Jurassic Park Read online

  “And there are other puzzles,” Morris said. “For example, what is the relationship of dinosaurs to amber?”

  “Amber?”

  “Yes. It’s the hard yellow resin of dried tree sap—”

  “I know what it is,” Grant said. “But why are you asking?”

  “Because,” Morris said, “over the last five years, Hammond has purchased enormous quantities of amber in America, Europe, and Asia, including many pieces of museum-quality jewelry. The foundation has spent seventeen million dollars on amber. They now possess the largest privately held stock of this material in the world.”

  “I don’t get it,” Grant said.

  “Neither does anybody else,” Morris said. “As far as we can tell, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Amber is easily synthesized. It has no commercial or defense value. There’s no reason to stockpile it. But Hammond has done just that, over many years.”

  “Amber,” Grant said, shaking his head.

  “And what about his island in Costa Rica?” Morris continued. “Ten years ago, the Hammond Foundation leased an island from the government of Costa Rica. Supposedly to set up a biological preserve.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Grant said, frowning.

  “I haven’t been able to find out much,” Morris said. “The island is a hundred miles off the west coast. It’s very rugged, and it’s in an area of ocean where the combinations of wind and current make it almost perpetually covered in fog. They used to call it Cloud Island. Isla Nublar. Apparently the Costa Ricans were amazed that anybody would want it.” Morris searched in his briefcase. “The reason I mention it,” he said, “is that, according to the records, you were paid a consultant’s fee in connection with this island.”

  “I was?” Grant said.

  Morris passed a sheet of paper to Grant. It was the Xerox of a check issued in March 1984 from InGen Inc., Farallon Road, Palo Alto, California. Made out to Alan Grant in the amount of twelve thousand dollars. At the lower corner, the check was marked CONSULTANT SERVICES/COSTA RICA/JUVENILE HYPERSPACE.

  “Oh, sure,” Grant said. “I remember that. It was weird as hell, but I remember it. And it didn’t have anything to do with an island.”

  Alan Grant had found the first clutch of dinosaur eggs in Montana in 1979, and many more in the next two years, but he hadn’t gotten around to publishing his findings until 1983. His paper, with its report of a herd of ten thousand duckbilled dinosaurs living along the shore of a vast inland sea, building communal nests of eggs in the mud, raising their infant dinosaurs in the herd, made Grant a celebrity overnight. The notion of maternal instincts in giant dinosaurs—and the drawings of cute babies poking their snouts out of the eggs—had appeal around the world. Grant was besieged with requests for interviews, lectures, books. Characteristically, he turned them all down, wanting only to continue his excavations. But it was during those frantic days of the mid-1980s that he was approached by the InGen corporation with a request for consulting services.

  “Had you heard of InGen before?” Morris asked.

  “No.”

  “How did they contact you?”

  “Telephone call. It was a man named Gennaro or Gennino, something like that.”

  Morris nodded. “Donald Gennaro,” he said. “He’s the legal counsel for InGen.”

  “Anyway, he wanted to know about eating habits of dinosaurs. And he offered me a fee to draw up a paper for him.” Grant drank his beer, set the can on the floor. “Gennaro was particularly interested in young dinosaurs. Infants and juveniles. What they ate. I guess he thought I would know about that.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not really, no. I told him that. We had found lots of skeletal material, but we had very little dietary data. But Gennaro said he knew we hadn’t published everything, and he wanted whatever we had. And he offered a very large fee. Fifty thousand dollars.”

  Morris took out a tape recorder and set it on the endtable. “You mind?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  “So Gennaro telephoned you in 1984. What happened then?”

  “Well,” Grant said. “You see our operation here. Fifty thousand would support two full summers of digging. I told him I’d do what I could.”

  “So you agreed to prepare a paper for him.”

  “Yes.”

  “On the dietary habits of juvenile dinosaurs?”

  “Yes.”

  “You met Gennaro?”

  “No. Just on the phone.”

  “Did Gennaro say why he wanted this information?”

  “Yes,” Grant said. “He was planning a museum for children, and he wanted to feature baby dinosaurs. He said he was hiring a number of academic consultants, and named them. There were paleontologists like me, and a mathematician from Texas named Ian Malcolm, and a couple of ecologists. A systems analyst. Good group.”

  Morris nodded, making notes. “So you accepted the consultancy?”

  “Yes. I agreed to send him a summary of our work: what we knew about the habits of the duckbilled hadrosaurs we’d found.”

  “What kind of information did you send?” Morris asked.

  “Everything: nesting behavior, territorial ranges, feeding behavior, social behavior. Everything.”

  “And how did Gennaro respond?”

  “He kept calling and calling. Sometimes in the middle of the night. Would the dinosaurs eat this? Would they eat that? Should the exhibit include this? I could never understand why he was so worked up. I mean, I think dinosaurs are important, too, but not that important. They’ve been dead sixty-five million years. You’d think his calls could wait until morning.”

  “I see,” Morris said. “And the fifty thousand dollars?”

  Grant shook his head. “I got tired of Gennaro and called the whole thing off. We settled up for twelve thousand. That must have been about the middle of ’85.”

  Morris made a note. “And InGen? Any other contact with them?”

  “Not since 1985.”

  “And when did the Hammond Foundation begin to fund your research?”

  “I’d have to look,” Grant said. “But it was around then. Mid-eighties.”

  “And you know Hammond as just a rich dinosaur enthusiast.”

  “Yes.”

  Morris made another note.

  “Look,” Grant said. “If the EPA is so concerned about John Hammond and what he’s doing—the dinosaur sites in the north, the amber purchases, the island in Costa Rica—why don’t you just ask him about it?”

  “At the moment, we can’t,” Morris said.

  “Why not?” Grant said.

  “Because we don’t have any evidence of wrongdoing,” Morris said. “But personally, I think it’s clear John Hammond is evading the law.”

  “I was first contacted,” Morris explained, “by the Office of Technology Transfer. The OTT monitors shipments of American technology which might have military significance. They called to say that InGen had two areas of possible illegal technology transfer. First, InGen shipped three Cray XMPs to Costa Rica. InGen characterized it as a transfer within corporate divisions, and said they weren’t for resale. But OTT couldn’t imagine why the hell somebody’d need that power in Costa Rica.”

  “Three Crays,” Grant said. “Is that a kind of computer?”

  Morris nodded. “Very powerful supercomputers. To put it in perspective, three Crays represent more computing power than any other privately held company in America. And InGen sent the machines to Costa Rica. You have to wonder why.”

  “I give up. Why?” Grant said.

  “Nobody knows. And the Hoods are even more worrisome,” Morris continued. “Hoods are automated gene sequencers—machines that work out the genetic code by themselves. They’re so new that they haven’t been put on the restricted lists yet. But any genetic engineering lab is likely to have one, if it can afford the half-million-dollar price tag.” He flipped through his notes. “Well, it seems InGen shipped twenty-four Hood sequencers to their i
sland in Costa Rica.

  “Again, they said it was a transfer within divisions and not an export,” Morris said. “There wasn’t much that OTT could do. They’re not officially concerned with use. But InGen was obviously setting up one of the most powerful genetic engineering facilities in the world in an obscure Central American country. A country with no regulations. That kind of thing has happened before.”

  There had already been cases of American bioengineering companies moving to another country so they would not be hampered by regulations and rules. The most flagrant, Morris explained, was the Biosyn rabies case.

  In 1986, Genetic Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino tested a bioengineered rabies vaccine on a farm in Chile. They didn’t inform the government of Chile, or the farm workers involved. They simply released the vaccine.

  The vaccine consisted of a live rabies virus, genetically modified to be nonvirulent. But the virulence hadn’t been tested; Biosyn didn’t know whether the virus could still cause rabies or not. Even worse, the virus had been modified. Ordinarily you couldn’t contract rabies unless you were bitten by an animal. But Biosyn modified the rabies virus to cross the pulmonary alveoli; you could get an infection just inhaling it. Biosyn staffers brought this live rabies virus down to Chile in a carry-on bag on a commercial airline flight. Morris often wondered what would have happened if the capsule had broken open during the flight. Everybody on the plane might have been infected with rabies.

  It was outrageous. It was irresponsible. It was criminally negligent. But no action was taken against Biosyn. The Chilean farmers who unwittingly risked their lives were ignorant peasants; the government of Chile had an economic crisis to worry about; and the American authorities had no jurisdiction. So Lewis Dodgson, the geneticist responsible for the test, was still working at Biosyn. Biosyn was still as reckless as ever. And other American companies were hurrying to set up facilities in foreign countries that lacked sophistication about genetic research. Countries that perceived genetic engineering to be like any other high-tech development, and thus welcomed it to their lands, unaware of the dangers posed.

  “So that’s why we began our investigation of InGen,” Morris said. “About three weeks ago.”

  “And what have you actually found?” Grant said.

  “Not much,” Morris admitted. “When I go back to San Francisco, we’ll probably have to close the investigation. And I think I’m about finished here.” He started packing up his briefcase. “By the way, what does ‘juvenile hyperspace’ mean?”

  “That’s just a fancy label for my report,” Grant said. “ ‘Hyperspace’ is a term for multidimensional space—like three-dimensional tic-tac-toe. If you were to take all the behaviors of an animal, its eating and movement and sleeping, you could plot the animal within the multidimensional space. Some paleontologists refer to the behavior of an animal as occurring in an ecological hyperspace. ‘Juvenile hyperspace’ would just refer to the behavior of juvenile dinosaurs—if you wanted to be as pretentious as possible.”

  At the far end of the trailer, the phone rang. Ellie answered it. She said, “He’s in a meeting right now. Can he call you back?”

  Morris snapped his briefcase shut and stood. “Thanks for your help and the beer,” he said.

  “No problem,” Grant said.

  Grant walked with Morris down the trailer to the door at the far end. Morris said, “Did Hammond ever ask for any physical materials from your site? Bones, or eggs, or anything like that?”

  “No,” Grant said.

  “Dr. Sattler mentioned you do some genetic work here.…”

  “Well, not exactly,” Grant said. “When we remove fossils that are broken or for some other reason not suitable for museum preservation, we send the bones out to a lab that grinds them up and tries to extract proteins for us. The proteins are then identified and the report is sent back to us.”

  “Which lab is that?” Morris asked.

  “Medical Biologic Services in Salt Lake.”

  “How’d you choose them?”

  “Competitive bids.”

  “The lab has nothing to do with InGen?” Morris asked.

  “Not that I know,” Grant said.

  They came to the door of the trailer. Grant opened it, and felt the rush of hot air from outside. Morris paused to put on his sunglasses.

  “One last thing,” Morris said. “Suppose InGen wasn’t really making a museum exhibit. Is there anything else they could have done with the information in the report you gave them?”

  Grant laughed. “Sure. They could feed a baby hadrosaur.”

  Morris laughed, too. “A baby hadrosaur. That’d be something to see. How big were they?”

  “About so,” Grant said, holding his hands six inches apart. “Squirrel-size.”

  “And how long before they become full-grown?”

  “Three years,” Grant said. “Give or take.”

  Morris held out his hand. “Well, thanks again for your help.”

  “Take it easy driving back,” Grant said. He watched for a moment as Morris walked back toward his car, and then closed the trailer door.

  Grant said, “What did you think?”

  Ellie shrugged. “Naïve.”

  “You like the part where John Hammond is the evil arch-villain?” Grant laughed. “John Hammond’s about as sinister as Walt Disney. By the way, who called?”

  “Oh,” Ellie said, “it was a woman named Alice Levin. She works at Columbia Medical Center. You know her?”

  Grant shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, it was something about identifying some remains. She wants you to call her back right away.”

  SKELETON

  Ellie Sattler brushed a strand of blond hair back from her face and turned her attention to the acid baths. She had six in a row, at molar strengths from 5 to 30 percent. She had to keep an eye on the stronger solutions, because they would eat through the limestone and begin to erode the bones. And infant-dinosaur bones were so fragile. She marveled that they had been preserved at all, after eighty million years.

  She listened idly as Grant said, “Miss Levin? This is Alan Grant. What’s this about a … You have what? A what?” He began to laugh. “Oh, I doubt that very much, Miss Levin.… No, I really don’t have time, I’m sorry.… Well, I’d take a look at it, but I can pretty much guarantee it’s a basilisk lizard. But … yes, you can do that. All right. Send it now.” Grant hung up, and shook his head. “These people.”

  Ellie said, “What’s it about?”

  “Some lizard she’s trying to identify,” Grant said. “She’s going to fax me an X ray.” He walked over to the fax and waited as the transmission came through. “Incidentally, I’ve got a new find for you. A good one.”

  “Yes?”

  Grant nodded. “Found it just before the kid showed up. On South Hill, horizon four. Infant velociraptor: jaw and complete dentition, so there’s no question about identity. And the site looks undisturbed. We might even get a full skeleton.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Ellie said. “How young?”

  “Young,” Grant said. “Two, maybe four months at most.”

  “And it’s definitely a velociraptor?”

  “Definitely,” Grant said. “Maybe our luck has finally turned.”

  For the last two years at Snakewater, the team had excavated only duckbilled hadrosaurs. They already had evidence for vast herds of these grazing dinosaurs, roaming the Cretaceous plains in groups of ten or twenty thousand, as buffalo would later roam.

  But increasingly the question that faced them was: where were the predators?

  They expected predators to be rare, of course. Studies of predator/prey populations in the game parks of Africa and India suggested that, roughly speaking, there was one predatory carnivore for every four hundred herbivores. That meant a herd of ten thousand duckbills would support only twenty-five tyrannosaurs. So it was unlikely that they would find the remains of a large predator.

  But where were the smaller
predators? Snakewater had dozens of nesting sites—in some places, the ground was literally covered with fragments of dinosaur eggshells—and many small dinosaurs ate eggs. Animals like Dromaeosaurus, Oviraptor, Velociraptor, and Coelurus—predators three to six feet tall—must have been found here in abundance.

  But they had discovered none so far.

  Perhaps this velociraptor skeleton did mean their luck had changed. And an infant! Ellie knew that one of Grant’s dreams was to study infant-rearing behavior in carnivorous dinosaurs, as he had already studied the behavior of herbivores. Perhaps this was the first step toward that dream. “You must be pretty excited,” Ellie said.

  Grant didn’t answer.

  “I said, you must be excited,” Ellie repeated.

  “My God,” Grant said. He was staring at the fax.

  Ellie looked over Grant’s shoulder at the X ray, and breathed out slowly. “You think it’s an amassicus?”

  “Yes,” Grant said. “Or a triassicus. The skeleton is so light.”

  “But it’s no lizard,” she said.

  “No,” Grant said. “This is not a lizard. No three-toed lizard has walked on this planet for two hundred million years.”

  Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax—an ingenious, skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Every biologist knew that the threat of a hoax was omnipresent. The most famous hoax, the Piltdown man, had gone undetected for forty years, and its perpetrator was still unknown. More recently, the distinguished astronomer Fred Hoyle had claimed that a fossil winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, on display in the British Museum, was a fraud. (It was later shown to be genuine.)

  The essence of a successful hoax was that it presented scientists with what they expected to see. And, to Ellie’s eye, the X ray image of the lizard was exactly correct. The three-toed foot was well balanced, with the medial claw smallest. The bony remnants of the fourth and fifth toes were located up near the metatarsal joint. The tibia was strong, and considerably longer than the femur. At the hip, the acetabulum was complete. The tail showed forty-five vertebrae. It was a young Procompsognathus.