Malcolm listened, shaking his head.
“You think I’m wasting my time,” Levine said. “I do, yes.”
“But suppose – just suppose – that animals start to show up again.”
“Never happen.”
“But suppose they did?” Levine said. “Would you be interested in helping me? To plan an expedition?”
Malcolm finished his meal, and pushed the plate aside. He stared at Levine.
“Yes,” he said finally. “If animals started showing up again, I would be interested in helping you.”
“Great!” Levine said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
Outside, in the bright sunlight on Guadalupe Street, Malcolm walked with Sarah toward Malcolm’s battered Ford sedan. Levine climbed into a bright-red Ferrari, waved cheerfully, and roared off.
“You think it will ever happen?” Sarah Harding said. “That these, ah, animals will start showing up again?”
“No,” Malcolm said, “I am quite sure they never will.”
“You sound hopeful.”
He shook his head, and got awkwardly in the car, swinging his bad leg tinder the steering wheel. Harding climbed in beside him. He glanced at her, and turned the key in the ignition. They drove back to the Institute.
The following day, she went back to Africa. During the next eighteen months, she had a rough sense of Levine’s progress, since from time to time he called her with some question about field protocols, or vehicle tires, or the best anaesthetic to use on animals in. the wild. Sometimes she got a call from Doc Thorne, who was building the vehicles. He usually sounded harassed.
From Malcolm she heard nothing at all, although he sent her a card on her birthday. It arrived a month late. He had scrawled at the bottom, “Have a happy birthday. Be glad you’re nowhere near him. He’s driving me crazy.”
FIRST CONFIGURATION
“In the conservative region far from the chaotic edge,
individual elements coalesce slowly, showing no clear pattern.”
IAN MALCOLM
Aberrant Forms
In the fading afternoon light, the helicopter skimmed low along the coast, following the line where the dense jungle met the beach. The last of the fishing villages had flashed by beneath them ten minutes ago. Now there was only impenetrable Costa Rican jungle, mangrove swamps, and mile after mile of deserted sand. Sitting beside the pilot, Marty, Guitierrez stared out the window as the coastline swept past. There weren’t even any roads in this area, at least none that Guitierrez could see.
Guitierrez was a quiet, bearded American of thirty-six, a field biologist who had lived for the last eight years in Costa Rica. He had originally come to study toucan speciation in the rain forest, but stayedon as a consultant to the Reserva Biológica de Carara, the national park in the north. He clicked the radio mike and said to the pilot, “How much farther?”
“Five minutes, Señior Guitierrez.”
Guitierrez turned and said, “It won’t be long now.” But the tall man folded up in the back seat of the helicopter didn’t answer, or even acknowledge that he had been spoken to. He merely sat, with his hand on his chin, and stared frowning out the window.
Richard Levine wore sun-faded field khakis, and an Australian slouch hat pushed low over his head. A battered pair of binoculars hung around his neck. But despite his rugged appearance, Levine conveyed an air of scholarly absorption. Behind his wire-frame spectacles, his features were sharp, his expression intense and critical as he looked out the window.
“What is this place?”
“It’s called Rojas.”
“So we’re far south?”
“Yes. Only about fifty miles from the border with Panama.”
Levine stared at the jungle. “I don’t see any roads,” he said. “How was the thing found?”
“Couple of campers,” Guitierrez said. “They came in by boat, landed on the beach.”
“When was that?”
Yesterday. They took one look at the thing, and ran like hell.”
Levine nodded. With his long limbs folded up, his hands tucked under his chin, he looked like a praying mantis. That had been his nickname in graduate school; in part because of his appearance – and in part because of his tendency to bite off the head of anyone who disagreed with him.
Guitierrez said, “Been to Costa Rica before?”
“No. First time,” Levine said. And then he gave an irritable wave of his hand, as ‘if he didn’t want to be bothered with small talk.