Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода

The late twentieth century has witnessed a scientific gold rush: the haste to make genetic engineering profitable. Biotechnology promises the greatest revolution in human history. By the end of this decade, it will surpass atomic power and computers in its effect on our everyday lives; it is going to transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertainment, and our bodies. Nothing will ever be the same again. It’s going to change the face of the planet.

When, in 1953, two young researchers in England, James Watson and Francis Crick, deciphered the structure of DNA, this was a triumph of the human spirit, of the centuries-old quest to understand the universe in a scientific way. It was expected that their discovery would be used to the greater benefit of mankind.

Yet thirty years later research in molecular genetics had become a vast, multibillion dollar industry.

In April 1976 Robert Swanson, a rich industrialist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California founded a commercial company to exploit Boyer’s gene-splicing techniques. Their new company, Genentech, quickly became the largest and most successful of the genetic engineering start-ups. Suddenly everyone wanted to become rich. New companies were founded almost weekly, and scientists from universities went there to exploit genetic research and make money. By 1986, at least 362 scientists, including 64 in the National Academy, sat on the boards of biotech firms.

This shift in attitude actually was very significant. In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn’t get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. So there were independent university scientists free of industry ties, who could discuss the problems at the highest levels.

But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial interests. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.

In this commercial climate, a company named International Genetic Technologies, Inc., of Palo Alto, arose and went bankrupt. It created the genetic crisis that went nearly unnoticed. After all, InGen conducted its research in secret; the actual incident occurred in the most remote region of Central America; and fewer than twenty people were there to witness it. Of those, only a handful survived, and they were willing to discuss the remarkable events that lead up to those final two days in August 1989 on a remote island off the west coast of Costa Rica.

Prologue:

The Bite of the Raptor

The tropical rain fell like wall, splashed on the ground in a torrent. Roberta Carter sighed, and stared out the window. From the clinic, she couldn’t see the beach or the ocean beyond. This wasn’t what she had expected when she decided to spend two months as a visiting physician in the village on the west coast of Costa Rica.

She had been in the village now for three weeks. And it had rained every day.

Everything else was fine. She liked the isolation of the place and the friendliness of its people. Costa Rica had one of the twenty best medical systems in the world, and even in this remote coastal village, the clinic was well maintained and supplied. Her paramedic, Manuel Aragon, was intelligent and well trained. Bobbie was able to practice a level of medicine equal to what she had practiced in Chicago.

But the rain! The constant, unending rain!

Across the examining room, Manuel cocked his head. “Listen,” he said.

“Believe me, I hear it,” Bobbie said.

“No. Listen.”

And then she caught the rhythmic thumping of a helicopter which burst low through the ocean fog and roared overhead, circled, and came back. She saw the helicopter swing back over the water, near the fishing boats. It was looking for a place to land.

Bobbie wondered what was so urgent that the helicopter would fly in this weather. The helicopter settled onto the wet sand of the beach. Uniformed men jumped out, and flung open the big side door. She heard frantic shouts in Spanish. They were calling for a doctor. She ran up to the helicopter.

“I’m Dr. Carter,” she said.

“Ed Regis. We’ve got a very sick man here, doctor.”

“Then you better take him to San Jose,” she said. San Jose was the capital, just twenty minutes away by air.

“We would, but we can’t get over the mountains in this weather. You have to treat him here.”

Bobbie trotted alongside the injured man as they carried him to the clinic. He was a kid, no older than eighteen. She lifted the blood-soaked shirt and saw a big slashing rip along his shoulder, and another on the leg.

“What happened to him?”

“Construction accident,” Ed shouted. “He fell.”

The kid was pale, unconscious. Bobbie bent to examine the wounds. A big tearing laceration ran from his shoulder down his torso. At the edge of the wound, the flesh was shredded. A second slash cut through the heavy muscles of the thigh. Her first impression was that his leg had been ripped open.

“Tell me again about this injury,” she said.

“I didn’t see it,” Ed said. “They say the backhoe dragged him.”

“Because it almost looks as if some big animal mauled him,” Bobbie Carter said. Like most emergency room physicians, she could remember in detail patients she had seen even years before. She had seen two maulings. One was a two-year-old child who had been attacked by a Rottweiler dog. The other was a circus attendant who had been attacked by a Bengal tiger. Both injuries were similar. There was a characteristic look to an animal attack.

“Mauled?” Ed said. “No, no. It was a backhoe, believe me.” Ed licked his lips as he spoke. He was acting as if he had done something wrong.

She bent lower, probed the wound with her fingertips. If an earth mover had rolled over him, there would be dirt in the wound. But there wasn’t any dirt, just a slippery, slimy foam. And the wound had a strange odor, a kind of rotten stench, a smell of death and decay. She had never smelled anything like it before.

“How long ago did this happen?”

“An hour.”

Bobbie Carter turned back to the injuries. Somehow she didn’t think she was seeing mechanical trauma. It just didn’t look right. No soil in the wound, and no crush- injury. Mechanical trauma of any sort – an auto injury, a factory accident – almost always had some component of crushing. But here there was none. Instead, the man’s skin was shredded – ripped – across his shoulder, and again across his thigh.

It really did look like a maul. On the other hand, most of the body was unmarked, which was unusual for an animal attack. She looked again at the head, the arms, the hands. She felt a chill when she looked at the kid’s hands. There were short slashing cuts on both palms, and bruises on the wrists and forearms. She had worked in Chicago long enough to know what that meant.

“All right,” she said. “Wait outside.”

“Why?” Ed said, alarmed. He didn’t like that.

“Do you want me to help him, or not?” she said, and pushed him out the door and closed it on his face. She didn’t know what was going on, but she didn’t like it. Manuel hesitated. “I continue to wash?”

“Yes,” she said. She reached for her little photo camera. She took several snapshots of the injury. It really did look like bites, she thought. Then the kid groaned, and she put her camera aside and bent toward him. His lips moved, his tongue thick.

“Raptor,” he said. “Lo sa raptor.”

At those words, Manuel froze, stepped back in horror.

“What does it mean?” Bobbie said.

Manuel shook his head. “I do not know, doctor. ‘Lo sa raptor’ – no es espanol.”

“No?” It sounded to her like Spanish. “Then please continue to wash him.”

“No, doctor.” He wrinkled his nose. “Bad smell.” And he crossed himself.

Bobbie looked again at the slippery foam streaked across the wound. She touched it, rubbing it between her fingers. It seemed almost like saliva.

The injured boy’s lips moved. “Raptor,” he whispered.

In a tone of horror, Manuel said, “It bit him.”

“What bit him?”

“Raptor.”

“What’s a raptor?”

“It means hupia.”

Bobbie frowned. The Costa Ricans were not especially superstitious, but she had heard the hupia mentioned in the village before. They were said to be night ghosts, faceless vampires who kidnapped small children. According to the belief, the hupia had once lived in the mountains of Costa Rica, but now inhabited the islands offshore.

Manuel was backing away, murmuring and crossing himself. “It is not normal, this smell,” he said. “It is the hupia.”

Suddenly the injured youth opened his eyes and sat straight up on the table. Manuel shrieked in terror. The injured boy moaned and twisted his head, looked left and right with wide open eyes, and then he vomited blood. He went immediately into convulsions, his body vibrated, and Bobbie grabbed for him but he fell off the table onto the concrete floor. He vomited again. There was blood everywhere. Ed opened the door, saying, “What the hell’s happening?” and when he saw the blood he turned away, his hand to his mouth. Bobbie was grabbing for a stick to put in the boy’s clenched jaws, but even as she did it she knew it was hopeless, and with a final spastic jerk he relaxed and lay still.

She bent to perform mouth-to-mouth, but Manuel grabbed her shoulder fiercely, pulling her back. “No,” he said. “The hupia will cross over.”

“Manuel, for God’s sake!”

“No.” He stared at her fiercely. “No. You do not understand these things.”

Bobbie looked at the body on the ground and realized that it didn’t matter; the boy was dead. Manuel called for the men, who came back into the room and took the body away. Ed appeared, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, muttering, “I’m sure you did all you could,” and then she watched as the men took the body away, back to the helicopter, and it lifted thunderously up into the sky.

“It is better,” Manuel said.

Bobbie was thinking about the boy’s hands. They had been covered with cuts and bruises, in the characteristic pattern of defense wounds. She was quite sure he had not died in a construction accident; he had been attacked, and he had held up his bands against his attacker. “Where is this island they’ve come from?” she asked.

“In the ocean. Perhaps a hundred, hundred and twenty miles offshore,”

“Pretty far for a resort,” she said.

Manuel watched the helicopter. “I hope they never come back.”

Well, she thought, at least she had pictures. But when she turned back to the table, she saw that her camera was gone.

The rain finally stopped later that night. Alone in the bedroom behind the clinic, Bobbie thumbed through her Spanish dictionary. The boy had said “raptor,” and, despite Manuel’s protests, she suspected it was a Spanish word. Sure enough, she found it in her dictionary. It meant “ravisher” or “abductor.”

That gave her pause. The sense of the word was suspiciously close to the meaning of hupia. Of course she did not believe in the superstition. And no ghost had cut those hands. What had the boy been trying to tell her?

Bobbie looked at the stars. The whole scene was quiet, so normal, she felt foolish to talk of vampires and kidnapped babies.

Mike Bowman drove the Land Rover through the Cabo Blanco Biological Reserve, on the west coast of Costa Rica. According to the guidebooks, Cabo Blanco was unspoiled wilderness, almost a paradise.

They had come to Costa Rica for a two-week holiday.

The Land Rover bounced in a pothole, splashing mud. Seated beside him, Ellen said, “Mike, are you sure this is the right road? We haven’t seen any other people for hours.”

“Darling, you wanted a deserted beach,” he said, “and that’s what you’re going to get.”

Ellen shook her head doubtfully. “I hope you’re right.”

“Yeah, Dad, I hope you’re right,” said Tina from the back seat. She was eight years old.

“Trust me, I’m right.” He drove in silence a moment. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Look at that view. It’s beautiful.”

The road began to descend, and Mike Bowman concentrated on driving. Suddenly a small black shape flashed across the road and Tina shrieked, “Look! Look!” Then it was gone, into the jungle.

“What was it?” Ellen asked. “A monkey?”

“Maybe a squirrel monkey,” Bowman said.

“Can I count it?” Tina said. She was keeping a list of all the animals she had seen on her trip, as a project for school.

“I don’t know,” Mike said doubtfully.

Tina consulted the pictures in the guidebook. “I don’t think it was a squirrel monkey,” she said. “I think it was just another howler.” They had seen several howler monkeys already on their trip, “Hey,” she said, more brightly. “According to this book, ‘the beaches of Cabo Blanco are full of wildlife, including howler monkeys, three-toed sloths, and coatimundis[1]. You think we’ll see a three-toed sloth, Dad?”

“I bet we do.”

The road sloped downward through the jungle, toward the ocean.

Mike Bowman felt like a hero when they finally reached the beach: two miles of white sand, utterly deserted. He parked the Land Rover in the shade of the palm trees and got out the box lunches. Ellen changed into her bathing suit; Tina was already running down the beach: “I’m going to see if there’s a sloth.”

Ellen Bowman looked around at the beach, and the trees. “You think she’s all right?”

“Honey, there’s nobody here for miles,” Mike said.

“What about snakes?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mike Bowman said. “There are no snakes on a beach.”

“Well, there might be…”

“Honey,” he said firmly. “Snakes are cold-blooded. They’re reptiles. They can’t control their body temperature. It’s ninety degrees on that sand. If a snake came out, it’d be cooked. Believe me. There are no snakes on the beach. Let her go. Let her have a good time.”

Tina ran until she was exhausted and then she looked back toward her parents and the car, to see how far she had come. She wanted to stay right here, and maybe see a sloth. Tina sat in the sand under the shade of palm trees and noticed many bird tracks in the sand. Costa Rica was famous for its birds. The guidebooks said there were three times as many birds in Costa Rica as in all of America and Canada.

In the sand, some of the three-toed bird tracks were small, and so faint they could hardly be seen. Other tracks were large, and cut deeper in the sand. Tina was looking idly at the tracks when she heard a chirping, followed by a rustling in the mangrove thicket.

Did sloths make a chirping sound? Tina didn’t think so, but she wasn’t sure. The chirping was probably some ocean bird. She waited quietly, not moving, hearing the rustling again, and finally she saw the source of the sounds. A few yards away, a lizard emerged from the mangrove roots and looked at her.

Tina held her breath. A new animal for her list! The lizard stood up on its hind legs, balancing on its thick tail, and stared at her. Standing like that, it was almost a foot tall, dark green with brown stripes along its back. Its tiny front legs ended in little lizard fingers that wiggled in the air. The lizard cocked its head as it looked at her.

Tina thought it was cute. Sort of like a big salamander. The lizard wasn’t frightened. It came toward her, walking upright on its hind legs. It was hardly bigger than a chicken, and like a chicken it bobbed its head as it walked. She noticed that the lizard left three-toed tracks that looked exactly like bird tracks. The lizard came closer to Tina. She kept her body still, not wanting to frighten the little animal. She was amazed that it would come so close. This lizard was probably tame. Slowly, Tina extended her hand, palm open.

The lizard paused, cocked his head, and chirped. And then, without warning, the lizard jumped up onto her outstretched hand. Tina could feel its little toes pinching the skin of her palm, and she felt the surprising weight of the animal’s body pressing her arm down.

And then the lizard scrambled up her arm, toward her face.

“I just wish I could see her,” Ellen Bowman said. “That’s all. Just see her.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.”

“I just wish I could see her, is all,” Ellen repeated.

Then, from down the beach they heard their daughter’s voice. She was screaming.

Puntarenas

“I think she is quite comfortable now,” Dr. Cruz said, and lowered the plastic flap of the oxygen tent around Tina as she slept. Mike Bowman sat beside the bed, close to his daughter. Chnica Santa Maria, the modern hospital in Puntarenas, was spotless and efficient.

But, even so, Mike Bowman felt nervous. His only daughter was ill, and they were far from home.

When Mike had first reached Tina, she was screaming hysterically. Her whole left arm was bloody, covered with small bites, each the size of a thumbprint. And there were flecks of sticky foam on her arm, like a foamy saliva.

He carried her back down the beach to the car. Almost immediately her arm began to redden and swell. Mike couldn’t forget the drive back to civilization while his daughter screamed in fear and pain, and her arm grew more bloated and red. By the time they reached the hospital, the swelling had spread to her neck, and then Tina began to have trouble breathing.

“She’ll be all right now?” Ellen said, staring through the plastic oxygen tent.

“I believe so,” Dr. Cruz said. “I have given her another dose of steroids, and her breathing is much easier.”

Mike Bowman said, “About those bites…”

“We have no identification yet,” the doctor said. “I myself haven’t seen bites like that before. But you’ll notice they are disappearing. It’s already quite difficult to make them out. Fortunately I have taken photographs for reference. And I have washed her arm to collect some samples of the sticky saliva – one for analysis here, a second to send to the labs in San Jose, and the third we will keep frozen in case it is needed. Do you have the picture she made?”

“Yes,” Mike Bowman said. He handed the doctor the sketch that Tina had drawn, in response to questions from the admitting officials.

“This is the animal that bit her?” Dr. Cruz said, looking at the picture.

“Yes,” Mike Bowman said. “She said it was a green lizard, the size of a chicken or a crow.”

“I don’t know of such a lizard,” the doctor said. “She has drawn it standing on its hind legs…”

“That’s right,” Mike Bowman said. “She said it walked on its hind legs.”

Dr. Cruz frowned. He stared at the picture a while longer.

“I am not an expert. I’ve asked for Dr. Guitierrez to visit us here. He is a senior researcher at the Reserva Bioldgica de Carara, which is across the bay. Perhaps he can identify the animal for us.”

Dr. Guitierrez was a bearded man wearing khaki shorts and shirt. He explained that he was a field biologist from Yale who had worked in Costa Rica for the last five years. Marty Guitierrez examined Tina thoroughly, then measured the bites with a small pocket ruler and asked several questions about the saliva. Finally he turned to Mike Bowman and his wife. “I think Tina’s going to be fine. I just want to be clear about a few details,” he said, making notes. “Your daughter says she was bitten by a green lizard, approximately one foot high, which walked upright onto the beach from the mangrove swamp?”

“That’s right, yes.”

“And the lizard made some kind of a vocalization?”

“Tina said it chirped, or squeaked.”

“Like a mouse, would you say?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” Dr. Guitierrez said, “I know this lizard.” He explained that, of the six thousand species of lizards in the world, no more than a dozen species walked upright. Of those species, only four were found in Latin America. And judging by the coloration, the lizard could be only one of the four. “I am sure this lizard was a striped basilisk lizard[2], found here in Costa Rica and also in Honduras. Standing on their hind legs, they are sometimes as tall as a foot.”

“Are they poisonous?”

“No, Mrs. Bowman. Not at all.” Guitierrez explained that the swelling in Tina’s arm was an allergic reaction. “According to the literature, fourteen percent of people are strongly allergic to reptiles,” he said, “and your daughter must be one of them.”

“She was screaming, she said it was so painful.”

“Probably it was,” Guitierrez said. “Reptile saliva contains serotonin, which causes tremendous pain.” He turned to Cruz. “Her blood pressure came down with antihistamines?”

“Yes,” Cruz said. “Promptly.”

“Serotonin,” Guitierrez said. “No question.”

Still, Ellen Bowman remained uneasy. “But why would a lizard bite her in the first place?”

“Lizard bites are very common,” Guitierrez said. “Animal handlers in zoos get bitten all the time. And just the other day I heard that a lizard had bitten an infant in her crib in Amaloya, about sixty miles from where you were. So bites do occur. I’m not sure why your daughter had so many bites. What was she doing at the time?”

“Nothing. She said she was sitting pretty still, because she didn’t want to frighten it away.”

“Sitting pretty still,” Guitierrez said, frowning. He shook his head. “Well. I don’t think we can say exactly what happened. Wild animals are unpredictable.”

Mike Bowman then showed Guitierrez the picture that Tina had drawn. Guitierrez nodded. “I would accept this as a picture of a basillsk lizard,” he said. “A few details are wrong, of course. The neck is much too long, and she has drawn the hind legs with only three toes instead of five. The tail is too thick, and raised too high. But otherwise this is the lizard.”

A day later Tina was released from the hospital. “Go on. Say thank you to Dr. Cruz,” Ellen Bowman said, and pushed Tina forward.

“Thank you, Dr. Cruz,” Tina said. “I feel much better now.”

Dr. Cruz smiled and shook the little girl’s hand gravely. “Enjoy the rest of your holiday in Costa Rica, Tina.”

“I will.”

The Bowman family had started to leave when Dr. Cruz said, “Oh, Tina, do you remember the lizard that bit you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You remember its feet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did it have any toes?”

“Yes.”

“How many toes did it have?”

“Three,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I looked,” she said. “Anyway, all the birds on the beach made marks in the sand with three toes, like this.” She held up her hand, middle three fingers spread wide. “And the lizard made those kind of marks in the sand, too.”

“The lizard made marks like a bird?”

“Uh-huh,” Tina said. “He walked like a bird, too. He jerked his head like this, up and down.” She took a few steps, bobbing her head.

After the Bowmans had departed, Dr. Cruz decided to report this conversation to Guitierrez, at the biological station.

“I must admit the girl’s story is puzzling,” Guitierrez said. “I have been doing some checking myself. I am no longer certain she was bitten by a basilisk. Not certain at all.”

“Then what could it be?”

“Well,” Guitierrez said, “let’s not speculate prematurely. By the way, have you heard of any other lizard bites at the hospital?”

“No, why?”

“Let me know, my friend, if you do.”

The next day Marty Guitierrez found the remains of a lizard sat on the beach of Cabo Blanco, near the spot where the American girl had been, two days before. Guitierrez decided to send it to the United States for final positive identification. The acknowledged expert was Edward H. Simpson, emeritus professor of zoology at Columbia University, in New York. Probably, Marty thought, he would send his lizard to Dr. Simpson.