The Lost World Page 14

“Fine, Kel.” His eyes were heavy. He realized he couldn’t keep them open.

  “But”—she yawned again—“maybe I’ll just lie down for a minute.”

  He saw her stretch out on the bed opposite him, and then his eyes closed, and he was immediately asleep. He dreamed he was back in the airplane, feeling the gentle rocking motion, hearing the deep rumble of the engines. He slept lightly, and at one moment woke up, convinced that the trailer actually was rocking, and that there really was a low rumbling sound, coming from right outside the window. But almost immediately he was asleep again, and now he dreamed of dinosaurs, Kelly’s dinosaurs, and in his light sleep there were two animals, so huge that he could not see their heads through the window, only their thick scaly legs as they thumped on the ground and walked past the trailer. But in his dream the second animal paused, and bent over, and the big head peered in curiously through the window, and Arby realized that he was seeing the giant head of a Tyrannosaurus rex, the great jaws working, the white teeth glinting in the sunlight, and in his dream he watched it all calmly, and slept on.

  Interior

  Two large swinging glass doors at the front of the main building led into a darkened lobby beyond. The glass was scratched and dirty, the chrome door-handles pitted with corrosion. But it was clear that the dust, debris, and dead leaves in front of the doorway had been disturbed in twin arcs.

  “Somebody’s opened these doors recently,” Eddie said.

  “Yes,” Thorne said. “Somebody wearing Asolo boots.” He opened the door. “Shall we?”

  They stepped into the building. Inside, the air was hot and still and fetid. The lobby was small and unimpressive. A reception counter directly ahead was once covered with gray fabric, now overgrown with a dark, lichen-like growth. On the wall behind was a row of chrome letters that said “We Make The Future,” but the words were obscured by a tangle of vines. Mushrooms and fungi sprouted from the carpet. Over to the right, they saw a waiting area, with a coffee table, and two long couches.

  One of the couches was speckled with crusty brown mold; the other had been covered with a plastic tarp. Next to this couch was what was left of Levine’s green backpack, with several deep tears in the fabric. On the coffee table were two empty plastic Evian bottles, a satellite phone, a pair of muddy hiking shorts, and several crumpled candy-bar wrappers. A bright-green snake slithered quickly away as they approached.

  “So this is an InGen building?” Thorne said, looking at the wall sign.

  “Absolutely,” Malcolm said.

  Eddie bent over Levine’s backpack, ran his fingers along the tears in the fabric. As he did so, a large rat jumped out from the pack.

  “Jesus!”

  The rat scurried away, squeaking. Eddie looked cautiously inside the pack. “I don’t think anybody’s going to want the rest of these candy bars,” he said. He turned to the pile of clothes. “You getting a reading from this?” Some of the expedition clothes had micro-sensors sewn into them.

  “No,” Thorne said, moving his hand monitor. “I have a reading, but . . . it seems to be coming from there.”

  He pointed to a set of metal doors beyond the reception desk, leading into the building beyond. The doors had once been bolted shut and locked with rusted padlocks. But the padlocks now lay on the floor, broken open.

  “Let’s go get him,” Eddie said, heading for the doors. “What kind of a snake do you think that was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it poisonous?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The doors opened with a loud creak. The three men found themselves in a blank corridor, with broken windows along one wall, and dried leaves and debris on the floor. The walls were dirty and darkly stained in several places with what looked like blood. They saw several doors opening off the corridor. None appeared to be locked.

  Plants were growing up through rips in the carpeted floor. Near the windows, where it was light, vines grew thickly over the cracked walls. More vines hung down from the ceiling. Thorne and the others headed down the hallway. There was no sound except their feet crunching on the dried leaves.

  “Getting stronger,” Thorne said, looking at his monitor. “He must be somewhere in this building.”

  Thorne opened the first door he came to, and saw a plain office: a desk and chair, a map of the island on the wall. A desk lamp, toppled over from the weight of tangled vines. A computer monitor, with a film of mold. At the far end of the room, light filtered through a grimy window.

  They went down the hall to the second door, and saw an almost identical office: similar desk and chair, similar window at the far side of the room.

  Eddie grunted. “Looks like we’re in an office building,” he said.

  Thorne went on. He opened the third door, and then the fourth. More offices.

  Thorne opened the fifth door, and paused.

  He was in a conference room, dirty with leaves and debris. There were animal droppings on the long wooden table in the center of the room. The window on the far side was dusty. Thorne was drawn to a large map, which covered one whole wall of the conference room. There were pushpins of various colors stuck in the map. Eddie came in, and frowned.

  Beneath the map was a chest of drawers. Thorne tried to open them, but they were all locked. Malcolm walked slowly into the room, looking around, taking it in. “What’s this map mean?” Eddie said. “You have any idea what the pins are?”

  Malcolm glanced at it. “Twenty pins in four different colors. Five pins of each color. Arranged in a pentagon, or anyway a five-pronged pattern of some kind, going to all parts of the island. I’d say it looks like a network.”

  “Didn’t Arby say there was a network on this island?”

  “Yes, he did. . . . Interesting . . .”

  “Well, never mind that now,” Thorne said. He went back into the hallway again, following the signal from his hand unit. Malcolm closed the door behind them, and they continued on. They saw more offices, but no longer opened the doors. They followed the signal from Levine.

  At the end of the corridor was a pair of sliding glass doors marked NO ADMITTANCE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Thorne peered through the glass, but he could not see much beyond. He had the sense of a large space, and complex machinery, but the glass was dusty and streaked with grime. It was difficult to see.

  Thorne said to Malcolm, “You really think you know what this building was for?”

  “I know exactly what it was for,” Malcolm said. “It’s a manufacturing plant for dinosaurs.”

  “Why,” Eddie said, “would anybody want that?”

  “Nobody would,” Malcolm said. “That’s why they kept it a secret.”

  “I don’t get it,” Eddie said.

  Malcolm smiled. “Long story,” he said.

  He slipped his hands between the doors, and tried to pull them open, but they remained shut fast. He grunted, straining with effort. And then suddenly, with a metallic screech, they slid apart.

  They stepped into the darkness beyond.

  Their flashlights shone down an inky corridor, as they moved forward. “To understand this place, you have to go back ten years, to a man named John Hammond, and an animal called the quagga.”

  “The what?”

  “The quagga,” Malcolm said, “is an African mammal, rather like a zebra. It became extinct in the last century. But in the 1980s, somebody used the latest DNA-extraction techniques on a piece of quagga hide, and recovered a lot of DNA. So much DNA that people began to talk about bringing the quagga back to life. And if you could bring the quagga back to life, why not other extinct animals? The dodo? The saber-toothed tiger? Or even a dinosaur?”

  “Where could you get dinosaur DNA?” Thorne said.

  “Actually,” Malcolm said, “paleontologists have been finding fragments of dinosaur DNA for years. They never said much about it, because they never had enough material to use it as a classification tool. So it didn’t seem to have any value; it was just a curiosity.”
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  “But to re-create an animal, you’d need more than DNA fragments,” Thorne said. “You’d need the whole strand.”

  “That’s right,” Malcolm said. “And the man who figured out how to get it was a venture capitalist named John Hammond. He reasoned that, when dinosaurs were alive, insects probably bit them, and sucked their blood, just as insects do today. And some of those insects would afterward land on a branch, and be trapped in sticky sap. And some of that sap would harden into amber. Hammond decided that, if you drilled into insects preserved in amber, and extracted the stomach contents, you would eventually get some dino-DNA.”

  “And did he?”

  “Yes. He did. And he started InGen, to develop this discovery. Hammond was a hustler, and his true talent was raising money. He figured out how to get enough money to do the research to go from a DNA strand to a living animal. Sources of funding weren’t immediately apparent. Because, although it would be exciting to re-create a dinosaur, it wasn’t exactly a cure for cancer.

  “So he decided to make a tourist attraction. He planned to recover the cost of the dinosaurs by putting them in a kind of zoo or theme park, where he would charge admission.”

  “Are you joking?” Thorne said.

  “No. Hammond actually did it. He built his park on an island called Isla Nublar, north of here, and he planned to open it to the public in late 1989. I went to see the place myself, shortly before it was scheduled to open. But it turned out Hammond had problems,” Malcolm said. “The park systems broke down, and the dinosaurs got free. Some visitors were killed. Afterward, the park and all its dinosaurs were destroyed.”

  They passed a window where they could look out over the plain, at the herds of dinosaurs browsing by the river. Thorne said, “If they were all destroyed, what’s this island?”

  “This island,” Malcolm said, “is Hammond’s dirty little secret. It’s the dark side of his park.”

  They continued down the corridor.

  “You see,” Malcolm said, “visitors to Hammond’s park at Isla Nublar were shown a very impressive genetics lab, with computers and gene sequencers, and all sorts of facilities for hatching and growing young dinosaurs. Visitors were told that the dinosaurs were created right there at the park. And the laboratory tour was entirely convincing.

  “But actually, Hammond’s tour skipped several steps in the process. In one room, he showed you dinosaur DNA being extracted. In the next room, he showed you eggs about to hatch. It was very dramatic, but how had he gotten from DNA to a viable embryo? You never saw that critical step. It was just presented as having happened, between rooms.

  “The fact was, Hammond’s whole show was too good to be true. For example, he had a hatchery where the little dinosaurs pecked their way out of the eggs, while you watched in amazement. But there were never any problems in the hatchery. No stillbirths, no deformities, no difficulties of any sort. In Hammond’s presentation, this dazzling technology was carried off without a hitch.

  “And if you think about it, it couldn’t possibly be true. Hammond was claiming to manufacture extinct animals using cutting-edge technology. But with any new manufacturing technology, initial yields are low: on the order of one percent or less. So in fact, Hammond must have been growing thousands of dinosaur embryos to get a single live birth. That implied a giant industrial operation, not the spotless little laboratory we were shown.”

  “You mean this place,” Thorne said.

  “Yes. Here, on another island, in secret, away from public scrutiny, Hammond was free to do his research, and deal with the unpleasant truth behind his beautiful little park. Hammond’s little genetic zoo was a showcase. But this island was the real thing. This is where the dinosaurs were made.”

  “If the animals at the zoo were destroyed,” Eddie said, “how come they weren’t destroyed on this island, too?”

  “A critical question,” Malcolm said. “We should know the answer in a few minutes.” He shone his light down the tunnel; it glinted off glass walls. “Because, if I am not mistaken,” he said, “the first of the manufacturing bays is just ahead.”

  Arby

  Arby awoke, sitting upright in bed, blinking his eyes in the morning light that streamed in through the trailer windows. In the next bunk, Kelly was still asleep, snoring loudly.

  He looked out the window at the entrance to the big building, and saw that the adults were gone. The Explorer was standing by the entrance, but there was no one inside the car. Their trailer sat isolated in the clearing of tall grass. Arby felt entirely alone—frighteningly alone—and a sudden sense of panic made his heart pound. He never should have come here, he thought. The whole idea was stupid. And worst of all, it had been his plan. The way they had huddled together in the trailer, and then had gone back to Thorne’s office. And Kelly had talked to Thorne, so that Arby could steal the key. The way he had set up a delayed radio message to be transmitted to Thorne so that Thorne would think they were still in Woodside. Arby had felt very clever at the time, but now he regretted it all. He decided that he had to call Thorne immediately. He had to turn himself in. He was filled with an overwhelming desire to confess.

  He needed to hear somebody’s voice. That was the truth.

  He walked from the back of the trailer, where Kelly was sleeping, to the front, and turned on the ignition key in the dashboard. He picked up the radio handset and said, “This is Arby. Is anybody there? Over. This is Arby.”

  But nobody answered. After a moment, he looked at the dashboard systems monitor, which registered all the systems that were operative. He didn’t see anything about communications. It occurred to him that the communications system was probably hooked into the computer. He decided to turn the computer on.

  So he went back to the middle of the trailer, unstrapped the keyboard, plugged it in, and turned the computer on. There was a menu screen that said “Thorne Field Systems” and underneath that a listing of subsystems inside the trailer. One of them was radio communications. So he clicked on that, and turned it on.

  The computer screen showed a scrambled hash of static. At the bottom was a command line that read: “Multiple Frequency Inputs Received. Do you want to Autotune?”

  Arby didn’t know what that meant, but he was fearless around computers. Autotune sounded interesting. Without hesitation, he typed “Yes.”

  The static scramble remained on the screen, while numbers rolled at the bottom. He guessed he was seeing frequencies in megahertz. But he didn’t really know.

  And then, suddenly, the screen went blank, except for a single flashing word in the upper-left corner:

  LOGIN:

  He paused, frowning. That was odd. Apparently he was required to log into the trailer’s computer system. That meant he would need a password. He tried: THORNE.

  Nothing happened.

  He waited a moment, then tried Thorne’s initials: JT.

  Nothing.

  LEVINE.

  Nothing.

  THORNE FIELD SYSTEMS.

  Nothing.

  TFS.

  Nothing.

  FIELD.

  Nothing.

  USER.

  Nothing.

  Well, he thought, at least the system hadn’t dumped him out. Most networks logged you off after three wrong tries. But apparently Thorne hadn’t designed any security features into this one. Arby would never have made it this way. The system was too patient and helpful.

  He tried: HELP.

  The cursor moved to another line. There was a pause. The drives whirred.

  “Action,” he said, rubbing his hands.

  Laboratory

  As Thorne’s eyes adjusted to the low light, he saw they were standing inside an enormous space, consisting of row after row of rectangular stainless-steel boxes, each fitted with a tangled maze of plastic tubing. Everything was dusty; many of the boxes were knocked over.

  “The first rows,” Malcolm said, “are Nishihara gene sequencers. And beyond are the automatic DNA synthesizers.”<
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  “It’s a factory,” Eddie said. “It’s like agribusiness or something.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  At the corner of the room was a printer, with some loose sheets of yellowing paper lying beside it. Malcolm picked up one, and glanced at it.

  “It’s a reference to a computer database,” Malcolm said. “For some dinosaur blood factor. Something to do with red cells.”

  “And is that the sequence?”

  “No,” Malcolm said. He started shuffling through the papers. “No, the sequence should be a series of nucleotides. . . . Here.”

  He picked up another sheet of paper.

  SEQUENCE

  “Does this have something to do with why the animals survived?” Thorne said.

  “I’m not sure,” Malcolm said. Was this sheet related to the final days of the manufacturing facility? Or was it just something that a worker printed out years ago, and somehow left behind?

  He looked around by the printer, and found a shelved stack of sheets. Pulling them out, he discovered that they were memos. They were on faded blue paper, and they were all brief.

  From: CC/D-P. Jenkins

  To: H. Wu

  Excess dopamine in Alpha 5 means D1 receptor still not functioning with desired avidity. To minimize aggressive behavior in finished orgs must try alternate genetic backgrounds. We need to start this today.

  And again:

  From: CC/D

  To: H. Wu/Sup

  Isolated glycogen synthase kinase-3 from Xenopus may work better than mammalian GSK-3 alpha/beta currently in use. Anticipate more robust establishment of dorsoventral polarity and less early embryo wastage. Agree?

  Malcolm looked at the next one:

  From: Backes

  To: H. Wu/Sup

  Short protein fragments may be acting as prions. Sourcing doubtful but suggest halt all exogenous protein for carniv. orgs until origin is cleared up. Disease cannot continue!