The Lost World Page 15

  Thorne looked over his shoulder. “Seems like they had problems,” he said.

  “Undoubtedly they did,” Malcolm said. “It would be impossible not to have them. But the question is . . .”

  He drifted off, staring at the next memo, which was longer.

  INGEN PRODUCTION UPDATE 10/10/88

  From: Lori Ruso

  To: All Personnel

  Subject: Low Production Yields

  Recent episodes of wastage of successful live births in the period 24–72 hours post-hatching have been traced to contamination from Escherichia coli bacteria. These have cut production yields by 60%, and arise from inadequate sterile precautions by floor personnel, principally during Process H (Egg Maintenance Phase, Hormone Enhancement 2G/H).

  Komera swing arms have been replaced and re-sleeved on robots 5A and 7D, but needle replacement must still be done daily in accordance with sterile conditions (General Manual: Guideline 5–9).

  During the next production cycle (10/12–10/26) we will sacrifice every tenth egg at H Step to test for contamination. Begin set-asides at once. Report all errors. Stop the line whenever necessary until this is cleared up.

  “They had problems with infection, and contamination of the production line,” Malcolm said. “And maybe other sources of contamination as well. Look at this.”

  He handed Thorne the next memo:

  INGEN PRODUCTION UPDATE 12/18/88

  From: H. Wu

  To: All Personnel

  Subject: DX: TAG AND RELEASE

  Live births will be fitted with the new Grumbach field tags at the earliest viable interval. Formula or other feeding within the laboratory confines will no longer be done. The release program is now fully operational and tracking networks are activated to monitor.

  Thorne said, “Does this mean what I think it means?”

  “Yes,” Malcolm said. “They were having trouble keeping the newborn animals alive, so they tagged them and released them.”

  “And kept track of them on some kind of network?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “They set dinosaurs loose on this island?” Eddie said. “They must have been crazy.”

  “Desperate, is more like it,” Malcolm said. “Just imagine: here’s this huge expensive high-tech process, and in the end the animals are getting sick and dying. Hammond must have been furious. So they decided to get the animals out of the laboratory, and into the wild.”

  “But why didn’t they find the cause of the sickness, why didn’t they—”

  “Commercial process,” Malcolm said. “It’s all about results. And I’m sure they thought they were keeping track of the animals, they could get them back anytime they wanted. And don’t forget, it must have worked. They must have put the animals into the field, then collected them after a while, when they were older, and shipped them to Hammond’s zoo.”

  “But not all of them. . . .”

  “We don’t know everything yet,” Malcolm said. “We don’t know what happened here.”

  They went through the next doorway, and found themselves in a small, bare room, with a central bench, and lockers on the walls. Signs said OBSERVE STERILE PRECAUTIONS and MAINTAIN SK4 STANDARDS. At the end of the room was a cabinet with stacks of yellowing gowns and caps. Eddie said, “It’s a changing room.”

  “Looks like it,” Malcolm said. He opened a locker; it was empty, except for a pair of men’s shoes. He opened several other lockers. They were all empty. Inside one, a sheet of paper was taped:

  Safety Is Everybody’s Business!

  Report Genetic Anomalies!

  Dispose of Biowaste Properly!

  Halt the Spread of DX Now!

  “What’s DX?” Eddie said.

  “I think,” Malcolm said, “it’s the name for this mysterious disease.”

  At the far end of the changing room were two doors. The right-hand door was pneumatic, operated by a rubber foot-panel set in the floor. But that door was locked, so they went through the left door, which opened freely.

  They found themselves in a long corridor, with floor-to-ceiling glass panels along the right wall. The glass was scratched and dirty, but they peered through it into the room beyond, which was unlike anything Thorne had ever seen.

  The space was vast, the size of a football field. Conveyor belts crisscrossed the room at two levels, one very high, the other at waist level. At various stations around the room, clusters of large machinery, with intricate tubing and swing arms, stood beside the belts.

  Thorne shone his light on the conveyor belts. “An assembly line,” he said.

  “But it looks untouched, like it’s still ready to go,” Malcolm said. “There are a couple of plants growing through the floor over there, but, overall, remarkably clean.”

  “Too clean,” Eddie said.

  Thorne shrugged. “If it’s a clean-room environment, then it’s probably air-sealed,” he said. “I guess it just stayed the way it was years ago.”

  Eddie shook his head. “For years? Doc, I don’t think so.”

  “Then what do you think explains it?”

  Malcolm frowned, peering through the glass. How was it possible for a room this size to remain clean after so many years? It didn’t make any—

  “Hey!” Eddie said.

  Malcolm saw it, too. It was in the far corner of the room, a small blue box halfway up the wall, cables running into it. It was obviously some kind of electrical junction box. Mounted on the box was a tiny red light.

  It was glowing.

  “This place has power!”

  Thorne moved close to the glass, looking through with them. “That’s impossible. It must be some kind of stored charge, or a battery. . . .”

  “After five years? No battery can last that long,” Eddie said. “I’m telling you, Doc, this place has power!”

  Arby stared at the monitor as white lettering slowly printed across the screen:

  ARE YOU FIRST-TIME USER OF THE NETWORK?

  He typed:

  YES.

  There was another pause.

  He waited.

  More letters slowly appeared:

  YOUR FULL NAME?

  He typed in his name.

  DO YOU WANT A PASSWORD ISSUED TO YOU?

  You’re kidding, he thought. This was going to be a snap. It was almost disappointing. He really thought Dr. Thorne would have been more clever. He typed:

  YES.

  After a moment:

  YOUR NEW PASSWORD IS VIG/&*849/. PLEASE MAKE A NOTE OF IT.

  Sure thing, Arby thought. You bet I will. There was no paper on the desk in front of him; he patted his pockets, found a scrap of paper, and wrote it down.

  PLEASE RE-ENTER YOUR PASSWORD NOW.

  He typed in the series of characters and numbers.

  There was another pause, and then more printing appeared across the screen. The speed of the printing was oddly slow, and halting at times. After all this time, maybe the system wasn’t working very—

  THANK YOU. PASSWORD CONFIRMED.

  The screen flashed, and suddenly turned dark blue. There was an electronic chime.

  And then Arby’s jaw dropped open as he stared at the screen, which read:

  INTERNATIONAL GENETIC TECHNOLOGIES

  SITE B

  LOCAL NODE NETWORK SERVICES

  It didn’t make any sense. How could there be a Site B network? InGen had closed Site B years ago. Arby had already read the documents. And InGen was out of business, long since bankrupt. What network? he thought. And how had he managed to get on it? The trailer wasn’t connected to anything. There were no cables or anything. So it must be a radio network, already on the island. Somehow he’d managed to log onto it. But how could it exist? A radio network needed power, and there was no power here.

  Arby waited.

  Nothing happened. The words just sat there on the screen. He waited for a menu to come up, but one never did. Arby began to think that perhaps the system was defunct. Or hung up. Maybe it j
ust let you log on, and then nothing happened after that.

  Or maybe, he thought, he was supposed to do something. He did the simplest thing, which was to press return.

  He saw:

  So it really was an old system: files hadn’t been modified for years. Wondering if it still worked, he clicked on video network. And to his amazement, he saw the screen begin to fill with tiny video images. There were fifteen in all, crowding the screen, showing views of various parts of the island. Most of the cameras seemed to be mounted high up, in trees or something, and they showed—

  He stared.

  They showed dinosaurs.

  He squinted. It wasn’t possible. These were movies or something he was seeing. Because in one corner he saw a herd of triceratops. In an adjacent square, some green lizard-looking things, in high grass, with just their heads sticking up. In another, a single stegosaurus, ambling along.

  They must be movies, he thought. The dinosaur channel.

  But then, in another image, Arby saw the two connected trailers standing in the clearing. He could see the black photovoltaic panels glistening on the roof. He almost imagined he could see himself, through the window of the trailer.

  Oh, my God, he thought.

  And in another image, he saw Thorne and Malcolm and Eddie get quickly into the green Explorer, and drive around the back of the laboratory. And he realized with a shock:

  The pictures were all real.

  Power

  They drove the Explorer to the back of the main building, heading for the power station. On the way, they passed a little village to their right. Thorne saw six plantation-style cottages and a larger building marked “Manager’s Residence.” It was clear that the cottages had once been nicely landscaped, but they were now overgrown, partially retaken by the jungle. In the center of the complex, they saw a tennis court, a drained swimming pool, a small gas pump in front of what looked like a little general store.

  Thorne said, “I wonder how many people they had here?”

  Eddie said, “How do you know they’re all gone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Doc—they have power. After all these years. There has to be an explanation for it.” Eddie steered the car around the back of the loading bays, and drove toward the power station, directly ahead.

  The power station was a windowless, featureless concrete blockhouse, marked only by a corrugated-steel rim for ventilation around the top. The steel vents were long since rusted a uniform brown, with flecks of yellow.

  Eddie drove the car around the block, looking for a door. He found it at the back. It was a heavy steel door, with a peeling, painted sign that said: CAUTION HIGH VOLTAGE DO NOT ENTER.

  Eddie jumped out of the car, and the others followed. Thorne sniffed the air. “Sulfur,” he said.

  “Very strong,” Malcolm said, nodding.

  Eddie tugged at the door. “Guys, I got a feeling . . .”

  The door opened suddenly with a clang, banging against the concrete wall. Eddie peered into darkness inside. Thorne saw a dense maze of pipes, a trickle of steam coming out of the floor. The room was extremely hot. There was a loud, constant whirring sound.

  Eddie said, “I’ll be damned.” He walked forward, looking at the gauges, many of which were unreadable, the glass thickly coated with yellow. The joints of the pipes were also rimmed with yellow crust. Eddie wiped away some of the crust with his finger. “Amazing,” he said.

  “Sulfur?”

  “Yeah, sulfur. Amazing.” He turned toward the source of the sound, saw a large circular vent, a turbine inside. The turbine blades, spinning rapidly, were dull yellow.

  “And that’s sulfur, too?” Thorne said.

  “No,” Eddie said. “That must be gold. Those turbine blades are gold alloy.”

  “Gold?”

  “Yeah. It would have to be very inert.” He turned to Thorne. “You realize what all this is? It’s incredible. So compact and efficient. Nobody has figured out how to do this. The technology is—”

  “You’re saying it’s geothermal?” Malcolm said.

  “That’s right,” Eddie said. “They’ve tapped a heat source here, probably gas or steam, which is piped up through the floor over there. Then the heat is used to boil water in a closed cycle—that’s the network of pipes up there—and turn the turbine—there—which makes electric power. Whatever the heat source, geothermal’s almost always corrosive as hell. Most places, maintenance is brutal. But this plant still works. Amazing.”

  Along one wall was a main panel, which distributed power to the entire laboratory complex. The panel was flecked with mold, and dented in several spots.

  “Doesn’t look like anybody’s been in here in years,” he said. “And a lot of the power grid is dead. But the plant itself is still going—incredible.”

  Thorne coughed in the sulfurous air, and walked back into the sunlight. He looked up at the rear of the laboratory. One of the loading bays seemed in good shape, but the other had collapsed. The glass at the rear of the building was shattered.

  Malcolm came to stand beside him. “I wonder if an animal hit the building.”

  “You think an animal could do that much damage?”

  Malcolm nodded. “Some of these dinosaurs weigh forty, fifty tons. A single animal has the mass of a whole herd of elephants. That could easily be damage from an animal, yes. You notice that path, running there? That’s a game trail going past the loading bays, and down the hill. It could have been animals, yes.”

  Thorne said, “Didn’t they think of that when they released the animals in the first place?”

  “Oh, I’m sure they just planned to release them for a few weeks or months, then round them up when they were still juvenile. I doubt they ever thought they—”

  They were interrupted by a crackling electrical hiss, like static. It was coming from inside the Explorer. Behind them, Eddie hurried toward the car, with a worried look.

  “I knew it,” Eddie said. “Our communications module is frying. I knew we should have put in the other one.” He opened the door to the Explorer and climbed in the passenger side, picked up the handset, pressed the automatic tuner. Through the windshield, he saw Thorne and Malcolm coming back toward the car.

  And then the transmission locked. “—into the car!” said a scratchy voice.

  “Who is this?”

  “Dr. Thorne! Dr. Malcolm! Get in the car!”

  As Thorne arrived, Eddie said, “Doc. It’s that damn kid.”

  “What?” Thorne said.

  “It’s Arby.”

  Over the radio, Arby was saying, “Get in the car! I can see it coming!”

  “What’s he talking about?” Thorne said, frowning. “He’s not here, is he? Is he on this island?”

  The radio crackled. “Yes, I’m here! Dr. Thorne!”

  “But how the hell did he—”

  “Dr. Thorne! Get in the car!”

  Thorne turned purple with anger. He bunched his fists. “How did that little son of a bitch manage to do this?” He grabbed the handset from Eddie. “Arby, God damn it—”

  “It’s coming!”

  Eddie said, “What’s he talking about? He sounds completely hysterical.”

  “I can see it on the television! Dr. Thorne!”

  Malcolm looked around at the jungle. “Maybe we should get in the car,” he said quietly.

  “What does he mean, television?” Thorne said. He was furious.

  Eddie said, “I don’t know, Doc, but if he’s got a feed in the trailer, we can see it too.” He flicked on the dashboard monitor. He watched as the screen glowed to life.

  “That damn kid,” Thorne said. “I’m going to wring his neck.”

  “I thought you liked that kid,” Malcolm said.

  “I do, but—”

  “Chaos at work,” Malcolm said, shaking his head.

  Eddie was looking at the monitor.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  On the tiny dashboard monitor, they h
ad a view looking straight down at the powerful body of a Tyrannosaurus rex, as it moved up the game trail toward them. Its skin was a mottled reddish brown, the color of dried blood. In dappled sunlight, they could clearly see the powerful muscles of its haunches. The animal moved quickly, without any sign of fear or hesitation.

  Staring, Thorne said, “Everybody in the car.”

  The men climbed hurriedly in. On the monitor, the tyrannosaur moved out of view of the camera. But, sitting in the Explorer, they could hear it coming. The earth was shaking beneath them, swaying the car slightly.

  Thorne said, “Ian? What do you think we should do?”

  Malcolm didn’t answer. He was frozen, staring forward, eyes blank.

  “Ian?” Thorne said.

  The radio clicked. Arby said, “Dr. Thorne, I’ve lost him on the monitor. Can you see him yet?”

  “Jesus,” Eddie said.

  With astonishing speed the Tyrannosaurus rex burst into view, emerging from the foliage to the right of the Explorer. The animal was immense, the size of a two-storey building, its head rising high above them, out of sight. Yet for such a large creature it moved with incredible speed and agility. Thorne stared in stunned silence, waiting to see what would happen. He felt the car vibrate with each thundering footstep. Eddie moaned softly.

  But the tyrannosaur ignored them. Continuing at the same rapid pace, it moved swiftly past the front of the Explorer. They hardly had a chance to see it before its big head and body disappeared into the foliage to the left. Now they saw only the thick counterbalancing tail, some seven feet in the air, swinging back and forth with each footstep as the animal moved on.

  So fast! Thorne thought. Fast! The giant animal had emerged, blocked their vision, and then was gone again. He was not accustomed to seeing something that big move so fast. Now there was only the tip of the tail swinging back and forth as the animal hurried away.