Jurassic Park (9 page)

    The pilot announced four hours' flying time to Dallas, where they would refuel, and then go on to Costa Rica, arriving the following morning.

    "And how long will we be in Costa Rica?" Grant asked.

    "Well, that really depends," Gennaro said. "We have a few things to clear up."

    "Take my word for it," Hammond said, turning to Grant. "We'll be down there no more than forty-eight hours."

    Grant buckled his seat belt. "This island of yours that we're going to-I haven't heard anything about it before. Is it some kind of secret?"

    "In a way," Hammond said. "We have been very, very careful about making sure nobody knows about it, until the day we finally open that island to a surprised and delighted public."

Target of Opportunity

The Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino, California, had never called an emergency meeting of its board of directors. The ten directors now sitting in the conference room were irritable and impatient. It was 8:00 p.m. They had been talking among themselves for the last ten minutes, but slowly had fallen silent. Shuffling papers. Looking pointedly at their watches.

    "What are we waiting for?" one asked.

    "One more," Lewis Dodgson said. "We need one more." He glanced at his watch. Ron Meyer's office had said he was coming up on the six o'clock plane from San Diego. He should be here by now, even allowing for traffic from the airport.

    "You need a quorum?" another director asked.

    "Yes," Dodgson said. "We do."

    That shut them up for a moment. A quorum meant that they were going to be asked to make an important decision. And God knows they were, although Dodgson would have preferred not to call a meeting at all. But Steingarten, the head of Biosyn, was adamant. "You'll have to get their agreement for this one, Lew," he had said.

    Depending on who you talked to, Lewis Dodgson was famous as the most aggressive geneticist of his generation, or the most reckless. Thirty-four, balding, hawk-faced, and intense, he had been dismissed by Johns Hopkins as a graduate student, for planning gene therapy on human patients without obtaining the proper FDA protocols. Hired by Biosyn, he had conducted the controversial rabies vaccine test in Chile. Now he was the head of product development at Biosyn, which supposedly consisted of "reverse engineering": taking a competitor's product, tearing it apart, learning how it worked, and then making your own version. In practice, it involved industrial espionage, much of it directed toward the InGen corporation.

    In the 1980s, a few genetic engineering companies began to ask, "What is the biological equivalent of a Sony Walkman?" These companies weren't interested in pharmaceuticals or health; they were interested in entertainment, sports, leisure activities, cosmetics, and pets. The perceived demand for "consumer biologicals" in the 1990s was high. InGen and Biosyn were both at work in this field.

    Biosyn had already achieved some success, engineering a new, pale trout under contract to the Department of Fish and Game of the State of Idaho. This trout was easier to spot in streams, and was said to represent a step forward in angling. (At least, it eliminated complaints to the Fish and Came Department that there were no trout in the streams.) The fact that the pale trout sometimes died of sunburn, and that its flesh was soggy and tasteless, was not discussed. Biosyn was still working on that, and-

    The door opened and Ron Meyer entered the room, slipped into a seat. Dodgson now had his quorum. He immediately stood.

    "Gentlemen," he said, "we're here tonight to consider a target of opportunity: InGen."

    Dodgson quickly reviewed the background. InGen's start-up in 1983, with Japanese investors. The purchase of three Cray XMP supercomputers. The purchase of Isla Nublar in Costa Rica. The stockpiling of amber. The unusual donations to zoos around the world, from the New York Zoological Society to the Rantbapur Wildlife Park in India.

    "Despite all these clues," Dodgson said, "we still had no idea where InGen might be going. The company seemed obviously focused on animals; and they had hired researchers with an interest in the past-paleoblologists, DNA phylogeneticists, and so on.

    "Then, in 1987, InGen bought an obscure company called Millipore Plastic Products in Nashville, Tennessee. This was an agribusiness company that had recently patented a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell. This plastic could be shaped into an egg and used to grow chick embryos. Starting the following year, InGen took the entire output of this millipore plastic for its own use."

    "Dr. Dodgson, this is all very interesting-"

    "At the same time," Dodgson continued, "construction was begun on Isla Nublar, This involved massive earthworks, including a shallow lake two miles long, in the center of the island. Plans for resort facilities were let out with a high degree of confidentiality, but it appears that InGen has built a private zoo of large dimensions on the island."

    One of the directors leaned forward and said, "Dr. Dodgson. So what?"

    "It's not an ordinary zoo," Dodgson said. "This zoo is unique in the world. It seems that InGen has done something quite extraordinary. They have managed to clone extinct animals from the past."

    "What animals?"  

    "Animals that hatch from eggs, and that require a lot of room in a zoo."

    "What animals?"

    "Dinosaurs," Dodgson said. "They are cloning dinosaurs."

The consternation that followed was entirely misplaced, in Dodgson's view. The trouble with money men was that they didn't keep up: they had invested in a field, but they didn't know what was possible.

    In fact, there had been discussion of cloning dinosaurs in the technical literature as far back as 1982. With each passing year, the manipulation of DNA had grown easier. Genetic material had already been extracted from Egyptian mummies, and from the hide of a quagga, a zebra-like African animal that had become extinct in the 1880s. By 1985, it seemed possible that quagga DNA might be reconstituted, and a new animal grown. If so, it would be the first creature brought back from extinction solely by reconstruction of its DNA. If that was possible, what else was also possible? The mastodon? The saber-toothed tiger? The dodo?

    Or even a dinosaur?

    Of course, no dinosaur DNA was known to exist anywhere in the world. But by grinding up large quantities of dinosaur bones it might be possible to extract fragments of DNA. Formerly it was thought that fossilization eliminated all DNA. Now that was recognized as untrue. If enough DNA fragments were recovered, it might be possible to clone a living animal.

    Back in 1982, the technical problems had seemed daunting. But there was no theoretical barrier. It was merely difficult, expensive, and unlikely to work, Yet it was certainly possible, if anyone cared to try.

    InGen had apparently decided to try.

    "What they have done," Dodgson said, "is build the greatest single tourist attraction in the history of the world. As you know, zoos are extremely popular. Last year, more Americans visited zoos than all professional baseball and football games combined. And the Japanese love zoos-there are fifty zoos in Japan, and more being built. And for this zoo, InGen can charge whatever they want, Two thousand dollars a day, ten thousand dollars a day . . . And then there is the merchandising. The picture books, T-shirts, video games, caps, stuffed toys, comic books, and pets."

    "Pets?"

    "Of course. If InGen can make full-size dinosaurs, they can also make pygmy dinosaurs as household pets. What child won't want a little dinosaur as a pet? A little patented animal for their very own. InGen will sell millions of them. And InGen will engineer them so that these pet dinosaurs can only eat InGen pet food. . . ."

    "Jesus," somebody said.

    "Exactly," Dodgson said. "The zoo is the centerpiece of an enormous enterprise."

    "You said these dinosaurs will be patented?"

    "Yes. Genetically engineered animals can now be patented. The Supreme Court ruled on that in favor of Harvard in 1987. InGen will own its dinosaurs, and no one else can legally make them."

    "What prevents us from creating our own dinosaurs?" someone said.

    "Nothing, except that they have a five-year start. It'll be almost impossible to catch up before the end of the century."

    He paused. "Of course, if we could obtain examples of their dinosaurs, we could reverse engineer them and make our own, with enough modifications in the DNA to evade their patents."

    "Can we obtain examples of their dinosaurs?"

    Dodgson paused. "I believe we can, yes."

    Somebody cleared his throat. "There wouldn't be anything illegal about it. . . ."

    "Oh no," Dodgson said quickly. "Nothing illegal. I'm talking about a legitimate source of their DNA. A disgruntled employee, or some trash improperly disposed of, something like that."

    "Do you have a legitimate source, Dr. Dodgson?"

    "I do," Dodgson said. "But I'm afraid there is some urgency to the decision, because InGen is experiencing a small crisis, and my source will have to act within the next twenty-four hours."

    A long silence descended over the room. The men looked at the secretary, taking notes, and the tape recorder on the table in front of her.

    "I don't see the need for a formal resolution on this," Dodgson said. "Just a sense of the room, as to whether you feel I should proceed. . . ."

    Slowly the heads nodded.

    Nobody spoke. Nobody went on record. They just nodded silently.

    "Thank you for coming, gentlemen," Dodgson said. "I'll take it from here."

Airport

Lewis Dodgson entered the coffee shop in the departure building of the San Francisco airport and looked around quickly. His man was already there, waiting at the counter. Dodgson sat down next to him and placed the briefcase on the floor between them.

    "You're late, pal," the man said. He looked at the straw hat Dodgson was wearing and laughed. "What is this supposed to be, a disguise?"

    "You never know," Dodgson said, suppressing his anger. For six months, Dodgson had patiently cultivated this man, who had grown more obnoxious and arrogant with each meeting. But there was nothing Dodgson could do about tbat-both men knew exactly what the stakes were.

    Bioengineered DNA was, weight for weight, the most valuable material in the world. A single microscopic bacterium, too small to see with the naked eye, but containing the genes for a heart-attack enzyme, streptokinase, or for "ice-minus," which prevented frost damage to crops, might be worth five billion dollars to the right buyer.

    And that fact of life had created a bizarre new world of industrial espionage. Dodgson was especially skilled at it. In 1987, he convinced a disgruntled geneticist to quit Cetus for Biosyn, and take five strains of engineered bacteria with her. The geneticist simply put a drop of each on the fingernails of one hand, and walked out the door.

    But InGen presented a tougher challenge. Dodgson wanted more than bacterial DNA; he wanted frozen embryos, and he knew InGen guarded its embryos with the most elaborate security measures. To obtain them, he needed an InGen employee who had access to the embryos, who was willing to steal them, and who could defeat the security. Such a person was not easy to find.

    Dodgson had finally located a susceptible InGen employee earlier in the year. Although this particular person had no access to genetic material, Dodgson kept up the contact, meeting the man monthly at Carlos and Charlie's in Silicon Valley, helping him in small ways. And now that InGen was inviting contractors and advisers to visit the island, it was the moment that Dodgson had been waiting for-because it meant his man would have access to embryos.

    "Let's get down to it," the man said. "I've got ten minutes before my flight,"

    "You want to go over it again?" Dodgson said.

    "Hell no, Dr. Dodgson," the man said. "I want to see the damn money."

    Dodgson flipped the latch on the briefcase and opened it a few inches. The man glanced down casually. "That's all of it?"

    "That's half of it. Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars."

    "Okay. Fine." The man turned away, drank his coffee. "That's fine, Dr. Dodgson."

    Dodgson quickly locked the briefcase. "That's for all fifteen species, you remember."

    "I remember. Fifteen species, frozen embryos. And how am I going to transport them?"

    Dodgson handed the man a large can of Gillette Foamy shaving cream.

    "That's it?"

    "That's it."

    "They may check my luggage. . . ."

    Dodgson shrugged. "Press the top," he said.

    The man pressed it, and white shaving cream puffed into his hand. "Not bad." He wiped the foam on the edge of his plate. "Not bad."

    "The can's a little heavier than usual, is all." Dodgson's technical team had been assembling it around the clock for the last two days. Quickly he showed him how it worked.

    "How much coolant gas is inside?"

    "Enough for thirty-six hours. The embryos have to be back in San José by then."

    "That's up to your guy in the boat," the man said. "Better make sure he has a portable cooler on board."

    "I'll do that," Dodgson said.

    "And let's just review the bidding. . . ."

    "The deal is the same," Dodgson said. "Fifty thousand on delivery of each embryo. If they're viable, an additional fifty thousand each."

    "That's fine. Just make sure you have the boat waiting at the east dock of the island, Friday night. Not the north dock, Where the big supply boats arrive. The east dock. It's a small utility dock. You got that?"

    "I got it," Dodgson said. "When will you be back in San José?"

    "Probably Sunday." The man pushed away from the counter.

    Dodgson fretted. "You're sure you know how to work the-"

    "I know," the man said. "Believe me, I know."

    "Also," Dodgson said, "we think the island maintains constant radio contact with InGen corporate headquarters in California, so-"