Jurassic Park: A Novel (46 page)

Sticky. He smelled it.

Blood.

He looked up. The raptor was perched on pipes, just a few feet above his head. Blood was trickling from its claws. With an odd sense of detachment, he wondered if it was injured. And then he began to run, but the raptor jumped onto his back, pushing him to the ground.

Gennaro was strong; he heaved up, knocking the raptor away, and rolled off across the concrete. When he turned back, he saw that the raptor had fallen on its side, where it lay panting.

Yes, it was injured. Its leg was hurt, for some reason.

Kill it.

Gennaro scrambled to his feet, looking for a weapon. The raptor was still panting on the concrete. He looked frantically for something—anything—to use as a weapon. When he turned back, the raptor was gone.

It snarled, the sound echoing in the darkness.

Gennaro turned in a full circle, feeling with his outstretched hands. And then he felt a sharp pain in his right hand.

Teeth.

It was biting him.

The raptor jerked his head, and Donald Gennaro was yanked off his feet, and he fell.

Lying in bed, soaked in sweat, Malcolm listened as the radio crackled.

“Anything?” Muldoon said. “You getting anything?”

“No word,” Wu said.

“Hell,” Muldoon said.

There was a pause.

Malcolm sighed. “I can’t wait,” he said, “to hear his new plan.”

“What I would like,” Muldoon said, “is to get everybody to the lodge and regroup. But I don’t see how.”

“There’s a Jeep in front of the visitor center,” Wu said. “If I drove over to you, could you get yourself into it?”

“Maybe. But you’d be abandoning the control room.”

“I can’t do anything here anyway.”

“God knows that’s true,” Malcolm said. “A control room without electricity is not much of a control room.”

“All right,” Muldoon said. “Let’s try. This isn’t looking good.”

Lying in his bed, Malcolm said, “No, it’s not looking good. It’s looking like a disaster.”

Wu said, “The raptors are going to follow us over there.”

“We’re still better off,” Malcolm said. “Let’s go.”

The radio clicked off. Malcolm closed his eyes, and breathed slowly, marshaling his strength.

“Just relax,” Ellie said. “Just take it easy.”

“You know what we are really talking about here,” Malcolm said. “All this attempt to control … We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old. They began at the time when Florence, Italy, was the most important city in the world. The basic idea of science—that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was
rational
—that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn’t really work any more. It didn’t work economically, it didn’t work intellectually, and it didn’t fit the new world that was emerging.”

Malcolm coughed.

“But now,” he continued, “science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways—air, and water, and land—because of ungovernable science.” He sighed. “This much is obvious to everyone.”

There was a silence. Malcolm lay with his eyes closed, his breathing
labored. No one spoke, and it seemed to Ellie that Malcolm had finally fallen asleep. Then he sat up again, abruptly.

“At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn’t make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel’s theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some special inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know that what we call ‘reason’ is just an arbitrary game. It’s not special, in the way we thought it was.

“And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rainstorm we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old—the dream of total control—has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn’t true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.”

“This is very extreme,” Hammond said, shaking his head.

“We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now. Fifty years ago, everyone was gaga over the atomic bomb. That was power. No one could imagine anything more. Yet, a bare decade after the bomb, we began to have genetic power. And genetic power is far more potent than atomic power. And it will be in everyone’s hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question—What should I do with my power?—which is the very question science says it cannot answer.”

“So what will happen?” Ellie said.

Malcolm shrugged. “A change.”

“What kind of change?”

“All major changes are like death,” he said. “You can’t see to the other side until you are there.” And he closed his eyes.

“The poor man,” Hammond said, shaking his head.

Malcolm sighed. “Do you have any idea,” he said, “how unlikely it is that you, or any of us, will get off this island alive?”

Its electric motor whirring, the cart raced forward down the dark underground tunnel. Grant drove, his foot to the floor. The tunnel was featureless except for the occasional air vent above, shaded to protect against rainfall, and thus permitting little light to enter. But he noticed that there were crusty white animal droppings in many places. Obviously lots of animals had been in here.

Sitting beside him in the cart, Lex shone the flashlight to the back, where the velociraptor lay. “Why is it having trouble breathing?”

“Because I shot it with tranquilizer,” he said.

“Is it going to die?” she said.

“I hope not.”

“Why are we taking it?” Lex said.

“To prove to the people back at the center that the dinosaurs are really breeding,” Grant said.

“How do you know they’re breeding?”

“Because this one is young,” Grant said. “And because it’s a boy dinosaur.”

“Is it?” Lex said, peering along the flashlight beam.

“Yes. Now shine that light forward, will you?” He held out his wrist, turning the watch to her. “What does it say?”

“It says … ten-fifteen.”

“Okay.”

Tim said, “That means we have only forty-five minutes to contact the boat.”

“We should be close,” Grant said. “I figure we should be almost to the visitor center right now.” He wasn’t sure, but he sensed the tunnel was gently tilting upward, leading them back to the surface, and—

“Wow!” Tim said.

They burst out into daylight with shocking speed. There was a light mist blowing, partially obscuring the building that loomed directly above them. Grant saw at once that it was the visitor center. They had arrived right in front of the garage!

“Yay!” Lex shouted. “We did it! Yay!” She bounced up and down in the seat as Grant parked the cart in the garage. Along one wall were stacked animal cages. They put the velociraptor in one, with a dish of water. Then they started climbing the stairs to the ground-floor entrance of the visitor center.

“I’m going to get a hamburger! And french fries! Chocolate milk shake! No more dinosaurs! Yay!” They came to the lobby, and they opened the door.

And they fell silent.

In the lobby of the visitor center, the glass doors had been shattered, and a cold gray mist blew through the cavernous main hall. A sign that read
WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH
dangled from one hinge, creaking in the wind. The big tyrannosaur robot was upended and lay with its legs in the air, its tubing and metal innards exposed. Outside, through the glass, they saw rows of palm trees, shadowy shapes in the fog.

Tim and Lex huddled against the metal desk of the security guard. Grant took the guard’s radio and tried all the channels. “Hello, this is Grant. Is anybody there? Hello, this is Grant.”

Lex stared at the body of the guard, lying on the floor to the right. She couldn’t see anything but his legs and feet.

“Hello, this is Grant. Hello.”

Lex was leaning forward, peering around the edge of the desk.

Grant grabbed her sleeve. “Hey. Stop that.”

“Is he dead? What’s that stuff on the floor? Blood?”

“Yes.”

“How come it isn’t real red?”

“You’re morbid,” Tim said.

“What’s ‘morbid’? I am not.”

The radio crackled. “My God,” came a voice. “Grant? Is that you?”

And then: “Alan? Alan?” It was Ellie.

“I’m here,” Grant said.

“Thank God,” Ellie said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, yes.”

“What about the kids? Have you seen them?”

“I have the kids with me,” Grant said. “They’re okay.”

“Thank God.”

Lex was crawling around the side of the desk. Grant slapped her ankle. “Get back here.”

The radio crackled. “—n where are you?”

“In the lobby. In the lobby of the main building.”

Over the radio, he heard Wu say, “My God. They’re
here.
”

“Alan, listen,” Ellie said. “The raptors have gotten loose. They can open doors. They may be in the same building as you.”

“Great. Where are you?” Grant said.

“We’re in the lodge.”

Grant said, “And the others? Muldoon, everybody else?”

“We’ve lost a few people. But we got everybody else over to the lodge.”

“And are the telephones working?”

“No. The whole system is shut off. Nothing works.”

“How do we get the system back on?”

“We’ve been trying.”

“We have to get it back on,” Grant said, “right away. If we don’t, within half an hour the raptors will reach the mainland.”

He started to explain about the boat when Muldoon cut him off. “I don’t think you understand, Dr. Grant. We haven’t got half an hour left, over here.”

“How’s that?”

“Some of the raptors followed us. We’ve got two on the roof now.”

“So what? The building’s impregnable.”

Muldoon coughed. “Apparently not. It was never expected that animals would get up on the roof.” The radio crackled, “—must have planted a tree too close to the fence. The raptors got over the fence, and onto the roof. Anyway, the steel bars on the skylight are supposed to be electrified, but of course the power’s off. They’re biting through the bars of the skylight.”

Grant said, “Biting through the bars?” He frowned, trying to imagine it. “How fast?”

“Yes,” Muldoon said, “they have a bite pressure of fifteen thousand pounds a square inch. They’re like hyenas, they can bite through steel and—” The transmission was lost for a moment.

“How fast?” Grant said again.

Muldoon said, “I’d guess we’ve got another ten, fifteen minutes before they break through completely and come through the skylight into the building. And once they’re in … Ah, just a minute, Dr. Grant.”

The radio clicked off.

In the skylight above Malcolm’s bed, the raptors had chewed through the first of the steel bars. One raptor gripped the end of the bar and tugged, pulling it back. It put its powerful hind limb on the skylight and the glass shattered, glittering down on Malcolm’s bed below. Ellie reached over and removed the largest fragments from the sheets.

“God, they’re ugly,” Malcolm said, looking up.

Now that the glass was broken, they could hear the snorts and snarls of the raptors, the squeal of their teeth on the metal as they chewed the bars. There were silver thinned sections where they had chewed. Foamy saliva spattered onto the sheets, and the bedside table.