Malcolm glanced at it. “Twenty pins in four different colors. Five pins of each color. Arranged in a pentagon, or anyway a five-pronged pattern of some kind, going to all parts of the island. I’d say it looks like a network.”
“Didn’t Arby say there was a network on this island?”
“Yes, he did….Interesting….”
“Well, never mind that now,” Thorne said. He went back into the hallway again, following the signal from his hand unit. Malcolm closed the door behind them, and they continued on. They saw more offices, but no longer opened the doors. They followed the signal from Levine.
At the end of the corridor was a pair of sliding glass doors marked NO ADMITTANCE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Thorne peered through the glass, but he could not see much beyond. He had the sense of a large space, and complex machinery, but the glass was dusty and streaked with grime. It was difficult to see.
Thorne said to Malcolm, “You really think you know what this building was for?”
“I know exactly what it was for,” Malcolm said. “It’s a manufacturing plant for dinosaurs.”
“Why,” Eddie said, “would anybody want that?”
“Nobody would,” Malcolm said. “That’s why they kept it a secret.”
“I don’t get it,” Eddie said.
Malcolm smiled. “Long story,” he said.
He slipped his hands between the doors, and tried to pull them open, but they remained shut fast. He grunted, straining with effort. And then suddenly, with a metallic screech, they slid apart.
They stepped into the darkness beyond.
Their flashlights shone down an inky corridor, as they moved forward. “To understand this place, you have to go back ten years, to a man named John Hammond, and an animal called the quagga.”
“The what?”
“The quagga,” Malcolm said, “is an African mammal, rather like a zebra. It became extinct in the last century. But in the 1980s, somebody used the latest DNA-extraction techniques on a piece of quagga hide, and recovered a lot of DNA. So much DNA that people began to talk about bringing the quagga back to life. And if you could bring the quagga back to life, why not other extinct animals? The dodo? The saber-toothed tiger? Or even a dinosaur?”
“Where could you get dinosaur DNA?” Thorne said.
“Actually,” Malcolm said, “paleontologists have been finding fragments of dinosaur DNA for years. They never said much about it, because they never had enough material to use it as a classification tool. So it didn’t seem to have any value; it was just a curiosity,”
“But to re-create an animal, you’d need more than DNA fragments,” Thorne said. “You’d need the whole strand.”
“That’s right,” Malcolm said. “And the man who figured out how to, get it was a venture capitalist named John Hammond. He reasoned that, when dinosaurs were alive, insects probably bit them, and sucked their blood, just as insects do today. And some of those insects would afterward land on a branch, and be trapped in sticky sap. And some of that sap would harden into amber. Hammond decided that, if you drilled into insects preserved in amber, and extracted the stomach contents, you would eventually get some dino-DNA.”
“And did he?”
“Yes. He did, And he started InGen, to develop this discovery. Hammond was a hustler, and his true talent was raising money. He figured out how to get enough money to do the research to go from a DNA strand to a living animal. Sources of funding weren’t immediately apparent. Because, although it would be exciting to re-create a dinosaur, it wasn’t exactly a cure for cancer.
“So he decided to make a tourist attraction. He planned to recover the cost of the dinosaurs by putting them in a kind of zoo or theme park, where he would charge admission.”
“Are you joking?” Thorne said.
“No. Hammond actually did it. He built his park on an island called Isla Nublar, north of here, and he planned to open it to the public in late 1989. I went to see the place myself, shortly before it was scheduled to open. But it turned out Hammond had problems,” Malcolm said. “The park systems broke down, and the dinosaurs got free. Some visitors were killed. Afterward, the park and all its dinosaurs were destroyed.”