“So they didn’t do it,” Thorne said. “Right,” Arby said. “They just erased the directory, and sold them.”
“And that means the original files are still on the disk.”
“Right.”
The monitor glowed. The screen said:
TOTAL RECOVERED FILES: 2,387
“Jeez,” Arby said. He leaned forward, staring intently, fingers poised over the keys. He pushed the directory button, and row after row of file names scrolled down, Thousands of files in all.
Thorne said “How are you going to – ”
“Give me a minute here,” Arby said, interrupting him. Then he began to type rapidly.
Okay, Arb,” Thorne said. He was amused by the imperious way Arby behaved whenever he was working with a computer. He seemed to forget how young he was, his usual diffidence and timidity vanished. The electronic world was really his element. And he knew he was good at it.
Thorne said, “Any help you can give us will be – ”
“Doc,” Arby said. “Come on. Go and, uh, I don’t know. Help Kelly or something.”
And he turned away, and typed.
Raptor
The velociraptor was six feet tall and dark green. Poised to attack, it hissed loudly, its muscular neck thrust forward, jaws wide. Tim, one of the modelers, said, “What do you think, Dr. Malcolm?”
“No menace,” Malcolm said, walking by. He was in the back win of the biology department, on his way to his office.
“No menace?” Tim said.
“They never stand like this, flatfooted on two feet. Give him a book” – he grabbed a notebook from a desk, and placed it in the forearms of the animal – “and he might be singing a Christmas carol.”
“Gee,” Tim said. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“Bad?” Malcolm said. “This is an insult to a great predator. We should feel his speed and menace and power. Widen the jaws. Get the neck down. Tense the muscles, tighten the skin. And get that leg up. Remember, raptors don’t attack with their jaws – they use their toe-claws,” Malcolm said. “I want to see the claw raised up, ready to slash down and tear the guts out of its prey.”
“You really think so?” Tim said doubtfully. “It might scare little kids….”
“You mean it might scare you.” Malcolm continued down the hallway. “And another thing: change that hissing sound. It sounds like somebody taking a pee. Give this animal a snarl. Give a great predator his due.”
“Gee,” Tim said, “I didn’t know you had such personal feelings about it.”
“It should be accurate,” Malcolm said. “You know, there is such a thing as accurate and inaccurate. Irrespective of whatever your feelings are.” He walked on, irritable, ignoring the momentary pain in his leg. The modeler annoyed him, although he had to admit Tim was just a representative of the current, fuzzy-minded thinking – what Malcolm called “sappy science.”
Malcolm had long been impatient with the arrogance of his scientific colleagues. They maintained that arrogance, he knew, by resolutely ignoring the history of science as a way of thought. Scientists pretended that history didn’t matter, because the errors of the past were now corrected by modern discoveries. But of course their forebears had believed exactly the same thing in the past, too. They had been wrong then. And modern scientists were wrong now. No episode of science history proved it better than the way dinosaurs had been portrayed over the decades.
It was sobering to realize that the most accurate perception of dinosaurs had also been the first. Back in the 1840s, when Richard Owen first described giant bones in England, he named them Dinosauria: terrible lizards. That was still the most accurate description of these creatures, Malcolm thought. They were indeed like lizards, and they were terrible.
But since Owen, the “scientific” view of dinosaurs had undergone many changes. Because the Victorians believed in the inevitability of progress, they insisted that the dinosaurs must necessarily be inferior – why else would they be extinct? So the Victorians made them fat, lethargic, and dumb-big dopes from the past. This perception was elaborated, so that by the early twentieth century, dinosaurs had become so weak that they could not support their own weight. Apatosaurs had to stand belly-deep in water or they would crush their own legs. The whole conception of the ancient world was suffused with these ideas of weak, stupid, slow animals.