Jurassic Park: A Novel (53 page)

Grant said something that Tim didn’t hear, he only heard the tension in his voice. He was looking at Tim, worried.

Tim felt his heart thumping in his chest. Lex was yelling at him. He didn’t want to look at the video monitor anymore. He could hear the sound of the bars bending in the lodge, and the raptors snarling. He heard Malcolm say, “Dear God …”

He pushed
LODGE.

SPECIFY GRID NUMBER TO RESET.

For a frozen interminable moment he couldn’t remember the number, but then he remembered
F
4, and he pressed that.

ACTIVATING LODGE GRID F
4
NOW.

On the video monitor he saw an explosion of sparks, sputtering down from the ceiling of the hotel room. The monitor flared white. Lex shouted “What did you do!” but almost immediately the image came back and they could see that the raptors were caught between the bars, writhing and screaming in a hot cascade of sparks while Muldoon and the others cheered, their voices tinny over the radio.

“That’s it,” Grant said, slapping Tim on the back. “That’s it! You did it!”

They were all standing and jumping up and down when Lex said, “What about the ship?”

“The what?”

“The
ship,
” she said, and pointed to the screen.

On the monitor, the buildings beyond the bow of the ship were much larger, and moving to the right, as the ship turned left and prepared to dock. He saw crewmen heading out to the bow, preparing to tie up.

Tim scrambled back to his seat, and stared at the startup screen. He studied the screen. TeleCom VBB and TeleCom RSD both looked like they might have something to do with telephones. He pressed
TELECOM RSD.

YOU HAVE
23
WAITING CALLS AND/OR MESSAGES.

DO YOU WISH TO RECEIVE THEM NOW?

He pushed
NO.

“Maybe the ship was one of the waiting calls,” Lex said. “Maybe that way you could get the phone number!”

He ignored her.

ENTER THE NUMBER YOU WISH TO CALL OR PRESS F
7
FOR DIRECTORY.

He pushed
F
7 and suddenly names and numbers spilled over the screen, an enormous directory. It wasn’t alphabetical, and it took a while to scan it visually before he found what he was looking for:

VSL ANNE B.
(
FREDDY
) 708-3902

Now all he had to do was figure out how to dial. He pushed a row of buttons at the bottom of the screen:

DIAL NOW OR DIAL LATER?

He pushed
DIAL NOW.

WE’RE SORRY, YOUR CALL CANNOT BE COMPLETED AS DIALED.
{
ERROR
-598}

PLEASE TRY AGAIN

He tried it again.

He heard a dial tone, then the tone of the numbers being automatically dialed in rapid succession.

“Is that it?” Grant said.

“Pretty good, Timmy,” Lex said. “But they’re almost there.” On the screen, they could see the prow of the ship closing on the Puntarenas dock. They heard a high-pitched squeal, and then a voice said, “Ah, hello, John, this is Freddy. Do you read me, over?”

Tim picked up a phone on the console but heard only a dial tone.

“Ah, hello, John, this is Freddy, over?”

“Answer it,”
Lex said.

Now they were all picking up phones, lifting every receiver in sight, but they heard only dial tones. Finally Tim saw a phone mounted on the side of the console with a blinking light.

“Ah, hello, control. This is Freddy. Do you read me, over?”

Tim grabbed the receiver. “Hello, this is Tim Murphy, and I need you to—”

“Ah, say again, didn’t get that, John.”

“Don’t land the boat! Do you hear me?”

There was a pause. Then a puzzled voice said, “Sounds like some damn kid.”

Tim said, “Don’t land the ship! Come back to the island!”

The voices sounded distant and scratchy. “Did he—name was Murphy?” And another voice said, “I didn’t get—name.”

Tim looked frantically at the others. Gennaro reached for the phone. “Let me do this. Can you get his name?”

There was the sharp crackle of static. “—got to be a joke or else—a—frigging ham operator—omething.”

Tim was working on the keyboard, there was probably some kind of a way to find out who Freddy was.…

“Can you hear me?” Gennaro said, into the phone. “If you can hear me, answer me now, over.”

“Son,” came the drawled reply, “we don’t know who the hell you are, but you’re not funny, and we’re about to dock and we’ve got work to do. Now, identify yourself properly or get off this channel.”

Tim watched as the screen printed out
FARRELL, FREDERICK D.
(
CAPT.
).

“Try this for identification, Captain Farrell,” Gennaro said. “If you don’t turn that boat around and return to this island immediately, you will be found in violation of Section 509 of the Uniform Maritime Act, you will be subject to revocation of license, penalties in excess of fifty thousand dollars, and five years in jail. Do you hear that?”

There was a silence.

“Do you copy that, Captain Farrell?”

And then, distantly, they heard a voice say, “I copy,” and another voice said, “All ahead stern.” The boat began to turn away from the dock.

Lex began to cheer. Tim collapsed back in the chair, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

Grant said, “What’s the Uniform Maritime Act?”

“Who the hell knows?” Gennaro said.

They all watched the screen in satisfaction. The boat was definitely heading away from the shore.

“I guess the hard part’s finished,” Gennaro said.

Grant shook his head. “The hard part,” he said, “is just beginning.”

They moved Malcolm to another room in the lodge, to a clean bed. Hammond seemed to revive, and began bustling around, straightening up. “Well,” he said, “at least disaster is averted.”

“What disaster is that?” Malcolm said, sighing.

“Well,” Hammond said, “they didn’t get free and overrun the world.”

Malcolm sat up on one elbow. “You were worried about that?”

“Surely that’s what was at stake,” Hammond said. “These animals, lacking predators, might get out and destroy the planet.”

“You egomaniacal
idiot,
” Malcolm said, in fury. “Do you have any idea what you are talking about? You think you can destroy the planet? My, what intoxicating power you must have.” Malcolm sank back on the bed. “You can’t destroy this planet. You can’t even come close.”

“Most people believe,” Hammond said stiffly, “that the planet is in jeopardy.”

“Well, it’s not,” Malcolm said.

“All the experts agree that our planet is in trouble.”

Malcolm sighed. “Let me tell you about our planet,” he said. “Our planet is four and a half billion years old. There has been life on this planet for nearly that long. Three point eight billion years. The first bacteria. And, later, the first multicellular animals, then the first complex creatures, in the sea, on the land. Then the great sweeping ages of animals—the amphibians, the dinosaurs, the mammals, each lasting millions upon millions of years. Great dynasties of creatures arising, flourishing, dying away. All this happening against a background of continuous and violent upheaval, mountain ranges thrust up and eroded away, cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving … Endless,
constant and violent change … Even today, the greatest geographical feature on the planet comes from two great continents colliding, buckling to make the Himalayan mountain range over millions of years. The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.”

Hammond frowned. “Just because it lasted a long time,” he said, “doesn’t mean it is permanent. If there was a radiation accident …”

“Suppose there was,” Malcolm said. “Let’s say we had a bad one, and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere—under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic ice. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. And of course it would be very different from what it is now. But the earth would survive our folly. Life would survive our folly. Only we,” Malcolm said, “think it wouldn’t.”

Hammond said, “Well, if the ozone layer gets thinner—”

“There will be more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. So what?”

“Well. It’ll cause skin cancer.”

Malcolm shook his head. “Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation.”

“And many others will die out,” Hammond said.

Malcolm sighed. “You think this is the first time such a thing has happened? Don’t you know about oxygen?”

“I know it’s necessary for life.”

“It is
now,
” Malcolm said. “But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It’s a corrosive gas, like fluorine, which is used to etch glass. And when oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells—say, around three billion years ago—it created a crisis for all other life on our planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. On earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly—five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth had an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!”

Hammond looked irritated. “So what is your point? That modern pollutants will be incorporated, too?”

“No,” Malcolm said. “My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn’t have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines.… It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is
nothing.
A million years is
nothing.
This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”

“And we very well might be gone,” Hammond said, huffing.

“Yes,” Malcolm said. “We might.”

“So what are you saying? We shouldn’t care about the environment?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then what?”

Malcolm coughed, and stared into the distance. “Let’s be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy.
We
are in jeopardy. We haven’t got the power to destroy the planet—or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”

Four hours had passed. It was afternoon; the sun was falling. The air conditioning was back on in the control room, and the computer was functioning properly. As near as they could determine, out of twenty-four people on the island, eight were dead and six more were missing. The visitor center and the Safari Lodge were both secure, and the northern perimeter seemed to be clear of dinosaurs. They had called authorities in San José for help. The Costa Rican National Guard was on its way, as well as an air ambulance to carry Malcolm to a hospital. But over the telephone, the Costa Rican guard had been distinctly cautious; undoubtedly calls would go back and forth between San José and Washington before help was finally sent to the island. And now it was growing late in the day; if the helicopters did not arrive soon, they would have to wait until morning.
In the meantime, there was nothing to do but wait. The ship was returning; the crew had discovered three young raptors scampering about in one of the aft holds, and had killed the animals. On Isla Nublar, the immediate danger appeared to have passed; everyone was in either the visitor center or the lodge. Tim had gotten quite good with the computer, and he flashed up a new screen.