“What paper?” Thorne said.
The radio clicked again. “Roxton,” Levine said, “believed that tyrannosaurs had a visual system like an amphibian: like a frog. A frog sees motion but doesn’t see stillness. But it is quite impossible that a predator such as a tyrannosaur would have a visual system that worked that way. Quite impossible. Because the most common defense of prey animals is to freeze. A deer or something like that, it senses danger, and it freezes. A predator has to be able to see them anyway. And of course a tyrannosaur could.”
Over the radio, Levine snorted with disgust. “It’s just like the other idiotic theory put forth by Grant a few years back that a tyrannosaur could be confused by a driving rainstorm, because it was not adapted to wet climates. That’s equally absurd. The Cretaceous wasn’t particularly dry. And in any case, tyrannosaurs are North American animals—they’ve only been found in the U.S. or Canada. Tyrannosaurus rex lived on the shores of the great inland sea, east of the Rocky Mountains. There are lots of thunderstorms on mountain slopes. I’m quite sure tyrannosaurs saw plenty of rain, and they evolved to deal with it.”
“So is there any reason why a tyrannosaur might not attack somebody?” Malcolm said.
“Yes, of course. The most obvious one,” Levine said.
“Which is?”
“If it wasn’t hungry. If it had just eaten another animal. Anything larger than a goat would take care of its hunger for hours to come. No, no. The tyrannosaur sees fine, moving or still.”
They listened to the roaring, coming up from the valley below. They saw thrashing in the underbrush, about half a mile away, to the north. More bellowing. The two rexes seemed to be answering each other.
Sarah Harding said, “What are we carrying?”
Thorne said, “Three Lindstradts. Fully loaded.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
The radio crackled. “I’m not there,” Levine said, over the radio. “But I’d certainly advise waiting.”
“The hell with waiting,” Malcolm said. “Sarah’s right. Let’s go down there and see how bad it is.”
“Your funeral,” Levine said.
Arby came back to the monitor, wiping his chin. He still looked a little green. “What are they doing now?”
“Dr. Malcolm and the others are going to the nest.”
“Are you kidding?” he said, alarmed.
“Don’t worry,” Kelly said. “Sarah can handle it.”
“You hope,” Arby said.
Nest
Just beyond the clearing, they parked the Explorer. Eddie pulled up in the motorcycle, and leaned it against the trunk of a tree and waited while the others climbed out of the Explorer.
Sarah Harding smelled the familiar sour odor of rotting flesh and excrement that always marked a carnivore nesting site. In the afternoon heat, it was faintly nauseating. Flies buzzed in the still air. Harding took one of the rifles, slung it over her shoulder. She looked at the three men. They were all standing very still, tense, not moving. Malcolm’s face was pale, particularly around the lips. It reminded her of the time that Coffmann, her old professor, had visited her in Africa. Coffmann was one of those hard-drinking Hemingway types, with lots of affairs at home, and lots of tales of his adventures with the orangs in Sumatra, the ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar. So she took him with her to a kill site in the savannah. And he promptly passed out. He weighed more than two hundred pounds, and she had to drag him out by the collar while the lions circled and snarled at her. It had been a good lesson for her.
Now she leaned close to the three men and whispered, “If you’ve got any qualms about this, don’t go. Just wait here. I don’t want to worry about you. I can do this myself.” She started off.
“Are you sure—”
“Yes. Now keep quiet.” She moved directly toward the clearing. Malcolm and the others hurried to catch up with her. She pushed aside the palm fronds, and stepped out into the open. The tyrannosaurs were gone, and the mud cone was deserted. Over to the right, she saw a shoe, with a bit of torn flesh sticking out above the ragged sock. That was all there was left of Baselton.
From within the nest, she heard a plaintive, high-pitched squeal. Harding climbed up the mud bank, with Malcolm struggling to follow. She saw two infant tyrannosaurs there, mewling. Nearby were three large eggs. They saw heavy footprints all around, in the mud.
“They took one of the eggs,” Malcolm said. “Damn.”
“You didn’t want anything to disrupt your little ecosystem?”
Malcolm smiled crookedly. “Yeah. I was hoping.”
“Too bad,” she said, and moved quickly around the edge of the pit. She bent over, looking at the baby tyrannosaurs. One of the babies was cowering, its downy neck pulled into its body. But the second one behaved very differently. It did not move as they approached, but remained lying sprawled on its side, breathing shallowly, eyes glazed.
“This one’s been hurt,” she said.
Levine was standing in the high hide. He pressed the headset to his ear, and spoke into the microphone near his cheek. “I need a description,” he said.
Thorne said, “There’s two of them, roughly two feet long, weighing maybe forty pounds. About the size of small cassowary birds. Large eyes. Short snouts. Pale-brown color. And there’s a ring of down around the necks.”
“Can they stand?”
“Uh . . . if they can, not very well. They’re kind of flopping around. Squeaking a lot.”
“Then they’re infants,” Levine said, nodding. “Probably only a few days old. Never been out of the nest. I’d be very careful.”
“Why is that?”
“With offspring that young,” Levine said, “the parents won’t leave them for long.”
Harding moved closer to the injured infant. Still mewling, the baby tried to crawl toward her, dragging its body awkwardly. One leg was bent at an odd angle. “I think the left leg’s hurt.”
Eddie came closer, standing alongside her to see. “Is it broken?”
“Yeah, probably, but—”
“Hey!” Eddie said. The baby lunged forward, and clamped its jaws around the ankle of his boot. He pulled his foot away, dragging the baby, which held its grip tightly. “Hey! Let go!”
Eddie lifted his leg up, shook it back and forth, but the baby refused to let go. He pulled for a moment longer, then stopped. Now the baby just lay there on the ground, breathing shallowly, jaws still locked around Eddie’s boot. “Jeez,” Eddie said.
“Aggressive little guy, isn’t he,” Sarah said. “Right from birth . . .”
Eddie looked down at the tiny, razor-sharp jaws. They hadn’t penetrated the leather. The baby held on firmly. With the butt of his rifle, he poked the infant’s head a couple of times. It had no effect at all. The baby lay on the ground, breathing shallowly. Its big eyes blinked slowly as they stared up at Eddie, but it did not release its grip.
They heard the distant roars of the parents, somewhere to the north. “Let’s get out of here,” Malcolm said. “We’ve seen what we came here to see. We’ve got to find where Dodgson went.”
Thorne said, “I think I saw a track up the trail. They might have gone off there.”
“We better have a look.”
They all started back to the car.
“Wait a minute,” Eddie said, looking down at his foot. “What am I going to do about the baby?”
“Shoot it,” Malcolm said, over his shoulder.
“You mean kill it?”
Sarah said, “It’s got a broken leg, Eddie, it’s going to die anyway.”
“Yeah, but—”
Thorne called, “We’re going back up the trail, Eddie, and if we don’t find Dodgson, we’ll take the ridge road going toward the laboratory. Then down to the trailer again.”
“Okay, Doc. I’m right behind you.” Eddie lifted his rifle, turned it in his hands.
“Do it now,” Sarah said, climbing into the Explorer. “Because you don’t want to be here when Momma
and Poppa get back.”
Gambler’s Ruin
Driving up the trail, Malcolm stared at the dashboard monitor, as the image flicked from one camera view to another. He was looking for Dodgson and the rest of his party.
Over the radio, Levine said, “How bad was it?”
“They took one egg,” Malcolm said. “And we had to shoot one of the babies.”
“So, a loss of two. Out of a total hatching brood of what, six?”
“That’s right.”
“Frankly, I’d say it’s a minor matter,” Levine said. “As long as you stop those people from doing anything more.”
“We’re looking for them now,” Malcolm said morosely.
Harding said, “It was bound to happen, Ian. You know you can’t expect to observe the animals without changing anything. It’s a scientific impossibility.”
“Of course it is,” Malcolm said. “That’s the greatest single scientific discovery of the twentieth century. You can’t study anything without changing it.”
Since Galileo, scientists had adopted the view that they were objective observers of the natural world. That was implicit in every aspect of their behavior, even the way they wrote scientific papers, saying things like “It was observed . . .” As if nobody had observed it. For three hundred years, that impersonal quality was the hallmark of science. Science was objective, and the observer had no influence on the results he or she described.
This objectivity made science different from the humanities, or from religion—fields where the observer’s point of view was integral, where the observer was inextricably mixed up in the results observed.
But in the twentieth century, that difference had vanished. Scientific objectivity was gone, even at the most fundamental levels. Physicists now knew you couldn’t even measure a single subatomic particle without affecting it totally. If you stuck your instruments in to measure a particle’s position, you changed its velocity. If you measured its velocity, you changed its position. That basic truth became the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that whatever you studied you also changed. In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.
“I know objectivity is impossible,” Malcolm said impatiently. “I’m not concerned about that.”
“Then what are you concerned about?”
“I’m concerned about the Gambler’s Ruin,” Malcolm said, staring at the monitor.
Gambler’s Ruin was a notorious and much-debated statistical phenomenon that had major consequences both for evolution, and for everyday life. “Let’s say you’re a gambler,” he said. “And you’re playing a coin-toss game. Every time the coin comes up heads, you win a dollar. Every time it comes up tails, you lose a dollar.”
“Okay . . .”
“What happens over time?”
Harding shrugged. “The chances of getting either heads or tails is even. So maybe you win, maybe you lose. But in the end, you’ll come out at zero.”
“Unfortunately, you don’t,” Malcolm said. “If you gamble long enough, you’ll always lose—the gambler is always ruined. That’s why casinos stay in business. But the question is, what happens over time? What happens in the period before the gambler is finally ruined?”
“Okay,” she said. “What happens?”
“If you chart the gambler’s fortunes over time, what you find is the gambler wins for a period, or loses for a period. In other words, everything in the world goes in streaks. It’s a real phenomenon, and you see it everywhere: in weather, in river flooding, in baseball, in heart rhythms, in stock markets. Once things go bad, they tend to stay bad. Like the old folk saying that bad things come in threes. Complexity theory tells us the folk wisdom is right. Bad things cluster. Things go to hell together. That’s the real world.”
“So what are you saying? That things are going to hell now?”
“They could be, thanks to Dodgson,” Malcolm said, frowning at the monitor. “What happened to those bastards, anyway?”
King
There was a buzzing, like the sound of a distant bee. Howard King was dimly aware of it, as he came slowly back to consciousness. He opened his eyes, and saw the windshield of a car, and the branches of trees beyond.
The buzzing was louder.
King didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t remember how he got here, what had happened. He felt pain in his shoulders, and at his hips. His forehead throbbed. He tried to remember but the pain distracted him, prevented him from thinking clearly. The last thing he remembered was the tyrannosaur in front of him on the road. That was the last thing. Then Dodgson had looked back and—
King turned his head, and cried out as sudden, sharp pain ran up his neck to his skull. The pain made him gasp, took his breath away. He closed his eyes, wincing. Then he slowly opened them again.
Dodgson was not in the car. The driver’s door hung wide open, a dappled shadow across the door panel. The keys were still in the ignition.
Dodgson was gone.
There was a streak of blood across the top of the steering wheel. The black box was on the floor by the gearshift. The open driver’s door creaked a little, moved a little.
In the distance, King heard the buzzing again, like a giant bee. It was a mechanical sound, he now realized. Something mechanical.
It made him think of the boat. How long would the boat wait at the river? What time was it, anyway? He looked at his watch. The crystal was smashed, the hands fixed at 1:54.
He heard the buzzing again. It was coming closer.
With an effort, King pushed himself away from the seat, toward the dashboard. Streaks of electric pain shot up his spine, but quickly subsided. He took a deep breath.
I’m all right, he thought. At least, I’m still here.
King looked at the open driver’s door, in the sunlight. The sun was still high. It must still be sometime in the afternoon. When was the boat leaving? Four o’clock? Five o’clock? He couldn’t remember any more. But he was certain that those Spanish fishermen wouldn’t hang around once it started to get dark. They’d leave the island.
And Howard King wanted to be on the boat when they did. It was the only thing he wanted in the world. Wincing, he raised himself up, and painfully slid over to the driver’s seat. He settled himself in, took a deep breath, and then leaned over, and looked out the open door.
The car was hanging over empty space, supported by trees. He saw a steep jungle hillside, falling away beneath him. It was dark beneath the canopy of trees. He felt dizzy, just looking down. The ground must be twenty or thirty feet below him. He saw scattered green ferns, and a few dark boulders. He twisted his body to look more.
And then he saw him.
Dodgson lay on his back, head downward, on the slope of the hill. His body was crumpled, arms and legs thrown out in awkward positions. He was not moving. King couldn’t see him very well, in the dense foliage on the hillside, but Dodgson looked dead.
The buzzing was suddenly very loud, building rapidly, and King looked forward and saw, through the foliage that blocked the windshield, a car driving by, not ten yards away. A car!
And then the car was gone. From the sound of it, he thought, it was an electric car. So it must be Malcolm.
Howard King was somehow encouraged by the thought that other people were on this island. He felt new strength, despite the pain in his body. He reached forward, and turned the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled.
He put the car in gear, and gently stepped on the accelerator.
The rear wheels spun. He engaged the front-wheel drive. At once, the Jeep rumbled forward, lurching through the branches. A moment later, he was out on the road.
He remembered this road now. To the right, it led down to the tyrannosaurus nest. Malcolm’s car had gone to the left.
King turned left, and headed up the road. He was trying to remember how to get back to the river, back to the boat. He vaguely recalled that there was a
Y-fork in the road at the top of the hill. He would take that fork, he decided, drive down the hill, and get the hell off this island.
That was his only goal.
To get off this island, before it was too late.
Bad News
The Explorer came to the top of the hill, and Thorne drove onto the ridge road. The road curved back and forth, cut into the rock face of the cliff. In many places, the dropoff was precipitous, but they had views over the entire island. Eventually they came to a place where they could look over the valley. They could see the high hide off to the left, and closer by, the clearing with the two trailers. Off to the right was the laboratory complex, and the worker complex beyond.
“I don’t see Dodgson anywhere,” Malcolm said unhappily. “Where could he have gone?”
Thorne pushed the radio button. “Arby?”
“Yes, Doc.”
“Do you see them?”
“No, but . . .” He hesitated.
“What?”
“Don’t you want to come back here now? It’s pretty amazing.”
“What is?” Thorne said.
“Eddie,” Arby said. “He just got back. And he brought the baby with him.”
Malcolm leaned forward. “He did what?”
FIFTH CONFIGURATION
“At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.”
IAN MALCOLM
Baby
In the trailer, they were clustered around the table where the baby Tyrannosaurus rex now lay unconscious on a stainless-steel pan, his large eyes closed, his snout pushed into the clear plastic oval of an oxygen mask. The mask almost fitted the baby’s blunt snout. The oxygen hissed softly.