Jurassic Park (16 page)

    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 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 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.

    The head was two feet long. From a pointed snout, a long row of teeth ran back to the hole of the auditory meatus which served as an ear. The head reminded him of a large lizard, or perhaps a crocodile. The eyes did not blink, and the animal did not move. Its skin was leathery, with a pebbled texture, and basically the same coloration as the infant's: yellow-brown with darker reddish markings, like the stripes of a tiger.

    As Grant watched, a single forelimb reached up very slowly to part the ferns beside the animal's face. The limb, Grant saw, was strongly muscled. The hand had three grasping fingers, each ending in curved claws. The band gently, slowly, pushed aside the ferns.

    Grant felt a chill and thought, He's hunting us.

    For a mammal like man, there was something indescribably alien about the way reptiles hunted their prey. No wonder men hated reptiles. The stillness, the coldness, the pace was all wrong. To be among alligators or other large reptiles was to be reminded of a different kind of life, a different kind of world, now vanished from the earth. Of course, this animal didn't realize that he had been spotted, that he-

    The attack came suddenly, from the left and right. Charging raptors covered the ten yards to the fence with shocking speed. Grant had a blurred impression of powerful, six-foot-tall bodies, stiff balancing tails, limbs with curving claws, open jaws with rows of jagged teetb.

    The animals snarled as they came forward, and then leapt bodily into the air, raising their hind legs with their big dagger-claws. Then they struck the fence in front of them, throwing off twin bursts of hot sparks.

    The veloctiraptors fell backward to the ground, hissing. The visitors all moved forward, fascinated. Only then did the third animal attack, leaping up to strike the fence at chest level. Tim screamed in fright as the sparks exploded all around him. The creatures snarled, a low reptilian hissing sound, and leapt back among the ferns. Then they were gone, leaving behind a faint odor of decay, and banging acrid smoke.

    "Holy shit," Tim said.

    "It was so fast," Ellie said.

    "Pack hunters," Grant said, shaking his head. "Pack hunters for whom ambush is an instinct . . . Fascinating."

    "I wouldn't call them tremendously intelligent," Malcolm said.

    On the other side of the fence, they heard snorting in the palm trees. Several heads poked slowly out of the foliage. Grant counted three . . . four . . . five . . . The animals watched them. Staring coldly.

    A black man in coveralls came running up to them. "Are you all right?"

    "We're okay," Grant said.

    "The alarms were set off." The man looked at the fence, dented and charred. "They attacked you?"

    "Three of them did, yes."

    The black man nodded. "They do that all the time. Hit the fence, take a shock. They never seem to mind."

    "Not too smart, are they?" Malcolm said.

    The black man paused. He squinted at Malcolm in the afternoon light, "Be glad for that fence, señor, " he said, and turned away.

From beginning to end, the entire attack could not have taken more than six seconds. Grant was still trying to organize his impressions. The speed was astonishing-the animals were so fast, he had hardly seen them move.

    Walking back, Malcolm said, "They are remarkably fast."

    "Yes," Grant said. "Much faster than any living reptile. A bull alligator can move quickly, but only over a short distance-five or six feet. Big lizards like the five-foot Komodo dragons of Indonesia have been clocked at thirty miles an hour, fast enough to run down a man. And they kill men all the time. But I'd guess the animal behind the fence was more than twice that fast."

    "Cheetah speed," Malcolm said. "Sixty, seventy miles an hour."

    "Exactly."

    "But they seemed to dart forward," Malcolm said. "Rather like birds."

    "Yes." In the contemporary world, only very small mammals, like the cobra-fighting mongoose, had such quick responses. Small mammals, and of course birds. The snake-hunting secretary bird of Africa, or the cassowary. In fact, the velociraptor conveyed precisely the same impression of deadly, swift menace Grant had seen in the cassowary, the clawed ostrich-like bird of New Guinea.

    "So these velociraptors look like reptiles, with the skin and general appearance of reptiles, but they move like birds, with the speed and predatory intelligence of birds. Is that about it?" Malcolm said.

    "Yes," Grant said. "I'd say they display a mixture of traits."

    "Does that surprise you?"

    "Not really," Grant said. "It's actually rather close to what paleontologists believed a long time ago."

When the first giant bones were found in the 1820s and 1830s, scientists felt obliged to explain the bones as belonging to some oversize variant of a modern species. This was because it was believed that no species could ever become extinct, since God would not allow one of His creations to die.

    Eventually it became clear that this conception of God was mistaken, and the bones belonged to extinct animals. But what kind of animals?

    In 1842, Richard Owen, the leading British anatomist of the day, called them Dinosauria, meaning "terrible lizards." Owen recognized that dinosaurs seemed to combine traits of lizards, crocodiles, and birds. In particular, dinosaur hips were bird-like, not lizard-like. And, unlike lizards, many dinosaurs seemed to stand upright. Owen imagined dinosaurs to be quick-moving, active creatures, and his view was accepted for the next forty years.

    But when truly gigantic finds were unearthed-animals that had weighed a hundred tons in life-scientists began to envision the dinosaurs as stupid, slow-moving giants destined for extinction. The image of the sluggish reptile gradually predominated over the image of the quick-moving bird. In recent years, scientists like Grant had begun to swing back toward the idea of more active dinosaurs. Grant's colleagues saw him as radical in his conception of dinosaur behavior. But now he had to admit his own conception had fallen far short of the reality of these large, incredibly swift hunters.

    "Actually, what I was driving at," Malcolm said, "was this: Is it a persuasive animal to you? Is it in fact a dinosaur?"

    "I'd say so, yes."

    "And the coordinated attack behavior . . ."

    "To be expected," Grant said. According to the fossil record, packs of velociraptors were capable of bringing down animals that weighed a thousand pounds, like Tenontosaurus, which could run as fast as a horse. Coordination would be required.

    "How do they do that, without language?"

    "Oh, language isn't necessary for coordinated hunting," Ellie said. "Chimpanzees do it all the time. A group of chimps will stalk a monkey and kill it. All communication is by eyes."

    "And were the dinosaurs in fact attacking us?"

    "Yes."

    "They would kill us and eat us if they could?" Malcolm said.

    "I think so."

    "The reason I ask," Malcolm said, "is that I'm told large predators such as lions and tigers are not born man-eaters. Isn't that true? These animals must learn somewhere along the way that human beings are easy to kill. Only afterward do they become man-killers."

    "Yes, I believe that's true," Grant said.

    "Well, these dinosaurs must be even more reluctant than lions and tigers. After all, they come from a time before human beings-or even large mammals-existed at all. God knows what they think when they see us. So I wonder: have they learned, somewhere along the line, that humans are easy to kill?"

    The group fell silent as they walked.

    "In any case," Malcolm said, "I shall be extremely interested to see the control room now."

Version 4.4

"Was there any problem with the group?" Hammond asked.

    "No," Henry Wu said, "there was no problem at all."

    "They accepted your explanation?"

    "Why shouldn't they?" Wu said. "It's all quite straightforward, in the broad strokes. It's only the details that get sticky. And I wanted to talk about the details with you today. You can think of it as a matter of aesthetics."

    John Hammond wrinkled his nose, as if he smelled something disagreeable. "Aesthetics?" he repeated.

    They were standing in the living room of Hammond's elegant bungalow, set back among palm trees in the northern sector of the park. The living room was airy and comfortable, fitted with a half-dozen video monitors showing the animals in the park. The file Wu had brought, stamped ANIMAL DEVELOPMENT: VERSION 4.4, lay on the coffee table.