Cowan, Swain and Ross
Midday sun streamed into the San Francisco law offices of Cowan, Swain and Ross, giving the room a cheerfulness that Donald Gennaro did not feel. He listened on the phone and looked at his boss, Daniel Ross, cold as an undertaker in his dark pinstripe suit.
“I understand, John,” Gennaro said. “And Grant agreed to come? Good, good . . . yes, that sounds fine to me. My congratulations, John.” He hung up the phone and turned to Ross.
“We can’t trust Hammond any more. He’s under too much pressure. The EPA’s investigating him, he’s behind schedule on his Costa Rican resort, and the investors are getting nervous. There have been too many rumors of problems down there. Too many workmen have died. And now this business about a living procompsit-whatever on the mainland . . . ”
“What does that mean?” Ross said.
“Maybe nothing,” Gennaro said. “But Hamachi is one of our principal investors. I got a report last week from Hamachi’s representative in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. According to the report, some new kind of lizard is biting children on the coast.”
Ross blinked. “New lizard?”
“Yes,” Gennaro said. “We can’t screw around with this. We’ve got to inspect that island right away. I’ve asked Hammond to arrange independent site inspections every week for the next three weeks.”
“And what does Hammond say?”
“He insists nothing is wrong on the island. Claims he has all these security precautions.”
“But you don’t believe him,” Ross said.
“No,” Gennaro said. “I don’t.”
Donald Gennaro had come to Cowan, Swain from a background in investment banking. Cowan, Swain’s high-tech clients frequently needed capitalization, and Gennaro helped them find the money. One of his first assignments, back in 1982, had been to accompany John Hammond while the old man, then nearly seventy, put together the funding to start the InGen corporation. They eventually raised almost a billion dollars, and Gcnnaro remembered it as a wild ride.
“Hammond’s a dreamer,” Gennaro said.
“A potentially dangerous dreamer,” Ross said. “We should never have gotten involved. What is our financial position?”
“The firm,” Gennaro said, “owns five percent.”
“General or limited?”
“General.”
Ross shook his head. “We should never have done that.”
“It seemed wise at the time,” Gennaro said. “Hell, it was eight years ago. We took it in lieu of some fees. And, if you remember, Hammond’s plan was extremely speculative. He was really pushing the envelope. Nobody really thought he could pull it off.”
“But apparently he has,” Ross said. “In any case, I agree that an inspection is overdue. What about your site experts?”
“I’m starting with experts Hammond already hired as consultants, early in the project.” Gennaro tossed a list onto Ross’s desk. “First group is a paleontologist, a paleobotanist, and a mathematician. They go down this weekend. I’ll go with them.”
“Will they tell you the truth?” Ross said.
“I think so. None of them had much to do with the island, and one of them-the mathematician, Ian Malcolm-was openly hostile to the project from the start. Insisted it would never work, could never work.”
“And who else?”
“Just a technical person: the computer system analyst. Review the park’s computers and fix some bugs. He should be there by Friday morning.”
Fine,” Ross said. “You’re making the arrangements?”
“Hammond asked to place the calls himself. I think he wants to pretend that he’s not in trouble, that it’s just a social invitation. Showing off his island.”
“All right,” Ross said. “But just make sure it happens. Stay on top of it. I want this Costa Rican situation resolved within a week.” Ross got up, and walked out of the room.
Gennaro dialed, heard the whining hiss of a radiophone. Then he heard a voice say, “Grant here.”
“Hi, Dr. Grant, this is Donald Gennaro. I’m the general counsel for InGen. We talked a few years back, I don’t know if you remember-”
“I remember,” Grant said.
“Well,” Gennaro said. “I just got off the phone with John Hammond, who tells me the good news that you’re coming down to our island in Costa Rica. . . .”
“Yes,” Grant said. “I guess we’re going down there tomorrow.”
“Well, I just want to extend my thanks to you for doing this on short notice. Everybody at InGen appreciates it. We’ve asked fan Malcolm, who like you was one of the early consultants, to come down as well. He’s the mathematician at UT in Austin?”
“John Hammond mentioned that,” Grant said.
“Well, good,” Gennaro said. “And I’ll be coming, too, as a matter of fact. By the way, this specimen you have found of a pro . . . procom . . . what is it?”
“Procompsognathus,” Grant said.
“Yes. Do you have the specimen with you, Dr. Grant? The actual specimen?”
“No,” Grant said. “I’ve only seen an X-ray. The specimen is in New York. A woman from Columbia University called me.”
“Well, I wonder if you could give me the details on that,” Gennaro said. “Then I can run down that specimen for Mr. Hammond, who’s very excited about it. I’m sure you want to see the actual specimens too. Perhaps I can even get it delivered to the island while you’re all down there,” Gennaro said.
Grant gave him the information. “Well, that’s fine, Dr. Grant,” Gennaro said. “My regards to Dr. Sattler. I look forward to meeting you and him tomorrow.” And Gennaro hung up.
Plans
“This just came,” Ellie said the next day, walking to the back of the trailer with a thick manila envelope. “One of the kids brought it back from town. It’s from Hammond.”
Grant noticed the blue-and-white InGen logo as he tore open the envelope. Inside there was no cover letter, just a bound stack of paper. Pulling it out, he discovered it was blueprints. They were reduced, forming a thick book. The cover was marked: ISLA NUBLAR RESORT GUEST FACILITIES (FULL SET: SAFARI LODGE).
“What the hell is this?” he said.
As he flipped open the book, a sheet of paper fell out.
Dear Alan and Ellie:
As you can imagine we don’t have much in the way of formal promotional materials yet. But this should give you some idea of the Isla Nublar project. I think it’s Very exciting!
Looking forward to discussing this with you! Hope you can join us!
Regards,
John
“I don’t get it,” Grant said. He flipped through the sheets. “These are architectural plans.” He turned to the top sheet:
VISITOR CENTER/LODGE ISLA NUBLAR RESORT
CLIENT InGen Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.
ARCHITECTS Dunning, Murphy & Associates, New
York. Richard Murphy, design partner;
Theodore Chen, senior designer;
Sheldon James, administrative partner.
ENGINEERS Harlow, Whitney & Fields, Boston,
structural; A.T.Misikawa, Osaka,
mechanical.
LANDSCAPING Shepperton Rogers, London;
A.Ashikiga, H. Ieyasu, Kanazawa.
ELECTRICAL N. V. Kobayashi, Tokyo. A. R
Makasawa, senior consultant.
COMPUTER C/C Integrated Computer Systems, Inc.,
Cambridge, Mass. Dennis Nedry,
project supervisor.
Grant turned to the plans themselves. They were stamped INDUSTRIAL SECRETS DO NOT COPY and CONFIDENTIAL WORK PRODUCT-NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. Each sheet was numbered, and at the top: “These plans represent the confidential creations of InGen Inc. You must have signed document 112/4A or you risk prosecution.”
“Looks pretty paranoid to me,” he said.
“Maybe there’s a reason,” Ellie said.
The next page was a topographical map. It showed Isla Nublar as an inverted teardrop, bulging at the north, tapering at the south. The island was eight miles long, and the map divided it into several large sections.
The northern section was marked VISITOR AREA and it contained structures marked “Visitor Arrivals,” “Visitor Center/Administration,” ” Power/Desalinization/Support,” “Hammond Res.,” and “Safari Lodge.” Grant could see the outline of a swimming pool, the rectangles of tennis courts, and the round squiggles that represented planting and shrubbery.
“Looks like a resort, all right,” Ellie said.
There followed detail sheets for the Safari Lodge itself. In the elevation sketches, the lodge looked dramatic: a long low building with a series of pyramid shapes on the roof. But there was little about the other buildings in the visitor area.
And the rest of the island was even more mysterious. As far as Grant could tell, it was mostly open space. A network of roads, tunnels, and outlying buildings, and a long thin lake that appeared to be man-made, with concrete dams and barriers. But, for the most part, the island was divided into big curving areas with very little development at all. Each area was marked by codes:
/P/PROC/V/2A, /D/TRIC/L/5(4A+I), /LN/OTHN/C/4(3A+]), and /VV/ HADR/X/ 11(6A + 3 + 3DB).
“Is there an explanation for the codes?” she said.
Grant flipped the pages rapidly, but he couldn’t find one.
“Maybe they took it out,” she said.
“I’m telling you,” Grant said. “Paranoid.” He looked at the big curving divisions, separated from one another by the network of roads. There were only six divisions on the whole island. And each division was separated from the road by a concrete moat. Outside each moat was a fence with a little lightning sign alongside it. That mystified them until they were finally able to figure out It meant the fences were electrified.
“That’s odd,” she said. “Electrified fences at a resort?”
“Miles of them,” Grant said. “Electrified fences and moats, together. And usually with a road alongside them as well.”
“Just like a zoo,” Ellie said.
They went back to the topographical map and looked closely at the contour lines. The roads had been placed oddly. The main road ran north-soutb, right through the central hills of the island, including one section of road that seemed to be literally cut into the side of a cliff, above a river. It began to look as if there had been a deliberate effort to leave these open areas as big enclosures, separated from the roads by moats and electric fences. And the roads were raised up above ground level, so you could see over the fences. . . .
“You know,” Ellie said, “some of these dimensions are enormous. Look at this. This concrete moat is thirty feet wide. That’s like a military fortification.”
“So are these buildings,” Grant said. He had noticed that each open division had a few buildings, usually located in out-of-the-way corners. But the buildings were all concrete, with thick walls. In side-view elevations they looked like concrete bunkers with small windows. Like the Nazi pillboxes from old war movies.
At that moment, they heard a muffled explosion, and Grant put the papers aside. “Back to work,” he said.
“Fire!”
There was a slight vibration, and then yellow contour lines traced across the computer screen. This time the resolution was perfect, and Alan Grant had a glimpse of the skeleton, beautifully defined, the long neck arched back. It was unquestionably an infant velociraptor, and it looked in perfect-
The screen went blank.
“I hate computers,” Grant said, squinting in the sun. “What happened now?”
“Lost the integrator input,” one of the kids said. “Just a minute.” The kid bent to look at the tangle of wires going into the back of the battery-powered portable computer. They had set the computer up on a beer carton on top of Hill Four, not far from the device they called Thumper.
Grant sat down on the side of the hill and looked at his watch. He said to Ellie, “We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
One of the kids overheard. “Aw, Alan.”
“Look,” Grant said, “I’ve got a plane to catch. And I want the fossil protected before I go.”
Once you began to expose a fossil, you had to continue, or risk losing it. Visitors imagined the landscape of the badlands to be unchanging, but in fact it was continuously eroding, literally right before your eyes; all day long you could hear the clatter of pebbles rolling down the crumbling hillside. And there was always the risk of a rainstorm; even a brief shower would wash away a delicate fossil. Thus Grant’s partially exposed skeleton was at risk, and it had to be protected until he returned.
Fossil protection ordinarily consisted of a tarp over the site, and a trench around the perimeter to control water runoff. The question was how large a trench the velociraptor fossil required. To decide that, they were using computer-assisted sonic tomography, or CAST. This was a new procedure, in which Thumper fired a soft lead slug into the ground, setting up shock waves that were read by the computer and assembled into a kind of X-ray image of the hillside. They had been using it all summer with varying results.
Thumper was twenty feet away now, a big silver box on wheels, with an umbrella on top. It looked like an ice-cream vendor’s pushcart, parked incongruously on the badlands. Thumper had two youthful attendants loading the next soft lead pellet.
So far, the CAST program merely located the extent of finds, helping Grant’s team to dig more efficiently. But the kids claimed that within a few years it would be possible to generate an image so detailed that excavation would he redundant. You could get a perfect image of the bones, in three dimensions, and it promised a whole new era of archaeology without excavation.
But none of that had happened yet. And the equipment that worked flawlessly in the university laboratory proved pitifully delicate and fickle in the field.
“How much longer?” Grant said.
“We got it now, Alan. It’s not bad.”
Grant went to look at the computer screen. He saw the complete skeleton, traced in bright yellow. It was indeed a young specimen. The outstanding characteristic of Velociraptor-the single-toed claw, which in a full-grown animal was a curved, six-inch-long weapon capable of ripping open its prey-was in this infant no larger than the thorn on a rosebush. It was hardly visible at all on the screen. And Velociraptor was a lightly built dinosaur in any case, an animal as fine-boned as a bird, and presumably as intelligent.
Here the skeleton appeared in perfect order, except that the head and neck were bent back, toward the posterior. Such neck flexion was so common in fossils that some scientists had formulated a theory to explain it, suggesting that the dinosaurs had become extinct because they had been poisoned by the evolving alkaloids in plants. The twisted neck was thought to signify the death agony of the dinosaurs. Grant had finally put that one to rest, by demonstrating that many species of birds and reptiles underwent a postmortem contraction of posterior neck ligaments, which bent the head backward in a characteristic way. It had nothing to do with the cause of death; it had to do with the way a carcass dried in the sun.
Grant saw that this particular skeleton had also been twisted laterally, so that the right leg and foot were raised up above the backbone.
“It looks kind of distorted,” one of the kids said. “But I don’t think it’s the computer.”
“No,” Grant said. “It’s just time. Lots and lots of time.”
Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years – the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.
In the classroom, Grant had tried different comparisons. If you imagined the human lifespan of sixty years was compressed to an hour, then eighty million years would still be 3,652 years-older than the pyramids. The velociraptor had been dead a long time.
“Doesn’t look very fearsome,” one of the kids said.
“He wasn’t,” Grant said. “At least, not until he grew up.” Probably this baby had scavenged, feeding off carcasses slain by the adults, after the big animals had gorged themselves, and lay basking in the sun. Carnivores could eat as much as 25 percent of their body weight in a single meal, and it made them sleepy afterward. The babies would chitter and scramble over the indulgent, somnolent bodies of the adults, and nip little bites from the dead animal. The babies were probably cute little animals.