Jurassic Park

by Michael Crichton

  He would do that right away. In just a couple of minutes. He yawned, and closed his eyes again.

  “Not bad,” Arnold said in the control room, staring at the glowing map. “There’s only three cutouts in the whole park. Much better than I hoped for.”

  “Cutouts?” Gennaro said.

  “The fence automatically cuts out short-circuited sections,” he explained. “You can see a big one here, in sector twelve, near the main road.”

  “That’s where the rex knocked the fence down,” Muldoon said.

  “Exactly. And another one is here in sector eleven. Near the sauropod maintenance building.”

  “Why would that section be out?” Gennaro said.

  “God knows,” Arnold said. “Probably storm damage or a fallen tree. We can check it on the monitor in a while. The third one is over there by the jungle river. Don’t know why that should be out, either.”

  As Gennaro looked, the map became more complex, filling with green spots and numbers. “What’s all this?”

  “The animals. The motion sensors are working again, and the computer’s starting to identify the location of all the animals in the park. And anybody else, too.”

  Gennaro stared at the map. “You mean Grant and the kids …”

  “Yes. We’ve reset our search number above four hundred. So, if they’re out there moving around,” Arnold said, “the motion sensors will pick them up as additional animals.” He stared at the map. “But I don’t see any additionals yet.”

  “Why does it take so long?” Gennaro said.

  “You have to realize, Mr. Gennaro,” Arnold said, “that there’s a lot of extraneous movement out there. Branches blowing in the wind, birds flying around, all kinds of stuff. The computer has to eliminate all the background movement. It may take—ah. Okay. Count’s finished.”

  Gennaro said, “You don’t see the kids?”

  Arnold twisted in his chair, and looked back to the map. “No,” he said, “at the moment, there are no additionals on the map at all. Everything out there has been accounted for as a dinosaur. They’re probably up in a tree, or somewhere else where we can’t see them. I wouldn’t worry yet. Several animals haven’t shown up, like the big rex. That’s probably because it’s sleeping somewhere and not moving. The people may be sleeping, too. We just don’t know.”

  Muldoon shook his head. “We better get on with it,” he said. “We need to repair the fences, and get the animals back into their paddocks. According to that computer, we’ve got five to herd back to the proper paddocks. I’ll take the maintenance crews out now.”

  Arnold turned to Gennaro. “You may want to see how Dr. Malcolm is doing. Tell Dr. Harding that Muldoon will need him in about an hour to supervise the herding. And I’ll notify Mr. Hammond that we’re starting our final cleanup.”

  Gennaro passed through the iron gates and went in the front door of the Safari Lodge. He saw Ellie Sattler coming down the hallway, carrying towels and a pan of steaming water. “There’s a kitchen at the other end,” she said. “We’re using that to boil water for the dressings.”

  “How is he?” Gennaro asked.

  “Surprisingly good,” she said.

  Gennaro followed Ellie down to Malcolm’s room, and was startled to hear the sound of laughter. The mathematician lay on his back in the bed, with Harding adjusting an IV line.

  “So the other man says, ‘I’ll tell you frankly, I didn’t like it, Bill. I went back to toilet paper!’ ”

  Harding was laughing.

  “It’s not bad, is it?” Malcolm said, smiling. “Ah, Mr. Gennaro. You’ve come to see me. Now you know what happens from trying to get a leg up on the situation.”

  Gennaro came in, tentatively.

  Harding said, “He’s on fairly high doses of morphine.”

  “Not high enough, I can tell you,” Malcolm said. “Christ, he’s stingy with his drugs. Did they find the others yet?”

  “No, not yet,” Gennaro said. “But I’m glad to see you doing so well.”

  “How else should I be doing,” Malcolm said, “with a compound fracture of the leg that is likely septic and beginning to smell rather, ah, pungent? But I always say, if you can’t keep a sense of humor …”

  Gennaro smiled. “Do you remember what happened?”

  “Of course I remember,” Malcolm said. “Do you think you could be bitten by a Tyrannosaurus rex and it would escape your mind? No indeed, I’ll tell you, you’d remember it for the rest of your life. In my case, perhaps not a terribly long time. But, still—yes, I remember.”

  Malcolm described running from the Land Cruiser in the rain, and being chased down by the rex. “It was my own damned fault, he was too close, but I was panicked. In any case, he picked me up in his jaws.”

  “How?” Gennaro said.

  “Torso,” Malcolm said, and lifted his shirt. A broad semicircle of bruised punctures ran from his shoulder to his navel. “Lifted me up in his jaws, shook me bloody hard, and threw me down. And I was fine—terrified of course, but, still and all, fine—right up to the moment he threw me. I broke the leg in the fall. But the bite was not half bad.” He sighed. “Considering.”

  Harding said, “Most of the big carnivores don’t have strong jaws. The real power is in the neck musculature. The jaws just hold on, while they use the neck to twist and rip. But with a small creature like Dr. Malcolm, the animal would just shake him, and then toss him.”

  “I’m afraid that’s right,” Malcolm said. “I doubt I’d have survived, except the big chap’s heart wasn’t in it. To tell the truth, he struck me as a rather clumsy attacker of anything less than an automobile or a small apartment building.”

  “You think he attacked halfheartedly?”

  “It pains me to say it,” Malcolm said, “but I don’t honestly feel I had his full attention. He had mine, of course. But, then, he weighs eight tons. I don’t.”

  Gennaro turned to Harding and said, “They’re going to repair the fences now. Arnold says Muldoon will need your help herding animals.”

  “Okay,” Harding said.

  “So long as you leave me Dr. Sattler, and ample morphine,” Malcolm said. “And so long as we do not have a Malcolm Effect here.”

  “What’s a Malcolm Effect?” Gennaro said.

  “Modesty forbids me,” Malcolm said, “from telling you the details of a phenomenon named after me.” He sighed again, and closed his eyes. In a moment, he was sleeping.

  Ellie walked out into the hallway with Gennaro. “Don’t be fooled,” she said. “It’s a great strain on him. When will you have a helicopter here?”

  “A helicopter?”

  “He needs surgery on that leg. Make sure they send for a helicopter, and get him off this island.”

  THE PARK

  The portable generator sputtered and roared to life, and the quartz floodlights glowed at the ends of their telescoping arms. Muldoon heard the soft gurgle of the jungle river a few yards to the north. He turned back to the maintenance van and saw one of the workmen coming out with a big power saw.

  “No, no,” he said. “Just the ropes, Carlos. We don’t need to cut it.”

  He turned back to look at the fence. They had difficulty finding the shorted section at first, because there wasn’t much to see: a small protocarpus tree was leaning against the fence. It was one of several that had been planted in this region of the park, their feathery branches intended to conceal the fence from view.

  But this particular tree had been tied down with guy wires and turnbuckles. The wires had broken free in the storm, and the metal turnbuckles had blown against the fence and shorted it out. Of course, none of this should have happened; grounds crews were supposed to use plastic-coated wires and ceramic turnbuckles near fences. But it had happened anyway.

  In any case, it wasn’t going to be a big job. All they had to do was pull the tree off the fence, remove the metal fittings, and mark it for the gardeners to fix in the morning. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.
And that was just as well, because Muldoon knew the dilophosaurs always stayed close to the river. Even though the workmen were separated from the river by the fence, the dilos could spit right through it, delivering their blinding poison.

  Ramón, one of the workmen, came over. “Señor Muldoon,” he said, “did you see the lights?”

  “What lights?” Muldoon said.

  Ramón pointed to the east, through the jungle. “I saw it as we were coming out. It is there, very faint. You see it? It looks like the lights of a car, but it is not moving.”

  Muldoon squinted. It probably was just a maintenance light. After all, power was back on. “We’ll worry about it later,” he said. “Right now let’s just get that tree off the fence.”

  Arnold was in an expansive mood. The park was almost back in order. Muldoon was repairing the fences. Hammond had gone off to supervise the transfer of the animals with Harding. Although he was tired, Arnold was feeling good; he was even in a mood to indulge the lawyer, Gennaro. “The Malcolm Effect?” Arnold said. “You worried about that?”

  “I’m just curious,” Gennaro said.

  “You mean you want me to tell you why Ian Malcolm is wrong?”

  “Sure.”

  Arnold lit another cigarette. “It’s technical.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay,” Arnold said. “Chaos theory describes nonlinear systems. It’s now become a very broad theory that’s been used to study everything from the stock market to heart rhythms. A very fashionable theory. Very trendy to apply it to any complex system where there might be unpredictability. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Gennaro said.

  “Ian Malcolm is a mathematician specializing in chaos theory. Quite amusing and personable, but basically what he does, besides wear black, is use computers to model the behavior of complex systems. And John Hammond loves the latest scientific fad, so he asked Malcolm to model the system at Jurassic Park. Which Malcolm did. Malcolm’s models are all phase-space shapes on a computer screen. Have you seen them?”

  “No,” Gennaro said.

  “Well, they look like a weird twisted ship’s propeller. According to Malcolm, the behavior of any system follows the surface of the propeller. You with me?”

  “Not exactly,” Gennaro said.

  Arnold held his hand in the air. “Let’s say I put a drop of water on the back of my hand. That drop is going to run off my hand. Maybe it’ll run toward my wrist. Maybe it’ll run toward my thumb, or down between my fingers. I don’t know for sure where it will go, but I know it will run somewhere along the surface of my hand. It has to.”

  “Okay,” Gennaro said.

  “Chaos theory treats the behavior of a whole system like a drop of water moving on a complicated propeller surface. The drop may spiral down, or slip outward toward the edge. It may do many different things, depending. But it will always move along the surface of the propeller.”

  “Okay.”

  “Malcolm’s models tend to have a ledge, or a sharp incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly. He modestly calls this speeding-up movement the Malcolm Effect. The whole system could suddenly collapse. And that was what he said about Jurassic Park. That it had inherent instability.”

  “Inherent instability,” Gennaro said. “And what did you do when you got his report?”

  “We disagreed with it, and ignored it, of course,” Arnold said.

  “Was that wise?”

  “It’s self-evident,” Arnold said. “We’re dealing with living systems, after all. This is life, not computer models.”

  In the harsh quartz lights, the hypsilophodont’s green head hung down out of the sling, the tongue dangling, the eyes dull.

  “Careful! Careful!” Hammond shouted, as the crane began to lift.

  Harding grunted and eased the head back onto the leather straps. He didn’t want to impede circulation through the carotid artery. The crane hissed as it lifted the animal into the air, onto the waiting flatbed truck. The hypsy was a small dryosaur, seven feet long, weighing about five hundred pounds. She was dark green with mottled brown spots. She was breathing slowly, but she seemed all right. Harding had shot her a few moments before with the tranquilizer gun, and apparently he had guessed the correct dose. There was always a tense moment dosing these big animals. Too little and they would run off into the forest, collapsing where you couldn’t get to them. Too much and they went into terminal cardiac arrest. This one had taken a single bounding leap and keeled over. Perfectly dosed.

  “Watch it! Easy!” Hammond was shouting to the workmen.

  “Mr. Hammond,” Harding said. “Please.”

  “Well, they should be careful—”

  “They are being careful,” Harding said. He climbed up onto the back of the flatbed as the hypsy came down, and he set her into the restraining harness. Harding slipped on the cardiogram collar that monitored heartbeat, then picked up the big electronic thermometer the size of a turkey baster and slipped it into the rectum. It beeped: 96.2 degrees.

  “How is she?” Hammond asked fretfully.

  “She’s fine,” Harding said. “She’s only dropped a degree and a half.”

  “That’s too much,” Hammond said. “Too deep.”

  “You don’t want her waking up and jumping off the truck,” Harding snapped.

  Before coming to the park, Harding had been the chief of veterinary medicine at the San Diego Zoo, and the world’s leading expert on avian care. He flew all over the world, consulting with zoos in Europe, India, and Japan on the care of exotic birds. He’d had no interest when this peculiar little man showed up, offering him a position in a private game park. But when he learned what Hammond had done … It was impossible to pass up. Harding had an academic bent, and the prospect of writing the first Textbook of Veterinary Internal Medicine: Diseases of Dinosauria was compelling. In the late twentieth century, veterinary medicine was scientifically advanced; the best zoos ran clinics little different from hospitals. New textbooks were merely refinements of old. For a world-class practitioner, there were no worlds left to conquer. But to be the first to care for a whole new class of animals: that was something!

  And Harding had never regretted his decision. He had developed considerable expertise with these animals. And he didn’t want to hear from Hammond now.

  The hypsy snorted and twitched. She was still breathing shallowly; there was no ocular reflex yet. But it was time to get moving. “All aboard,” Harding shouted. “Let’s get this girl back to her paddock.”

  “Living systems,” Arnold said, “are not like mechanical systems. Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.”

  Gennaro was frowning. “But lots of things don’t change; body temperature doesn’t change, all kinds of other—”

  “Body temperature changes constantly,” Arnold said. “Constantly. It changes cyclically over twenty-four hours, lowest in the morning, highest in the afternoon. It changes with mood, with disease, with exercise, with outside temperature, with food. It continuously fluctuates up and down. Tiny jiggles on a graph. Because, at any moment, some forces are pushing temperature up, and other forces are pulling it down. It is inherently unstable. And every other aspect of living systems is like that, too.”

  “So you’re saying …”

  “Malcolm’s just another theoretician,” Arnold said. “Sitting in his office, he made a nice mathematical model, and it never occurred to him that what he saw as defects were actually necessities. Look: when I was working on missiles, we dealt with something called ‘resonant yaw.’ Resonant yaw meant that, even though a missile was only slightly unstable off the pad, it was hopeless. It was inevitably going to go out of control, and it couldn’t be brought back. That’s a feature of mechanical systems. A little wobble can get worse until the whole system collapses. But those same little wobbles are essential to a living system
. They mean the system is healthy and responsive. Malcolm never understood that.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t understand that? He seems pretty clear on the difference between living and nonliving—”

  “Look,” Arnold said. “The proof is right here.” He pointed to the screens. “In less than an hour,” he said, “the park will all be back on line. The only thing I’ve got left to clear is the telephones. For some reason, they’re still out. But everything else will be working. And that’s not theoretical. That’s a fact.”

  The needle went deep into the neck, and Harding injected the medrine into the anesthetized female dryosaur as she lay on her side on the ground. Immediately the animal began to recover, snorting and kicking her powerful hind legs.

  “Back, everybody,” Harding said, scrambling away. “Get back.”

  The dinosaur staggered to her feet, standing drunkenly. She shook her lizard head, stared at the people standing back in the quartz lights, and blinked.

  “She’s drooling,” Hammond said, worried.

  “Temporary,” Harding said. “It’ll stop.”

  The dryosaur coughed, and then moved slowly across the field, away from the lights.

  “Why isn’t she hopping?”

  “She will,” Harding said. “It’ll take her about an hour to recover fully. She’s fine.” He turned back to the car. “Okay, boys, let’s go deal with the stego.”

  Muldoon watched as the last of the stakes was pounded into the ground. The lines were pulled taut, and the protocarpus tree was lifted clear. Muldoon could see the blackened, charred streaks on the silver fence where the short had occurred. At the base of the fence, several ceramic insulators had burst. They would have to be replaced. But before that could be done, Arnold would have to shut down all the fences.