Jurassic Park: A Novel (19 page)

Two weeks after the funeral, John Hammond came to see Wu. Everyone in the lab knew that Atherton had had some association with Hammond, although the details were never clear. But Hammond had approached Wu with a directness Wu never forgot.

“Norman always said you’re the best geneticist in his lab,” he said. “What are your plans now?”

“I don’t know. Research.”

“You want a university appointment?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a mistake,” Hammond said briskly. “At least, if you respect your talent.”

Wu had blinked. “Why?”

“Because, let’s face facts,” Hammond said. “Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don’t look so surprised. I’m not saying anything you don’t know. Since World War II, all the really important discoveries have come out of private laboratories. The laser, the transistor, the polio vaccine, the microchip, the hologram, the personal computer, magnetic resonance imaging, CAT scans—the list goes on and on. Universities simply aren’t where it’s happening any more. And they haven’t been for forty
years. If you want to do something important in computers or genetics, you don’t go to a
university.
Dear me, no.”

Wu found he was speechless.

“Good heavens,” Hammond said, “what must you go through to start a new project? How many grant applications, how many forms, how many approvals? The steering committee? The department chairman? The university resources committee? How do you get more work space if you need it? More assistants if you need them? How long does all that take? A brilliant man can’t squander precious time with forms and committees. Life is too short, and DNA too long. You want to make your mark. If you want to get something
done,
stay out of universities.”

In those days, Wu desperately wanted to make his mark. John Hammond had his full attention.

“I’m talking about
work,
” Hammond continued. “Real accomplishment. What does a scientist need to work? He needs time, and he needs money. I’m talking about giving you a five-year commitment, and ten million dollars a year in funding. Fifty million dollars, and no one tells you how to spend it. You decide. Everyone else just
gets out of your way.
”

It sounded too good to be true. Wu was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “In return for what?”

“For taking a crack at the impossible,” Hammond said. “For trying something that probably can’t be done.”

“What does it involve?”

“I can’t give you details, but the general area involves cloning reptiles.”

“I don’t think that’s impossible,” Wu said. “Reptiles are easier than mammals. Cloning’s probably only ten, fifteen years off. Assuming some fundamental advances.”

“I’ve got five years,” Hammond said. “And a lot of money, for somebody who wants to take a crack at it now.”

“Is my work publishable?”

“Eventually.”

“Not immediately?”

“No.”

“But eventually publishable?” Wu asked, sticking on this point.

Hammond had laughed. “Don’t worry. If you succeed, the whole world will know about what you’ve done, I promise you.”

And now it seemed the whole world would indeed know, Wu thought. After five years of extraordinary effort, they were just a year away from opening the park to the public. Of course, those years hadn’t gone exactly as Hammond had promised. Wu had had some people telling him what to do, and many times fearsome pressures were placed on him. And the work itself had shifted—it wasn’t even reptilian cloning, once they began to understand that dinosaurs were so similar to birds. It was avian cloning, a very different proposition. Much more difficult. And for the last two years, Wu had been primarily an administrator, supervising teams of researchers and banks of computer-operated gene sequencers. Administration wasn’t the kind of work he relished. It wasn’t what he had bargained for.

Still, he had succeeded. He had done what nobody really believed could be done, at least in so short a time. And Henry Wu thought that he should have some rights, some say in what happened, by virtue of his expertise and his efforts. Instead, he found his influence waning with each passing day. The dinosaurs existed. The procedures for obtaining them were worked out to the point of being routine. The technologies were mature. And John Hammond didn’t need Henry Wu any more.

“That should be fine,” Hammond said, speaking into the phone. He listened for a while, and smiled at Wu. “Fine. Yes. Fine,” He hung up. “Where were we, Henry?”

“We were talking about phase two,” Wu said.

“Oh yes. We’ve gone over some of this before, Henry—”

“I know, but you don’t realize—”

“Excuse me, Henry,” Hammond said, with an edge of impatience in his voice. “I
do
realize. And I must tell you frankly, Henry. I see no reason to improve upon reality. Every change we’ve made in the genome has been forced on us by law or necessity. We may make other changes in the future, to resist disease, or for other reasons. But I don’t think we should improve upon reality just because we think it’s better that way. We have real dinosaurs out there now. That’s what people want to see. And that’s what they
should
see. That’s our obligation, Henry. That’s
honest,
Henry.”

And, smiling, Hammond opened the door for him to leave.

Grant looked at all the computer monitors in the darkened control room, feeling irritable. Grant didn’t like computers. He knew that this made him old-fashioned, dated as a researcher, but he didn’t care. Some of the kids who worked for him had a real feeling for computers, an intuition. Grant never felt that. He found computers to be alien, mystifying machines. Even the fundamental distinction between an operating system and an application left him confused and disheartened, literally lost in a foreign geography he didn’t begin to comprehend. But he noticed that Gennaro was perfectly comfortable, and Malcolm seemed to be in his element, making little sniffing sounds, like a bloodhound on a trail.

“You want to know about control mechanisms?” John Arnold said, turning in his chair in the control room. The head engineer was a thin, tense, chain-smoking man of forty-five. He squinted at the others in the room. “We have
unbelievable
control mechanisms,” Arnold said, and lit another cigarette.

“For example,” Gennaro said.

“For example, animal tracking.” Arnold pressed a button on his console, and the vertical glass map lit up with a pattern of jagged blue lines. “That’s our juvenile T-rex. The little rex. All his movements within the park over the last twenty-four hours.” Arnold pressed the button again. “Previous twenty-four.” And again. “Previous twenty-four.”

The lines on the map became densely overlaid, a child’s scribble. But the scribble was localized in a single area, near the southeast side of the lagoon.

“You get a sense of his home range over time,” Arnold said. “He’s young, so he stays close to the water. And he stays away from
the big adult rex. You put up the big rex and the little rex, and you’ll see their paths never cross.”

“Where is the big rex right now?” Gennaro asked.

Arnold pushed another button. The map cleared, and a single glowing spot with a code number appeared in the fields northwest of the lagoon. “He’s right there.”

“And the little rex?”

“Hell, I’ll show you every animal in the park,” Arnold said. The map began to light up like a Christmas tree, dozens of spots of light, each tagged with a code number. “That’s two hundred thirty-eight animals as of this minute.”

“How accurate?”

“Within five feet.” Arnold puffed on the cigarette. “Let’s put it this way: you drive out in a vehicle and you will find the animals right there, exactly as they’re shown on the map.”

“How often is this updated?”

“Every thirty seconds.”

“Pretty impressive,” Gennaro said. “How’s it done?”

“We have motion sensors all around the park,” Arnold said. “Most of ’em hard-wired, some radio-telemetered. Of course, motion sensors won’t usually tell you the species, but we get image recognition direct off the video. Even when we’re not watching the video monitors, the computer is. And checking where everybody is.”

“Does the computer ever make a mistake?”

“Only with the babies. It mixes those up sometimes, because they’re such small images. But we don’t sweat that. The babies almost always stay close to herds of adults. Also you have the category tally.”

“What’s that?”

“Once every fifteen minutes, the computer tallies the animals in all categories,” Arnold said. “Like this.”

“What you see here,” Arnold said, “is an entirely separate counting procedure. It isn’t based on the tracking data. It’s a fresh look. The whole idea is that the computer can’t make a mistake, because it compares two different ways of gathering the data. If an animal were missing, we’d know it within five minutes.”

“I see,” Malcolm said. “And has that ever actually been tested?”

“Well, in a way,” Arnold said. “We’ve had a few animals die. An othnielian got caught in the branches of a tree and strangled. One of the stegos died of that intestinal illness that keeps bothering them. One of the hypsilophodonts fell and broke his neck. And in each case, once the animal stopped moving, the numbers stopped tallying and the computer signaled an alert.”

“Within five minutes.”

“Yes.”

Grant said, “What is the right-hand column?”

“Release version of the animals. The most recent are version 4.1 or 4.3. We’re considering going to version 4.4.”

“Version numbers? You mean like software? New releases?”

“Well, yes,” Arnold said. “It is like software, in a way. As we discover the glitches in the DNA, Dr. Wu’s labs have to make a new version.”

The idea of living creatures being numbered like software, being subject to updates and revisions, troubled Grant. He could not exactly say why—it was too new a thought—but he was instinctively uneasy about it. They were, after all, living creatures.…

Arnold must have noticed his expression, because he said, “Look, Dr. Grant, there’s no point getting starry-eyed about these animals. It’s important for everyone to remember that these animals are
created.
Created by man. Sometimes there are bugs. So, as we discover
the bugs, Dr. Wu’s labs have to make a new version. And we need to keep track of what version we have out there.”

“Yes, yes, of course you do,” Malcolm said impatiently. “But, going back to the matter of
counting
—I take it all the counts are based on motion sensors?”

“Yes.”

“And these sensors are everywhere in the park?”

“They cover ninety-two percent of the land area,” Arnold said. “There are only a few places we can’t use them. For example, we can’t use them on the jungle river, because the movement of the water and the convection rising from the surface screws up the sensors. But we have them nearly everywhere else. And if the computer tracks an animal into an unsensed zone, it’ll remember, and look for the animal to come out again. And if it doesn’t, it gives us an alarm.”

“Now, then,” Malcolm said. “You show forty-nine procompsognathids. Suppose I suspect that some of them aren’t really the correct species. How would you show me that I’m wrong?”