Jurassic Park: A Novel (17 page)

The raptor was still screaming, but Grant paid no attention. Now he was squeezing the tail, feeling the bones. Regis said, “Dr. Grant. If you please.”

“I’m not hurting her.”

“Dr. Grant. These creatures are not of our world. They come from a time when there were no human beings around to prod and poke them.”

“I’m not prodding and—”

“Dr. Grant.
Put her down,
” Ed Regis said.

“But—”

“Now.”
Regis was starting to get annoyed.

Grant handed the animal back to Tim. It stopped squealing. Tim could feel its little heart beating rapidly against his chest.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Grant,” Regis said. “But these animals are delicate in infancy. We have lost several from a postnatal stress syndrome, which we believe is adrenocortically mediated. Sometimes they die within five minutes.”

Tim petted the little raptor. “It’s okay, kid,” he said. “Everything’s fine now.” The heart was still beating rapidly.

“We feel it is important that the animals here be treated in the most humane manner,” Regis said. “I promise you that you will have every opportunity to examine them later.”

But Grant couldn’t stay away. He again moved toward the animal in Tim’s arms, peering at it.

The little velociraptor opened her jaws and hissed at Grant, in a posture of sudden intense fury.

“Fascinating,” Grant said.

“Can I stay and play with her?” Tim said.

“Not right now,” Ed Regis said, glancing at his watch. “It’s three o’clock, and it’s a good time for a tour of the park itself, so you can see all the dinosaurs in the habitats we have designed for them.”

Tim released the velociraptor, which scampered across the room, grabbed a cloth rag, put it in her mouth, and tugged at the end with her tiny claws.

Walking back toward the control room, Malcolm said, “I have one more question, Dr. Wu. How many different species have you made so far?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” Wu said. “I believe the number at the moment is fifteen. Fifteen species. Do you know, Ed?”

“Yes, it’s fifteen,” Ed Regis said, nodding.

“You don’t know for
sure
?” Malcolm said, affecting astonishment.

Wu smiled. “I stopped counting,” he said, “after the first dozen. And you have to realize that sometimes we think we have an animal correctly made—from the standpoint of the DNA, which is our basic work—and the animal grows for six months and then something untoward happens. And we realize there is some error. A releaser gene isn’t operating. A hormone not being released. Or some other problem in the developmental sequence. So we have to go back to the drawing board with that animal, so to speak.” He smiled. “At one time, I thought I had more than twenty species. But now, only fifteen.”

“And is one of the fifteen species a—” Malcolm turned to Grant.

“What was the name?”

“Procompsognathus,
” Grant said.

“You have made some procompsognathuses, or whatever they’re called?” Malcolm asked.

“Oh yes,” Wu said immediately. “Compys are very distinctive animals. And, we made an unusually large number of them.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, we want Jurassic Park to be as real an environment as possible—as authentic as possible—and the procompsognathids are
actual scavengers from the Jurassic period. Rather like jackals. So we wanted to have the compys around to clean up.”

“You mean to dispose of carcasses?”

“Yes, if there were any. But with only two hundred and thirty-odd animals in our total population, we don’t have many carcasses,” Wu said. “That wasn’t the primary objective. Actually, we wanted the compys for another kind of waste management entirely.”

“Which was?”

“Well,” Wu said, “we have some very big herbivores on this island. We have specifically tried not to breed the biggest sauropods, but even so, we’ve got several animals in excess of thirty tons walking around out there, and many others in the five- to ten-ton area. That gives us two problems. One is feeding them, and in fact we must import food to the island every two weeks. There is no way an island this small can support these animals for any time.

“But the other problem is waste. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen elephant droppings,” Wu said, “but they are substantial. Each spoor is roughly the size of a soccer ball. Imagine the droppings of a brontosaur, ten times as large. Now imagine the droppings of a
herd
of such animals, as we keep here. And the largest animals do not digest their food terribly well, so that they excrete a great deal. And in the sixty million years since dinosaurs disappeared, apparently the bacteria that specialize in breaking down their feces disappeared, too. At least, the sauropod feces don’t decompose readily.”

“That’s a problem,” Malcolm said.

“I assure you it is,” Wu said, not smiling. “We had a hell of a time trying to solve it. You probably know that in Africa there is a specific insect, the dung beetle, which eats elephant feces. Many other large species have associated creatures that have evolved to eat their excrement. Well, it turns out that compys will eat the feces of large herbivores and redigest it. And the droppings of compys are readily broken down by contemporary bacteria. So, given enough compys, our problem was solved.”

“How many compys did you make?”

“I’ve forgotten exactly, but I think the target population was fifty animals. And we attained that, or very nearly so. In three batches.

We did a batch every six months until we had the number.”

“Fifty animals,” Malcolm said, “is a lot to keep track of.”

“The control room is built to do exactly that. They’ll show you how it’s done.”

“I’m sure,” Malcolm said. “But if one of these compys were to escape from the island, to get away …”

“They can’t get away.”

“I know that, but just supposing one did …”

“You mean like the animal that was found on the beach?” Wu said, raising his eyebrows, “The one that bit the American girl?”

“Yes, for example.”

“I don’t know what the explanation for that animal is,” Wu said. “But I know it can’t possibly be one of ours, for two reasons. First, the control procedures: our animals are counted by computer every few minutes. If one were missing, we’d know at once.”

“And the second reason?”

“The mainland is more than a hundred miles away. It takes almost a day to get there by boat. And in the outside world our animals will die within twelve hours,” Wu said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve made sure that’s precisely what will occur,” Wu said, finally showing a trace of irritation. “Look, we’re not fools. We understand these are prehistoric animals. They are part of a vanished ecology—a complex web of life that became extinct millions of years ago. They might have no predators in the contemporary world, no checks on their growth. We don’t want them to survive in the wild. So I’ve made them lysine dependent. I inserted a gene that makes a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. As a result, the animals cannot manufacture the amino acid lysine. They must ingest it from the outside. Unless they get a rich dietary source of exogenous lysine—supplied by us, in tablet form—they’ll go into a coma within twelve hours and expire. These animals are genetically engineered to be unable to survive in the real world. They can only live here in Jurassic Park. They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.”

“Here’s the control room,” Ed Regis said. “Now that you know how the animals are made, you’ll want to see the control room for the park itself, before we go out on the—”

He stopped. Through the thick glass window, the room was dark. The monitors were off, except for three that displayed spinning numbers and the image of a large boat.

“What’s going on?” Ed Regis said. “Oh hell, they’re docking.”

“Docking?”

“Every two weeks, the supply boat comes in from the mainland. One of the things this island doesn’t have is a good harbor, or even a good dock. It’s a little hairy to get the ship in, when the seas are rough. Could be a few minutes.” He rapped on the window, but the men inside paid no attention. “I guess we have to wait, then.”

Ellie turned to Dr. Wu. “You mentioned before that sometimes you make an animal and it seems to be fine but, as it grows, it shows itself to be flawed.…”

“Yes,” Wu said. “I don’t think there’s any way around that. We can duplicate the DNA, but there is a lot of timing in development, and we don’t know if everything is working unless we actually see an animal develop correctly.”

Grant said, “How do you know if it’s developing correctly? No one has ever seen these animals before.”

Wu smiled. “I have often thought about that. I suppose it is a bit of a paradox. Eventually, I hope, paleontologists such as yourself will compare our animals with the fossil record to verify the developmental sequence.”

Ellie said, “But the animal we just saw, the velociraptor—you said it was a
mongoliensis
?”

“From the location of the amber,” Wu said. “It is from China.”

“Interesting,” Grant said. “I was just digging up an infant
antirrhopus.
Are there any full-grown raptors here?”

“Yes,” Ed Regis said without hesitation. “Eight adult females. The females are the real hunters. They’re pack hunters, you know.”

“Will we see them on the tour?”

“No,” Wu said, looking suddenly uncomfortable. And there was an awkward pause. Wu looked at Regis.

“Not for a while,” Regis said cheerfully. “The velociraptors haven’t been integrated into the park setting just yet. We keep them in a holding pen.”

“Can I see them there?” Grant said.

“Why, yes, of course. In fact, while we’re waiting”—he glanced at his watch—“you might want to go around and have a look at them.”

“I certainly would,” Grant said.

“Absolutely,” Ellie said.

“I want to go, too,” Tim said eagerly.

“Just go around the back of this building, past the support facility,
and you’ll see the pen. But don’t get too close to the fence. Do you want to go, too?” he said to the girl.

“No,” Lex said. She looked appraisingly at Regis. “You want to play a little pickle? Throw a few?”

“Well, sure,” Ed Regis said. “Why don’t you and I go downstairs and we’ll do that, while we wait for the control room to open up?”

Grant walked with Ellie and Malcolm around the back of the main building, with the kid tagging along. Grant liked kids—it was impossible not to like any group so openly enthusiastic about dinosaurs. Grant used to watch kids in museums as they stared open-mouthed at the big skeletons rising above them. He wondered what their fascination really represented. He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents. Fascinating and frightening, like parents. And kids loved them, as they loved their parents.

Grant also suspected that was why even young children learned the names of dinosaurs. It never failed to amaze him when a three-year-old shrieked:
“Stegosaurus!”
Saying these complicated names was a way of exerting power over the giants, a way of being in control.

“What do you know about
Velociraptor
?” Grant asked Tim. He was just making conversation.

“It’s a small carnivore that hunted in packs, like
Deinonychus,
” Tim said.

“That’s right,” Grant said, “although
Deinonychus
is now considered one of the velociraptors. And the evidence for pack hunting is all circumstantial. It derives in part from the appearance of the animals, which are quick and strong, but small for dinosaurs—just a hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds each. We assume they hunted in groups if they were to bring down larger prey. And there are some fossil finds in which a single large prey animal is associated with several raptor skeletons, suggesting they hunted in packs. And, of course, raptors were large-brained, more intelligent than most dinosaurs.”

“How intelligent is that?” Malcolm asked.

“Depends on who you talk to,” Grant said. “Just as paleontologists have come around to the idea that dinosaurs were probably
warm-blooded, a lot of us are starting to think some of them might have been quite intelligent, too. But nobody knows for sure.”

They left the visitor area behind, and soon they heard the loud hum of generators, smelled the faint odor of gasoline. They passed a grove of palm trees and saw a large, low concrete shed with a steel roof. The noise seemed to come from there. They looked in the shed.

“It must be a generator,” Ellie said.

“It’s big,” Grant said, peering inside.

The power plant actually extended two stories below ground level: a vast complex of whining turbines and piping that ran down in the earth, lit by harsh electric bulbs. “They can’t need all this just for a resort,” Malcolm said. “They’re generating enough power here for a small city.”

“Maybe for the computers?”

“Maybe.”

Grant heard bleating, and walked north a few yards. He came to an animal enclosure with goats. By a quick count, he estimated there were fifty or sixty goats.

“What’s that for?” Ellie asked.

“Beats me.”

“Probably they feed ’em to the dinosaurs,” Malcolm said.

The group walked on, following a dirt path through a dense bamboo grove. At the far side, they came to a double-layer chain-link fence twelve feet high, with spirals of barbed wire at the top. There was an electric hum along the outer fence.

Beyond the fences, Grant saw dense clusters of large ferns, five feet high. He heard a snorting sound, a kind of snuffling. Then the sound of crunching footsteps, coming closer.

Then a long silence.

“I don’t see anything,” Tim whispered, finally.

“Ssssh.”

Grant waited. Several seconds passed. Flies buzzed in the air. He still saw nothing.

Ellie tapped him on the shoulder, and pointed.

Amid the ferns, Grant saw the head of an animal. It was motionless, partially hidden in the fronds, the two large dark eyes watching them coldly.