Jurassic Park: A Novel (35 page)

But Grant also remembered that the tyrannosaurs were isolated from all the other animals, which meant they would know they had left the paddock when they crossed a barrier—a fence, or a moat, or both.

He had seen no barriers, so far.

The girl put her head on his shoulder, and twirled her hair in her fingers. Soon she was snoring. Tim trudged alongside Grant.

“How you holding up, Tim?”

“Okay,” he said. “But I think we might be in the tyrannosaur area.”

“I’m pretty sure we are. I hope we get out soon.”

“You going to go into the woods?” Tim said. As they came closer, the woods seemed dark and forbidding.

“Yes,” Grant said. “I think we can navigate by the numbers on the motion sensors.”

The motion sensors were green boxes set about four feet off the ground. Some were freestanding; most were attached to trees. None of them were working, because apparently the power was still off. Each sensor box had a glass lens mounted in the center, and a painted code number beneath that. Up ahead, in the mist-streaked moonlight, Grant could see a box marked
T
/
S
/04.

They entered the forest. Huge trees loomed on all sides. In the moonlight, a low mist clung to the ground, curling around the roots of the trees. It was beautiful, but it made walking treacherous. And Grant was watching the sensors. They seemed to be numbered in descending order. He passed
T
/
S
/03, and
T
/
S
/02. Eventually they reached
T
/
S
/01. He was tired from carrying the girl, and he had hoped this would coincide with a boundary for the tyrannosaur paddock, but it was just another box in the middle of the woods. The next box after that was marked
T
/
N
/01, followed by
T
/
N
/02. Grant realized the numbers must be arranged geographically around a central point, like a compass. They were going from south to north, so the numbers got smaller as they approached the center, then got larger again.

“At least we’re going the right way,” Tim said.

“Good for you,” Grant said.

Tim smiled, and stumbled over vines in the mist. He got quickly to his feet. They walked on for a while. “My parents are getting a divorce,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Grant said.

“My dad moved out last month. He has his own place in Mill Valley now.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He never carries my sister any more. He never even picks her up.”

“And he says you have dinosaurs on the brain,” Grant said.

Tim sighed. “Yeah.”

“You miss him?” Grant said.

“Not really,” Tim said. “Sometimes. She misses him more.”

“Who, your mother?”

“No, Lex. My mom has a boyfriend. She knows him from work.”

They walked in silence for a while, passing
T
/
N
/03 and
T
/
N
/04.

“Have you met him?” Grant said.

“Yeah.”

“How is he?”

“He’s okay,” Tim said. “He’s younger than my dad, but he’s bald.”

“How does he treat you?”

“I don’t know. Okay. I think he just tries to get on my good side. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Sometimes my mom says we’ll have to sell the house and move. Sometimes he and my mom fight, late at night. I sit in my room and play with my computer, but I can still hear it.”

“Uh-huh,” Grant said.

“Are you divorced?”

“No,” Grant said. “My wife died a long time ago.”

“And now you’re with Dr. Sattler?”

Grant smiled in the darkness. “No. She’s my student.”

“You mean she’s still in
school
?”

“Graduate school, yes.” Grant paused long enough to shift Lex to his other shoulder, and then they continued on, past
T
/
N
/05 and
T
/
N
/06. There was the rumble of thunder in the distance. The storm had moved to the south. There was very little sound in the forest except for the drone of cicadas and the soft croaking of tree frogs.

“You have children?” Tim asked.

“No,” Grant said.

“Are you going to marry Dr. Sattler?”

“No, she’s marrying a nice doctor in Chicago sometime next year.”

“Oh,” Tim said. He seemed surprised to hear it. They walked along for a while. “Then who are you going to marry?”

“I don’t think I’m going to marry anybody,” Grant said.

“Me neither,” Tim said.

They walked for a while. Tim said, “Are we going to walk all night?”

“I don’t think I can,” Grant said. “We’ll have to stop, at least for a few hours.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re okay. We’ve got almost fifteen hours before we have to be back. Before the ship reaches the mainland.”

“Where are we going to stop?” Tim asked, immediately.

Grant was wondering the same thing. His first thought was that
they might climb a tree, and sleep up there. But they would have to climb very high to get safely away from the animals, and Lex might fall out while she was asleep. And tree branches were hard; they wouldn’t get any rest. At least, he wouldn’t.

They needed someplace really safe. He thought back to the plans he had seen on the jet coming down. He remembered that there were outlying buildings for each of the different divisions. Grant didn’t know what they were like, because plans for the individual buildings weren’t included. And he couldn’t remember exactly where they were, but he remembered they were scattered all around the park. There might be buildings somewhere nearby.

But that was a different requirement from simply crossing a barrier and getting out of the tyrannosaur paddock. Finding a building meant a search strategy of some kind. And the best strategies were—

“Tim, can you hold your sister for me? I’m going to climb a tree and have a look around.”

High in the branches, he had a good view of the forest, the tops of the trees extending away to his left and right. They were surprisingly near the edge of the forest—directly ahead the trees ended before a clearing, with an electrified fence and a pale concrete moat. Beyond that, a large open field in what he assumed was the sauropod paddock. In the distance, more trees, and misty moonlight sparkling on the ocean.

Somewhere he heard the bellowing of a dinosaur, but it was far away. He put on Tim’s night-vision goggles and looked again. He followed the gray curve of the moat, and then saw what he was looking for: the dark strip of a service road, leading to the flat rectangle of a roof. The roof was barely above ground level, but it was there. And it wasn’t far. Maybe a quarter of a mile or so from the tree.

When he came back down, Lex was sniffling.

“What’s the matter?”

“I heard an aminal.”

“It won’t bother us. Are you awake now? Come on.”

He led her to the fence. It was twelve feet high, with a spiral of barbed wire at the top. It seemed to stretch far above them in the moonlight. The moat was immediately on the other side.

Lex looked up at the fence doubtfully.

“Can you climb it?” Grant asked her.

She handed him her glove, and her baseball. “Sure. Easy.” She started to climb. “But I bet Timmy can’t.”

Tim spun in fury: “
You shut up.
”

“Timmy’s afraid of heights.”

“I am not.”

She climbed higher. “Are so.”

“Am not.”

“Then come and get me.”

Grant turned to Tim, pale in the darkness. The boy wasn’t moving. “You okay with the fence, Tim?”

“Sure.”

“Want some help?”

“Timmy’s a fraidy-cat,” Lex called.

“What a stupid jerk,” Tim said, and he started to climb.

“It’s
freezing,
” Lex said. They were standing waist-deep in smelly water at the bottom of a deep concrete moat. They had climbed the fence without incident, except that Tim had torn his shirt on the coils of barbed wire at the top. Then they had all slid down into the moat, and now Grant was looking for a way out.

“At least I got Timmy over the fence for you,” Lex said. “He really is scared most times.”

“Thanks for your help,” Tim said sarcastically. In the moonlight, he could see floating lumps on the surface. He moved along the moat, looking at the concrete wall on the far side. The concrete was smooth; they couldn’t possibly climb it.

“Eww,” Lex said, pointing to the water.

“It won’t hurt you, Lex.”

Grant finally found a place where the concrete had cracked and a vine grew down toward the water. He tugged on the vine, and it held his weight. “Let’s go, kids.” They started to climb the vine, back to the field above.

It took only a few minutes to cross the field to the embankment leading to the below-grade service road, and the maintenance building off to the right. They passed two motion sensors, and Grant noticed with some uneasiness that the sensors were still not working, nor were the lights. More than two hours had passed since the power first went out, and it was not yet restored.

Somewhere in the distance, they heard the tyrannosaur roar. “Is he around here?” Lex said.

“No,” Grant said. “We’re in another section of park from him.” They slid down a grassy embankment and moved toward the concrete building. In the darkness it was forbidding, bunker-like.

“What is this place?” Lex said.

“It’s safe,” Grant said, hoping that was true.

The entrance gate was large enough to drive a truck through. It was fitted with heavy bars. Inside, they could see, the building was an open shed, with piles of grass and bales of hay stacked among equipment.

The gate was locked with a heavy padlock. As Grant was examining it, Lex slipped sideways between the bars. “Come on, you guys.”

Tim followed her. “I think you can do it, Dr. Grant.”

He was right; it was a tight squeeze, but Grant was able to ease his body between the bars and get into the shed. As soon as he was inside, a wave of exhaustion struck him.

“I wonder if there’s anything to eat,” Lex said.

“Just hay.” Grant broke open a bale, and spread it around on the concrete. The hay in the center was warm. They lay down, feeling the warmth. Lex curled up beside him, and closed her eyes. Tim put his arm around her. He heard the sauropods trumpeting softly in the distance.

Neither child spoke. They were almost immediately snoring. Grant raised his arm to look at his watch, but it was too dark to see. He felt the warmth of the children against his own body.

Grant closed his eyes, and slept.

Muldoon and Gennaro came into the control room just as Arnold clapped his hands and said, “Got you, you little son of a bitch.”

“What is it?” Gennaro said.

Arnold pointed to the screen:

“That’s it,” Arnold said, pleased.

“That’s what?” Gennaro asked, staring at the screen.

“I finally found the command to restore the original code. The command called ‘fini.obj’ resets the linked parameters, namely the fence and the power.”

“Good,” Muldoon said.

“But it does something else,” Arnold said. “It then erases the code lines that refer to it. It destroys all evidence it was ever there. Pretty slick.”

Gennaro shook his head. “I don’t know much about computers.”

Although he knew enough to know what it meant when a high-tech company went back to the source code. It meant big, big problems.

“Well, watch this,” Arnold said, and he typed in the command:

FINI.OBJ

The screen flickered and immediately changed.

Muldoon pointed to the windows. “Look!” Outside, the big
quartz lights were coming on throughout the park. They went to the windows and looked out.

“Hot damn,” Arnold said.

Gennaro said, “Does this mean the electrified fences are back on?”

“You bet it does,” Arnold said. “It’ll take a few seconds to get up to full power, because we’ve got fifty miles of fence out there, and the generator has to charge the capacitors along the way. But in half a minute we’ll be back in business.” Arnold pointed to the vertical glass see-through map of the park.

On the map, bright red lines were snaking out from the power station, moving throughout the park, as electricity surged through the fences.

“And the motion sensors?” Gennaro said.

“Yes, them, too. It’ll be a few minutes while the computer counts. But everything’s working,” Arnold said. “Half past nine, and we’ve got the whole damn thing back up and running.”

Grant opened his eyes. Brilliant blue light was streaming into the building through the bars of the gate. Quartz light: the power was back on! Groggily, he looked at his watch. It was just nine-thirty. He’d been asleep only a couple of minutes. He decided he could sleep a few minutes more, and then he would go back up to the field and stand in front of the motion sensors and wave, setting them off. The control room would spot him; they’d send a car out to pick him and the kids up, he’d tell Arnold to recall the supply ship, and they’d all finish the night in their own beds back in the lodge.