Jurassic Park (11 page)

    "Jesus," Malcolm said.

    The beeping was louder. Grant looked at the pilot. He was concentrating. Grant glanced down and saw a giant glowing fluorescent cross beneath the Plexi bubble at his feet. There were flashing lights at the corners of the cross. The pilot corrected slightly and touched down on a helipad. The sound of the rotors faded, and died.

    Grant sighed, and released his seat belt.

    "We have to come down fast, that way," Hammond said, "because of the wind shear. There is often had wind shear on this peak, and . . . well, we're safe."

    Someone was running up to the helicopter. A man with a baseball cap and red hair. He threw open the door and said cheerfully, "Hi, I'm Ed Regis. Welcome to Isla Nublar, everybody. And watch your step, please."

A narrow path wound down the hill. The air was chilly and damp. As they moved lower, the mist around them thinned, and Grant could see the landscape better. It looked, he thought, rather like the Pacific Northwest, the Olympic Peninsula.

    "That's right," Regis said. "Primary ecology is deciduous rain forest. Rather different from the vegetation on the mainland, which is more classical rain forest. But this is a microclimate that only occurs at elevation, on the slopes of the northern hills. The majority of the island is tropical."

    Down below, they could see the white roofs of large buildings, nestled among the planting. Grant was surprised: the construction was elaborate. They moved lower, out of the mist, and now he could see the full extent of the island, stretching away to the south. As Regis had said, it was mostly covered in tropical forest.

    To the south, rising above the palm trees, Grant saw a single trunk with no leaves at all, just a big curving stump. Then the stump moved, and twisted around to face the new arrivals. Grant realized that he was not seeing a tree at all.

    He was looking at the graceful, curving neck of an enormous creature, rising fifty feet into the air.

    He was looking at a dinosaur.

Welcome

"My God," Ellie said softly. They were all staring at the animal above the trees. "My God."

    Her first thought was that the dinosaur was extraordinarily beautiful. Books portrayed them as oversize, dumpy creatures, but this long-necked animal had a gracefulness, almost a dignity, about its movements. And it was quick-there was nothing lumbering or dull in its behavior. The sauropod peered alertly at them, and made a low trumpeting sound, rather like an elephant. A moment later, a second head rose above the foliage, and then a third, and a fourth.

    "My God," Ellie said again.

Gennaro was speechless. He had known all along what to expect-he had known about it for years-but he had somehow never believed it would happen, and now, he was shocked into silence. The awesome power of the new genetic technology, which he had formerly considered to he just so many words in an overwrought sales pitch-the power suddenly became clear to him. These animals were so big! They were enormous! Big as a house! And so many of them! Actual damned dinosaurs! Just as real as you could want.

    Gennaro thought: We are going to make a fortune on this place. A fortune.

    He hoped to God the island was safe.

Grant stood on the path on the side of the hill, with the mist on his face, staring at the gray necks craning above the palms. He felt dizzy, as if the ground were sloping away too steeply. He had trouble getting his breath. Because he was looking at something he had never expected to see in his life. Yet he was seeing it.

    The animals in the mist were perfect apatosaurs, medium-size sauropods. His stunned mind made academic associations: North American herbivores, late Jurassic horizon. Commonly called "brontosaurs." First discovered by E. D. Cope in Montana in 1876. Specimens associated with Morrison formation strata in Colorado, Utah, and Oklahoma. Recently Berman and McIntosh had reclassified it a diplodocus based on skull appearance, Traditionally, Brontosaurus was thought to spend most of its time in shallow water, which would help support its large bulk. Although this animal was clearly not in the water, it was moving much too quickly, the head and neck shifting above the palms in a very active manner-a surprisingly active manner-

    Grant began to laugh.

    "What is it?" Hammond said, worried. "Is something wrong?"

    Grant just shook his head, and continued to laugh. He couldn't tell them that what was funny was that he had seen the animal for only a few seconds, but he had already begun to accept it-and to use his observations to answer long-standing questions in the field.

    He was still laughing as he saw a fifth and a sixth neck crane up above the palm trees. The sauropods watched the people arrive. They reminded Grant of oversize giraffes-they had the same pleasant, rather stupid gaze.

    "I take it they're not animatronic," Malcolm said. "They're very lifelike."

    "Yes, they certainly are," Hammond said. "Well, they should be, shouldn't they?"

    From the distance, they heard the trumpeting sound again. First one animal made it, and then the others joined in.

    "That's their call," Ed Regis said. "Welcoming us to the island."

    Grant stood and listened for a moment, entranced.

    "You probably want to know what happens next," Hammond was saying, continuing down the path. "We've scheduled a complete tour of the facilities for you, and a trip to see the dinosaurs in the park later this afternoon. I'll be joining you for dinner, and will answer any remaining questions you may have then. Now, if you'll go with Mr. Regis . . ."

    The group followed Ed Regis toward the nearest buildings. Over the path, a crude band-painted sign read: "Welcome to Jurassic Park."

THIRD ITERATION

[picture]

"Details emerge more clearly as the fractal curve is redrawn."

IAN MALCOM

Jurassic Park

They moved into a green tunnel of overarching palms leading toward the main visitor building. Everywhere, extensive and elaborate planting emphasized the feeling that they were entering a new world, a prehistoric tropical world, and leaving the normal world behind.

    Ellie said to Grant, "They look pretty good."

    "Yes," Grant said. "I want to see them up close. I want to lift up their toe pads and inspect their claws and feel their skin and open their laws and have a look at their teeth. Until then I don't know for sure. But yes, they look good. "

    "I suppose it changes your field a bit," Malcolm said.

    Grant shook his head. "It changes everything," he said.

    For 150 years, ever since the discovery of gigantic animal bones in Europe, the study of dinosaurs had been an exercise in scientific deduction. Paleontology was essentially detective work, searching for clues in the fossil bones and the trackways of the long-vanished giants. The best paleontologists were the ones who could make the most clever deductions.

    And all the great disputes of paleontology were carried out in this fashion-including the bitter debate, in which Grant was a key figure, about whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

    Scientists had always classified dinosaurs as reptiles, cold-blooded creatures drawing the heat they needed for life from the environment. A mammal could metabolize food to produce bodily warmth, but a reptile could not. Eventually a handful of researchers-led chiefly by John Ostrom and Robert Bakker at Yale-began to suspect that the concept of sluggish, cold-blooded dinosaurs was inadequate to explain the fossil record. In classic deductive fashion, they drew conclusions from several lines of evidence.

    First was posture: lizards and reptiles were bent-legged sprawlers, hugging the ground for warmth. Lizards didn't have the energy to stand on their hind legs for more than a few seconds. But the dinosaurs stood on straight legs, and many walked erect on their hind legs. Among living animals, erect posture occurred only in warm-blooded mammals and birds. Thus dinosaur posture suggested warm-bloodedness.

    Next they studied metabolism, calculating the pressure necessary to push blood up the eigbteen-foot-long neck of a brachlosaur, and concluding that it could only be accomplished by a four-chambered, hot-blooded heart.

    They studied trackways, fossil footprints left in mud, and concluded that dinosaurs ran as fast as a man; such activity implied warm blood. They found dinosaur remains above the Arctic Circle, in a frigid environment unimaginable for a reptile. And the new studies of group behavior, based largely on Grant's own work, suggested that dinosaurs had a complex social life and reared their young, as reptiles did not. Crocodiles and turtles abandon their eggs. But dinosaurs probably did not.

    The warm-blooded controversy had raged for fifteen years, before a new perception of dinosaurs as quick-moving, active animals was acecpted-but not without lasting animosities. At conventions, there were still colleagues who did not speak to one another.

    But now, if dinosaurs could be cloned-why, Grant's field of study was going to change instantly. The paleontological study of dinosaurs was finished. The whole enterprise-the museum balls with their giant skeletons and flocks of echoing schoolchildren, the university laboratories with their bone trays, the research papers, the journals-all of it was going to end.

    "You don't seem upset," Malcolm said.

    Grant shook his head. "It's been discussed, in the field. Many people imagined it was coming. But not so soon."

    "Story of our species," Malcolm said, laughing. "Everybody knows it's coming, but not so soon."

    As they walked down the path, they could no longer see the dinosaurs, but they could hear them, trumpeting softly in the distance.

    Grant said, "My only question is, where'd they get the DNA?"

    Grant was aware of serious speculation in laboratories in Berkeley, Tokyo, and London that it might eventually be possible to clone an extinct animal such as a dinosaur-if you could get some dinosaur DNA to work with. The problem was that all known dinosaurs were fossils, and the fossilization destroyed most DNA, replacing it with inorganic material. Of course, if a dinosaur was frozen, or preserved in a peat bog, or mummified in a desert environment, then its DNA might be recoverable.

    But nobody had ever found a frozen or mummified dinosaur. So cloning was therefore impossible. There was nothing to clone from. All the modern genetic technology was useless, It was like having a Xerox copier but nothing to copy with it.

    Ellie said, "You can't reproduce a real dinosaur, because you can't get real dinosaur DNA."

    "Unless there's a way we haven't thought of," Grant said. "Like what?" she said.

    "I don't know," Grant said.

Beyond a fence, they came to the swimming pool, which spilled over into a series of waterfalls and smaller rocky pools. The area was planted with huge ferns. "Isn't this extraordinary?" Ed Regis said. "Especially on a misty day, these plants really contribute to the prehistoric atmosphere. These are authentic Jurassic ferns, of course."

    Ellie paused to look more closely at the ferns. Yes, it was just as he said: Serenna veriformans, a plant found abundantly in fossils more than two hundred million years old, now common only in the wetlands of Brazil and Colombia. But whoever had decided to place this particular fern at poolside obviously didn't know that the spores of veriformans contained a deadly beta-carboline alkaloid. Even touching the attractive green fronds could make you sick, and if a child were to take a mouthful, he would almost certainly die-the toxin was fifty times more poisonous than oleander.

    People were so naive about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction-and defense.

    But Ellie knew that, in the earth's history, plants had evolved as competitively as animals, and in some ways more fiercely. The poison in Serenna veriformans was a minor example of the elaborate chemical arsenal of weapons that plants had evolved. There were terpenes, which plants spread to poison the soil around them and inhibit competitors; alkaloids, which made them unpalatable to insects and predators (and children); and pheromones, used for communication. When a Douglas fir tree was attacked by beetles, it produced an anti-feedant chemical-and so did other Douglas firs in distant parts of the forest. It happened in response to a warning alleochemical secreted by the trees that were under attack.

    People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with ammals-discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others, and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds. It was a complex, dynamic process which she never ceased to find fascinating. And which she knew most people simply didn't understand.

    But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

    "Isn't it just wonderful?" Ed Regis was saying. "If you look up ahead, you'll see our Safari Lodge." Ellie saw a dramatic, low building, with a series of glass pyramids on the roof. "That's where you'll all be staying here in Jurassic Park."

Grant's suite was done in beige tones, the rattan furniture in green jungle-print motifs. The room wasn't quite finished; there were stacks of lumber in the closet, and pieces of electrical conduit on the floor. There was a television set in the corner, with a card on top:

                        Channel 2: Hypsilophodont Highlands

Channel 3: Triceratops Territory

Channel 4: Sauropod Swamp

Channel 5: Carnivore Country

Channel 6: Stegosaurus South

Channel 7: Velociraptor Valley