The car was hanging over empty space, supported by trees. He saw a steep jungle hillside, falling away beneath him. It was dark beneath the canopy of trees. He felt dizzy, just looking down. The ground must be twenty or thirty feet below him. He saw scattered green ferns, and a few dark boulders. He twisted his body to look more.
And then he saw him.
Dodgson lay on his back, head downward, on the slope of the hill. His body was crumpled, arms and legs thrown out in awkward positions. He was not moving. King couldn’t see him very well, in the dense foliage on the hillside, but Dodgson looked dead.
The buzzing was suddenly very loud, building rapidly, and King looked forward and saw, through the foliage that blocked the windshield, a car driving by, not ten yards away. A car!
And then the car was gone. From the sound of it, he thought, it was an electric car. So it must be Malcolm.
Howard King was somehow encouraged by the thought that other people were on this island. He felt new strength, despite the pain in his body. He reached forward, and turned the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled.
He put the car in gear, and gently stepped on the accelerator.
The rear wheels spun. He engaged the front-wheel drive. At once, the Jeep rumbled forward, lurching through the branches. A moment later, he was out on the road.
He remembered this road now. To the right, it led down to the tyrannosaurus nest. Malcolm’s car had gone to the left.
King turned left, and headed up the road. He was trying to remember how to get back to the river, back to the boat. He vaguely recalled that there was a Y-fork in the road at the top of the hill. He would take that fork, he decided, drive down the hill, and get the hell off this island.
That was his only goal.
To get off this island, before it was too late.
Bad News
The Explorer came to the top of the hill, and Thorne drove onto the ridge road. The road curved back and forth, cut into the rock face of the cliff. In many places, the dropoff was precipitous, but they had views over the entire island. Eventually they came to a place where they could look over the valley. They could see the high hide off to the left, and closer by, the clearing with the two trailers. Off to the right was the laboratory complex, and the worker complex beyond.
“I don’t see Dodgson anywhere,” Malcolm said unhappily. “Where could he have gone?”
Thorne pushed the radio button. “Arby?”
“Yes, Doc.”
“Do you see them?”
“No, but…” He hesitated.
“What?”
“Don’t you want to come back here now? It’s pretty amazing.”
“What is?” Thorne said.
“Eddie,” Arby said. “He just got back. And he brought the baby with
him.”
Malcolm leaned forward. “He did what?”
FIFTH CONFIGURATION
“At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.”
IAN MALCOLM
Baby
In the trailer, they were clustered around the table where the baby Tyrannosaurus rex now lay unconscious on a stainless-steel pan, his large eyes closed, his snout pushed into the clear plastic oval of an oxygen mask. The mask almost fitted the baby’s blunt snout. The oxygen hissed softly.
“I couldn’t just leave him,” Eddie said. “And I figured we can fix his leg…”
“But Eddie,” Malcolm said, shaking his head.
“So I shot him full of morphine from the first-aid kit, and brought him back. You see? The oxygen mask almost fits him.”
“Eddie,” Malcolm said, “this was the wrong thing to do.”
“Why? He’s okay. We just fix him and take him back.”
“But you’re interfering with the system,” Malcolm said.
The radio clicked. “This is extremely unwise,” Levine said, over the radio. “Extremely.”
“Thank you, Richard,” Thorne said.
“I am entirely opposed to bringing any animal back to the trailer.”
“Too late to worry about that now,” Sarah Harding said. She had moved forward alongside the baby, and began strapping cardiac leads to the animal’s chest; they heard the thump of the heartbeat. It was very fast, over a hundred and fifty beats a minute. “How much morphine did you give him?”