“Would the river bring them all the way back here?”
“Yes, but it’s not the safest way to go, because it passes through the aviary. . . .”
“Why wasn’t the aviary on the tour?” Malcolm said.
“We’ve had problems setting it up. Originally the park was intended to have a treetop lodge built high above the ground, where visitors could observe the pterodactyls at flight level. We’ve got four dactyls in the aviary now-actually, they’re cearadactyls, which are big fish-eating dactyls.”
“What about them?”
“Well, while we finished the lodge, we put the dactyls in the aviary to acclimate them. But that was a big mistake. It turns out our fish-hunters are territorial.”
“Territorial?”
“Fiercely territorial,” Arnold said. “They fight among themselves for territory-and they’ll attack any other animal that comes into the area they’ve marked out.”
“Attack?”
“It’s impressive,” Arnold said. “The dactyls glide to the top of the aviary, fold up their wings, and dive. A thirty-pound animal will strike a man on the ground like a ton of bricks. They were knocking the workmen unconscious, cutting them up pretty badly.”
“That doesn’t injure the dactyls?”
“Not so far.”
“So, if those kids are in the aviary . . .”
“They’re not,” Arnold said. “At least, I hope they’re not.”
“Is that the lodge?” Lex said. “What a dump.”
Beneath the aviary dome, Pteratops Lodge was built high above the ground, on big wooden pylons, in the middle of a stand of fir trees. But the building was unfinished and unpainted; the windows were boarded up. The trees and the lodge were splattered with broad white streaks.
“I guess they didn’t finish it, for some reason,” Grant said, hiding his disappointment. He glanced at his watch. “Come on, let’s go back to the boat.”
The sun came out as they walked along, making the morning more cheerful. Grant looked at the latticework shadows on the ground from the dome above, He noticed that the ground and the foliage were spattered with broad streaks of the same white chalky substance that had been on the building. And there was a distinctive, sour odor in the morning air.
“Stinks here,” Lex said. “What’s all the white stuff?”
“Looks like reptile droppings. Probably from the birds.”
“How come they didn’t finish the lodge?”
“I don’t know.”
They entered a clearing of low grass, dotted with wild flowers. They heard a long, low whistle. Then an answering whistle, from across the forest.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
Then Grant saw the dark shadow of a cloud on the grassy field ahead. The shadow was moving fast. In moments, it had swept over them. He looked up and saw an enormous dark shape gliding above them, blotting out the sun.
“Yew!” Lex said. “Is it a pterodactyl?”
“Yes,” Tim said.
Grant didn’t answer. He was entranced by the sight of the huge flying creature. In the sky above, the pterodactyl gave a low whistle and wheeled gracefully, turning back toward them.
“How come they’re not on the tour?” Tim said.
Grant was wondering the same thing. The flying dinosaurs were so beautiful, so graceful as they moved through the air. As Grant watched, he saw a second pterodactyl appear in the sky, and a third, and a fourth.
“Maybe because they didn’t finish the lodge,” Lex said.
Grant was thinking these weren’t ordinary pterodactyls. They were too large. They must cearadactyls, big flying reptiles from the early Cretaceous. When they were high, these looked like small airplanes. When they came lower, he could see the animals had fifteen-foot wingspans, furry bodies, and heads like crocodiles. They ate fish, he remembered. South America and Mexico.
Lex shaded her eyes and looked up at the sky. “Can they hurt us?”
“I don’t think so. They eat fish.”
One of the dactyls spiraled down, a flashing dark shadow that whooshed past them with a rush of warm air and a lingering sour odor.
“Wow!” Lex said. “They’re really big.” And then she said, “Are you sure they can’t hurt us?”
“Pretty sure.”
A second dactyl swooped down, moving faster than the first. It came from behind, streaked over their heads. Grant had a glimpse of its toothy beak and the furry body. It looked like a huge bat, he thought. But Grant was impressed with the frail appearance of the animals. Their huge wingspans-the delicate pink membranes stretched across them-so thin they were translucent-everything reinforced the delicacy of the dactyls.
“Ow!” Lex shouted, grabbing her hair. “He bit me!”
“He what?” Grant said.
“He bit me! He bit me!” When she took her band away, he saw blood on her fingers.
Up in the sky, two more dactyls folded their wings, collapsing into small dark shapes that plummeted toward the ground. They made a kind of scream as they hurtled downward.
“Come on!” Grant said, grabbing their hands. They ran across the meadow, bearing the approaching scream, and he flung himself on the ground at the last moment, pulling the kids down with him, as the two dactyls whistled and squeaked past them, flapping their wings. Grant felt claws tear the shirt along his back.
Then he was up, pulling Lex back onto her feet, and running with Tim a few feet forward while overhead two more birds wheeled and dove toward them, screaming. At the last moment, he pushed the kids to the ground, and the big shadows flapped past.
“Uck,” Lex said, disgusted. He saw that she was streaked with white droppings from the birds.
Grant scrambled to his feet. “Come on!”
He was about to run when Lex shrieked in terror. He turned back and saw that one of the dactyls had grabbed her by the shoulders with its hind claws. The animal’s huge leathery wings, translucent in the sunlight, flapped broadly on both sides of her. The dactyl was trying to take off, but Lex was too heavy, and while it struggled it repeatedly jabbed at her head with its long pointed jaw.
Lex was screaming, waving her arms wildly. Grant did the only thing he could think to do. He ran forward and jumped up, throwing himself against the body of the dactyl. He knocked it onto its back on the ground, and fell on top of the furry body. The animal screamed and snapped; Grant ducked his head away from the jaws and pushed back, as the giant wings beat around his body. It was like being in a tent In a windstorm. He couldn’t see; he couldn’t hear; there was nothing but the flapping and shrieking and the leathery membranes. The clawed legs scratched frantically at his chest. Lex was screaming. Grant pushed away from the dactyl and it squeaked and gibbered as it flapped its wings and struggled to turn over, to right itself. Finally it pulled in its wings like a bat and rolled over, lifted itself up on its little wing claws, and began to walk that way. He paused, astonished.
It could walk on its wings! Lederer’s speculation was right! But then the other dactyls were diving down at them and Grant was dizzy, off balance, and in horror he saw Lex run away, her arms over her head . . . Tim shouting at the top of his lungs. . . .
The first of them swooped down and she threw something and suddenly the dactyl whistled and climbed. The other dactyls immediately climbed and chased the first into the sky. The fourth dactyl flapped awkwardly into the air to join the others. Grant looked upward, squinting to see what had happened. The three dactyls chased the first, screaming angrily.
They were alone in the field.
“What happened?” Grant said.
“They got my glove,” Lex said. “My Darryl Strawberry special.”
They started walking again. Tim put his arm around her shoulders. “Are you all right?”
“Of course, stupid,” she said, shaking him off. She looked upward. “I hope they choke and die,” she said.
“Yeah,” Tim said. “Me, too-”
Up ahead, they saw the boat on the shore. Grant looked at his watch. It was eight-thirty. He now had two and a half hours to get back.
Lex cheered as they drifted beyond the silver aviary dome. Then the banks of the river closed in on both sides, the trees meeting overhead once more. The river was narrower than ever, in some places only ten feet wide, and the current flowed very fast. Lex reached up to touch the branches as they went past.
Grant sat back in the raft and listened to the gurgle of the water through the warm rubber. They were moving faster now, the branches overhead slipping by more rapidly. It was pleasant. It gave a little breeze in the hot confines of the overhanging branches. And it meant they would get back that much sooner.
Grant couldn’t guess how far they had come, but it must be several miles at least from the sauropod building where they had spent the night. Perhaps four or five miles. Maybe even more. That meant they might be only an hour’s walk from the hotel, once they left the raft. But after the aviary, Grant was in no hurry to leave the river again. For the moment, they were making good time.
“I wonder how Ralph is,” Lex said. “He’s probably dead or something.”
“I’m sure he’s fine.”
“I wonder if he’d let me ride him.” She sighed, sleepy in the sun. “That would be fun, to ride Ralph.”
Tim said to Grant, “Remember back at the stegosaurus? Last night?”
“Yes.”
“How come you asked them about frog DNA?”
“Because of the breeding,” Grant said. “They can’t explain why the dinosaurs are breeding, since they irradiate them, and since they’re all females.”
“Right.”
“Well, irradiation is notoriously unreliable and probably doesn’t work. I think that’ll eventually be shown here. But there is still the problem of the dinosaurs’ being female. How can they breed when they’re all female?”
“Right,” Tim said.
“Well, across the animal kingdom, sexual reproduction exists in extraordinary variety.”
“Tim’s very interested in sex,” Lex said.
They both ignored her. “For example,” Grant said, “many animals have sexual reproduction without ever having what we would call sex. The male releases a spermatophore, which contains the sperm, and the female picks it up at a later time. This kind of exchange does not require quite as much physical differentiation between male and female as we usually think exists. Male and female are more alike in some animals than they are in human beings.”
Tim nodded. “But what about the frogs?”
Grant heard sudden shrieks from the trees above, as the microceratopsians scattered in alarm, shaking the branches. The big head of the tyrannosaur lunged through the foliage from the left, the jaws snapping at the raft. Lex howled in terror, and Grant paddled away toward the opposite bank, but the river here was only ten feet wide. The tyrannosaur was caught in the heavy growth- it butted and twisted its head, and roared. Then it pulled its head back.
Through the trees that lined the riverbank, they saw the huge dark form of the tyrannosaur, moving north, looking for a gap in the trees that lined the bank. The microceratopsians had all gone to the opposite bank, where they shrieked and scampered and jumped up and down. In the raft, Grant, Tim, and Lex stared helplessly as the tyrannosaur tried to break through again, But the trees were too dense along the banks of the river. The tyrannosaur again moved downstream, ahead of the boat, and tried again, shaking the branches furiously.
But again it failed.
Then it moved off, heading farther downstream.
“I hate him,” Lex said.
Grant sat back in the boat, badly shaken. If the tyrannosaur had broken through, there was nothing be could have done to save them. The river was so narrow that it was hardly wider than the raft. It was like being in a tunnel. The rubber gunwales often scraped on the mud as the boat was pulled along by the swift current.
He glanced at his watch. Almost nine. The raft continued downstream.
“Hey,” Lex said, “listen!”
He heard snarling, interspersed by a repeated hooting cry. The cries were coming from beyond a curve, farther downriver. He listened, and heard the hooting again.
“What is it?” Lex said.
“I don’t know,” Grant said. “But there’s more than one of them.” He paddled the boat to the opposite bank, grabbed a branch to stop the raft. The snarling was repeated. Then more hooting.
“It sounds like a bunch of owls,” Tim said.
Malcolm groaned. “Isn’t it time for more morphine yet?”
“Not yet,” Ellie said.
Malcolm sighed. “How much water have we got here?”
“I don’t know. There’s plenty of running water from the tap-”
“No, I mean, how much stored? Any?”
Ellie shrugged. “None.”
“Go into the rooms on this floor,” Malcolm said, “and fill the bathtubs with water.”
Ellie frowned.
“Also,” Malcolm said, “have we got any walkie-talkies? Flashlights? Matches? Sterno stoves? Things like that?”
“I’ll look around. You planning for an earthquake?”
“Something like that,” Malcolm said. “Malcolm Effect implies catastrophic changes.”
“But Arnold says all the systems are working perfectly.”
“That’s when it happens,” Malcolm said.
Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”
“He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”
“Don’t you think it’s just human nature?” Ellie said.
“God, no,” Malcolm said. “That’s like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s uniquely Western training, and much of the rest of the world is nauseated by the thought of it.” He winced in pain. “The morphine’s making me philosophical.”
“You want some water?”
“No. I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like ‘seeking truth.’
“Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators sear the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.
“The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch. They can’t just appreciate. They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.” He sighed, and sank back.
Ellie said, “Don’t you think you’re overstating-“