“No photographs? No proof?”
“Apparently not.”
“So it’s just a story,” Malcolm said.
“Perhaps. But I believe it is worth mounting an expedition, to find out about these reported survivals.”
Malcolm stared at him. “An expedition? To find a hypothetical Lost World? Who is going to pay for it?”
“I am,” Levine said. “I have already begun the preliminary planning.”
“But that could cost – ”
“I don’t care what it costs,” Levine said. “The fact is, survival is possible, it has occurred in a variety of species from other genera, and it may be that there are survivals from the Cretaceous as well.”
“Fantasy,” Malcolm said again, shaking his head. Levine paused, and stared at Malcolm. “Dr. Malcolm,” he said, “I must say I’m very surprised at your attitude. You’ve just presented a thesis and I am offering you a chance to prove it. I would have thought You’d jump at the opportunity.”
” My jumping days are over,” Malcolm said.
“But instead of taking me up on this, you – ”
“I’m not interested in dinosaurs,” Malcolm said.
“But everyone is interested in dinosaurs.”
“Not me.” He turned on his cane, and started to walk off.
“By the way,” Levine said. “What were you doing in Costa Rica? I heard you were there for almost a year.”
“I was lying in a hospital bed. They couldn’t move me out of intensive care for six months. I Couldn’t even get on a plane.”
“Yes,” Levine said. “I know you got hurt. But what were you doing there in the first place? Weren’t you looking for dinosaurs?”
Malcolm squinted at him in the bright sun, and leaned on his cane. “No,” he said. “I wasn’t.”
They were all three sitting at a small painted table in the corner of the Guadalupe Cafe, on the other side of the river. Sarah Harding drank Corona from the bottle, and watched the two men opposite her. Levine looked pleased to be with them, as if he had won some victory to be sitting at the table. Malcolm looked weary, like a parent who has spent too much time with a hyperactive child.
“You want to know what I’ve heard?” Levine said. “I’ve heard that a couple of years back, a company named InGen genetically engineered some dinosaurs and put them on an island in Costa Rica. But something went wrong, a lot of people were killed, and the dinosaurs were destroyed. And now nobody will talk about it, because of some legal angle. Nondisclosure agreements or something. And the Costa Rican government doesn’t want to hurt tourism. So nobody will talk. That’s what I’ve heard.”
Malcolm stared at him. “And you believe that?”
“Not at first, I didn’t,” Levine said. “But the thing is, I keep hearing it. The rumors keep floating around. Supposedly you, and Alan Grant, and a bunch of other people were there.”
“Did you ask Grant about it?”
“I asked him, last year, at a conference in Peking. He said it was absurd.”
Malcolm nodded slowly.
“Is that what you say?” Levine asked, drinking his beer. “I mean, you know Grant, don’t you?”
“No. I never met him.”
Levine was watching Malcolm closely. “So it’s not true?”
Malcolm sighed. “Are you familiar with the concept of a technomyth? It was developed by Geller at Princeton. Basic thesis is that we’ve lost all the old myths, Orpheus and Eurydice and Perseus and Medusa. So we fill the gap with modern techno-myths. Geller listed a dozen or so. One is that an alien’s living at a hangar at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Another is that somebody invented a carburetor that gets a hundred and fifty miles to the gallon, but the automobile companies bought the patent and are sitting on it. Then there’s the story that the Russians trained children in ESP at a secret base in Siberia and these kids can kill people anywhere in the world with their thoughts. The story that the lines in Nazca, Peru, are an alien spaceport. That the CIA released the AIDS virus to kill homosexuals. That Nikola Tesla discovers an incredible energy source but his notes are lost. That in Istanbul there’s a tenth-century drawing that shows the earth from space. That the Stanford Research Institute found a guy whose body glows in the dark. Get the picture?”