Jurassic Park: A Novel (38 page)

“Yow!” Lex shouted, ducking. Two giant red dragonflies with six-foot wingspans hummed past them. “What was that?”

“Dragonflies,” he said. “The Jurassic was a time of huge insects.”

“Do they bite?” Lex said.

“I don’t think so,” Grant said.

Tim held out his hand. One of the dragonflies lighted on it. He could feel the weight of the huge insect.

“He’s going to bite you,” Lex warned.

But the dragonfly just slowly flapped its red-veined transparent wings, and then, when Tim moved his arm, flew off again.

“Which way do we go?” Lex said.

“There.”

They started walking across the field. They reached a black box mounted on a heavy metal tripod, the first of the motion sensors. Grant stopped and waved his hand in front of it back and forth, but nothing happened. If the phones didn’t work, perhaps the sensors didn’t work, either. “We’ll try another one,” he said, pointing across the field. Somewhere in the distance, they heard the roar of a large animal.

“Ah hell,” Arnold said. “I just can’t find it.” He sipped coffee and stared bleary-eyed at the screens. He had taken all the video monitors off line. In the control room, he was searching the computer code. He was exhausted; he’d been working for twelve straight hours. He turned to Wu, who had come up from the lab.

“Find what?”

“The phones are still out. I can’t get them back on. I think Nedry did something to the phones.”

Wu lifted one phone, heard hissing. “Sounds like a modem.”

“But it’s not,” Arnold said. “Because I went down into the basement and shut off all the modems. What you’re hearing is just white noise that sounds like a modem transmitting.”

“So the phone lines are jammed?”

“Basically, yes. Nedry jammed them very well. He’s inserted some kind of a lockout into the program code, and now I can’t find it, because I gave that restore command which erased part of the program listings. But apparently the command to shut off the phones is still resident in the computer memory.”

Wu shrugged. “So? Just reset: shut the system down and you’ll clear memory.”

“I’ve never done it before,” Arnold said. “And I’m reluctant to do it. Maybe all the systems will come back on start-up—but maybe they won’t. I’m not a computer expert, and neither are you. Not really. And without an open phone line, we can’t talk to anybody who is.”

“If the command is RAM-resident, it won’t show up in the code. You can do a RAM dump and search that, but you don’t know what you’re searching for. I think all you can do is reset.”

Gennaro stormed in. “We still don’t have any telephones.”

“Working on it.”

“You’ve been working on it since midnight. And Malcolm is worse. He needs medical attention.”

“It means I’ll have to shut down,” Arnold said. “I can’t be sure everything will come back on.”

Gennaro said, “Look. There’s a sick man over in that lodge. He needs a doctor or he’ll die. You can’t call for a doctor unless you have a phone. Four people have probably died already. Now, shut down and get the phones working!”

Arnold hesitated.

“Well?” Gennaro said.

“Well, it’s just … the safety systems don’t allow the computer to be shut down, and—”

“
Then turn the goddamn safety systems off!
Can’t you get it through your head that he’s going to die unless he gets help?”

“Okay,” Arnold said.

He got up and went to the main panel. He opened the doors, and uncovered the metal swing-latches over the safety switches. He popped them off, one after another. “You asked for it,” Arnold said. “And you got it.”

He threw the master switch.

The control room was dark. All the monitors were black. The three men stood there in the dark.

“How long do we have to wait?” Gennaro said.

“Thirty seconds,” Arnold said.

“P-U!” Lex said, as they crossed the field.

“What?” Grant said.

“That smell!” Lex said. “It stinks like rotten garbage.”

Grant hesitated. He stared across the field toward the distant trees, looking for movement. He saw nothing. There was hardly a breeze to stir the branches. It was peaceful and silent in the early morning. “I think it’s your imagination,” he said.

“Is not—”

Then he heard the honking sound. It came from the herd of duckbilled hadrosaurs behind them. First one animal, then another and another, until the whole herd had taken up the honking cry. The duckbills were agitated, twisting and turning, hurrying out of the water, circling the young ones to protect them.…

They smell it, too, Grant thought.

With a roar, the tyrannosaur burst from the trees fifty yards away, near the lagoon. It rushed out across the open field with huge strides. It ignored them, heading toward the herd of hadrosaurs.

“I told you!” Lex screamed. “Nobody listens to me!”

In the distance, the duckbills were honking and starting to run. Grant could feel the earth shake beneath his feet. “Come on, kids!” He grabbed Lex, lifting her bodily off the ground, and ran with Tim through the grass. He had glimpses of the tyrannosaur down by the lagoon, lunging at the hadrosaurs, which swung their big tails in defense and honked loudly and continuously. He heard the crashing of foliage and trees, and when he looked over again, the duckbills were charging.

In the darkened control room, Arnold checked his watch. Thirty seconds. The memory should be cleared by now. He pushed the main power switch back on.

Nothing happened.

Arnold’s stomach heaved. He pushed the switch off, then on again. Still nothing happened. He felt sweat on his brow.

“What’s wrong?” Gennaro said.
“Oh hell,” Arnold said. Then he remembered you had to turn the safety switches back on before you restarted the power. He flipped on the three safeties, and covered them again with the latch covers. Then he held his breath, and turned the main power switch.

The room lights came on.

The computer beeped.

The screens hummed.

“Thank God,” Arnold said. He hurried to the main monitor. There were rows of labels on the screen:

Gennaro reached for the phone, but it was dead. No static hissing this time—just nothing at all. “What’s this?”

“Give me a second,” Arnold said. “After a reset, all the system modules have to be brought on line manually.” Quickly, he went back to work.

“Why manually?” Gennaro said.

“Will you just let me work, for Christ’s sake?”

Wu said, “The system is not intended to ever shut down. So, if it does shut down, it assumes that there is a problem somewhere. It requires you to start up everything manually. Otherwise, if there were a short somewhere, the system would start up, short out, start up again, short out again, in an endless cycle.”

“Okay,” Arnold said. “We’re going.”

Gennaro picked up the phone and started to dial, when he suddenly stopped.

“Jesus, look at that,” he said. He pointed to one of the video monitors.

But Arnold wasn’t listening. He was staring at the map, where a tight cluster of dots by the lagoon had started to move in a coordinated way. Moving fast, in a kind of swirl.

“What’s happening?” Gennaro said.

“The duckbills,” Arnold said tonelessly. “They’ve stampeded.”

The duckbills charged with surprising speed, their enormous bodies in a tight cluster, honking and roaring, the infants squealing and trying to stay out from underfoot. The herd raised a great cloud of yellow dust. Grant couldn’t see the tyrannosaur.

The duckbills were running right toward them.

Still carrying Lex, he ran with Tim toward a rocky outcrop, with a stand of big conifers. They ran hard, feeling the ground shake beneath their feet. The sound of the approaching herd was deafening, like the sound of jets at an airport. It filled the air, and hurt their ears. Lex was shouting something, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying, and as they scrambled onto the rocks, the herd closed in around them.

Grant saw the immense legs of the first hadrosaurs that charged past, each animal weighing five tons, and then they were enveloped in a cloud so dense he could see nothing at all. He had the impression of huge bodies, giant limbs, bellowing cries of pain as the animals
wheeled and circled. One duckbill struck a boulder and it rolled past them, out into the field beyond.

In the dense cloud of dust, they could see almost nothing beyond the rocks. They clung to the boulders, listening to the screams and honks, the menacing roar of the tyrannosaur. Lex dug her fingers into Grant’s shoulder.

Another hadrosaur slammed its big tail against the rocks, leaving a splash of hot blood. Grant waited until the sounds of the fighting had moved off to the left, and then he pushed the kids to start climbing the largest tree. They climbed swiftly, feeling for the branches, as the animals stampeded all around them in the dust. They went up twenty feet, and then Lex clutched at Grant and refused to go farther. Tim was tired, too, and Grant thought they were high enough. Through the dust, they could see the broad backs of the animals below as they wheeled and honked. Grant propped himself against the coarse bark of the trunk, coughed in the dust, closed his eyes, and waited.

Arnold adjusted the camera as the herd moved away. The dust slowly cleared. He saw that the hadrosaurs had scattered, and the tyrannosaur had stopped running, which could only mean it had made a kill. The tyrannosaur was now near the lagoon. Arnold looked at the video monitor and said, “Better get Muldoon to go out there and see how bad it is.”

“I’ll get him,” Gennaro said, and left the room.

A faint crackling sound, like a fire in a fireplace. Something warm and wet tickled Grant’s ankle. He opened his eyes and saw an enormous beige head. The head tapered to a flat mouth shaped like the bill of a duck. The eyes, protruding above the flat duckbill, were gentle and soft like a cow’s. The duck mouth opened and chewed branches on the limb where Grant was sitting. He saw large flat teeth in the cheek. The warm lips touched his ankle again as the animal chewed.

A duckbilled hadrosaur. He was astonished to see it up close. Not that he was afraid; all the species of duckbilled dinosaurs were herbivorous, and this one acted exactly like a cow. Even though it was huge, its manner was so calm and peaceful Grant didn’t feel threatened. He stayed where he was on the branch, careful not to move, and watched as it ate.

The reason Grant was astonished was that he had a proprietary feeling about this animal: it was probably a maiasaur, from the late Cretaceous in Montana. With John Horner, Grant had been the first to describe the species. Maiasaurs had an upcurved lip, which gave them the appearance of smiling. The name meant “good mother lizard”; maiasaurs were thought to protect their eggs until the babies were born and could take care of themselves.

Grant heard an insistent chirping, and the big head swung down. He moved just enough to see the baby hadrosaur scampering around the feet of the adult. The baby was dark beige with black spots. The adult bent her head low to the ground and waited, unmoving, while the baby stood up on its hind legs, resting its front legs on the mother’s jaw, and ate the branches that protruded from the side of the mother’s mouth.

The mother waited patiently until the baby had finished eating,
and dropped back down to all fours again. Then the big head came back up toward Grant.

The hadrosaur continued to eat, just a few feet from him. Grant looked at the two elongated airholes on top of the flat upper bill. Apparently the dinosaur couldn’t smell Grant. And even though the left eye was looking right at him, for some reason the hadrosaur didn’t react to him.

He remembered how the tyrannosaur had failed to see him, the previous night. Grant decided on an experiment.

He coughed.

Instantly the hadrosaur froze, the big head suddenly still, the jaws no longer chewing. Only the eye moved, looking for the source of the sound. Then, after a moment, when there seemed to be no danger, the animal resumed chewing.

Amazing, Grant thought.

Sitting in his arms, Lex opened her eyes and said, “Hey, what’s
that
?”

The hadrosaur trumpeted in alarm, a loud resonant honk that so startled Lex that she nearly fell out of the tree. The hadrosaur pulled its head away from the branch and trumpeted again.

“Don’t make her mad,” Tim said, from the branch above.

The baby chirped and scurried beneath the mother’s legs as the hadrosaur stepped away from the tree. The mother cocked her head and peered inquisitively at the branch where Grant and Lex were sitting. With its upturned smiling lips, the dinosaur had a comical appearance.

“Is it dumb?” Lex said.

“No,” Grant said. “You just surprised her.”

“Well,” Lex said, “is she going to let us get down, or what?”

The hadrosaur had backed ten feet away from the tree. She honked again. Grant had the impression she was trying to frighten them away. But the dinosaur didn’t really seem to know what to do. She acted confused and uneasy. They waited in silence, and after a minute the hadrosaur approached the branch again, jaws moving in anticipation. She was clearly going to resume eating.