Jurassic Park: A Novel (37 page)

“Living systems,” Arnold said, “are not like mechanical systems. Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.”

Gennaro was frowning. “But lots of things don’t change; body temperature doesn’t change, all kinds of other—”

“Body temperature changes constantly,” Arnold said. “
Constantly.
It changes cyclically over twenty-four hours, lowest in the morning, highest in the afternoon. It changes with mood, with disease, with exercise, with outside temperature, with food. It continuously fluctuates up and down. Tiny jiggles on a graph. Because, at any moment, some forces are pushing temperature up, and other forces are pulling it down. It is inherently unstable. And every other aspect of living systems is like that, too.”

“So you’re saying …”

“Malcolm’s just another theoretician,” Arnold said. “Sitting in his office, he made a nice mathematical model, and it never occurred to him that what he saw as defects were actually necessities. Look: when I was working on missiles, we dealt with something called ‘resonant yaw.’ Resonant yaw meant that, even though a missile was only slightly unstable off the pad, it was hopeless. It was inevitably going to go out of control, and it couldn’t be brought back. That’s a feature of mechanical systems. A little wobble can get worse until the whole system collapses. But those same little wobbles are essential to a living system. They mean the system is healthy and responsive. Malcolm never understood that.”

“Are you sure he didn’t understand that? He seems pretty clear on the difference between living and nonliving—”

“Look,” Arnold said. “The proof is right here.” He pointed to the screens. “In less than an hour,” he said, “the park will all be back on line. The only thing I’ve got left to clear is the telephones. For some reason, they’re still out. But everything else will be working. And that’s not theoretical. That’s a fact.”

The needle went deep into the neck, and Harding injected the medrine into the anesthetized female dryosaur as she lay on her side on the ground. Immediately the animal began to recover, snorting and kicking her powerful hind legs.

“Back, everybody,” Harding said, scrambling away. “Get back.”

The dinosaur staggered to her feet, standing drunkenly. She shook her lizard head, stared at the people standing back in the quartz lights, and blinked.

“She’s drooling,” Hammond said, worried.

“Temporary,” Harding said. “It’ll stop.”

The dryosaur coughed, and then moved slowly across the field, away from the lights.

“Why isn’t she hopping?”

“She will,” Harding said. “It’ll take her about an hour to recover fully. She’s fine.” He turned back to the car. “Okay, boys, let’s go deal with the stego.”

Muldoon watched as the last of the stakes was pounded into the ground. The lines were pulled taut, and the protocarpus tree was lifted clear. Muldoon could see the blackened, charred streaks on the silver fence where the short had occurred. At the base of the fence, several ceramic insulators had burst. They would have to be replaced. But before that could be done, Arnold would have to shut down all the fences.

“Control. This is Muldoon. We’re ready to begin repair.”

“All right,” Arnold said. “Shutting out your section now.”

Muldoon glanced at his watch. Somewhere in the distance, he heard soft hooting. It sounded like owls, but he knew it was the dilophosaurs. He went over to Ramón and said, “Let’s finish this up. I want to get to those other sections of fence.”

An hour went by. Donald Gennaro stared at the glowing map in the control room as the spots and numbers flickered and changed. “What’s happening now?”

Arnold worked at the console. “I’m trying to get the phones back. So we can call about Malcolm.”

“No, I mean out there.”

Arnold glanced up at the board. “It looks as if they’re about done with the animals, and the two sections. Just as I told you, the park is back in hand. With no catastrophic Malcolm Effect. In fact, there’s just that third section of fence.…”

“Arnold.” It was Muldoon’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Have you seen this bloody fence?”

“Just a minute.”

On one of the monitors, Gennaro saw a high angle down on a field of grass, blowing in the wind. In the distance was a low concrete roof. “That’s the sauropod maintenance building,” Arnold explained. “It’s one of the utility structures we use for equipment, feed storage, and so on. We have them all around the park, in each of the paddocks.” On the monitor, the video image panned. “We’re turning the camera now to get a look at the fence.…”

Gennaro saw a shining wall of metallic mesh in the light. One section had been trampled, knocked flat. Muldoon’s Jeep and work crew were there.

“Huh,” Arnold said. “Looks like the rex went into the sauropod paddock.”

Muldoon said, “Fine dining tonight.”

“We’ll have to get him out of there,” Arnold said.

“With what?” Muldoon said. “We haven’t got anything to use on a rex. I’ll fix this fence, but I’m not going in there until daylight.”

“Hammond won’t like it.”

“We’ll discuss it when I get back,” Muldoon said.

“How many sauropods will the rex kill?” Hammond said, pacing around the control room.

“Probably just one,” Harding said. “Sauropods are big; the rex can feed off a single kill for several days.”

“We have to go out and get him tonight,” Hammond said.

Muldoon shook his head. “I’m not going in there until daylight.”

Hammond was rising up and down on the balls of his feet, the way he did whenever he was angry. “Are you forgetting you work for me?”

“No, Mr. Hammond, I’m not forgetting. But that’s a full-grown adult tyrannosaur out there. How do you plan to get him?”

“We have tranquilizer guns.”

“We have tranquilizer guns that shoot a twenty-cc dart,” Muldoon said. “Fine for an animal that weighs four or five hundred pounds. That tyrannosaur weighs eight tons. It wouldn’t even feel it.”

“You ordered a larger weapon.…”

“I ordered three larger weapons, Mr. Hammond, but you cut the requisition, so we got only one. And it’s gone. Nedry took it when he left.”

“That was pretty stupid. Who let that happen?”

“Nedry’s not my problem, Mr. Hammond,” Muldoon said.

“You’re saying,” Hammond said, “that, as of this moment, there is no way to stop the tyrannosaur?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Muldoon said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Hammond said.

“It’s your park, Mr. Hammond. You didn’t want anybody to be able to injure your precious dinosaurs. Well, now you’ve got a rex
in with the sauropods, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.” He left the room.

“Just a minute,” Hammond said, hurrying after him.

Gennaro stared at the screens, and listened to the shouted argument in the hallway outside. He said to Arnold, “I guess you don’t have control of the park yet, after all.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Arnold said, lighting another cigarette. “We have the park. It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours. We may lose a couple of dinos before we get the rex out of there, but, believe me, we have the park.”

Grant was awakened by a loud grinding sound, followed by a mechanical clanking. He opened his eyes and saw a bale of hay rolling past him on a conveyor belt, up toward the ceiling. Two more bales followed it. Then the clanking stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the concrete building was silent again.

Grant yawned. He stretched sleepily, winced in pain, and sat up.

Soft yellow light came through the side windows. It was morning: he had slept the whole night! He looked quickly at his watch: 5:00 a.m. Still almost six hours to go before the boat had to be recalled. He rolled onto his back, groaning. His head throbbed, and his body ached as if he had been beaten up. From around the corner, he heard a squeaking sound, like a rusty wheel. And then Lex giggling.

Grant stood slowly, and looked at the building. Now that it was daylight, he could see it was some kind of a maintenance building, with stacks of hay and supplies. On the wall he saw a gray metal box and a stenciled sign:
SAUROPOD MAINTENANCE BLDG
(04). This must be the sauropod paddock, as he had thought. He opened the box and saw a telephone, but when he lifted the receiver he heard only hissing static. Apparently the phones weren’t working yet.

“Chew your food,” Lex was saying. “Don’t be a piggy, Ralph.”

Grant walked around the corner and found Lex by the bars, holding out handfuls of hay to an animal outside that looked like a large pink pig and was making the squeaking sounds Grant had heard. It was actually an infant triceratops, about the size of a pony. The infant didn’t have horns on its head yet, just a curved bony frill behind big soft eyes. It poked its snout through the bars toward Lex, its eyes watching her as she fed it more hay.

“That’s better,” Lex said. “There’s plenty of hay, don’t worry.” She patted the baby on the head. “You like hay, don’t you, Ralph?”

Lex turned back and saw him.

“This is Ralph,” Lex said. “He’s my friend. He likes hay.”

Grant took a step and stopped, wincing.

“You look pretty bad,” Lex said.

“I feel pretty bad.”

“Tim, too. His nose is all swollen up.”

“Where is Tim?”

“Peeing,” she said. “You want to help me feed Ralph?”

The baby triceratops looked at Grant. Hay stuck out of both sides of its mouth, dropping on the floor as it chewed.

“He’s a
very
messy eater,” Lex said. “And he’s very hungry.”

The baby finished chewing and licked its lips. It opened its mouth, waiting for more. Grant could see the slender sharp teeth, and the beaky upper jaw, like a parrot.

“Okay, just a minute,” Lex said, scooping up more straw from the concrete floor. “Honestly, Ralph,” she said, “you’d think your mother never fed you.”

“Why is his name Ralph?”

“Because he looks like Ralph. At school.”

Grant came closer and touched the skin of the neck gently.

“It’s okay, you can pet him,” Lex said. “He likes it when you pet him, don’t you, Ralph?”

The skin felt dry and warm, with the pebbled texture of a football. Ralph gave a little squeak as Grant petted it. Outside the bars, its thick tail swung back and forth with pleasure.

“He’s pretty tame.” Ralph looked from Lex to Grant as it ate, and showed no sign of fear. It reminded Grant that the dinosaurs didn’t have ordinary responses to people. “Maybe I can ride him,” Lex said.

“Let’s not.”

“I bet he’d let me,” Lex said. “It’d be fun to ride a dinosaur.”

Grant looked out the bars past the animal, to the open fields of the sauropod compound. It was growing lighter every minute. He should go outside, he thought, and set off one of the motion sensors on the field above. After all, it might take the people in the control room an hour to get out here to him. And he didn’t like the idea that the phones were still down.…

He heard a deep snorting sound, like the snort of a very large horse, and suddenly the baby became agitated. It tried to pull its head back through the bars, but got caught on the edge of its frill, and it squeaked in fright.

The snorting came again. It was closer this time.

Ralph reared up on its hind legs, frantic to get out from between the bars. It wriggled its head back and forth, rubbing against the bars.

“Ralph, take it easy,” Lex said.

“Push him out,” Grant said. He reached up to Ralph’s head and leaned against it, pushing the animal sideways and backward. The frill popped free and the baby fell outside the bars, losing its balance and flopping on its side. Then the baby was covered in shadow, and a huge leg came into view, thicker than a tree trunk. The foot had five curved toenails, like an elephant’s.

Ralph looked up and squeaked. A head came down into view: six feet long, with three long white horns, one above each of the large brown eyes and a smaller horn at the tip of the nose. It was a full-grown triceratops. The big animal peered at Lex and Grant, blinking slowly, and then turned its attention to Ralph. A tongue came out and licked the baby. Ralph squeaked and rubbed up against the big leg happily.

“Is that his mom?” Lex said.

“Looks like it,” Grant said.

“Should we feed the mom, too?” Lex said.

But the big triceratops was already nudging Ralph with her snout, pushing the baby away from the bars.

“Guess not.”

The infant turned away from the bars and walked off. From time to time, the big mother nudged her baby, guiding it away, as they both walked out into the fields.

“Good-bye, Ralph,” Lex said, waving. Tim came out of the shadows of the building.

“Tell you what,” Grant said. “I’m going up on the hill to set off the motion sensors, so they’ll know to come get us. You two stay here and wait for me.”

“No,” Lex said.

“Why? Stay here. It’s safe here.”

“You’re not leaving us,” she said. “Right, Timmy?”

“Right,” Tim said.

“Okay,” Grant said.

They crawled through the bars, stepping outside.

It was just before dawn.

The air was warm and humid, the sky soft pink and purple. A white mist clung low to the ground. Some distance away, they saw the mother triceratops and the baby moving away toward a herd of large duckbilled hadrosaurs, eating foliage from trees at the edge of the lagoon.

Some of the hadrosaurs stood knee-deep in the water. They drank, lowering their flat heads, meeting their own reflections in the still water. Then they looked up again, their heads swiveling. At the water’s edge, one of the babies ventured out, squeaked, and scrambled back while the adults watched indulgently.

Farther south, other hadrosaurs were eating the lower vegetation. Sometimes they reared up on their hind legs, resting their forelegs on the tree trunks, so they could reach the leaves on higher branches. And in the far distance, a giant apatosaur stood above the trees, the tiny head swiveling on the long neck. The scene was so peaceful Grant found it hard to imagine any danger.