Jurassic Park

The Main Road

Rain drummed loudly on the roof of the Land Cruiser. Tim felt the night-vision goggles pressing heavily on his forehead. He reached for the knob near his ear and adjusted the intensity. There was a brief phosphorescent flare, and then, in shades of electronic green and black, he could see the Land Cruiser behind, with Dr. Grant and Dr. Malcolm inside. Neat!

Dr. Grant was staring out the front windshield toward him. Tim saw him pick up the radio from the dash. There was a burst of static, and then he heard Dr. Grant's voice: "Can you see us back here?"

Tim picked up the radio from Ed Regis. "I see you."

"Everything all right?"

"We're fine, Dr. Grant."

"Stay in the car."

"We will. Don't Worry." He clicked the radio off.

Ed Regis snorted. "It's pouring down rain. Of course we'll stay in the car," he muttered.

Tim turned to look at the foliage at the side of the road. Through the goggles, the foliage was a bright electronic green, and beyond he could see sections of the green grid pattern of the fence. The Land Cruisers were stopped on the downslope of a hill, which must mean they were someplace near the tyrannosaur area. It would be amazing to see a tyrannosaur with these night-vision goggles. A real thrill. Maybe the tyrannosaur would come to the fence and look over at them. Tim wondered if its eyes would glow in the dark when he saw them. That would be neat.

But he didn't see anything, and eventually he stopped looking. Everyone in the cars fell silent. The rain thrummed on the roof of the car. Sheets of water streamed down over the sides of the windows. It was hard for Tim to see out, even with the goggles.

"How long have we been sitting here?" Malcolm asked.

"I don't know. Four or five minutes."

"I wonder what the problem is."

"Maybe a short circuit from the rain."

"But it happened before the rain really started."

There was another silence. In a tense voice, Lex said, "But there's no lightning, right?" She had always been afraid of lightning, and she now sat nervously squeezing her leather mitt in her hands.

Dr. Grant said, "What was that? We didn't quite read that."

"Just my sister talking."

"Oh."

Tim again scanned the foliage, but saw nothing. Certainly nothing as big as a tyrannosaur. He began to wonder if the tyrannosaurs came out at night. Were they nocturnal animals? Tim wasn't sure if he had ever read that. He had the feeling that tyrannosaurs were all-weather, day or night animals. The time of day didn't matter to a tyrannosaur.

The rain continued to pour.

"Hell of a rain," Ed Regis said. "It's really coming down."

Lex said, "I'm hungry."

"I know that, Lex," Regis said, "but we're stuck here, sweetie. The cars run on electricity in buried cables in the road."

"Stuck for how long?"

"Until they fix the electricity."

Listening to the sound of the rain, Tim felt himself growing sleepy. He yawned, and turned to look at the palm trees on the left side of the road, and was startled by a sudden tbump as the ground shook. He swung back just in time to catch a glimpse of a dark shape as it swiftly crossed the road between the two cars.

"Jesus! "

"What was it?"

"It was huge, it was big as the car-"

"Tim! Are you there?"

He picked up the radio. "Yes, I'm here."

"Did you see it, Tim?"

"No," Tim said. "I missed it."

"What the hell was it?" Malcolm said.

"Are you wearing the night-vision goggles, Tim?"

"Yes. I'll watch," Tim said.

"Was it the tyrannosaur?" Ed Regis asked.

"I don't think so. It was in the road."

"But you didn't see it?" Ed Regis said.

"No. "

Tim felt had that he had missed seeing the animal whatever it was.

There was a sudden white crack of lightning, and his night goggles flared bright green. He blinked his eyes and started counting. "One one thousand… two one thousand…"

The thunder crashed, deafeningly loud and very close. Lex began to cry. "Oh, no…"

"Take it easy, honey," Ed Regis said. "It's just lightning."

Tim scanned the side of the road. The rain was coming down bard now, shaking the leaves with hammering drops. It made everything move. Everything seemed alive. He scanned the leaves…

He stopped. There was something beyond the leaves.

Tim looked up, higher.

Behind the foliage, beyond the fence, he saw a thick body with a pebbled, grainy surface like the bark of a tree. But it wasn't a tree. He continued to look higher, sweeping the goggles upward-

He saw the huge head of the tyrannosaurus. Just standing there, looking over the fence at the two Land Cruisers. The lightning flashed again, and the big animal rolled its head and bellowed in the glaring light. Then darkness, and silence again, and the pounding rain.

"Tim?"

"Yes, Dr. Grant."

"You see what it is?"

"Yes, Dr. Grant."

Tim had the sense that Dr. Grant was trying to talk in a way that wouldn't upset his sister.

"What's going on right now?"

"Nothing," Tim said, watching the tyrannosaur through his night goggles. "Just standing on the other side of the fence."

"I can't see much from here, Tim."

"I can see fine, Dr. Grant. It's just standing there."

"Okay."

Lex continued to cry, snuffling.

There was another pause. Tim watched the tyrannosaur. The head was huge! The animal looked from one vehicle to another. Then back again. It seemed to stare right at Tim.

In the goggles, the eyes glowed bright green.

Tim felt a chill, but then, as he looked down the animal's body, moving down from the massive head and jaws, he saw the smaller, muscular forelimb. It waved in the air and then it gripped the fence.

"Jesus Christ," Ed Regis said, staring out the window.

The greatest preditor the world has ever known. The most fearsome attack in human history. Somewhere in the back of his publicist's brain, Ed Regis was still writing copy. But he could feel his knees begin to shake uncontrollably, his trousers flapping like flags, Jesus, he was frightened. He didn't want to be here. Alone among all the people in the two cars, Ed Regis knew what a dinosaur attack was like. He knew what happened to people. He had seen the mangled bodies that resulted from a raptor attack. He could picture it in his mind. And this was a rex! Much, much bigger! The greatest meat-eater that ever walked the earth!

Jesus.

When the tyrannosaur roared it was terrifying, a scream from some other world. Ed Regis felt the spreading warmth in his trousers. He'd peed in his pants. He was simultaneously embarrassed and terrified. But he knew he had to do something. He couldn't just stay here. He had to do something. Something. His hands were shaking, trembling against the dash.

"Jesus Christ," he said again.

"Bad language," Lex said, wagging her finger at him.

Tim heard the sound of a door opening, and he swung his head away from the tyrannosaur-the night-vision goggles streaked laterally-in time to see Ed Regis stepping out through the open door, ducking his head in the rain.

"Hey," Lex said, "where are you going?"

Ed Regis just turned and ran in the opposite direction from the tyrannosaur, disappearing into the woods. The door to the Land Cruiser hung open; the paneling was getting wet.

"He left!" Lex said. "Where did he go? He left us alone!"

"Shut the door," Tim said, but she had started to scream, "He left us! He left us!"

"Tim, what's going on?" It was Dr. Grant, on the radio. "Tim?"

Tim leaned forward and tried to shut the door. From the back seat, he couldn't reach the handle. He looked back at the tyrannosaur as lightning flashed again, momentarily silhouetting the huge black shape against the white-flaring sky.

"Tim, what's happening?"

"He left us, he left us!"

Tim blinked to recover his vision. When he looked again, the tyrannosaur was standing there, exactly as before, motionless and huge. Rain dripped from its jaws. The forelimb gripped the fence…

And then Tim realized: the tyrannosaur was holding on to the fence! The fence wasn't electrified any more!

"Lex, close the door!"

The radio crackled. "Tim!"

"I'm here, Dr. Grant."

"What's going on?"

"Regis ran away," Tim said.

"He what?"

"He ran away. I think he saw that the fence isn't electrified," Tim said.

"The fence isn't electrified?" Malcolm said, over the radio. "Did he say the fence isn't electrified?"

"Lex," Tim said, "close the door. " But Lex was screaming, "He left us, he left us!" in a steady, monotonous wail, and there was nothing for Tim to do but climb out of the back door, into the slashing rain, and shut the door for her. Thunder rumbled, and the lightning flashed again. Tim looked up and saw the tyrannosaur crashing down the cyclone fence with a giant hind limb.

"Timmy!"

He jumped back in and slammed the door, the sound lost in the tbunderclap.

The radio: "Tim! Are you there?"

He grabbed the radio. "I'm here." He turned to Lex. "Lock the doors. Get in the middle of the car. And shut up."

Outside, the tyrannosaur rolled its head and took an awkward step forward. The claws of its feet had caught in the grid of the flattened fence. Lex saw the animal finally, and became silent, still. She watched with wide eyes.

Radio crackle. "Tim."

"Yes, Dr. Grant."

"Stay in the car. Stay down. Be quiet. Don't move, and don't make noise."

"Okay."

"You should be all right. I don't think it can open the car."

"Okay."

"Just stay quiet, so you don't arouse its attention any more than necessary.

"Okay." Tim clicked the radio off. "You hear that, Lex?" His sister nodded, silently. She never took her eyes off the dinosaur. The tyrannosaur roared. In the glare of lightning, they saw it pull free of the fence and take a bounding step forward.

Now it was standing between the two cars. Tim couldn't see Dr. Grant's car any more, because the huge body blocked his view. The rain ran in rivulets down the pebbled skin of the muscular hind legs. He couldn't see the animal's head, which was high above the roofline.

The tyrannosaur moved around the side of their car. It went to the very spot where Tim had gotten out of the car. Where Ed Regis had gotten out of the car. The animal paused there. The big head ducked down, toward the mud.

Tim looked back at Dr. Grant and Dr. Malcolm in the rear car. Their faces were tense as they stared forward through the windshield.

The huge head raised back up, jaws open, and then stopped by the side windows. In the glare of lightning, they saw the beady, expressionless reptile eye moving in the socket.

It was looking in the car.

His sister's breath came in ragged, frightened gasps. He reached out and squeezed her arm, hoping she would stay quiet. The dinosaur continued to stare for a long time through the side window. Perhaps the dinosaur couldn't really see them, he thought. Finally the head lifted up, out of view again.

"Timmy…" Lex whispered.

"It's okay," Tim whispered. "I don't think it saw us."

He was looking back toward Dr. Grant when a jolting impact rocked the Land Cruiser and shattered the windshield in a spiderweb as the tyrannosaur's head crashed against the hood of the Land Cruiser. Tim was knocked flat on the seat. The night-vision goggles slid off his forehead.

He got back up quickly, blinking in the darkness, his mouth warm with blood.

"Lex?"

He couldn't see his sister anywhere.

The tyrannosaur stood near the front of the Land Cruiser, its chest moving as it breathed, the forelimbs making clawing movements in the air.

"Lex!" Tim whispered. Then he heard her groan. She was lying somewhere on the floor under the front seat.

Then the huge head came down, entirely blocking the shattered windshield. The tyrannosaur banged again on the front hood of the Land Cruiser. Tim grabbed the seat as the car rocked on its wheels. The tyrannosaur banged down twice more, denting the metal.

Then it moved around the side of the car. The big raised tail blocked his view out of all the side windows. At the back, the animal snorted, a deep rumbling growl that blended with the thunder. It sank its jaws into the spare tire mounted on the back of the Land Cruiser and, in a single head shake, tore it away. The rear of the car lifted into the air for a moment; then it thumped down with a muddy splash.

"Tim!" Dr. Grant said. "Tim, are you there?"

Tim grabbed the radio. "We're okay," he said. There was a shrill metallic scrape as claws raked the roof of the car. Tim's heart was pounding in his chest. He couldn't see anything out of the windows on the right side except pebbled leathery flesh. The tyrannosaur was leaning against the car, which rocked back and forth with each breath, the springs and metal creaking loudly.

Lex groaned again. Tim put down the radio, and started to crawl over into the front seat. The tyrannosaur roared and the metal roof dented downward. Tim felt a sharp pain in his head and tumbled to the floor, onto the transmission bump. He found himself lying alongside Lex, and he was shocked to see that the whole side of her head was covered in blood. She looked unconscious.

There was another jolting impact, and pieces of glass fell all around him. Tim felt rain. He looked up and saw that the front windshield had broken out. There was just a jagged rim of glass and, beyond, the big head of the dinosaur.

Looking down at him.

Tim felt a sudden chill and then the head rushed forward toward him, the jaws open. There was the squeal of metal against teeth, and he felt the hot stinking breath of the animal and a thick tongue stuck into the car through the windshield opening. The tongue slapped wetly around inside the car-he felt the hot lather of dinosaur saliva-and the tyrannosaur roared-a deafening sound inside the car-

The head pulled away abruptly.

Tim scrambled up, avoiding the dent in the roof. There was still room to sit on the front seat by the passenger door. The tyrannosaur stood in the rain near the front fender. It seemed confused by what had happened to it. Blood dripped freely from its jaws.

The tyrannosaur looked at Tim, cocking its head to stare with one big eye. The head moved close to the car, sideways, and peered in. Blood spattered on the dented bood of the Land Cruiser, mixing with the rain.

It can't get to me, Tim thought. It's too big.

Then the head pulled away, and in the flare of lightning he saw the hind leg lift up. And the world tilted crazily as the Land Cruiser slammed over its side, the windows splatting in the mud. He saw Lex fall helplessly against the side window, and he fell down beside her, banging his head. Tim felt dizzy. Then the tyrannosaur's jaws clamped onto the window frame, and the whole Land Cruiser was lifted up into the air, and shaken.

"Timmy!" Lex shrieked, so near to his ear that it hurt. She was suddenly awake, and he grabbed her as the tyrannosaur crashed the car down again. Tim felt a stabbing pain in his side, and his sister fell on top of him. The car went up again, tilting crazily. Lex shouted "Timmy!" and he saw the door give way beneath her, and she fell out of the car into the mud but Tim couldn't answer, because in the next instant everything swung crazily-he saw the trunks of the palm trees sliding downward past him-moving sideways through the air-he glimpsed the ground very far below-the hot roar of the tyrannosaur-the blazing eye-the tops of the palm trees-

And then, with a metallic scraping shriek, the car fell from the tyrannosaur's jaws, a sickening fall, and Tim's stomach heaved in the moment before the world became totally black, and silent.

In the other car, Malcolm gasped. "Jesus! What happened to the car?" Grant blinked his eyes as the lightning faded.

The other car was gone.

Grant couldn't believe it. He peered forward, trying to see through the rain-streaked windshield. The dinosaur's body was so large, it was probably just blocking-

No. In another flash of lightning, he saw clearly: the car was gone.

"What happened?" Malcolm said.

"I don't know."

Faintly, over the rain, Grant heard the sound of the little girl screaming. The dinosaur was standing in darkness on the road up ahead, but they could see well enough to know that it was bending over now, sniffing the ground.

Or eating something on the ground.

"Can you see?" Malcolm said, squinting.

"Not much, no," Grant said. The rain pounded on the roof of the car. He listened for the little girl, but he didn't hear her any more. The two men sat in the car, listening.

"Was it the girl?" Malcolm said, finally. "It sounded like the girl."

"It did, yes."

"Was it?"

"I don't know," Grant said. He felt a seeping fatigue overtake him. Blurred through the rainy windshield, the dinosaur was coming toward their car. Slow, ominous strides, coming right toward them.

Malcolm said, "You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct. Don't you have that feeling now?"

"Yes," Grant said. He was feeling his heart pounding.

"Umm. Do you, ah, have any suggestions about what we do now?"

"I can't think of a thing," Grant said.

Malcolm twisted the handle, kicked open the door, and ran. But even as he did, Grant could see he was too late, the tyrannosaur too close. There was another crack of lightning, and in that instant of glaring white light, Grant watched in horror as the tyrannosaur roared, and leapt forward.

Grant was not clear about exactly what happened next. Malcolm was running, his feet splashing in the mud. The tyrannosaur bounded alongside him and ducked its massive head, and Malcolm was tossed into the air like a small doll.

By then Grant was out of the car, too, feeling the cold rain slashing his face and body. The tyrannosaur had turned its back to him, the huge tail swinging through the air. Grant was tensing to run for the woods when suddenly the tyrannosaur spun back to face him, and roared.

Grant froze.

He was standing beside the passenger door of the Land Cruiser, drenched in rain. He was completely exposed, the tyrannosaur no more than eight feet away. The big animal roared again. At so close a range the sound was terrifyingly loud. Grant felt himself shaking with cold and fright. He pressed his trembling hands against the metal of the door panel to steady them.

The tyrannosaur roared once more, but it did not attack. It cocked its head, and looked with first one eye, then the other, at the Land Cruiser. And it did nothing.

It just stood there.

What was going on?

The powerful jaws opened and closed. The tyrannosaur bellowed angrily, and then the big hind leg came up and crashed down on the roof of the car; the claws slid off with a metal screech, barely missing Grant as he stood there, still unmoving.

The foot splashed in the mud. The head ducked down in a slow arc, and the animal inspected the car, snorting. It peered into the front windshield. Then, moving toward the rear, it banged the passenger door shut, and moved right toward Grant as he stood there. Grant was dizzy with fear his heart pounding inside his chest. With the animal so close, he could smell the rotten flesh in the mouth, the sweetish blood-smell, the sickening stench of the carnivore…

He tensed his body, awaiting the inevitable.

The big head slid past him, toward the rear of the car. Grant blinked.

What had happened?

Was it possible the tyrannosaur hadn't seen him? It seemed as if it hadn't. But how could that be? Grant looked back to see the animal sniffing the rear-mounted tire. It nudged the tire with its snout, and then the head swung back. Again it approached Grant.

This time the animal stopped, the black flaying nostrils just inches away. Grant felt the animal's startling hot breath on his face. But the tyrannosaur wasn't sniffing like a dog. It was just breathing, and if anything it seemed puzzled.

No, the tyrannosaur couldn't see him. Not if he stood motionless. And in a detached academic corner of his mind he found an explanation for that, a reason why-

The laws opened before him, the massive head raised up. Grant squeezed his fists together, and bit his lip, trying desperately to remain motionless, to make no sound.

The tyrannosaur bellowed in the night air.

But by now Grant was beginning to understand. The animal couldn't see him, but it suspected he was there, somewhere, and was trying with its bellowing to frighten Grant into some revealing movement. So long as he stood his ground, Grant realized, he was invisible.

In a final gesture of frustration, the big hind leg lifted up and kicked the Land Cruiser over, and Grant felt searing pain and the surprising sensation of his own body flying through the air. It seemed to be happening very slowly, and he had plenty of time to feel the world turn colder, and watch the ground rush up to strike him in the face.

Return

"Oh damn," Harding said. "Will you look at that."

They were sitting in Harding's gasoline-powered Jeep, staring forward past the flick flick of the windshield wipers. In the yellow flare of the headlamps, a big fallen tree blocked the road.

"Must have been the lightning," Gennaro said. "Hell of a tree."

"We can't get past it," Harding said. "I better tell Arnold in control." He picked up the radio and twisted the channel dial. "Hello, John. Are you there, John?"

There was nothing but steady hissing static. "I don't understand," he said. "The radio lines seem to be down."

"It must be the storm," Gennaro said.

"I suppose," Harding said.

"Try the Land Cruisers," Ellie said.

Harding opened the other channels, but there was no answer.

"Nothing," he said. "They're probably back to camp by now, and outside the range of our little set. In any case, I don't think we should stay here. It'll be hours before Maintenance gets a crew out here to move that tree."

He turned the radio off, and put the Jeep into reverse.

"Wbat're you going to do?" Ellie said.

"Go back to the turnout, and get onto the maintenance road. Fortunately there's a second road system," Harding explained. "We have one road for visitors, and a second road for animal handlers and feed trucks and so on. We'll drive back on that maintenance road. It's a little longer. And not so scenic. But you may find it interesting. If the rain lets up, we'll get a glimpse of some of the animals at night. We should be back in thirty, forty minutes," Harding said. "If I don't get lost."

He turned the Jeep around in the night, and headed south again.

Lightning flashed, and every monitor in the control room went black.

Arnold sat forward, his body rigid and tense. Jesus, not now. Not now. That was all he needed-to have everything go out now in the storm. All the main power circuits were surge-protected, of course, but Arnold wasn't sure about the modems Nedry was using for his data transmission. Most people didn't know it was possible to blow an entire system through a modem-the lightning pulse climbed back into the computer through the telephone line, and-bang!-no more motherboard. No more RAM. No more file server. No more computer.

The screens flickered. And then, one by one, they came back on.

Arnold sighed, and collapsed back in his chair.

He wondered again where Nedry had gone. Five minutes ago, he'd sent guards to search the building for him. The fat bastard was probably in the bathroom reading a comic book. But the guards hadn't come back, and they hadn't called in.

Five minutes. If Nedry was in the building, they should have found him by now.

"Somebody took the damned Jeep," Muldoon said as he came back in the room. "Have you talked to the Land Cruisers yet?"

"Can't raise them on the radio," Arnold said. "I have to use this, because the main board is down. It's weak, but it ought to work. I've tried on all six channels. I know they have radios in the cars, but they're not answering."

"That's not good," Muldoon said.

"If you want to go out there, take one of the maintenance vehicles."

"I would," Muldoon said, "but they're all in the east garage, more than a mile from here. Where's Harding?"

"I assume he's on his way back."

"Then he'll pick up the people in the Land Cruisers on his way."

"I assume so."

"Anybody tell Hammond the kids aren't back yet?"

"Hell no," Arnold said. "I don't want that son of a bitch running around here, screaming at me. Everytbing's all right, for the moment. The Land Cruisers are just stuck in the rain. They can sit a while, until Harding brings them back. Or until we find Nedry, and make that little bastard turn the systems back on."

"You can't get them back on?" Muldoon said.

Arnold shook his head. "I've been trying. But Nedry's done something to the system. I can't figure out what, but if I have to go into the code itself, that'll take hours. We need Nedry. We've got to find the son of a bitch right away."

Nedry

The sign said ELECTRIFIED FENCE 10,000 VOLTS DO NOT TOUCH, but Nedry opened it with his bare band, and unlocked the gate, swinging it wide. He went back to the Jeep, drove through the gate, and then walked back to close it behind him.

Now he was inside the park itself, no more than a mile from the east dock. He stepped on the accelerator and bunched forward over the steering wheel, peering through the rain-slashed windshield as he drove the Jeep down the narrow road. He was driving fast-too fast-but he had to keep to his timetable. He was surrounded on all sides by black jungle, but soon he should be able to see the beach and the ocean off to his left.

This damned storm, he thought. It might screw up everything. Because if Dodgson's boat wasn't waiting for him at the east dock when Nedry got there, the whole plan would be ruined. Nedry couldn't wait very long, or he would be missed back at the control room. The whole idea behind the plan was that he could drive to the east dock, drop off the embryos, and be back in a few minutes, before anyone noticed. It was a good plan, a clever plan. Nedry'd worked on it carefully, refining every detail. This plan was going to make him a million and a half dollars, one point five meg. That was ten years of income in a single tax-free shot, and it was going to change his life. Nedry'd been damned careful, even to the point of making Dodgson meet him in the San Francisco airport at the last minute with an excuse about wanting to see the money, Actually, Nedry wanted to record his conversation with Dodgson, and mention him by name on the tape. Just so that Dodgson wouldn't forget he owed the rest of the money, Nedry was including a copy of the tape with the embryos. In short, Nedry had thought of everything.

Except this damned storm.

Something dashed across the road, a white flash in his headlights. It looked like a large rat. It scurried into the underbrush, dragging a fat tail. Possum. Amazing that a possum could survive here. You'd think the dinosaurs would get an animal like that.

Where was the damned dock?

He was driving fast, and he'd already been gone five minutes. He should have reached the east dock by now. Had he taken a wrong turn? He didn't think so. He hadn't seen any forks in the road at all.

Then where was the dock?

It was a shock when he came around a corner and saw that the road terminated in a gray concrete barrier, six feet tall and streaked dark with rain. He slammed on the brakes, and the Jeep fishtailed, losing traction in an end-to-end spin, and for a horrified moment he thought he was going to smash into the barrier-he knew he was going to smash-and he spun the wheel frantically, and the Jeep slid to a stop, the headlamps just a foot from the concrete wall.

He paused there, listening to the rhythmic flick of the wipers. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He looked back down the road. He'd obviously taken a wrong turn somewhere. He could retrace his steps, but that would take too long.

He'd better try and find out where the hell he was.

He got out of the Jeep, feeling heavy raindrops spatter his head. It was a real tropical storm, raining so hard that it hurt. He glanced at his watch, pushing the button to illuminate the digital dial. Six minutes gone. Where the hell was he? He walked around the concrete barrier and on the other side, along with the rain, he heard the sound of gurgling water. Could it be the ocean? Nedry hurried forward, his eyes adjusting to the darkness as he went. Dense jungle on all sides. Raindrops slapping on the leaves.

The gurgling sound became louder, drawing him forward, and suddenly he came out of the foliage and felt his feet sink into soft earth and saw the dark currents of the river. The river! He was at the jungle river!

Damn, he thought. At the river where? The river ran for miles through the island. He looked at his watch again. Seven minutes gone. "You have a problem, Dennis," he said aloud.

As if in reply, there was a soft hooting cry of an owl in the forest.

Nedry hardly noticed; he was worrying about his plan. The plain fact was that time had run out. There wasn't a choice any more. He had to abandon his original plan. All he could do was go back to the control room, restore the computer, and somehow try to contact Dodgson, to set up the drop at the east dock for the following night. Nedry would have to scramble to make that work, but he thought he could pull it off. The computer automatically logged all calls; after Nedry got through to Dodgson, he'd have to go back into the computer and erase the record of the call. But one thing was sure-he couldn't stay out in the park any longer, or his absence would be noticed.

Nedry started back, heading toward the glow of the car's headlights. He was drenched and miserable. He heard the soft booting cry once more, and this time he paused. That hadn't really sounded like an owl. And it seemed to be close by, in the jungle somewhere off to his right.

As he listened, he heard a crashing sound in the underbrush. Then silence. He waited, and heard it again. It sounded distinctly like something big, moving slowly through the jungle toward him.

Something big. Something near. A big dinosaur.

Get out of here.

Nedry began to run. He made a lot of noise as he ran, but even so he could hear the animal crashing through the foliage. And hooting.

It was coming closer.

Stumbling over tree roots in the darkness, clawing his way past dripping branches, he saw the Jeep ahead, and the lights shining around the vertical wall of the barrier made him feel better. In a moment he'd be in the car and then he'd get the hell out of here. He scrambled around the barrier and then he froze.

The animal was already there.

But it wasn't close. The dinosaur stood forty feet away, at the edge of the illumination from the headlamps. Nedry hadn't taken the tour, so he hadn't seen the different types of dinosaurs, but this one was strange-looking. The ten-foot-tall body was yellow with black spots, and along the head ran a pair of red V-shaped crests. The dinosaur didn't move, but again gave its soft hooting cry.

Nedry waited to see if it would attack. It didn't. Perhaps the headlights from the Jeep frightened it, forcing it to keep its distance, like a fire.

The dinosaur stared at him and then snapped its head in a single swift motion. Nedry felt something smack wetly against his chest. He looked down and saw a dripping glob of foam on his rain-soaked shirt. He touched it curiously, not comprehending…

It was spit.

The dinosaur had spit on him.

It was creepy, he thought. He looked back at the dinosaur and saw the head snap again, and immediately felt another wet smack against his neck, just above the shirt collar. He wiped it away with his hand.

Jesus, it was disgusting. But the skin of his neck was already starting to tingle and burn. And his hand was tingling, too. It was almost like he had been touched with acid.

Nedry opened the car door, glancing back at the dinosaur to make sure it wasn't going to attack, and felt a sudden, excruciating pain in his eyes, stabbing like spikes into the back of his skull, and he squeezed his eyes shut and gasped with the intensity of it and threw up his hands to cover his eyes and felt the slippery foam trickling down both sides of his nose.

Spit.

The dinosaur had spit in his eyes.

Even as he realized it, the pain overwhelmed him, and he dropped to his knees, disoriented, wheezing. He collapsed onto his side, his cheek pressed to the wet ground, his breath coming in thin whistles through the constant, ever-screaming pain that caused flashing spots of light to appear behind his tightly shut eyelids.

The earth shook beneath him and Nedry knew the dinosaur was moving, he could hear its soft hooting cry, and despite the pain he forced his eyes open and still he saw nothing but flashing spots against black. Slowly the realization came to him.

He was blind.

The hooting was louder as Nedry scrambled to his feet and staggered back against the side panel of the car, as a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over him. The dinosaur was close now, he could feel it coming close, he was dimly aware of its snorting breath.

But he couldn't see.

He couldn't see anything, and his terror was extreme.

He stretched out his hands, waving them wildly in the air to ward off the attack he knew was coming.

And then there was a new, searing pain, like a fiery knife in his belly, and Nedry stumbled, reaching blindly down to touch the ragged edge of his shirt, and then a thick, slippery mass that was surprisingly warm, and with horror he suddenly knew he was holding his own intestines in his hands. The dinosaur had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.

Nedry fell to the ground and landed on something scaly and cold, it was the animal's foot, and then there was new pain on both sides of his head. The pain grew worse, and as he was lifted to his feet he knew the dinosaur had his head in its jaws, and the horror of that realization was followed by a final wish, that it would all be ended soon.

Bungalow

"More coffee?" Hammond asked politely.

"No, thank you," Henry Wu said, leaning back in his chair. "I couldn't eat anything more." They were sitting in the dining room of Hammond's bungalow, in a secluded corner of the park not far from the labs. Wu had to admit that the bungalow Hammond had built for himself was elegant, with sparse, almost Japanese lines. And the dinner had been excellent, considering the dining room wasn't fully staffed yet.

But there was something about Hammond that Wu found troubling. The old man was different in some way… subtly different. All during dinner, Wu had tried to decide what it was. In part, a tendency to ramble, to repeat himself, to retell old stories. In part, it was an emotional lability, flaring anger one moment, maudlin sentimentality the next. But all that could be understood as a natural concomitant of age. John Hammond was, after all, almost seventy-seven.

But there was something else. A stubborn evasiveness. An insistence on having his way. And, in the end, a complete refusal to deal with the situation that now faced the park.

Wu had been stunned by the evidence (he did not yet allow himself to believe the case was proved) that the dinosaurs were breeding. After Grant had asked about amphibian DNA, Wu had intended to go directly to his laboratory and check the computer records of the various DNA assemblies. Because, if the dinosaurs were in fact breeding, then everything about Jurassic Park was called into question-their genetic development methods, their genetic control methods, everything. Even the lysine dependency might be suspect. And if these animals could truly breed, and could also survive in the wild…

Henry Wu wanted to check the data at once. But Hammond had stubbornly insisted Wu accompany him at dinner.

"Now then, Henry, you must save room for ice cream," Hammond said, pushing back from the table. "Maria makes the most wonderful ginger ice cream."

"All right." Wu looked at the beautiful, silent serving girl. His eyes followed her out of the room, and then he glanced up at the single video monitor mounted in the wall. The monitor was dark. "Your monitor's out," Wu said.

"Is it?" Hammond glanced over. "Must be the storm." He reached behind him for the telephone. "I'll just check with John in control."

Wu could hear the static crackle on the telephone line. Hammond shrugged, and set the receiver back in its cradle. "Lines must be down," he said. "Or maybe Nedry's still doing data transmission. He has quite a few bugs to fix this weekend. Nedry's a genius in his way, but we had to press him quite hard, toward the end, to make sure he got things right."

"Perhaps I should go to the control room and check," Wu said.

"No, no," Hammond said, "There's no reason. If there were any problem, we'd hear about it. Ah."

Maria came back into the room, with two plates of ice cream.

"You must have just a little, Henry," Hammond said. "It's made with fresh ginger, from the eastern part of the island. It's an old man's vice, ice cream. But still…"

Dutifully, Wu dipped his spoon. Outside, lightning flashed, and there was the sharp crack of thunder. "That was close," Wu said. "I hope the storm isn't frightening the children."

"I shouldn't think so," Hammond said. He tasted the ice cream. "But I can't help but hold some fears about this park, Henry."

Inwardly, Wu felt relieved. Perhaps the old man was going to face the facts, after all. "What kind of fears?"

"You know, Jurassic Park's really made for children. The children of the world love dinosaurs, and the children are going to delight-just delight-in this place. Their little faces will shine with the joy of finally seeing these wonderful animals. But I am afraid… I may not live to see it, Henry. I may not live to see the joy on their faces."

"I think there are other problems, too," Wu said, frowning.

"But none so pressing on my mind as this," Hammond said, "that I may not live to see their shining, delighted faces. This is our triumph, this park. We have done what we set out to do. And, you remember, our original intent was to use the newly emerging technology of genetic engineering to make money. A lot of money."

Wu knew Hammond was about to launch into one of his old speeches. He held up his hand. "I'm familiar with this, John-"

"If you were going to start a bioengineering company, Henry, what would you do? Would you make products to help mankind, to fight illness and disease? Dear me, no. That's a terrible idea. A very poor use of new technology."

Hammond shook his head sadly. "Yet, you'll remember," he said, "the original genetic engineering companies, like Genentech and Cetus, were all started to make pharmaceuticals. New drugs for mankind. Noble, noble purpose. Unfortunately, drugs face all kinds of barriers. FDA testing alone takes five to eight years-if you're lucky. Even worse, there are forces at work in the marketplace. Suppose you make a miracle drug for cancer or heart disease-as Genentech did. Suppose you now want to charge a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a dose. You might imagine that is your privilege. After all, you invented the drug, you paid to develop and test it; you should be able to charge whatever you wish. But do you really think that the government will let you do that? No, Henry, they will not. Sick people aren't going to pay a thousand dollars a dose for needed medication-they won't be grateful, they'll be outraged. Blue Cross isn't going to pay it. They'll scream highway robbery. So something will happen. Your patent application will be denied. Your permits will be delayed. Something will force you to see reason-and to sell your drug at a lower cost. From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind."

Wu had heard the argument before. And he knew Hammond was right, some new bioengineered pharmaceuticals had indeed suffered inexplicable delays and patent problems.

"Now," Hammond said, "think how different it is when you're making entertainment, Nobody needs entertainment. That's not a matter for government intervention. If I charge five thousand dollars a day for my park, who is going to stop me? After all, nobody needs to come here. And, far from being highway robbery, a costly price tag actually increases the appeal of the park. A visit becomes a status symbol, and all Americans love that. So do the Japanese, and of course they have far more money."

Hammond finished his ice cream, and Maria silently took the dish away. "She's not from here, you know," he said. "She's Haitian. Her mother is French. But in any case, Henry, you will recall that the original purpose behind pointing my company in this direction in the first place-was to have freedom from government intervention, anywhere in the world."

"Speaking of the rest of the world…"

Hammond smiled. "We have already leased a large tract in the Azores, for Jurassic Park Europe. And you know we long ago obtained an island near Guam, for Jurassic Park Japan. Construction on the next two Jurassic Parks will begin early next year. They will all be open within four years. At that time, direct revenues will exceed ten billion dollars a year, and merchandising, television, and ancillary rights should double that. I see no reason to bother with children's pets, which I'm told Lew Dodgson thinks we're planning to make."

"Twenty billion dollars a year," Wu said softly, shaking his head.

"That's speaking conservatively," Hammond said. He smiled. "There's no reason to speculate wildly. More ice cream, Henry?"

"Did you find him?" Arnold snapped, when the guard walked into the control room.

"No, Mr. Arnold."

"Find him."

"I don't think he's in the building, Mr. Arnold."

"Then look in the lodge," Arnold said, "look in the maintenance buildIng, look in the utility shed, look everywhere, but just find him."

"The thing is…" The guard hesitated. "Mr. Nedry's the fat man, is that right?"

"That's right," Arnold said. "He's fat. A fat slob."

"Well, Jimmy down in the main lobby said he saw the fat man go into the garage."

Muldoon spun around. "Into the garage? When?"

"About ten, fifteen minutes ago."

"Jesus," Muldoon said.

The Jeep screeched to a stop. "Sorry," Harding said.

In the headlamps, Ellie saw a herd of apatosaurs lumbering across the road. There were six animals, each the size of a house, and a baby as large as a full-grown horse. The apatosaurs moved in unhurried silence, never looking toward the Jeep and its glowing headlamps. At one point, the baby stopped to lap water from a puddle in the road, then moved on.

A comparable herd of elephants would have been startled by the arrival of a car, would have trumpeted and circled to protect the baby. But these animals showed no fear. "Don't they see us?" she said.

"Not exactly, no," Harding said. "Of course, in a literal sense they do see us, but we don't really mean anything to them. We hardly ever take cars out at night, and so they have no experience of them. We are just a strange, smelly object in their environment. Representing no threat, and therefore no interest. I've occasionally been out at night, visiting a sick animal, and on my way back these fellows blocked the road for an hour or more.

"What do you do?"

Harding grinned. "Play a recorded tyrannosaur roar. That gets them moving. Not that they care much about tyrannosaurs. These apatosaurs are so big they don't really have any predators. They can break a tyrannosaur's neck with a swipe of their tail. And they know it. So does the tyrannosaur."

"But they do see us. I mean, if we were to get out of the car…"

Harding shrugged. "They probably wouldn't react. Dinosaurs have excellent visual acuity, but they have a basic amphibian visual system: it's attuned to movement. They don't see unmoving things well at all."

The animals moved on, their skin glistening in the rain. Harding put the car in gear. "I think we can continue now," he said.

Wu said, "I suspect you may find there are pressures on your park, just as there are pressures on Genentech's drugs." He and Hammond had moved to the living room, and they were now watching the storm lash the big glass windows.

"I can't see how," Hammond said.

"The scientists may wish to constrain you. Even to stop you.

"Well, they can't do that, " Hammond said. He shook his finger at Wu. "You know why the scientists would try to do that? It's because they want to do research, of course. That's all they ever want to do, is research. Not to accomplish anything. Not to make any progress. Just do research. Well, they have a surprise coming to them."

"I wasn't thinking of that," Wu said.

Hammond sighed. "I'm sure it would be interesting for the scientists, to do research. But you arrive at the point where these animals are simply too expensive to be used for research. This is wonderful technology, Henry, but it's also frightfully expensive technology. The fact is, it can only be supported as entertainment." Hammond shrugged. "That's just the way it is."

"But if there are attempts to close down-"

"Face the damn facts, Henry," Hammond said irritably. "This isn't America. This isn't even Costa Rica. This is my island. I own it. And nothing is going to stop me from opening Jurassic Park to all the children of the world." He chuckled. "Or, at least, to the rich ones. And I tell you, they'll love it."

In the back seat of the Jeep, Ellie Sattler stared out the window. They had been driving through rain-drenched jungle for the last twenty minutes, and had seen nothing since the apatosaurs crossed the road.

"We're near the jungle river now," Harding said, as he drove. "It's off there somewhere to our left."

Abruptly he slammed on the brakes again, The car skidded to a stop in front of a flock of small green animals. "Well, you're getting quite a show tonight," he said. "Those are compys."

Procompsognathids, Ellie thought, wishing that Grant were here to see them. This was the animal they had seen in the fax, back in Montana. The little dark green procompsognathids scurried to the other side of the road, then squatted on their hind legs to look at the car, chattering briefly, before hurrying onward into the night.

"Odd," Harding said. "Wonder where they're off to? Compys don't usually move at night, you know. They climb up in a tree and wait for daylight."

"Then why are they out now?" Ellie said.

"I can't imagine. You know compys are scavengers, like buzzards. They're attracted to a dying animal, and they have tremendously sensitive smell. They can smell a dying animal for miles."

"Then they're going to a dying animal?"

"Dying, or already dead."

"Should we follow them?" Ellie said.

"I'd be curious," Harding said. "Yes, why not? Let's go see where they're going.

He turned the car around, and headed back toward the compys.

Tim

Tim Murphy lay in the Land Cruiser, his cheek pressed against the car door handle. He drifted slowly back to consciousness. He wanted only to sleep. He shifted his position, and felt the pain in his cheekbone where it lay against the metal door. His whole body ached. His arms and his legs and most of all his head-there was a terrible pounding pain in his head. All the pain made him want to go back to sleep.

He pushed himself up on one elbow, opened his eyes, and retched, vomiting all over his shirt. He tasted sour bile and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His head throbbed; he felt dizzy and seasick, as if the world were moving, as if he were rocking back and forth on a boat.

Tim groaned, and rolled onto his back, turning away from the puddle of vomit. The pain in his head made him breathe in short, shallow gasps. And he still felt sick, as if everything were moving. He opened his eyes and looked around, trying to get his bearings.

He was inside the Land Cruiser. But the car must have flipped over on its side, because he was lying on his back against the passenger door, looking up at the steering wheel and beyond, at the branches of a tree, moving in the wind. The rain had nearly stopped, but water drops still fell on him through the broken front windshield.

He stared curiously at the fragments of glass. He couldn't remember how the windshield had broken. He couldn't remember anything except that they had been parked on the road and he had been talking to Dr. Grant when the tyrannosaur came toward them. That was the last thing he remembered.

He felt sick again, and closed his eyes until the nausea passed. He was aware of a rhythmic creaking sound, like the rigging of a boat. Dizzy and sick to his stomach, he really felt as if the whole car were moving beneath him. But when he opened his eyes again, he saw it was true-the Land Cruiser was moving, lying on its side, swaying back and forth.

The whole car was moving.

Tentatively, Tim rose to his feet. Standing on the passenger door, he peered over the dashboard, looking out through the shattered windshield. At first he saw only dense foliage, moving in the wind. But here and there he could see gaps, and beyond the foliage, the ground was-

The ground was twenty feet below him.

He stared uncomprehendingly. The Land Cruiser was lying on its side in the branches of a large tree, twenty feet above the ground, swaying back and forth in the wind.

"Oh shit," he said. What was he going to do? He stood on his tiptoes and peered out, trying to see better, grabbing the steering wheel for support. The wheel spun free in his hand, and with a loud crack the Land Cruiser shifted position, dropping a few feet in the branches of the tree. He looked down through the shattered glass of the passenger-door window at the ground below.

"Oh shit. Oh shit." He kept repeating it. "Oh shit. Oh shit."

Another loud crack-the Land Cruiser jolted down another foot.

He had to get out of here.

He looked down at his feet. He was standing on the door handle. He crouched back down on his bands and knees to look at the handle. He couldn't see very well in the dark, but he could tell that the door was dented outward so the handle couldn't turn. He'd never get the door open. He tried to roll the window down, but the window was stuck, too. Then he thought of the back door. Maybe he could open that. He leaned over the front seat, and the Land Cruiser lurched with the shift in weight.

Carefully, Tim reached back and twisted the handle on the rear door.

It was stuck, too.

How was he going to get out?

He heard a snorting sound and looked down. A dark shape passed below him. It wasn't the tyrannosaur. This shape was tubby and it made a kind of snuffling as it waddled along. The tail flopped back and forth, and Tim could see the long spikes.

It was the stegosaur, apparently recovered from its illness. Tim wondered where the other people were: Gennaro and Sattler and the vet. He had last seen them near the stegosaur. How long ago was that? He looked at his watch, but the face was cracked; he couldn't see the numbers. He took the watch off and tossed it aside.

The stegosaur snuffled and moved on. Now the only sound was the wind in the trees, and the creaking of the Land Cruiser as it shifted back and forth.

He had to get out of here.

Tim grabbed the handle, tried to force it, but it was stuck solid. It wouldn't move at all. Then he realized what was wrong: the rear door was locked! Tim pulled up the pin and twisted the handle. The rear door swung open, downward-and came to rest against the branch a few feet below.

The opening was narrow, but Tim thought he could wriggle through it. Holding his breath, he crawled slowly back into the rear seat. The Land Cruiser creaked, but held its position. Gripping the doorposts on both sides, Tim slowly lowered himself down, through the narrow angled opening of the door. Soon he was lying flat on his stomach on the slanted door, his legs sticking out of the car. He kicked in the air-his feet touched something solid-a branch-and he rested his weight on it.

As soon as he did, the branch bent down and the door swung wider, spilling him out of the Land Cruiser, and he fell-leaves scratching his face-his body bouncing from branch to branch-a jolt-searing pain, bright light in his head-

He slammed to a stop, the wind knocked from him. Tim lay doubled over a large branch, his stomach burning pain.

Tim heard another crack and looked up at the Land Cruiser, a big dark shape five feet above him.

Another crack. The car shifted.

Tim forced himself to move, to climb down. He used to like to climb trees. He was a good tree-climber. And this was a good tree to climb, the branches spaced close together, almost like a staircase…

Crackkkk…

The car was definitely moving.

Tim scrambled downward, slipping over the wet branches, feeling sticky sap on his hands, hurrying. He had not descended more than a few feet when the Land Cruiser creaked a final time, and then slowly, very slowly, nosed over. Tim could see the big green grille and the front headlights swinging down at him, and then the Land Cruiser fell free, gaining momentum as it rushed toward him, slamming against the branch where Tim had just been-

And it stopped.

His face just inches from the dented grille, bent inward like an evil mouth, headlamps for eyes. Oil dripped on Tim's face.

He was still twelve feet above the ground. He reached down, found another branch, and moved down. Above, he saw the branch bending under the weight of the Land Cruiser, and then it cracked, and the Land Cruiser came rushing down toward him and he knew he could never escape it, he could never get down fast enough, so Tim just let go.

He fell the rest of the way.

Tumbling, banging, feeling pain in every part of his body, hearing the Land Cruiser smashing down through the branches after him like a pursuing animal, and then Tim's shoulder hit the soft ground, and he rolled as hard as he could, and pressed his body against the trunk of the tree as the Land Cruiser tumbled down with a loud metallic crash and a sudden hot burst of electrical sparks that stung his skin and sputtered and sizzled on the wet ground around him.

Slowly, Tim got to his feet. In the darkness he heard the snuffling, and saw the stegosaur coming back, apparently attracted by the crash of the Land Cruiser. The dinosaur moved dumbly, the low head thrust forward, and the big cartilaginous plates running in two rows along the bump of the back. It behaved like an overgrown tortoise. Stupid like that. And slow.

Tim picked up a rock and threw it. "Get away!"

The rock tbunked dully off the plates. The stegosaur kept coming. "Go on! Co!"

He threw another rock, and hit the stegosaur in the head. The animal grunted, turned slowly away, and shuffled off in the direction it had come.

Tim leaned against the crumpled Land Cruiser and looked around in the darkness. He had to get back to the others, but he didn't want to get lost. He knew he was somewhere in the park, probably not far from the main road. If he could only get his hearings. He couldn't see much in the dark, but-

Then he remembered the goggles.

He climbed through the shattered front windshield into the Land Cruiser and found the night-vision goggles, and the radio. The radio was broken and silent, so he left it behind. But the goggles still worked. He flicked them on, saw the reassuringly familiar phosphorescent green image.

Wearing the goggles, he saw the battered fence off to his left, and walked toward it. The fence was twelve feet high, but the tyrannosaur had flattened it easily. Tim hurried across it, moved through an area of dense foliage, and came out onto the main road.

Through his goggles, he saw the other Land Cruiser turned on its side. He ran toward it, took a breath, and looked inside. The car was empty. No sign of Dr. Grant and Dr. Malcolm.

Where had they gone?

Where had everybody gone?

He felt sudden panic, standing alone in the jungle road at night with that empty car, and turned quickly in circles, seeing the bright green world in the goggles swirl. Something pale by the side of the road caught his eye. It was Lex's baseball. He wiped the mud off it.

"Lex!"

Tim shouted as loud as he could, not caring if the animals heard him. He listened, but there was only the wind, and the plink of raindrops falling from the trees.

" Lex!

He vaguely remembered that she had been in the Land Cruiser when the tyrannosaur attacked. Had she stayed there? Or had she gotten away? The events of the attack were confused in his mind. He wasn't exactly sure what had happened, just to think of it made him uneasy. He stood in the road, gasping with panic.

"Lex!"

The night seemed to close in around him. Feeling sorry for himself, he sat in a cold rainy puddle in the road and whimpered for a while. When he finally stopped, he still heard whimpering. It was faint, and it was coming from somewhere farther up the road.

"How long has it been?" Muldoon said, coming back into the control room. He was carrying a black metal case.

"Half an hour."

"Harding's Jeep should he back here by now."

Arnold stubbed out his cigarette. "I'm sure they'll arrive any minute now.

"Still no sign of Nedry?" Muldoon said.

"No. Not yet."

Muldoon opened the case, which contained six portable radios. "I'm going to distribute these to people in the building." He handed one to Arnold. "Take the charger, too. These are our emergency radios, but nobody had them plugged in, naturally. Let it charge about twenty minutes, and then try and raise the cars."

Henry Wu opened the door marked FERTILIZATION and entered the darkened lab. There was nobody here; apparently all the technicians were still at dinner. Wu went directly to the computer terminal and punched up the DNA logbooks. The logbooks had to be kept on computer. DNA was such a large molecule that each species required ten gigabytes of optical disk space to store details of all the iterations. He was going to have to check all fifteen species. That was a tremendous amount of information to search through.

He still wasn't clear about why Grant thought frog DNA was important. Wu himself didn't often distinguish one kind of DNA from another. After all, most DNA in living creatures was exactly the same. DNA was an incredibly ancient substance. Human beings, walking around in the streets of the modern world, bouncing their pink new babies, hardly stopped to think that the substance at the center of it all-the substance that began the dance of life-was a chemical almost as old as the earth itself. The DNA molecule was so old that its evolution had essentially finished more than two billion years ago. There had been little new since that time. Just a few recent combinations of the old genes-and not much of that.

When you compared the DNA of man and the DNA of a lowly bacterium, you found that only about 10 percent of the strands were different. This innate conservatism of DNA emboldened Wu to use whatever DNA he wished. In making his dinosaurs, Wu had manipulated the DNA as a sculptor might clay or marble. He had created freely.

He started the computer search program, knowing it would take two or three minutes to run. He got up and walked around the lab, checking instruments out of long-standing habit. He noted the recorder outside the freezer door, which tracked the freezer temperature. He saw there was a spike in the graph. That was odd, he thought. It meant somebody had been in the freezer. Recently, too-witbin the last half-hour. But who would go in there at night?

The computer beeped, signaling that the first of the data searches was complete. Wu went over to see what it had found, and when he saw the screen, he forgot all about the freezer and the graph spike.

LEITZKE DNA SEARCH ALGORITHM

DNA: Version Search Criteria: RANA (all, fragment len» 0)

DNA Incorporating RANA Fragments Versions

Maiasaurs 2.1-2.9

Procompsognathids 3.0-3.7

Othnielia 3.1-3.3

Velociraptors 1.0-3.0

Hypsilopbodontids 2.4-2.7

The result was clear: all breeding dinosaurs incorporated rana, or frog, DNA. None of the other animals did. Wu still did not understand why this had caused them to breed. But he could no longer deny that Grant was right. The dinosaurs were breeding.

He hurried up to the control room.

Lex

She was curled up inside a big one-meter drainage pipe that ran under the road. She had her baseball glove in her mouth and she was rocking back and forth, banging her head repeatedly against the back of the pipe. It was dark in there, but he could see her clearly with his goggles. She seemed unhurt, and he felt a great burst of relief.

"Lex, it's me. Tim."

She didn't answer. She continued to bang her head on the pipe. "Come on out."

She shook her head no. He could see she was badly frightened.

"Lex," he said, "if you come out, I'll let you wear these night goggles."

She just shook her head.

"Look what I have," he said, holding up his band. She stared uncomprehendingly. It was probably too dark for her to see. "It's your ball, Lex. I found your ball."

"So what."

He tried another approach. "It must be uncomfortable in there. Cold, too. Wouldn't you like to come out?"

She resumed banging her head against the pipe.

"Why not?"

"There's aminals out there."

That threw him for a moment. She hadn't said "aminals" for years.

"The aminals are gone," he said.

"There's a big one. A Tyrannosaurus rex."

"He's gone."

"Where did he go?"

"I don't know, but he's not around here now," Tim said, hoping it was true.

Lex didn't move. He heard her hanging again. Tim sat down in the grass outside the pipe, where she could see him. The ground was wet where he sat. He hugged his knees and waited. He couldn't think of anything else to do. "I'm just going to sit here," he said. "And rest."

"Is Daddy out there?"

"No," he said, feeling strange. "He's back at home, Lex."

"Is Mommy?"

"No, Lex."

"Are there any grownups out there?" Lex said.

"Not yet. But I'm sure they'll come soon. They're probably on their way right now."

Then he heard her moving inside the pipe, and she came out. Shivering with cold, and with dried blood on her forehead, but otherwise all right.

She looked around in surprise and said, "Where's Dr. Grant?"

"I don't know."

"Well, he was here before."

"He was? When?"

"Before," Lex said. "I saw him when I was in the pipe."

"Where'd he go?"

"How am I supposed to know?" Lex said, wrinkling her nose. She began to shout: "Hellooo. Hell-oooo! Dr. Grant? Dr. Grant!"

Tim was uneasy at the noise she was making-it might bring back the tyrannosaur-but a moment later he heard an answering shout. It was coming from the right, over toward the Land Cruiser that Tim had left a few minutes before. With his goggles, Tim saw with relief that Dr. Grant was walking toward them, He had a big tear in his shirt at the shoulder, but otherwise he looked okay.

"Thank God," he said. "I've been looking for you."

Shivering, Ed Regis got to his feet, and wiped the cold mud off his face and hands. He had spent a very had half hour, wedged among big boulders on the slope of a hill below the road. He knew it wasn't much of a hiding place, but he was panicked and he wasn't thinking clearly. He had lain in this muddy cold place and he had tried to get hold of himself, but he kept seeing that dinosaur in his mind. That dinosaur coming toward him. Toward the car.

Ed Regis didn't remember exactly what had happened after that. He remembered that Lex had said something but he hadn't stopped, he couldn't stop, he had just kept running and running. Beyond the road he had lost his footing and tumbled down the hill and come to rest by some boulders, and it had seemed to him that he could crawl in among the boulders, and hide, there was enough room, so that was what he had done. Gasping and terrified, thinking of nothing except to get away from the tyrannosaur. And, finally, when he was wedged in there like a rat between the boulders, he had calmed down a little, and he had been overcome with horror and shame because he'd abandoned those kids, he had just run away, he had just saved himself. He knew he should go back up to the road, he should try to rescue them, because he had always imagined himself as brave and cool under pressure, but whenever he tried to get control of himself, to make himself go back up there-somehow he just couldn't. He started to feel panicky, and he had trouble breathing, and he didn't move.

He told himself it was hopeless, anyway. If the kids were still up there on the road they could never survive, and certainly there was nothing Ed Regis could do for them, and he might as well stay where he was. No one was going to know what had happened except him. And there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could have done. And so Regis had remained among the boulders for half an hour, fighting off panic, carefully not thinking about whether the kids had died, or about what Hammond would have to say when he found out.

What finally made him move was the peculiar sensation he noticed in his mouth. The side of his mouth felt funny, kind of numb and tingling, and he wondered if he had hurt it during the fall. Regis touched his face and felt swollen flesh on the side of his mouth. It was funny, but it didn't hurt at all. Then he realized the swollen flesh was a leech growing fat as it sucked his lips. It was practically in his mouth. Shivering with nausea, Regis pulled the leech away, feeling it tear from the flesh of his lips, feeling the gush of warm blood in his mouth. He spat, and flung it with disgust into the forest. He saw another leech on his forearm, and pulled it off, leaving a dark bloody streak behind. Jesus, he was probably covered with them. That fall down the hillside. These jungle hills were full of leeches. So were the dark rocky crevices. What did the workmen say? The leeches crawled up your underwear. They liked dark warm places. They liked to crawl right up your-

"Hellooo!"

He stopped. It was a voice, carried by the wind.

"Helloo! Dr. Grant!"

Jesus, that was the little girl.

Ed Regis listened to the tone of her voice. She didn't sound frightened, or in pain. She was just calling in her insistent way. And it slowly dawned on him that something else must have happened, that the tyrannosaur must have gone away-or at least hadn't attacked-and that the other people might still be alive. Grant and Malcolm. Everybody might be alive. An the realization made him pull himself together in an instant, the way you got sober in an instant when the cops pulled you over, and he felt better, because now he knew what he had to do. And as he crawled out from the boulders he was already formulating the next step, already figuring out what he would say, how to handle things from this point.

Regis wiped the cold mud off his face and hands, the evidence that he had been hiding. He wasn't embarrassed that he had been hiding, but now he had to take charge. He scrambled back up toward the road, but when he emerged from the foliage he had a moment of disorientation. He didn't see the cars at all. He was somehow at the bottom of the hill. The Land Cruisers must be at the top.

He started walking up the hill, back toward the Land Cruisers. It was very quiet. His feet splashed in the muddy puddles. He couldn't bear the little girl any more. Why had she stopped calling? As he walked, he began to think that maybe something had happened to her. In that case, he shouldn't walk back there. Maybe the tyrannosaur was still hanging around. Here he was, already at the bottom of the hill. That much closer to home.

And it was so quiet. Spooky, it was so quiet.

Ed Regis turned around, and started walking back toward the camp.

Alan Grant ran his hands over her limbs, squeezing the arms and legs briefly. She didn't seem to have any pain. It was amazing: aside from a cut on her head, she was fine. "I told you I was," she said.

"Well, I had to check."

The boy was not quite so fortunate. Tim's nose was swollen and painful; Grant suspected it was broken. His right shoulder was badly bruised and swollen. But his legs seemed to be all right. Both kids could walk. That was the important thing.

Grant himself was all right except for a claw abrasion down his right chest, where the tyrannosaur had kicked him. It burned with every breath, but it didn't seem to be serious, and it didn't limit his movement.

He wondered if he had been knocked unconscious, because he had only dim recollections of events immediately preceding the moment he had sat up, groaning, in the woods ten yards from the Land Cruiser. At first his chest had been bleeding, so he had stuck leaves on the wound, and after a while it clotted. Then he had started walking around, looking for Malcolm and the kids. Grant couldn't believe he was still alive, and as scattered images began to come back to him, he tried to make sense of them. The tyrannosaur should have killed them all easily. Why hadn't it?

"I'm hungry," Lex said.

"Me, too," Grant said. "We've got to get ourselves back to civilization. And we've got to tell them about the ship."

"We're the only ones who know?" Tim said.

"Yes. We've got to get back and tell them."

"Then let's walk down the road toward the hotel," Tim said, pointing down the hill. "That way we'll meet them when they come for us."

Grant considered that. And he kept thinking about one thing: the dark shape that had crossed between the Land Cruisers even before the attack started. What animal had that been? He could think of only one possibility-the little tyrannosaur.

"I don't think so, Tim. The road has high fences on both sides," Grant said. "If one of the tyrannosaurs is farther down on the road, we'll he trapped."

"Then should we wait here?" Tim said.

"Yes," Grant said. "Let's just wait here until someone comes."

"I'm hungry," Lex said.

"I hope it won't be very long," Grant said.

"I don't want to stay here," Lex said.

Then, from the bottom of the hill, they heard the sound of a man coughing.

"Stay here," Grant said. He ran forward, to look down the hill.

"Stay here," Tim said, and he ran forward after him.

Lex followed her brother. "Don't leave me, don't leave me here, you guys-"

Grant clapped his band over her mouth. She struggled to protest. He shook his head, and pointed over the hill, for her to look.

At the bottom of the hill, Grant saw Ed Regis, standing rigid, unmoving. The forest around them had become deadly silent. The steady background drone of cicadas and frogs had ceased abruptly. There was only the faint rustle of leaves, and the whine of the wind,

Lex started to speak, but Grant pulled her against the trunk of the nearest tree, ducking down among the heavy gnarled roots at the base. Tim came in right after them. Grant put his hands to his lips, signaling them to be quiet, and then he slowly looked around the tree.

The road below was dark, and as the branches of the big trees moved in the wind, the moonlight filtering through made a dappled, shifting pattern. Ed Regis was gone. It took Grant a moment to locate him. The publicist was pressed up against the trunk of a big tree, hugging it. Regis wasn't moving at all.

The forest remained silent.

Lex tugged impatiently at Grant's shirt; she wanted to know what was happening. Then, from somewhere very near, they heard a soft snorting exhalation, hardly louder than the wind. Lex heard it, too, because she stopped struggling.

The sound floated toward them again, soft as a sigh. Grant thought it was almost like the breathing of a horse.

Grant looked at Regis, and saw the moving shadows cast by the moonlight on the trunk of the tree. And then Grant realized there was another shadow, superimposed on the others, but not moving: a strong curved neck, and a square head.

The exhalation came again.

Tim leaned forward cautiously, to look. Lex did, too.

They heard a crack as a branch broke, and into the path stepped a tyrannosaur. It was the juvenile: about eight feet tall, and it moved with the clumsy gait of a young animal, almost like a puppy. The juvenile tyrannosaur shuffled down the path, stopping with every step to sniff the air before moving on. It passed the tree where Regis was hiding, and gave no indication that it had seen him. Grant saw Regis's body relax slightly. Regis turned his head, trying to watch the tyrannosaur on the far side of the tree.

The tyrannosaur was now out of view down the road. Regis started to relax, releasing his grip on the tree. But the jungle remained silent. Regis remained close to the tree trunk for another half a minute. Then the sounds of the forest returned: the first tentative croak of a tree frog, the buzz of one cicada, and then the full chorus. Regis stepped away from the tree, shaking his shoulders, releasing the tension. He walked into the middle of the road, looking in the direction of the departed tyrannosaur.

The attack came from the left.

The juvenile roared as it swung its head forward, knocking Regis flat to the ground. He yelled and scrambled to his feet, but the tyrannosaur pounced, and it must have pinned him with its hind leg, because suddenly Regis wasn't moving, he was sitting up in the path shouting at the dinosaur and waving his hands at it, as if he could scare it off. The young dinosaur seemed perplexed by the sounds and movement coming from its tiny prey. The juvenile bent its head over, sniffing curiously, and Regis pounded on the snout with his fists.

"Get away! Back off! Go on, back off!" Regis was shouting at the top of his lungs, and the dinosaur backed away, allowing Regis to get to his feet. Regis was shouting "Yeah! You heard me! Back off! Get away!" as he moved away from the dinosaur. The juvenile continued to stare curiously at the odd, noisy little animal before it, but when Regis had gone a few paces, it lunged and knocked him down again.

It's playing with him, Grant thought.

"Hey!" Regis shouted as he fell, but the juvenile did not pursue him, allowing him to get to his feet. He jumped to his feet, and continued backing away. "You stupid-back! Back! You heard me-back!" he shouted like a lion tamer.

The juvenile roared, but it did not attack, and Regis now edged toward the trees and high foliage to the right. In another few steps he would be in hiding. "Back! You! Back!" Regis shouted, and then, at the last moment the juvenile pounced, and knocked Regis flat on his back. "Cut that out", Regis yelled, and the juvenile ducked his head, and Regis began to scream. No words, just a high-pitched scream.

The scream cut off abruptly, and when the juvenile lifted his head, Grant saw ragged flesh in his jaws.

"Oh no," Lex said, softly. Beside her, Tim had turned away, suddenly nauseated. His night-vision goggles slipped from his forehead and landed on the ground with a metallic clink.

The juvenile's head snapped up, and it looked toward the top of the hill.

Tim picked up his goggles as Grant grabbed both the children's hands and began to run.

Control

In the night, the compys scurried along the side of the road. Harding's Jeep followed a short distance behind. Ellie pointed farther up the road. "Is that a light?"

"Could be," Harding said. "Looks almost like headlights."

The radio suddenly bummed and crackled. They heard John Arnold say,

"-you there?"

"Ah, there he is," Harding said. "Finally." He pressed the button. "Yes, John, we're here. We're near the river, following the compys. It's quite interesting."

More crackling. Then: "-eed your car-"

"What'd he say?" Gennaro said.

"Something about a car," Ellie said. At Grant's dig in Montana, Ellie was the one who operated the radiophone. After years of experience, she had become skilled at picking up garbled transmissions. "I think he said he needs your car."

Harding pressed the button. "John? Are you there? We can't read you very well. John?"

There was a flash of lightning, followed by a long sizzle of radio static, then Arnold's tense voice, "-where are-ou-"

"We're one mile north of the hypsy paddock. Near the river, following some compys."

"No-damn well-get back here-ow!"

"Sounds like he's got a problem," Ellie said, frowning. There was no mistaking the tension in the voice. "Maybe we should go back."

Harding shrugged. "John's frequently got a problem. You know how engineers are. They want everything to go by the book." He pressed the button on the radio. "John? Say again, please…"

More crackling.

More static. The loud crash of lightning. Then: "-Muldoo-need your car-ow-"

Gennaro frowned. "Is he saying Muldoon needs our car?"

"That's what it sounded like," Ellie said.

"Well, that doesn't make any sense," Harding said.

"-other-stuck-Muldoon wants-car-"

"I get it," Ellie said. "The other cars are stuck on the road in the storm, and Muldoon wants to go get them."

Harding shrugged. "Why doesn't Muldoon take the other car?" He pushed the radio button. "John? Tell Muldoon to take the other car. It's in the garage."

The radio crackled. "-not-listen-crazy bastards-car-"

Harding pressed the radio button. "I said, it's in the garage, John. The car is in the garage."

More static. "-edry has-ssing-one-"

"I'm afraid this isn't getting us anywhere," Harding said. "All right, John. We're coming in now." He turned the radio off, and turned the car around. "I just wish I understood what the urgency is."

Harding put the Jeep in gear, and they rumbled down the road in the darkness. It was another ten minutes before they saw the welcoming lights of the Safari Lodge. And as Harding pulled to a stop in front of the visitor center, they saw Muldoon coming toward them. He was shouting, and waving his arms.

"God damn it, Arnold, you son of a bitch! God damn it, get this park back on track! Now! Get my grandkids back here! Now!" John Hammond stood in the control room, screaming and stamping his little feet. He had been carrying on this way for the last two minutes, while Henry Wu stood in the corner, looking stunned.

"Well, Mr. Hammond," Arnold said, "Muldoon's on his way out right now, to do exactly that." Arnold turned away, and lit another cigarette. Hammond was like every other management guy Arnold had ever seen. Whether it was Disney or the Navy, management guys always behaved the same. They never understood the technical issues; and they thought that screaming was the way to make things happen. And maybe it was, if you were shouting at your secretaries to get you a limousine.

But screaming didn't make any difference at all to the problems that Arnold now faced. The computer didn't care if it was screamed at. The power network didn't care if it was screamed at. Technical systems were completely indifferent to all this explosive human emotion. If anything, screaming was counterproductive, because Arnold now faced the virtual certainty that Nedry wasn't coming back, which meant that Arnold himself had to go into the computer code and try and figure out what had gone wrong. It was going to be a painstaking job, he'd need to be calm and careful.

"Why don't you go downstairs to the cafeteria," Arnold said, "and get a cup of coffee? We'll call you when we have more news."

"I don't want a Malcolm Effect here," Hammond said.

"Don't worry about a Malcolm Effect," Arnold said. "Will you let me go to work?"

"God damn you," Hammond said.

"I'll call you, sir, when I have news from Muldoon," Arnold said.

He pushed buttons on his console, and saw the familiar control screens change.

*/Jurassic Park Main Modules/

*/

*/ Call Libs

Include: biostat.sys

Include: sysrom.vst

Include: net.sys

Include: pwr.mdl

*/

*/Initialize

SetMain [42]2002/9A{total CoreSysop %4 [vig. 7*tty]}

if ValidMeter(mH) (**mH).MeterViS return

Term Call 909 c.lev {void MeterVis $303} Random(3#*MaxFid)

on SetSystem(!Dn) set shp_val.obi to lim(Val{d}SumVal

if SetMeter(mH) (**mH).ValdidMeter(Vdd) return

on SetSystem(!Telcom) set mxcpl.obj to lim(Val{pdl}NextVal

Arnold was no longer operating the computer. He had now gone behind the scenes to look at the code-the line-by-line instructions that told the computer how to behave. Arnold was unhappily aware that the complete Jurassic Park program contained more than half a million lines of code, most of it undocumented, without explanation.

Wu came forward. "What are you doing, John?"

"Checking the code."

"By inspection? That'll take forever."

"Tell me," Arnold said. "Tell me."

The Road

Muldoon took the curve very fast, the Jeep sliding on the mud. Sitting beside him, Gennaro clenched his fists. They were racing along the cliff road, high above the river, now hidden below them in darkness. Muldoon accelerated forward. His face was tense.

"How much farther?" Gennaro said. "Two, maybe three miles."

Ellie and Harding were back at the visitor center. Gennaro had offered to accompany Muldoon. The car swerved. "It's been an hour," Muldoon said. "An hour, with no word from the other cars."

"But they have radios," Gennaro said.

"We haven't been able to raise them," Muldoon said.

Gennaro frowned. "If I was sitting in a car for an hour in the rain, I'd sure try to use the radio to call for somebody."

"So would I," Muldoon said.

Gennaro shook his head. "You really think something could have happened to them?"

"Chances are," Muldoon said, "that they're perfectly fine, but I'll he happier when I finally see them. Should be any minute now."

The road curved, and then ran up a hill. At the base of the hill Gennaro saw something white, lying among the ferns by the side of the road. "Hold it," Gennaro said, and Muldoon braked. Gennaro jumped out and ran forward in the headlights of the Jeep to see what it was. It looked like a piece of clothing, but there was-

Gennaro stopped.

Even from six feet away, he could see clearly what it was. He walked forward more slowly.

Muldoon leaned out of the car and said, "What is it?"

"It's a leg," Gennaro said.

The flesh of the leg was pale blue-wbite, terminating in a ragged bloody stump where the knee had been. Below the calf he saw a white sock, and a brown slip-on shoe. It was the kind of sboe Ed Regis had been wearing.

By then Muldoon was out of the car, running past him to crouch over the leg. "Jesus." He lifted the leg out of the foliage, raising it into the light of the headlamps, and blood from the stump gushed down over his band. Gennaro was still three feet away. He quickly bent over, put his hands on his knees, squeezed his eyes shut, and breathed deeply, trying not to be sick.

"Gennaro." Muldoon's voice was sharp.

"What?"

"Move. You're blocking the light."

Gennaro took a breath, and moved. When he opened his eyes he saw Muldoon peering critically at the stump. "Torn at the joint line," Muldoon said, "Didn't bite it-twisted and ripped it. Just ripped his leg off." Muldoon stood up, holding the severed leg upside down so the remaining blood dripped onto the ferns. His bloody hand smudged the white sock as fie gripped the ankle. Gennaro felt sick again.

"No question what happened," Muldoon was saying. "The T-rex got him." Muldoon looked up the hill, then back to Gennaro. "You all right? Can you go on?"

"Yes," Gennaro said. "I can go on."

Muldoon was walking back toward the Jeep, carrying the leg. "I guess we better bring this along," he said. "Doesn't seem right to leave it here. Christ, it's going to make a mess of the car. See if there's anything in the back, will you? A tarp or newspaper…"

Gennaro opened the back door and rummaged around in the space behind the rear seat. He felt grateful to think about something else for a moment. The problem of how to wrap the severed leg expanded to fill his mind, crowding out all other thoughts. He found a canvas bag with a tool kit, a wheel rim, a cardboard box, and-

"Two tarps," he said. They were neatly folded plastic.

"Give me one," Muldoon said, still standing outside the car. Muldoon wrapped the leg and passed the now shapeless bundle to Gennaro. Holding it in his hand, Gennaro was surprised at how heavy it felt. "Just put it in the back," Muldoon said. "If there's a way to wedge it, you know, so it doesn't roll around…"

"Okay." Gennaro put the bundle in the back, and Muldoon got behind the wheel. He accelerated, the wheels spinning in the mud, then digging in. The Jeep rushed up the hill, and for a moment at the top the headlights still pointed upward into the foliage, and then they swung down, and Gennaro could see the road before them.

"Jesus," Muldoon said.

Gennaro saw a single Land Cruiser, lying on its side in the center of the road. He couldn't see the second Land Cruiser at all. "Where's the other car?"

Muldoon looked around briefly, pointed to the left. "There." The second Land Cruiser was twenty feet away, crumpled at the foot of a tree.

"What's it doing there?"

"The T-rex threw it."

"Threw it?" Gennaro said.

Muldoon's face was grim. "Let's get this over with," he said, climbing out of the Jeep. They hurried forward to the second Land Cruiser. Their flashlights swung back and forth in the night.

As they came closer, Gennaro saw how battered the car was. He was careful to let Muldoon look inside first.

"I wouldn't worry," Muldoon said. "It's very unlikely we'll find anyone."

"No?"

"No," he said. He explained that, during his years in Africa, he had visited the scenes of a half-dozen animal attacks on humans in the bush. One leopard attack: the leopard had torn open a tent in the night and taken a three-year-old child. Then one buffalo attack in Amboseli; two lion attacks; one croc attack in the north, near Meru. In every case, there was surprisingly little evidence left behind.

Inexperienced people imagined horrific proofs of an animal attack-torn limbs left behind in the tent, trails of dripping blood leading away into the bush, bloodstained clothing not far from the campsite. But the truth was, there was usually nothing at all, particularly if the victim was small, an infant or a young child. The person just seemed to disappear, as if he had walked out into the bush and never come back. A predator could kill a child just by shaking it, snapping the neck. Usually there wasn't any blood.

And most of the time you never found any other remains of the victims. Sometimes a button from a shirt, or a sliver of rubber from a shoe. But most of the time, nothing.

Predators took children-they preferred children-and they left nothing behind. So Muldoon thought it highly unlikely that they would ever find any remains of the children.

But as he looked in now, he had a surprise. "I'll be damned," he said.

Muldoon tried to put the scene together. The front windshield of the Land Cruiser was shattered, but there wasn't much glass nearby. He had noticed shards of glass back on the road. So the windshield must have broken back there, before the tyrannosaur picked the car up and threw it here. But the car had taken a tremendous beating. Muldoon shone his light inside.

"Empty?" Gcnnaro said, tensely.

"Not quite," Muldoon said. His flashlight glinted off a Crushed radio handset, and on the floor of the car he saw something else, something curved and black. The front doors were dented and jammed shut, but he climbed in through the back door and crawled over the seat to pick up the black object.

"It's a watch," he said, peering at it in the beam of his flashlight. A cheap digital watch with a molded black rubber strap. The LCD face was shattered, He thought the boy might have been wearing it, though he wasn't sure. But it was the kind of watch a kid would have.

"What is it, a watch?" Gennaro said.

"Yes. And there's a radio, but it's broken."

"Is that significant?"

"Yes. And there's something else… " Muldoon sniffed. There was a sour odor inside the car. He shone the light around until he saw the vomit dripping off the side door panel. He touched it: still fresh. "One of the kids may still be alive," Muldoon said.

Gennaro squinted at him. "What makes you think so?"

"The watch," Muldoon said. "The watch proves it." He banded the watch to Gennaro, who held it in the glow of the flashlight, and turned it over in his hands.

"Crystal is cracked," Gennaro said.

"That's right," Muldoon said. "And the band is uninjured."

"Which means?"

"The kid took it off,"

"That could have happened anytime," Gennaro said. "Anytime before the attack."

"No," Muldoon said. "Those LCD crystals are tough. It takes a powerful blow to break them. The watch face was shattered during the attack."

"So the kid took his watch off."

"Think about it," Muldoon said. "If you were being attacked by a tyrannosaur, would you stop to take your watch off?"

"Maybe it was torn off."

"It's almost impossible to tear a watch off somebody's wrist, without tearing the band off, too. Anyway, the band is intact. No," Muldoon said. "The kid took it off himself. He looked at his watch, saw it was broken, and took it off. He had the time to do that."

"When?"

"It could only have been after the attack," Muldoon said. "The kid must have been in this car, after the attack. And the radio was broken, so he left it behind, too. He's a bright kid, and he knew they weren't useful."

"If he's so bright," Gennaro said, "where'd he go? Because I'd stay right here and wait to be picked up."

"Yes," Muldoon said. "But perhaps he couldn't stay here. May the tyrannosaur came back. Or some other animal. Anyway, something made him leave."

"Then where'd he go?" Gennaro said,

"Let's see if we can determine that," Muldoon said, and he strode off toward the main road.

Gennaro watched Muldoon peering at the ground with his flashlight. His face was just inches from the mud, intent on his search. Muldoon really believed he was on to something, that at least one of the kids was still alive. Gennaro remained unimpressed. The shock of finding the severed leg had left him with a grim determination to close the park, and destroy it. No matter what Muldoon said, Gennaro suspected him of unwarranted enthusiasm, and hopefulness, and-

"You notice these prints?" Muldoon asked, still looking at the ground. "What prints?" Gennaro said.

"These footprints-see them, coming toward us from up the road?-and they're adult-size prints. Some kind of rubber-sole sboe. Notice the distinctive tread pattern.

Gennaro saw only mud. Puddles catching the light from the flashlights.

"You can see," Muldoon continued, "the adult prints come to here, where they're joined by other prints. Small, and medium-size… moving around in circles, overlapping… almost as if they're standing together, talking… But now here they are, they seem to be running. He pointed off. "There. Into the park."

Gennaro shook his head. "You can see whatever you want in this mud."

Muldoon got to his feet and stepped back. He looked down at the ground and sighed. "Say what you like, I'll wager one of the kids survived. And maybe both. Perhaps even an adult as well, if these big prints belong to someone other than Regis, We've got to search the park."

"Tonight?" Gennaro said.

But Muldoon wasn't listening. He had walked away, toward an embankment of soft earth, near a drainpipe for rain. He crouched again. "What was that little girl wearing?"

"Christ," Gennaro said. "I don't know."

Proceeding slowly, Muldoon moved farther toward the side of the road. And then they heard a wheezing sound. It was definitely an animal sound.

"Listen," Gennaro said, feeling panic, "I think we better-"

"Shhh," Muldoon said.

He paused, listening.

"It's just the wind," Gennaro said.

They heard the wheezing again, distinctly this time. It wasn't the wind. It was coming from the foliage directly ahead of him, by the side of the road. It didn't sound like an animal, but Muldoon moved forward cautiously. He waggled his light and shouted, but the wheezing did not change character. Muldoon pushed aside the fronds of a palm.

"What is it?" Gennaro said,

"It's Malcolm," Muldoon said.

Ian Malcolm lay on his back, his skin gray-white, mouth slackly open. His breath came in wheezing gasps. Muldoon handed the flashlight to Gennaro, and then bent to examine the body. "I can't find the injury," he said. "Head okay, chest, arms…"

Then Gennaro shone the light on the legs. "He put a tourniquet on." Malcolm's belt was twisted tight over the right thigh. Gennaro moved the light down the leg. The right ankle was bent outward at an awkward angle from the leg, the trousers flattened, soaked in blood. Muldoon touched the ankle gently, and Malcolm groaned.

Muldoon stepped back and tried to decide what to do next. Malcolm might have other injuries. His back might be broken. It might kill him to move him. But if they left him here, he would die of shock. It was only because he had had the presence of mind to put a tourniquet on that he hadn't already bled to death. And probably he was doomed. They might as well move him.

Gennaro helped Muldoon pick the man up, hoisting him awkwardly over their shoulders. Malcolm moaned, and breathed in ragged gasps. "Lex," he said. "Lex… went… Lex…"

"Who's Lex?" Muldoon said.

"The little girl," Gennaro said. They carried Malcolm back to the Jeep, and wrested him into the back seat. Gennaro tightened the tourniquet around his leg. Malcolm groaned again. Muldoon slid the trouser cuff up and saw the pulpy flesh beneath, the dull white splinters of protruding bone.

"We've got to get him back," Muldoon said.

"You going to leave here without the kids?" Gennaro said.

"If they went into the park, it's twenty square miles," Muldoon said, shaking his head. "The only way we can find anything out there is with the motion sensors. If the kids are alive and moving around, the motion sensors will pick them up, and we can go right to them and bring them back. But if we don't take Dr. Malcolm back right now, he'll die."

"Then we have to go back," Gennaro said.

"Yes, I think so."

They climbed into the car. Gennaro said, "Are you going to tell Hammond the kids are missing?"

"No," Muldoon said. "You are."

Control

Donald Gennaro stared at Hammond, sitting in the deserted cafeteria. The man was spooning ice cream, calmly eating it. "So Muldoon believes the children are somewhere in the park?"

"He thinks so, yes."

"Then I'm sure we'll find them."

"I hope so," Gennaro said. He watched the old man deliberately eating, and he felt a chill.

"Oh, I am sure we'll find them. After all, I keep telling everyone, this park is made for kids."

Gennaro said, "Just so you understand that they're missing, sir."

"Missing?" he snapped. "Of course I know they're missing. I'm not senile." He sighed, and changed tone again. "Look, Donald," Hammond said. "Let's not get carried away. We've had a little breakdown from the storm or whatever, and as a result we've suffered a regrettable, unfortunate accident. And that's all that's happened. We're dealing with it. Arnold will get the computers cleaned up. Muldoon will pick up the kids, and I have no doubt he'll be back with them by the time we finish this ice cream. So let's just wait and see what develops, shall we?"

"Whatever you say, sir," Gennaro said.

"Why?" Henry Wu said, looking at the console screen.

"Because I think Nedry did something to the code," Arnold said. "That's why I'm checking it."

"All right," Wu said. "But have you tried your options?"

"Like what?" Arnold said.

"I don't know. Aren't the safety systems still running?" Wu said. "Keychecks? All that?"

"Jesus," Arnold said, snapping his fingers. "They must be. Safety systems can't be turned off except at the main panel."

"Well," Wu said, "if Keycheeks is active, you can trace what he did."

"I sure as hell can," Arnold said. He started to press buttons. Why hadn't he thought of it before? It was so obvious. The computer system at Jurassic Park had several tiers of safety systems built into it. One of them was a keycheck program, which monitored all the keystrokes entered by operators with access to the system. It was originally installed as a debugging device, but it was retained for its security value.

In a moment, all the keystrokes that Nedry had entered into the computer earlier in the day were listed in a window on the screen:

13,42,121,32,88,77,19,13,122,13,44,52,77,90,13,99,13,100,13,109,55,103

144,13,99,87,60,13,44,12,09,13,43,63,13,46,57,89,103,122,13,44,52,88,9

31,13,21,13,57,98,100,102,103,13,112,13,146,13,13,13,77,67,88,23,13,13

system

nedry

goto command level

nedry

040/ # xy/67 amp;

mr goodbytes

security

keycheck off

safety off

sl off

security

whte_rbt.obj

"That's it?" Arnold said. "He was screwing around here for hours, it seemed like."

"Probably just killing time," Wu said. "Until he finally decided to get down to it."

The initial list of numbers represented the ASCI keyboard codes for the keys Nedry had pushed at his console. Those numbers meant he was still within the standard user interface, like any ordinary user of the computer. So initially Nedry was just looking around, which you wouldn't have expected of the programmer who had designed the system.

"Maybe he was trying to see if there were changes, before he went in," Wu said.

"Maybe," Arnold said. Arnold was now looking at the list of commands, which allowed him to follow Nedry's progression through the system, line by line. "At least we can see what he did."

system was Nedry's request to leave the ordinary user interface and access the code itself. The computer asked for his name, and he replied: nedry.

That name was authorized to access the code, so the computer allowed him into the system. Nedry asked to goto command level, the computer's highest level of control. The command level required extra security, and asked Nedry for his name, access number 7 and password.

nedry

040/# xy/67 amp;

mr goodbytes

Those entries got Nedry into the command level. From there he wanted security. And since he was authorized, the computer allowed him to go there. Once at the security level, Nedry tried three variations:

keycheck off

safety off

sl off

"He's trying to turn off the safety systems," Wu said. "He doesn't want anybody to see what he's about to do."

"Exactly," Arnold said. "And apparently he doesn't know it's no longer possible to turn the systems off except by manually flipping switches on the main board."

After three failed commands, the computer automatically began to worry about Nedry. But since he had gotten in with proper authorization, the computer would assume that Nedry was lost, trying to do something he couldn't accomplish from where he was. So the computer asked him again where he wanted to be, and Nedry said:

security. And he was allowed to remain there.

"Finally," Wu said, "here's the kicker." He pointed to the last of the commands Nedry had entered.

Whte_rbt.obj

"What the hell is that?" Arnold said. "White rabbit? Is that supposed to be his private joke?"

"It's marked as an object," Wu said. In computer terminology, an "object" was a block of code that could be moved around and used, the way you might move a chair in a room. An object might be a set of commands to draw a picture, or to refresh the screen, or to perform a certain calculation.

"Let's see where it is in the code," Arnold said. "Maybe we can figure out what it does." He went to the program utilities and typed:

FIND WHTE-RBT.OBJ

The computer flashed back:

OBJECT NOT FOUND IN LIBRARIES

"It doesn't exist," Arnold said.

"Then search the code listing," Wu said.

Arnold typed:

FIND/LISTINGS: WHTE-RBT.OBJ

The screen scrolled rapidly, the lines of code blurring as they swept past. It continued this way for almost a minute, and then abruptly stopped.

"There it is," Wu said. "It's not an object, it's a command." The screen showed an arrow pointing to a single line of code:

curv = GetHandl {ssm.dt} tempRgn {itm.dd2}.

curh = GetHandl {ssd.itli} tempRgn2 {itm.dd4}.

on DrawMeter(!gN) set shp-val.obi to lim(Val{d})-Xval.

if ValidMeter(mH) (**mH).MeterVis return.

if Meterband](vGT) ((DrawBack(tY)) return.

limitDat.4 = maxbits (%33) to {limit 04} set on.

limitDat.5 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit.2-var(szb)}.

on whte-rbt.obi call link.sst {security, perimeter} set to off.

Vertrange={maxrange+setlim} tempVgn(fdn- amp;bb+$404).

Horrange={maxRange-setlim/2} tempHgn(fdn- amp;dd+$105).

void DrawMeter send-screen.obi print.

"Son of a bitch," Arnold said.

Wu shook his head. "It isn't a bug in the code at all."

"No," Arnold said. "It's a trap door. The fat bastard put in what looked like an object call, but it's actually a command that links the security and perimeter systems and then turns them off. Gives him complete access to every place in the park."

"Then we must be able to turn them back on," Wu said.

"Yeah, we must." Arnold frowned at the screen. "All we have to do is figure out the command. I'll run an execution trace on the link," he said. "We'll see where that gets us."

Wu got up from his chair. "Meanwhile," he said, "meanwhile, that somebody went into the freezer about an hour ago. I think I better go count my embryos."

Ellie was in her room, about to change out of her wet clothes, when there was a knock on the door.

"Alan?" she said, but when she opened the door she saw Muldoon standing there, with a plastic-wrapped package under his arm. Muldoon was also soaking wet, and there were streaks of dirt on his clothes.

"I'm sorry, but we need your help," Muldoon said briskly. "The Land Cruisers were attacked an hour ago. We brought Malcolm back, but he's in shock. He's got a very bad injury to his leg. He's still unconscious, but I put him in the bed in his room. Harding is on his way over."

"Harding?" she said. "What about the others?"

"We haven't found the others yet, Dr. Sattler," Muldoon said. He was speaking slowly now.

"Oh, my God."

"But we think that Dr. Grant and the children are still alive. We think they went into the park, Dr. Sattler."

"Went into the park?"

"We think so. Meanwhile, Malcolm needshelp. I've called Harding."

'Shouldn't you call the doctor?"

"There's no doctor on the island. Harding's the best we have."

"But surely you can call for a doctor-" she said.

"No." Muldoon shook his head. "Phone lines are down. We can't call out." He shifted the package in his arm.

"What's that?" she said.

"Nothing. Just go to Malcolm's room, and help Harding, if you will."

And Muldoon was gone.

She sat on her bed, shocked. Ellie Sattler was not a woman disposed to unnecessary panic, and she had known Grant to get out of dangerous situations before. Once he'd been lost in the badlands for four days when a cliff gave way beneath him and his truck fell a hundred feet into a ravine. Grant's right leg was broken. He had no water. But he walked back on a broken leg.

On the other hand, the kids…

She shook her head, pushing the thought away. The kids were probably with Grant. And if Grant was out in the park, well… what better person to get them safely through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert?

In the Park

"I'm tired," Lex said. "Carry me, Dr. Grant." "You're too big to carry," Tim said.

"But I'm tired," she said.

"Okay, Lex," Grant said, picking her up. "Oof, you're heavy."

It was almost 9:00 p.m. The full moon was blurred by drifting mist, and their blunted shadows led them across an open field, toward dark woods beyond. Grant was lost in thought, trying to decide where he was. Since they had originally crossed over the fence that the tyrannosaur had battered down, Grant was reasonably sure they were now somewhere in the tyrannosaur paddock. Which was a place he did not want to be. In his mind, he kept seeing the computer tracing of the tyrannosaur's home range, the tight squiggle of lines that traced his movements within a small area. He and the kids were in that area now.

But Grant also remembered that the tyrannosaurs were isolated from all the other animals, which meant they would know they had left the paddock when they crossed a barrier-a fence, or a moat, or both.

He had seen no barriers, so far.

The girl put her head on his shoulder, and twirled her hair in her fingers. Soon she was snoring. Tim trudged alongside Grant.

"How you holding up, Tim?"

"Okay," he said. "But I think we might be in the tyrannosaur area."

"I'm pretty sure we are. I hope we get out soon."

"You going to go into the woods?" Tim said. As they came closer, the woods seemed dark and forbidding.

"Yes," Grant said. "I think we can navigate by the numbers on the motion sensors."

The motion sensors were green boxes set about four feet off the ground. Some were freestanding; most were attached to trees. None of them were working, because apparently the power was still off. Each sensor box had a glass lens mounted in the center, and a painted code number beneath that. Up ahead, in the mist-streaked moonlight, Grant could see a box marked T/S/04.

They entered the forest. Huge trees loomed on all sides. In the moonlight, a low mist clung to the ground, curling around the roots of the trees. It was beautiful, but it made walking treacherous. And Grant was watching the sensors. They seemed to be numbered in descending order. He passed T/S/03, and T/S/02. Eventually they reached T/S/01. He was tired from carrying the girl, and he had hoped this would coincide with a boundary for the tyrannosaur paddock, but it was just another box in the middle of the woods. The next box after that was marked T/N/01, followed by T/N/02. Grant realized the numbers must be arranged geographically around a central point, like a compass. They were going from soutb to north, so the numbers got smaller as they approached the center, then got larger again.

"At least we're going the right way," Tim said.

"Good for you," Grant said.

Tim smiled, and stumbled over vines in the mist. He got quickly to his feet. They walked on for a while. "My parents are getting a divorce," he said.

"Uh-huh," Grant said.

"My dad moved out last month. He has his own place in Mill Valley now.

"Uh-huh."

"He never carries my sister any more. He never even picks her up."

"And he says you have dinosaurs on the brain," Grant said.

Tim sighed. "Yeah."

"You miss him?" Grant said.

"Not really," Tim said. "Sometimes. She misses him more."

"Who, your mother?"

"No, Lex. My mom has a boyfriend. She knows him from work."

They walked in silence for a while, passing T/N/03 and T/N/04. "Have you met him?" Grant said.

"Yeah."

"How is he?"

"He's okay," Tim said. "He's younger than my dad, but he's bald."

"How does he treat you?"

"I don't know. Okay. I think he just tries to get on my good side. I don't know what's going to happen. Sometimes my mom says we'll have to sell the house and move. Sometimes he and my mom fight, late at night. I sit in my room and play with my computer, but I can still hear it."

"Uh-huh," Grant said.

"Are you divorced?"

"No," Grant said. "My wife died a long time ago."

"And now you're with Dr. Sattler?"

Grant smiled in the darkness. "No. She's my student."

"You mean she's still in school?"

"Graduate school, yes." Grant paused long enough to shift Lex to his other shoulder, and then they continued on, past T/N/05 and T/N/06. There was the rumble of thunder in the distance. The storm had moved to the south. There was very little sound in the forest except for the drone of cicadas and the soft croaking of tree frogs.

You have children?" Tim asked.

"No," Crant said.

"Are you going to marry Dr. Sattler?"

"No, she's marrying a nice doctor in Chicago sometime next year.

"Oh," Tim said. He seemed surprised to hear it. They walked along for a while. "Then who are you going to marry?"

"I don't think I'm going to marry anybody," Grant said.

"Me neither," Tim said.

They walked for a while. Tim said, "Are we going to walk all night?"

"I don't think I can," Grant said. "We'll have to stop, at least for a few hours." He glanced at his watch. "We're okay. We've got almost fifteen hours before we have to be back. Before the ship reaches the mainland."

"Where are we going to stop?" Tim asked, immediately.

Grant was wondering the same thing. His first thought was that thev might climb a tree, and sleep up there. But they would have to climb very high to get safely away from the animals, and Lex might fall out while she was asleep. And tree branches were hard; they wouldn't get any rest. At least, he wouldn't.

They needed someplace really safe. He thought back to the plans he had seen on the jet coming down. He remembered that there were outlying buildings for each of the different divisions. Grant didn't know what they were like, because plans for the individual buildings weren't included. And he couldn't remember exactly where they were, but he remembered they were scattered all around the park. There might be buildings somewhere nearby.

But that was a different requirement from simply crossing a barrier and getting out of the tyrannosaur paddock, Finding a building meant a search strategy of some kind. And the best strategies were-

"Tim, can you hold your sister for me? I'm going to climb a tree and have a look around."

High in the branches, he had a good view of the forest, the tops of the trees extending away to his left and right. They were surprisingly near the edge of the forest-directly ahead the trees ended before a clearing, with an electrified fence and a pale concrete moat. Beyond that, a large open field in what he assumed was the sauropod paddock. In the distance, more trees, and misty moonlight sparkling on the ocean.

Somewhere he heard the bellowing of a dinosaur, but it was far away. He put on Tim's night-vision goggles and looked again. He followed the gray curve of the moat, and then saw what he was looking for: the dark strip of a service road, leading to the flat rectangle of a roof. The roof was barely above ground level, but it was there. And it wasn't far. Maybe a quarter of a mile or so from the tree.

When he came back down, Lex was sniffling.

"What's the matter?"

"I heard an aminal."

"It won't bother us. Are you awake now? Come on."

He led her to the fence. It was twelve feet high, with a spiral of barbed wire at the top. It seemed to stretch far above them in the moonligbt. The moat was immediately on the other side.

Lex looked up at the fence doubtfully.

"Can you climb it?" Grant asked her.

She handed him her glove, and her baseball. "Sure. Easy." She started to climb. "But I bet Timmy can't."

Tim spun in fury: "You shut up."

"Timmy's afraid of heights."

"I am not."

She climbed higher. "Are so."

"Am not."

"Then come and get me."

Grant turned to Tim, pale in the darkness. The boy wasn't moving. "You okay with the fence, Tim?"

"Sure."

"Want some help?"

"Timmy's a fraidy-cat," Lex called.

"What a stupid jerk," Tim said, and he started to climb.

"It's freezing," Lex said. They were standing waist-deep in smelly water at the bottom of a deep concrete moat. They had climbed the fence without incident, except that Tim had torn his shirt on the coils of barbed wire at the top. Then they had all slid down into the moat, and now Grant was looking for a way out.

"At least I got Timmy over the fence for you," Lex said. "He really is scared most times."

"Thanks for your help," Tim said sarcastically. In the moonlight, he could see floating lumps on the surface. He moved along the moat, looking at the concrete wall on the far side. The concrete was smooth; they couldn't possibly climb it.

"Eww," Lex said, pointing to the water.

"It won't hurt you, Lex."

Grant finally found a place where the concrete had cracked and a vine grew down toward the water. He tugged on the vine, and it held his weight. "Let's go, kids." They started to climb the vine, back to the field above.

It took only a few minutes to cross the field to the embankment leading to the below-grade service road, and the maintenance building off to the right. They passed two motion sensors, and Grant noticed with some uneasiness that the sensors were still not working, nor were the lights. More than two hours had passed since the power first went out, and it was not yet restored.

Somewhere in the distance, they heard the tyrannosaur roar. "Is he around here?" Lex said.

"No," Grant said. "We're in another section of park from him." They slid down a grassy embankment and moved toward the concrete building. In the darkness it was forbidding, bunker-like.

"What is this place?" Lex said.

"It's safe," Grant said, hoping that was true.

The entrance gate was large enough to drive a truck through. It was fitted with heavy bars. Inside, they could see, the building was an open shed, with piles of grass and bales of bay stacked among equipment.

The gate was locked with a heavy padlock. As Grant was examining it, Lex slipped sideways between the bars. "Come on, you guys."

Tim followed her. "I think you can do it, Dr. Grant."

He was right; it was a tight squeeze, but Grant was able to ease his body between the bars and get into the shed. As soon as he was inside, a wave of exhaustion struck him.

"I wonder if there's anything to eat," Lex said.

"Just hay." Grant broke open a bale, and spread it around on the concrete. The hay in the center was warm. They lay down, feeling the warmth. Lex curled up beside him, and closed her eyes. Tim put his arm around her. He heard the sauropods trumpeting softly in the distance.

Neither child spoke. They were almost immediately snoring. Grant raised his arm to look at his watch, but it was too dark to see. He felt the warmth of the children against his own body.

Grant closed his eves, and slept.

Control

Muldoon and Gennaro came into the control room just as Arnold clapped his bands and said, "Got you, you little son of a bitch."

"What is it?" Gennaro said,

Arnold pointed to the screen:

Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}

Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}

if Link(Vgl,Vg2) set Lim(Vgl,Vg2) return

if Link(Vg2,Vgl) set Lim(Vg2,Vgl) return

on whte_rbt.obj link set security (Vgl), perimeter (Vg2)

limitDat.1 = maxbits (%22) to {limit.04} set on

limitDat.2 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit.2-var(dzh)}

on fini.obi call link.sst {security, perimeter} set to on

on fini.obi set link.sst {security, perimeter} restore

on fini.obi delete line rf whte_rbt.obj, fini.obj

Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}

Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}

IimitDat.4 = maxbits (%33) to {limit.04} set on

limitDat.5 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit.2-var(szh)}

"That's it," Arnold said, pleased.

"That's what?" Gennaro asked, staring at the screen.

"I finally found the command to restore the original code. The command called 'fini.ob' resets the linked parameters, namely the fence and the power.

"Good," Muldoon said.

"But it does something else," Arnold said. "It then erases the code lines that refer to it. It destroys all evidence it was ever there. Pretty slick."

Gennaro shook his head. "I don't know much about computers." Although he knew enough to know what it meant when a high-tech company went back to the source code. It meant big, big problems.

"Well, watch this," Arnold said, and he typed in the command:

FINI.OBJ

The screen flickered and immediately changed.

Vg1 = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}

Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}

if Link(Vgl,Vg2) set Lim(Vgl,Vg2) return

if Link(Vg2,Vgl) set Lim(Vg2,Vgl) return

limitDat.1 = maxbits (%22) to {limit.04} set on

limitDat.2 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit.2-var(dzh)}

Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}

Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}

IimitDat.4 = maxbits (%33) to {limit.04} set on

limitDat.5 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit.2-var(szh)}

Muldoon pointed to the windows. "Look!" Outside, the big quartz lights were coming on throughout the park, They went to the windows and looked out.

"Hot damn," Arnold said,

Gennaro said, "Does this mean the electrified fences are back on?"

"You bet it does," Arnold said. "It'll take a few seconds to get up to full power, because we've got fifty miles of fence out there, and the generator has to charge the capacitors along the way. But in half a minute we'll be back in business," Arnold pointed to the vertical glass see-through map of the park.

On the map, bright red lines were snaking out from the power station, moving throughout the park, as electricity surged through the fences.

"And the motion sensors?" Gennaro said.

"Yes, them, too. It'll be a few minutes while the computer counts. But everything's working," Arnold said. "Half past nine, and we've got the whole damn thing back up and running."

Grant opened his eyes. Brilliant blue light was streaming into the building through the bars of the gate. Quartz light: the power was back on! Groggily, he looked at his watch. It was just nine-thirty. He'd been asleep only a couple of minutes. He decided he could sleep a few minutes more, and then he would go back up to the field and stand in front of the motion sensors and wave, setting them off. The control room would spot him; they'd send a car out to pick him and the kids up, he'd tell Arnold to recall the supply ship, and they'd all finish the night in their own beds back in the lodge.

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.

Gennarro 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 featherv 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.

Ramon, one of the workmen, came over. "Senor Muldoon," he said, "did you see the lights?"

"What lights?" Muldoon said.

Ramon 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 rioting crowds, to brain waves during epilepsy. 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 to have to shut down all the fences.

"Control. This is Muldoon. We're ready to begin repair."

"All right," Arnold said. "Shutting out your section now."

Muldoon glanced at his watch. Somewhere in the distance, he heard soft hooting. It sounded like owls, but he knew it was the dilophosaurs. He went over to Ramon and said, "Let's finish this up. I want to get to those other sections of fence."

An hour went by. Donald Gennaro stared at the glowing map in the control room as the spots and numbers flickered and changed. "What's happening now?"

Arnold worked at the console. "I'm trying to get the phones back. So we can call about Malcolm."

"No, I mean out there."

Arnold glanced up at the board. "It looks as if they're about done with the animals, and the two sections. just as I told you, the park is back in band. With no catastrophic Malcolm Effect. In fact, there's just that third section of fence…"

"Arnold." It was Muldoon's voice.

"Yes?"

"Have you seen this bloody fence?"

"Just a minute."

On one of the monitors, Gennaro saw a high angle down on a field of grass, blowing in the wind. In the distance was a low concrete roof. "That's the sauropod maintenance building," Arnold explained. "It's one of the utility structures we use for equipment, feed storage, and so on. We have them all around the park, in each of the paddocks." On the monitor, the video image panned. "We're turning the camera now to get a look at the fence…"

Gennaro saw a shining wall of metallic mesh in the light. One section had been trampled, knocked flat. Muldoon's Jeep and work crew were there.

"Huh," Arnold said. "Looks like the rex went into the sauropod paddock."

Muldoon said, "Fine dining tonight."

"We'll have to get him out of there," Arnold said.

"With what?" Muldoon said. "We haven't got anything to use on a rex. I'll fix this fence, but I'm not going in there until daylight."

"Hammond won't like it."

"We'll discuss it when I get back," Muldoon said.

"How many sauropods will the rex kill?" Hammond said, pacing around the control room.

"Probably just one," Harding said. "Sauropods are big; the rex can feed off a single kill for several days."

"We have to go out and get him tonight," Hammond said.

Muldoon shook his head. "I'm not going in there until daylight."

Hammond was rising up and down on the balls of his feet, the way he did whenever he was angry. "Are you forgetting you work for me?"

"No, Mr. Hammond, I'm not forgetting. But that's a full-grown adult tyrannosaur out there. How do you plan to get him?"

"We have tranquilizer guns."

"We have tranquilizer guns that shoot a twenty-cc dart," Muldoon said. "Fine for an animal that weighs four or five hundred pounds. That tyrannosaur weighs eight tons. It wouldn't even feel it."

"You ordered a larger weapon…"

"I ordered three larger weapons, Mr. Hammond, but you cut the requisition, so we got only one. And it's gone. Nedry took it when he left."

"That was pretty stupid. Who let that happen?"

"Nedry's not my problem, Mr. Hammond," Muldoon said.

"You're saying," Hammond said, "that, as of this moment, there is no way to stop the tyrannosaur?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying," Muldoon said.

"That's ridiculous," Hammond said.

"It's your park, Mr. Hammond. You didn't want anybody to be able to injure your precious dinosaurs. Well, now you've got a rex in with the sauropods, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it." He left the room.

"Just a minute," Hammond said, hurrying after him. Gennaro stared at the screens, and listened to the shouted argument in the hallway outside, He said to Arnold, "I guess you don't have control of the park yet, after all."

"Don't kid yourself," Arnold said, lighting another cigarette. "We have the park. It'll be dawn in a couple of hours. We may lose a couple of dinos before we get the rex out of there, but, believe me, we have the park."

Dawn

Grant was awakened by a loud grinding sound, followed by a mechanical clanking. He opened his eyes and saw a bale of bay rolling past him on a conveyor belt, up toward the ceiling. Two more bales followed it. Then the clanking stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the concrete building was silent again.

Grant yawned. He stretched sleepily, winced in pain, and sat up.

Soft yellow light came through the side windows. It was morning: he had slept the whole night! He looked quickly at his watch: 5:00 a.m. Still almost six hours to go before the boat had to be recalled. He rolled onto his back, groaning. His head throbbed, and his body ached as if he had been beaten up. From around the corner, he heard a squeaking sound, like a rusty wheel. And then Lex giggling.

Grant stood slowly, and looked at the building. Now that it was daylight, he could see it was some kind of a maintenance building, with stacks of hay and supplies. On the wall he saw a gray metal box and a stenciled sign: SAUROPOD MAINTENANCE BLDG (04). This must be the sauropod paddock, as he had thought. He opened the box and saw a telephone, but when he lifted the receiver he heard only hissing static. Apparently the phones weren't working yet.

"Chew your food," Lex was saying. "Don't be a piggy, Ralph."

Grant walked around the corner and found Lex by the bars, holding out handfuls of bay to an animal outside that looked like a large pink pig and was making the squeaking sounds Grant had heard. It was actually an infant triceratops, about the size of a pony. The infant didn't have horns on its head yet, just a curved bony frill behind big soft eyes. It poked its snout through the bars toward Lex, its eyes watching her as she fed it more hay.

"That's better," Lex said. "There's plenty of hay, don't worry." She patted the baby on the head. "You like hay, don't you, Ralph?"

Lex turned back and saw him.

"This is Ralph," Lex said. "He's my friend. He likes hay."

Grant took a step and stopped, wincing.

"You look pretty bad," Lex said.

"I feel pretty bad."

"Tim, too. His nose is all swollen up."

"Where is Tim?"

"Peeing," she said. "You want to help me feed Ralph?"

The baby triceratops looked at Grant. Hay stuck out of both sides of its mouth, dropping on the floor as it chewed.

"He's a very messy eater," Lex said, "And he's very hungry."

The baby finished chewing and licked its lips. It opened its mouth, waiting for more. Grant could see the slender sharp teeth, and the beaky upper jaw, like a parrot.

"Okay, just a minute," Lex said, scooping up more straw from the concrete floor, "Honestly, Ralph," she said, "You'd think your mother never fed you."

"Why is his name Ralph?"

"Because he looks like Ralph. At school."

Grant came closer and touched the skin of the neck gently.

"It's okay, you can pet him," Lex said. "He likes it when you pet him, don't you, Ralph?"

The skin felt dry and warm, with the pebbled texture of a football. Ralph gave a little squeak as Grant petted it. Outside the bars, its thick tail swung back and forth with pleasure.

"He's pretty tame." Ralph looked from Lex to Grant as it ate, and showed no sign of fear. It reminded Grant that the dinosaurs didn't have ordinary responses to people. "Maybe I can ride him," Lex said.

"Let's not."

"I bet he'd let me," Lex said. "It'd be fun to ride a dinosaur."

Grant looked out the bars past the animal, to the open fields of the sauropod compound. It was growing lighter every minute. He should go outside, he thought, and set off one of the motion sensors on the field above. After all, it might take the people in the control room an hour to get out here to him. And he didn't like the idea that the phones were still down…

He heard a deep snorting sound, like the snort of a very large horse, and suddenly the baby became agitated. It tried to pull its head back through the bars, but got caught on the edge of its frill, and it squeaked in fright.

Tle snorting came again. It was closer this time.

Ralph reared up on its hind legs, frantic to get out from between the bars, It wriggled its head back and forth, rubbing against the bars.

"Ralph, take it easy," Lex said.

"Push him out," Grant said. He reached up to Ralph's head and leaned against it, pushing the animal sideways and backward. The frill popped free and the baby fell outside the bars, losing its balance and flopping on its side. Then the baby was covered in shadow, and a huge leg came into view, thicker than a tree trunk. The foot had five curved toenails, like an elephant's.

Ralph looked up and squeaked. A head came down into view: six feet long, with three long white horns, one above each of the large brown eyes and a smaller horn at the tip of the nose. It was a full-grown triceratops. The big animal peered at Lex and Grant, blinking slowly, and then turned its attention to Ralph. A tongue came out and licked the baby. Ralph squeaked and rubbed up against the big leg happily.

"Is that his mom?" Lex said.

"Looks like it," Grant said.

"Should we feed the mom, too?" Lex said.

But the big triceratops was already nudging Ralph with her snout, pushing the baby away from the bars.

"Guess not."

The infant turned away from the bars and walked off. From time to time, the big mother nudged her baby, guiding it away, as they both walked out into the fields.

"Goodbye, Ralph," Lex said, waving. Tim came out of the shadows of the building.

"Tell you what," Grant said. "I'm going up on the hill to set off the motion sensors, so they'll know to come get us. You two stay here and wait for me."

"No," Lex said.

"Why? Stay here. It's safe here."

"You're not leaving us," she said. "Right, Timmy?"

"Right," Tim said.

"Okay," Grant said.

They crawled through the bars, stepping outside.

It was just before dawn.

The air was warm and humid, the sky soft pink and purple. A white mist clung low to the ground. Some distance away, they saw the mother triceratops and the baby moving away toward a herd of large duckbilled hadrosaurs, eating foliage from trees at the edge of the lagoon.

Some of the hadrosaurs stood knee-deep in the water. They drank, lowering their flat heads, meeting their own reflections in the still water. Then they looked up again, their heads swiveling. At the water's edge, one of the babies ventured out, squeaked, and scrambled back while the adults watched indulgently.

Farther South, other hadrosaurs were eating the lower vegetation. Sometimes they reared up on their hind legs, resting their forelegs on the tree trunks, so they could reach the leaves on higher branches. And in the far distance, a giant apatosaur stood above the trees, the tiny head swiveling on the long neck. The scene was so peaceful Grant found it bard to imagine any danger.

"Yew!" Lex shouted, ducking. Two giant red dragonflies with six-foot wingspans bummed 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 band. 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 band 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 bonked 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 swiitches 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:

[picture]

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 bonked. 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.

The Park

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 check. 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 bonk 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 bonked 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.

"Forget it," Lex said. "I'm not staying here." She started to climb down the branches. At her movement, the hadrosaur trumpeted in fresh alarm.

Grant was amazed. He thought, It really can't see us when we don't move. And after a minute it literally forgets that we're here. This was just like the tyrannosaur-another classic example of an amphibian visual cortex. Studies of frogs had shown that amphibians only saw moving things, like insects. If something didn't move, they literally didn't see it. The same thing seemed to be true of dinosaurs.

In any case, the maiasaur now seemed to find these strange creatures climbing down the tree too upsetting. With a final honk, she nudged her baby, and lumbered slowly away. She paused once, and looked back at them, then continued on.

They reached the ground. Lex shook herself off. Both children were covered in a layer of fine dust. All around them, the grass had been flattened. There were streaks of blood, and a sour smell.

Grant looked at his watch. "We better get going, kids," he said.

"Not me," Lex said. "I'm not walking out there any more."

"We have to."

"Why?"

"Because," Grant said, "we have to tell them about the boat. Since they can't seem to see us on the motion sensors, we have to go all the way back ourselves. It's the only way."

"Why can't we take the raft?" Tim said.

"What raft?"

Tim pointed to the low concrete maintenance building with the bars, where they had spent the night. It was twenty yards away, across the field. "I saw a raft back there," he said.

Grant immediately understood the advantages. It was now seven o'clock in the morning. They had at least eight miles to go. If they could take a raft along the river, they would make much faster progress than going overland. "Let's do it," Grant said.

Arnold punched the visual search mode and watched as the monitors began to scan throughout the park, the images changing every two seconds. It was tiring to watch, but it was the fastest way to find Nedry's Jeep, and Muldoon had been adamant about that. He had gone out with Gennaro to look at the stampede, but now that it was daylight, he wanted the car found. He wanted the weapons.

His intercom clicked. "Mr. Arnold, may I have a word with you, please?"

It was Hammond. He sounded like the voice of God.

"You want to come here, Mr. Hammond?"

"No, Mr. Arnold," Hammond said. "Come to me. I'm in the genetics lab with Dr. Wu. We'll be waiting for you."

Arnold sighed, and stepped away from the screens.

Grant stumbled deep in the gloomy recesses of the building. He pushed past five-gallon containers of herbicide, tree-pruning equipment, spare tires for a Jeep, coils of cyclone fencing, hundred-pound fertilizer bags, stacks of brown ceramic insulators, empty motor-oil cans, work lights and cables.

"I don't see any raft."

"Keep going."

Bags of cement, lengths of copper pipe, green mesb… and two plastic oars bung on clips on the concrete wall.

"Okay," he said, "but where's the raft?"

"It must be here somewhere," Tim said.

"You never saw a raft?"

"No, I just assumed it was here."

Poking among the junk, Grant found no raft. But he did find a set of plans, rolled up and speckled with mold from humidity, stuck back in a metal cabinet on the wall. He spread the plans on the floor, brushing away a big spider. He looked at them for a long time.

"I'm hungry…"

"Just a minute."

They were detailed topographical charts for the main area of the island, where they now were. According to this, the lagoon narrowed into the river they had seen earlier, which twisted northward… right through the aviary… and on to within a half-mile of the visitor lodge.

He flipped back through the pages. How to get to the lagoon? According to the plans, there should be a door at the back of the building they were in. Grant looked up, and saw it, recessed back in the concrete wall. The door was wide enough for a car. Opening it, he saw a paved road running straight down toward the lagoon. The road was dug below ground level, so it couldn't be seen from above. It must be another service road. And it led to a dock at the edge of the lagoon. And clearly stenciled on the dock was RAFT STORAGE.

"Hey," Tim said, "look at this." He held out a metal case to Grant.

Opening it, Grant found a compressed-air pistol and a cloth belt that held darts. There were six darts in all, each as thick as his finger. Labeled MORO-709.

"Good Work, Tim." He slung the belt around his shoulder, and stuck the gun in his trousers.

"Is it a tranquilizer gun?"

"I'd say so."

"What about the boat?" Lex said.

"I think it's on the dock," Grant said. They started down the road. Grant carried the oars on his shoulder. "I hope it's a big raft," Lex said, "because I can't swim."

"Don't worry," he said.

"Maybe we can catch some fish," she said.

They walked down the road with the sloping embankment rising up on both sides of them. They heard a deep rhythmic snorting sound, but Grant could not see where it was coming from.

"Are you sure there's a raft down here?" Lex said, wrinkling her nose.

"Probably," Grant said.

The rhythmic snorting became louder as they walked, but they also heard a steady droning, buzzing sound. When they reached the end of the road, at the edge of the small concrete dock, Grant froze in shock.

The tyrannosaur was right there.

It was sitting upright in the shade of a tree, its hind legs stretched out in front. Its eyes were open but it was not moving, except for its head, which lifted and fell gently with each snorting sound. The buzzing came from the clouds of flies that surrounded it, crawling over its face and slack jaws, its bloody fangs, and the red haunch of a killed hadrosaur that lay on its side behind the tyrannosaur.

The tyrannosaur was only twenty yards away. Grant felt sure it must have seen him, but the big animal did not respond. It just sat there. It took him a moment to realize: the tyrannosaur was asleep. Sitting up, but asleep.

He signaled to Tim and Lex to stay where they were. Grant walked slowly forward onto the dock, in full view of the tyrannosaur. The big animal continued to sleep, snoring softly.

Near the end of the dock, a wooden shed was painted green to blend with the foliage. Grant quietly unlatched the door and looked inside. He saw a half-dozen orange life vests hanging on the wall, several rolls of wire-mesh fencing, some coils of rope, and twob ig rubber cubes sitting on the floor. The cubes were strapped tight with flat rubber belts.

Rafts.

He looked back at Lex.

She mouthed: No boat

He nodded, Yes.

The tyrannosaur raised its forelimb to swipe at the flies buzzing around its snout. But otherwise it did not move. Grant pulled one of the cubes out onto the dock. It was surprisingly heavy. He freed the straps, found the inflation cylinder. With a loud hiss, the rubber began to expand, and then with a hiss-whap! it popped fully open on the dock. The sound was fearfully loud in their ears.

Grant turned, stared up at the dinosaur.

The tyrannosaur grunted, and snorted. It began to move. Grant braced himself to run, but the animal shifted its ponderous bulk and then it settled back against the tree trunk and gave a long, growling belch.

Lex looked disgusted, waving her hand in front of her face.

Grant was soaked in sweat from the tension. He dragged the rubber raft across the dock. It flopped into the water with a loud splash.

The dinosaur continued to sleep.

Grant tied the boat up to the dock, and returned to the shed to take out two life preservers. He put these in the boat, and then waved for the kids to come out onto the dock.

Pale with fear, Lex waved back, No.

He gestured: Yes.

The tyrannosaur continued to sleep.

Grant stabbed in the air with an emphatic finger. Lex came silently, and he gestured for her to get into the raft; then Tim got in, and they both put on their life vests. Grant got in and pushed off. The raft drifted silently out into the lagoon. Grant picked up his paddles and fitted them into the oarlocks. They moved farther from the dock.

Lex sat back, and sighed loudly with relief. Then she looked stricken, and put her band over her mouth. Her body shook, with muffled sounds: she was suppressing a cough.

She always coughed at the wrong times!

"Lex," Tim whispered fiercely, looking back toward the shore.

She shook her head miserably, and pointed to her throat. He knew what she meant: a tickle in her throat. What she needed was a drink of water. Grant was rowing, and Tim leaned over the side of the raft and scooped his hand in the lagoon, holding his cupped hand toward her.

Lex coughed loudly, explosively. In Tim's ears, the sound echoed across the water like a gunshot.

The tyrannosaur yawned lazily, and scratched behind its ear with its hind foot, just like a dog. It yawned again. It was groggy after its big meal, and it woke up slowly.

On the boat, Lex was making little gargling sounds.

"Lex, shut up!" Tim said.

"I can't help it," she whispered, and then she coughed again. Grant rowed hard, moving the raft powerfully into the center of the lagoon.

On the shore, the tyrannosaur stumbled to its feet.

"I couldn't help it, Timmy!" Lex shrieked miserably. "I couldn't help it!"

"Shhhh!"

Grant was rowing as fast as he could.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter," she said. "We're far enough away. He can't swim.

"Of course he can swim, you little idiot!" Tim shouted at her. On the shore, the tyrannosaur stepped off the dock and plunged into the water. It moved strongly into the lagoon after them.

"Well, how should I know?" she said.

"Everybody knows tyrannosaurs can swim! It's in all the books! Anyway, all reptiles can swim!"

"Snakes can't."

"Of course snakes can. You idiot!"

"Settle down," Grant said. "Hold on to something!" Grant was watching the tyrannosaur, noticing how the animal swam. The tyrannosaur was now chest-deep in the water, but it could hold its big head high above the surface. Then Grant realized the animal wasn't swimming, it was walking, because moments later only the very top of the head-the eyes and nostrils-protruded above the surface. By then it looked like a crocodile, and it swam like a crocodile, swinging its big tail back and forth, so the water churned behind it. Behind the head, Grant saw the hump of the back, and the ridges along the length of tail, as it occasionally broke the surface.

Exactly like a crocodile, he thought unhappily. The biggest crocodile in the world.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Grant!" Lex wailed. "I didn't mean it!"

Grant glanced over his shoulder. The lagoon was no more than a hundred yards wide here, and they had almost reached the center. If he continued, the water would become shallow again. The tyrannosaur would be able to walk again, and he would move faster in shallow water. Grant swung the boat around, and began to row north.

"What are you doing?"

The tyrannosaur was now just a few yards away. Grant could hear its sharp snorting breaths as it came closer. Grant looked at the paddles in his hands, but they were light plastic-not weapons at all.

The tyrannosaur threw its head back and opened its jaws wide, showing rows of curved teeth, and then in a great muscular spasm lunged forward to the raft, just missing the rubber gunwale, the huge skull slapping down, the raft rocking away on the crest of the splash.

The tyrannosaur sank below the surface, leaving gurgling bubbles. The lagoon was still. Lex gripped the gunwale handles and looked back.

"Did he drown?"

"No," Grant said. He saw bubbles-then a faint ripple along the surface-coming toward the boat-

"Hang on!" he shouted, as the head bucked up beneath the rubber, bending the boat and lifting it into the air, spinning them crazily before it splashed down again.

"Do something!" Alexis screamed. "Do something!"

Grant pulled the air pistol out of his belt. It looked pitifully small in his hands, but there was the chance that, if he shot the animal in a sensitive spot, in the eye or the nose-

The tyrannosaur surfaced beside the boat, opened its jaws, and roared. Grant aimed, and fired. The dart flashed in the light, and smacked into the cheek. The tyrannosaur shook its head, and roared again.

And suddenly they heard an answering roar, floating across the water toward them.

Looking back, Grant saw the juvenile T-rex on the shore, crouched over the killed sauropod, claiming the kill as its own. The juvenile slashed at the carcass, then raised its head high and bellowed. The big tyrannosaur saw it, too, and the response was immediate-it turned back to protect its kill, swimming strongly toward the shore.

"He's going away!" Lex squealed, clapping her hands. "He's going away! Naah-naah-na-na-naah! Stupid dinosaur!"

From the shore, the juvenile roared defiantly. Enraged, the big tyrannosaur burst from the lagoon at full speed, water streaming from its enormous body as it raced up the hill past the dock. The juvenile ducked its head and fled, its jaws still filled with ragged flesh.

The big tyrannosaur chased it, racing past the dead sauropod, disappearing over the hill. They heard its final threatening bellow, and then the raft moved to the north, around a bend in the lagoon, to the river.

Exhausted from rowing, Grant collapsed back, his chest heaving. He couldn't catch his breath. He lay gasping in the raft.

"Are you okay, Dr. Grant?" Lex asked.

"From now on, will you just do what I tell you?"

'Oh-kay, " she sighed, as if he had just made the most unreasonable demand in the world. She trailed her arm in the water for a while. "You stopped rowing," she said.

"I'm tired," Grant said.

"Then how come we're still moving?"

Grant sat up. She was right. The raft drifted steadily north. "There must be a current." The current was carrying them north, toward the hotel. He looked at his watch and was astonished to see it was fifteen minutes past seven. Only fifteen minutes had passed since he had last looked at his watch. It seemed like two hours.

Grant lay back against the rubber gunwales, closed his eyes, and slept.