Jurassic Park: A Novel (22 page)

Tim saw two animals, standing motionless in the shade of a large tree. Triceratops: the size and gray color of an elephant, with the truculent stance of a rhino. The horns above each eye curved five feet into the air, looking almost like inverted elephant tusks. A third, rhino-like horn was located near the nose. And they had the beaky snout of a rhino.

“Unlike other dinosaurs,” the voice said, “
Triceratops serratus
can’t see well. They’re nearsighted, like the rhinos of today, and they tend to be surprised by moving objects. They’d charge our car if they were close enough to see it! But relax, folks—we’re safe enough here.

“Triceratops have a fan-shaped crest behind their heads. It’s made of solid bone, and it’s very strong. These animals weigh about seven tons each. Despite their appearance, they are actually quite docile. They know their handlers, and they’ll allow themselves to be petted. They particularly like to be scratched in the hindquarters.”

“Why don’t they move?” Lex said. She rolled down her window. “Hey! Stupid dinosaur! Move!”

“Don’t bother the animals, Lex,” Ed Regis said.

“Why? It’s stupid. They just sit there like a picture in a book,” Lex said.

The voice was saying, “—easygoing monsters from a bygone world stand in sharp contrast to what we will see next. The most famous predator in the history of the world: the mighty tyrant lizard, known as
Tyrannosaurus rex.
”

“Good,
Tyrannosaurus rex,
” Tim said.

“I hope he’s better than these bozos,” Lex said, turning away from the triceratops.

The Land Cruiser rumbled forward.

“The mighty tyrannosaurs arose late in dinosaur history. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a hundred and twenty million years, but there were tyrannosaurs for only the last fifteen million years of that period.”

The Land Cruisers had stopped at the rise of a hill. They overlooked a forested area sloping down to the edge of the lagoon. The sun was falling to the west, sinking into a misty horizon. The whole landscape of Jurassic Park was bathed in soft light, with lengthening shadows. The surface of the lagoon rippled in pink crescents. Farther south, they saw the graceful necks of the apatosaurs, standing at the water’s edge, their bodies mirrored in the moving surface. It was quiet, except for the soft drone of cicadas. As they stared out at that landscape, it was possible to believe that they had really been transported millions of years back in time to a vanished world.

“It works, doesn’t it?” they heard Ed Regis say, over the intercom. “I like to come here sometimes, in the evening. And just sit.”

Grant was unimpressed. “Where is T-rex?”

“Good question. You often see the little one down in the lagoon. The lagoon’s stocked, so we have fish in there. The little one has learned to catch the fish. Interesting how he does it. He doesn’t use his hands, but he ducks his whole head under the water. Like a bird.”

“The little one?”

“The little T-rex. He’s a juvenile, two years old, and about a third grown now. Stands eight feet high, weighs a ton and a half. The other one’s a full-grown tyrannosaur. But I don’t see him at the moment.”

“Maybe he’s down hunting the apatosaurs,” Grant said.

Regis laughed, his voice tinny over the radio. “He would if he
could, believe me. Sometimes he stands by the lagoon and stares at those animals, and wiggles those little forearms of his in frustration. But the T-rex territory is completely enclosed with trenches and fences. They’re disguised from view, but believe me, he can’t go anywhere.”

“Then where is he?”

“Hiding,” Regis said. “He’s a little shy.”

“Shy?” Malcolm said. “Tyrannosaurus rex is
shy
?”

“Well, he conceals himself as a general rule. You almost never see him out in the open, especially in daylight.”

“Why is that?”

“We think it’s because he has sensitive skin and sunburns easily.”

Malcolm began to laugh.

Grant sighed. “You’re destroying a lot of illusions.”

“I don’t think you’ll be disappointed,” Regis said. “Just wait.”

They heard a soft bleating sound. In the center of a field, a small cage rose up into view, lifted on hydraulics from underground. The cage bars slid down, and the goat remained tethered in the center of the field, bleating plaintively.

“Any minute now,” Regis said again.

They stared out the window.

“Look at them,” Hammond said, watching the control room monitor. “Leaning out of the windows, so eager. They can’t wait to see it. They have come for the danger.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Muldoon said. He twirled the keys on his finger and watched the Land Cruisers tensely. This was the first time that visitors had toured Jurassic Park, and Muldoon shared Arnold’s apprehension.

Robert Muldoon was a big man, fifty years old, with a steel-gray mustache and deep blue eyes. Raised in Kenya, he had spent most of his life as a guide for African big-game hunters, as had his father before him. But since 1980, he had worked principally for conservation groups and zoo designers as a wildlife consultant. He had become well known; an article in the London Sunday
Times
had said, “What Robert Trent Jones is to golf courses, Robert Muldoon is to zoos: a designer of unsurpassed knowledge and skill.”

In 1986, he had done some work for a San Francisco company that was building a private wildlife park on an island in North America. Muldoon had laid out the boundaries for different animals,
defining space and habitat requirements for lions, elephants, zebras, and hippos. Identifying which animals could be kept together, and which had to be separated. At the time, it had been a fairly routine job. He had been more interested in an Indian park called Tiger World in southern Kashmir.

Then, a year ago, he was offered a job as game warden of Jurassic Park. It coincided with a desire to leave Africa; the salary was excellent; Muldoon had taken it on for a year. He was astonished to discover the park was really a collection of genetically engineered prehistoric animals.

It was of course interesting work, but during his years in Africa, Muldoon had developed an unblinking view of animals—an unromantic view—that frequently set him at odds with the Jurassic Park management in California, particularly the little martinet standing beside him in the control room. In Muldoon’s opinion, cloning dinosaurs in a laboratory was one thing. Maintaining them in the wild was quite another.

It was Muldoon’s view that some dinosaurs were too dangerous to be kept in a park setting. In part, the danger existed because they still knew so little about the animals. For example, nobody even suspected the dilophosaurs were poisonous until they were observed hunting indigenous rats on the island—biting the rodents and then stepping back, to wait for them to die. And even then nobody suspected the dilophosaurs could spit until one of the handlers was almost blinded by spitting venom.

After that, Hammond had agreed to study dilophosaur venom, which was found to contain seven different toxic enzymes. It was also discovered that the dilophosaurs could spit a distance of fifty feet. Since this raised the possibility that a guest in a car might be blinded, management decided to remove the poison sacs. The vets had tried twice, on two different animals, without success. No one knew where the poison was being secreted. And no one would ever know until an autopsy was performed on a dilophosaur—and management would not allow one to be killed.

Muldoon worried even more about the velociraptors. They were instinctive hunters, and they never passed up prey. They killed even when they weren’t hungry. They killed for the pleasure of killing. They were swift: strong runners and astonishing jumpers. They had lethal claws on all four limbs; one swipe of a forearm would disembowel a man, spilling his guts out. And they had powerful tearing
jaws that ripped flesh instead of biting it. They were far more intelligent than the other dinosaurs, and they seemed to be natural cage-breakers.

Every zoo expert knew that certain animals were especially likely to get free of their cages. Some, like monkeys and elephants, could undo cage doors. Others, like wild pigs, were unusually intelligent and could lift gate fasteners with their snouts. But who would suspect that the giant armadillo was a notorious cage-breaker? Or the moose? Yet a moose was almost as skillful with its snout as an elephant with its trunk. Moose were always getting free; they had a talent for it.

And so did velociraptors.

Raptors were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees. And, like chimpanzees, they had agile hands that enabled them to open doors and manipulate objects. They could escape with ease. And when, as Muldoon had feared, one of them finally escaped, it killed two construction workers and maimed a third before being recaptured. After that episode, the visitor lodge had been reworked with heavy barred gates, a high perimeter fence, and tempered-glass windows. And the raptor holding pen was rebuilt with electronic sensors to warn of another impending escape.

Muldoon wanted guns as well. And he wanted shoulder-mounted LAW-missile launchers. Hunters knew how difficult it was to bring down a four-ton African elephant—and some of the dinosaurs weighed ten times as much. Management was horrified, insisting there be no guns anywhere on the island. When Muldoon threatened to quit, and to take his story to the press, a compromise was reached. In the end, two specially built laser-guided missile launchers were kept in a locked room in the basement. Only Muldoon had keys to the room.

Those were the keys Muldoon was twirling now.

“I’m going downstairs,” he said.

Arnold, watching the control screens, nodded. The two Land Cruisers sat at the top of the hill, waiting for the T-rex to appear.

“Hey,” Dennis Nedry called, from the far console. “As long as you’re up, get me a Coke, okay?”

Grant waited in the car, watching quietly. The bleating of the goat became louder, more insistent. The goat tugged frantically at its tether, racing back and forth. Over the radio, Grant heard Lex say
in alarm, “What’s going to happen to the goat? Is she going to eat the goat?”

“I think so,” someone said to her, and then Ellie turned the radio down. Then they smelled the odor, a garbage stench of putrefaction and decay that drifted up the hillside toward them.

Grant whispered, “He’s here.”

“She,” Malcolm said.

The goat was tethered in the center of the field, thirty yards from the nearest trees. The dinosaur must be somewhere among the trees, but for a moment Grant could see nothing at all. Then he realized he was looking too low: the animal’s head stood twenty feet above the ground, half concealed among the upper branches of the palm trees.

Malcolm whispered, “Oh,
my God
.… She’s as large as a bloody building.…”

Grant stared at the enormous square head, five feet long, mottled reddish brown, with huge jaws and fangs. The tyrannosaur’s jaws worked once, opening and closing. But the huge animal did not emerge from hiding.

Malcolm whispered: “How long will it wait?”

“Maybe three or four minutes. Maybe—”

The tyrannosaur sprang silently forward, fully revealing her enormous body. In four bounding steps she covered the distance to the goat, bent down, and bit it through the neck. The bleating stopped. There was silence.

Poised over her kill, the tyrannosaur became suddenly hesitant. Her massive head turned on the muscular neck, looking in all directions. She stared fixedly at the Land Cruiser, high above on the hill.

Malcolm whispered, “Can she see us?”

“Oh yes,” Regis said, on the intercom. “Let’s see if she’s going to eat here in front of us, or if she’s going to drag the prey away.”

The tyrannosaur bent down, and sniffed the carcass of the goat. A bird chirped: her head snapped up, alert, watchful. She looked back and forth, scanning in small jerking shifts.

“Like a bird,” Ellie said.

Still the tyrannosaur hesitated. “What is she afraid of?” Malcolm whispered.

“Probably another tyrannosaur,” Grant whispered. Big carnivores like lions and tigers often became cautious after a kill, behaving as if suddenly exposed. Nineteenth-century zoologists imagined
the animals felt guilty for what they had done. But contemporary scientists documented the effort behind a kill—hours of patient stalking before the final lunge—as well as the frequency of failure. The idea of “nature, red in tooth and claw” was wrong; most often the prey got away. When a carnivore finally brought down an animal, it was watchful for another predator, who might attack it and steal its prize. Thus this tyrannosaur was probably fearful of another tyrannosaur.

The huge animal bent over the goat again. One great hind limb held the carcass in place as the jaws began to tear the flesh.

“She’s going to stay,” Regis whispered. “Excellent.”

The tyrannosaur lifted her head again, ragged chunks of bleeding flesh in her jaws. She stared at the Land Cruiser. She began to chew. They heard the sickening crunch of bones.

“Ewww,” Lex said, over the intercom. “That’s dis
gus
ting.”

And then, as if caution had finally gotten the better of her, the tyrannosaur lifted the remains of the goat in her jaws and carried them silently back among the trees.

“Ladies and gentlemen,
Tyrannosaurus rex
,” the tape said. The Land Cruisers started up, and moved silently off, through the foliage.

Malcolm sat back in his seat. “Fantastic,” he said.

Gennaro wiped his forehead. He looked pale.

Henry Wu came into the control room to find everyone sitting in the dark, listening to the voices on the radio.

“—Jesus, if an animal like that gets out,” Gennaro was saying, his voice tinny on the speaker, “there’d be no stopping it.”

“No stopping it, no …”

“Huge, with no natural enemies …”

“My God, think of it …”

In the control room, Hammond said, “Damn those people. They are so
negative.
”

Wu said, “They’re still going on about an animal escaping? I don’t understand. They must have seen by now that we have everything under control. We’ve engineered the animals and engineered the resort.…” He shrugged.