You mean she’s still in school?”
“Graduate school, yes.” Grant paused long enough to shift Lex to his other shoulder, and then they continued on, past T/N/05 and T/N/06. There was the rumble of thunder in the distance. The storm had moved to the south. There was very little sound in the forest except for the drone of cicadas and the soft croaking of tree frogs.
You have children?” Tim asked.
“No,” Crant said.
“Are you going to marry Dr. Sattler?”
“No, she’s marrying a nice doctor in Chicago sometime next year.
“Oh,” Tim said. He seemed surprised to hear it. They walked along for a while. “Then who are you going to marry?”
“I don’t think I’m going to marry anybody,” Grant said.
“Me neither,” Tim said.
They walked for a while. Tim said, “Are we going to walk all night?”
“I don’t think I can,” Grant said. “We’ll have to stop, at least for a few hours.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re okay. We’ve got almost fifteen hours before we have to be back. Before the ship reaches the mainland.”
“Where are we going to stop?” Tim asked, immediately.
Grant was wondering the same thing. His first thought was that thev might climb a tree, and sleep up there. But they would have to climb very high to get safely away from the animals, and Lex might fall out while she was asleep. And tree branches were hard; they wouldn’t get any rest. At least, he wouldn’t.
They needed someplace really safe. He thought back to the plans he had seen on the jet coming down. He remembered that there were outlying buildings for each of the different divisions. Grant didn’t know what they were like, because plans for the individual buildings weren’t included. And he couldn’t remember exactly where they were, but he remembered they were scattered all around the park. There might be buildings somewhere nearby.
But that was a different requirement from simply crossing a barrier and getting out of the tyrannosaur paddock, Finding a building meant a search strategy of some kind. And the best strategies were-
“Tim, can you hold your sister for me? I’m going to climb a tree and have a look around.”
High in the branches, he had a good view of the forest, the tops of the trees extending away to his left and right. They were surprisingly near the edge of the forest-directly ahead the trees ended before a clearing, with an electrified fence and a pale concrete moat. Beyond that, a large open field in what he assumed was the sauropod paddock. In the distance, more trees, and misty moonlight sparkling on the ocean.
Somewhere he heard the bellowing of a dinosaur, but it was far away. He put on Tim’s night-vision goggles and looked again. He followed the gray curve of the moat, and then saw what he was looking for: the dark strip of a service road, leading to the flat rectangle of a roof. The roof was barely above ground level, but it was there. And it wasn’t far. Maybe a quarter of a mile or so from the tree.
When he came back down, Lex was sniffling.
“What’s the matter?”
“I heard an aminal.”
“It won’t bother us. Are you awake now? Come on.”
He led her to the fence. It was twelve feet high, with a spiral of barbed wire at the top. It seemed to stretch far above them in the moonligbt. The moat was immediately on the other side.
Lex looked up at the fence doubtfully.
“Can you climb it?” Grant asked her.
She handed him her glove, and her baseball. “Sure. Easy.” She started to climb. “But I bet Timmy can’t.”
Tim spun in fury: “You shut up.”
“Timmy’s afraid of heights.”
“I am not.”
She climbed higher. “Are so.”
“Am not.”
“Then come and get me.”
Grant turned to Tim, pale in the darkness. The boy wasn’t moving. “You okay with the fence, Tim?”
“Sure.”
“Want some help?”
“Timmy’s a fraidy-cat,” Lex called.
“What a stupid jerk,” Tim said, and he started to climb.
“It’s freezing,” Lex said. They were standing waist-deep in smelly water at the bottom of a deep concrete moat. They had climbed the fence without incident, except that Tim had torn his shirt on the coils of barbed wire at the top. Then they had all slid down into the moat, and now Grant was looking for a way out.
“At least I got Timmy over the fence for you,” Lex said. “He really is scared most times.”
“Thanks for your help,” Tim said sarcastically. In the moonlight, he could see floating lumps on the surface. He moved along the moat, looking at the concrete wall on the far side. The concrete was smooth; they couldn’t possibly climb it.
“Eww,” Lex said, pointing to the water.
“It won’t hurt you, Lex.”
Grant finally found a place where the concrete had cracked and a vine grew down toward the water. He tugged on the vine, and it held his weight. “Let’s go, kids.” They started to climb the vine, back to the field above.
It took only a few minutes to cross the field to the embankment leading to the below-grade service road, and the maintenance building off to the right. They passed two motion sensors, and Grant noticed with some uneasiness that the sensors were still not working, nor were the lights. More than two hours had passed since the power first went out, and it was not yet restored.
Somewhere in the distance, they heard the tyrannosaur roar. “Is he around here?” Lex said.
“No,” Grant said. “We’re in another section of park from him.” They slid down a grassy embankment and moved toward the concrete building. In the darkness it was forbidding, bunker-like.
“What is this place?” Lex said.
“It’s safe,” Grant said, hoping that was true.
The entrance gate was large enough to drive a truck through. It was fitted with heavy bars. Inside, they could see, the building was an open shed, with piles of grass and bales of bay stacked among equipment.
The gate was locked with a heavy padlock. As Grant was examining it, Lex slipped sideways between the bars. “Come on, you guys.”
Tim followed her. “I think you can do it, Dr. Grant.”
He was right; it was a tight squeeze, but Grant was able to ease his body between the bars and get into the shed. As soon as he was inside, a wave of exhaustion struck him.
“I wonder if there’s anything to eat,” Lex said.
“Just hay.” Grant broke open a bale, and spread it around on the concrete. The hay in the center was warm. They lay down, feeling the warmth. Lex curled up beside him, and closed her eyes. Tim put his arm around her. He heard the sauropods trumpeting softly in the distance.
Neither child spoke. They were almost immediately snoring. Grant raised his arm to look at his watch, but it was too dark to see. He felt the warmth of the children against his own body.
Grant closed his eves, and slept.
Control
Muldoon and Gennaro came into the control room just as Arnold clapped his bands and said, “Got you, you little son of a bitch.”
“What is it?” Gennaro said,
Arnold pointed to the screen:
Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}
Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}
if Link(Vgl,Vg2) set Lim(Vgl,Vg2) return
if Link(Vg2,Vgl) set Lim(Vg2,Vgl) return
on whte_rbt.obj link set security (Vgl), perimeter (Vg2)
limitDat.1 = maxbits (%22) to {limit .04} set on
limitDat.2 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit .2-var(dzh)}
on fini.obi call link.sst {security, perimeter} set to on
on fini.obi set link.sst {security, perimeter} restore
on fini.obi delete line rf whte_rbt.obj, fini.obj
Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}
Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}
IimitDat.4 = maxbits (%33) to {limit .04} set on
limitDat.5 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit .2-var(szh)}
“That’s it,” Arnold said, pleased.
“That’s what?” Gennaro asked, staring at the screen.
“I finally found the command to restore the original code. The command called ‘fini.ob’ resets the linked parameters, namely the fence and the power.
“Good,” Muldoon said.
“But it does something else,” Arnold said. “It then erases the code lines that refer to it. It destroys all evidence it was ever there. Pretty slick.”
Gennaro shook his head. “I don’t know much about computers.” Although he knew enough to know what it meant when a high-tech company went back to the source code. It meant big, big problems.
“Well, watch this,” Arnold said, and he typed in the command:
FINI.OBJ
The screen flickered and immediately changed.
Vg1 = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}
Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}
if Link(Vgl,Vg2) set Lim(Vgl,Vg2) return
if Link(Vg2,Vgl) set Lim(Vg2,Vgl) return
limitDat.1 = maxbits (%22) to {limit .04} set on
limitDat.2 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit .2-var(dzh)}
Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}
Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}
IimitDat.4 = maxbits (%33) to {limit .04} set on
limitDat.5 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit .2-var(szh)}
Muldoon pointed to the windows. “Look!” Outside, the big quartz lights were coming on throughout the park, They went to the windows and looked out.
“Hot damn,” Arnold said,
Gennaro said, “Does this mean the electrified fences are back on?”
“You bet it does,” Arnold said. “It’ll take a few seconds to get up to full power, because we’ve got fifty miles of fence out there, and the generator has to charge the capacitors along the way. But in half a minute we’ll be back in business,” Arnold pointed to the vertical glass see-through map of the park.
On the map, bright red lines were snaking out from the power station, moving throughout the park, as electricity surged through the fences.
“And the motion sensors?” Gennaro said.
“Yes, them, too. It’ll be a few minutes while the computer counts. But everything’s working,” Arnold said. “Half past nine, and we’ve got the whole damn thing back up and running.”
Grant opened his eyes. Brilliant blue light was streaming into the building through the bars of the gate. Quartz light: the power was back on! Groggily, he looked at his watch. It was just nine-thirty. He’d been asleep only a couple of minutes. He decided he could sleep a few minutes more, and then he would go back up to the field and stand in front of the motion sensors and wave, setting them off. The control room would spot him; they’d send a car out to pick him and the kids up, he’d tell Arnold to recall the supply ship, and they’d all finish the night in their own beds back in the lodge.
He would do that right away. In just a couple of minutes. He yawned, and closed his eyes again.
“Not bad,” Arnold said in the control room, staring at the glowing map. “There’s only three cutouts in the whole park. Much better than I hoped for.”
“Cutouts?” Gennaro said.
“The fence automatically cuts out short-circuited sections,” he explained. “You can see a big one here, in sector twelve, near the main road.”
“That’s where the rex knocked the fence down,” Muldoon said.
“Exactly. And another one is here in sector eleven. Near the sauropod maintenance building.”
“Why would that section be out?” Gennaro said.
“God knows,” Arnold said. “Probably storm damage or a fallen tree. We can check It on the monitor in a while. The third one is over there by the jungle river. Don’t know why that should be out, either.”
As Gennaro looked, the map became more complex, filling with green spots and numbers. “What’s all this?”
“The animals. The motion sensors are working again, and the computer’s starting to identify the location of all the animals in the park. And anybody else, too.”
Gennaro stared at the map. “You mean Grant and the kids . . .”
“Yes. We’ve reset our search number above four hundred. So, if they’re out there moving around,” Arnold said, “the motion sensors will pick them up as additional animals.” He stared at the map. “But I don’t see any additionals yet.”
“Why does it take so long?” Gennaro said.
“You have to realize, Mr. Gennaro,” Arnold said, “that there’s a lot of extraneous movement out there. Branches blowing in the wind, birds flying around, all kinds of stuff. The computer has to eliminate all the background movement. It may take-ah. Okay. Count’s finished.”
Gennaro said, “You don’t see the kids?”
Arnold twisted in his chair, and looked back to the map. “No,” he said, “at the moment, there are no additionals on the map at all. Everything out there has been accounted for as a dinosaur. They’re probably up in a tree, or somewhere else where we can’t see them. I wouldn’t worry yet. Several animals haven’t shown up, like the big rex. That’s probably because it’s sleeping somewhere and not moving. The people may be sleeping, too. We just don’t know.”
Muldoon shook his head. “We better get on with it,” he said. “We need to repair the fences, and get the animals back into their paddocks. According to that computer, we’ve got five to herd back to the proper paddocks. I’ll take the maintenance crews out now.”
Arnold turned to Gennaro. “You may want to see how Dr. Malcolm is doing. Tell Dr. Harding that Muldoon will need him in about an hour to supervise the herding. And I’ll notify Mr. Hammond that we’re starting our final cleanup.”
Gennaro passed through the iron gates and went in the front door of the Safari Lodge. He saw Ellie Sattler coming down the hallway, carrying towels and a pan of steaming water. “There’s a kitchen at the other end,” she said. “We’re using that to boil water for the dressings.”
“How is he?” Gennaro asked.
“Surprisingly good,” she said.
Gennarro followed Ellie down to Malcolm’s room, and was startled to hear the sound of laughter. The mathematician lay on his back in the bed, with Harding adjusting an IV line.
“So the other man says, ‘I’ll tell you frankly, I didn’t like it, Bill. I went back to toilet paper!'”
Harding was laughing.
“It’s not bad, is it?” Malcolm said, smiling. “Ah. Mr. Gennaro. You’ve come to see me. Now you know what happens from trying to get a leg up on the situation.”
Gennaro came in, tentatively.
Harding said, “He’s on fairly high doses of morphine.”
“Not high enough, I can tell you,” Malcolm said. “Christ, he’s stingy with his drugs. Did they find the others yet?”
“No, not yet,” Gennaro said. “But I’m glad to see you doing so well.”
“How else should I be doing,” Malcolm said, “with a compound fracture of the leg that is likely septic and beginning to smell rather, ah, pungent? But I always say, if you can’t keep a sense of humor . . .”
Gennaro smiled. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Of course I remember,” Malcolm said. “Do you think you could be bitten by a Tyrannosaurus rex and it would escape your mind? No indeed, I’ll tell you, you’d remember it for the rest of your life. In my case, perhaps not a terribly long time. But, still-yes, I remember.”