Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода

The Shore of the Inland Sea

Alan Grant crouched down, his nose inches from the ground. The temperature was over a hundred degrees. His knees ached, his lungs burned from the dust. Sweat dripped off his forehead. But Grant didn’t notice it. His entire attention was focused on the six-inch square of earth in front of him.

Working patiently with a dental pick and an artist’s brush, he exposed the tiny L-shaped fragment ofjawbone. It was only an inch long, and no thicker than his little finger. There was no question that this was the jawbone from an infant carnivorous dinosaur. Its owner had died seventy-nine million years ago, at the age of about two months. With any luck, Grant might find the rest of the skeleton as well. If so, it would be the first complete skeleton of a baby carnivore.

“Hey, Alan!”

Alan Grant looked up, and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.

Visitors found the badlands depressing, but when Grant looked at this landscape, he saw something else entirely. This dry land was what remained of another, very different world, which had vanished eighty million years ago. In his mind’s eye, Grant saw himself back in the warm, swampy bayou that formed the shoreline of a great inland sea. This inland sea was a thousand miles wide, extending all the way from the Rocky Mountains to the sharp peaks of the Appalachians. All of the American West was underwater.

At that time, there were thin clouds in the sky overhead, darkened by the smoke of nearby volcanoes. The atmosphere was denser, richer in carbon dioxide. Plants grew rapidly along the shoreline. There were no fish in these waters, but there were clams and snails. A few carnivorous dinosaurs prowled the swampy shores of the lake, moving among the palm trees. There was a small island, about two acres in size. This island formed a sanctuary where herds of herbivorous dinosaurs laid their eggs in communal nests, and raised their squeaking young.

Over the millions of years the lake vanished, the island with its dinosaur eggs became the eroded hillside in northern Montana which Alan Grant was now excavating.

“Hey, Alan!”

He saw Ellie waving to him, from the shadow of the field laboratory.

“Visitor!” she called, and pointed to the east.

They didn’t get many visitors in Snakewater, and they didn’t know what a lawyer from the Environmental Protection Agency would want.

But Grant knew that paleontology, the study of extinct life, had in recent years taken on an unexpected relevance to the modern world. The modern world was changing fast, and urgent questions about the weather, global warming, or the ozone layer often seemed answerable with information from the past. Information that paleontologists could provide. He had been called as an expert witness twice in the past few years.

Grant started down the hill to meet the car.

“Bob Morris, EPA,” the visitor said. “I’m with the San Francisco office.”

Morris was in his late twenties, wearing a tie, and pants from a business suit.

“How long you been out here?”

“About sixty days. We start in June.”

“Sixty-three, to be exact,” Ellie Sattler said, as they reached the trailer. Ellie was wearing cut-offjeans and a shirt tied at her midriff. She was twenty-four and darkly tanned. Her blond hair was pulled back.

“Ellie keeps us going,” Grant said, introducing her. “She’s very good at what she does.”

“What does she do?” Morris asked.

“Paleobotany,” Ellie said. She opened the door and they went inside the laboratory trailer.

The trailer had a series of long wooden tables, with tiny bone specimens neatly laid out, tagged and labeled. Farther along were ceramic dishes and crocks. There was a strong odor of vinegar.

Morris glanced at the bones. “I thought dinosaurs were big,” he said.

“They were,” Ellie said. “But everything you see here comes from babies. Snakewater is important primarily because of the number of dinosaur nesting sites here. Until we started this work, there were hardly any infant dinosaurs known. Only one nest had ever been found, in the Gobi Desert. We’ve discovered a dozen different hadrosaur[3] nests, complete with eggs and bones of infants.”

“They look like chicken bones,” Morris said, peering into the ceramic dishes.

“Yes,” she said. “They’re very bird-like.”

“And what about those?” Morris said, pointing through the trailer window to piles of large bones outside, wrapped in heavy plastic.

“Rejects,” Ellie said. “Bones too fragmentary when we took them out of the ground, In the old days we’d just discard them, but nowadays we send them for genetic testing.”

Grant led Morris to the end of the trailer, where there was a torn couch, a sagging chair, and a battered table. Grant dropped onto the couch, leaned back and gestured for Morris to sit in the chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Grant was a professor of paleontology at the University of Denver, and one of the foremost researchers in his field, but he had never been comfortable with social niceties. He was an outdoor man, and he knew that all the important work in paleontology was done outdoors, with your hands. Grant had little patience for the academics, for the museum curators, for what he called Teacup Dinosaur Hunters.

Grant watched as Morris primly brushed off the seat of the chair before he sat down. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

Grant nodded. “It’s a long way to come, Mr. Morris.”

“Well,” Morris said, “to get right to the point, we are concerned about the activities of the Hammond Foundation. You receive some funding from them.”

“Thirty thousand dollars a year,” Grant said, nodding. “For the last five years.”

“What do you know about the foundation?” Morris said.

Grant shrugged. “The Hammond Foundation is a respected source of academic grants. They fund research all over the world, including several dinosaur researchers. I know they support Bob Kerry in Alberta, and John Weller in Alaska. Probably more.”

“Do you know why the Hammond Foundation supports so much dinosaur research?” Morris asked.

“Of course. It’s because old John Hammond is a dinosaur nut.”

“You’ve met Hammond?”

Grant shrugged. “Once or twice. He comes here for brief visits. He’s quite elderly, you know. And eccentric, the way rich people sometimes are. But always very enthusiastic. Why?”

“Well,” Morris said, “the Hammond Foundation is actually a rather mysterious organization. The Hammond Foundation only supports cold-weather digs. We’d like to know why. 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 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 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 to Alan Grant in the amount of twelve thousand dollars.

“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 dinosaur eggs in Montana in 1979, and his paper made Grant a celebrity overnight. He reported that a herd of ten thousand duckbilled dinosaurs lived along the shore of a vast inland sea, had communal nests of eggs in the mud, raised their infant dinosaurs in the herd. It was during those days 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 data on eating habits. 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 table. “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 why don’t you just ask him about it?”

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

“Why not?” Grant asked.

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

“Besides amber, there are other questions.” Morris explained, “In the few past years the InGen shipped to Costa Rica three very powerful supercomputers and twenty-four automated gene sequencers – machines that work out the genetic code by themselves. 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 could work without regulations and rules. The most scandalous, 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 test it. Biosyn modified the virus and you could get an infection just inhaling it.

It was outrageous. It was irresponsible. It was criminally negligent. But no action was taken against Biosyn.

“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.”

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,” 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. “Squirrelsize.”

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

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

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

After Morris had left, Grant asked: “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 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 Morris showed up. Infant velociraptor[4]: 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 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[5]. 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 covered with fragments of dinosaur eggshells – and many small dinosaurs ate eggs. Animals like Dromaeosaurus[6], Oviraptor,[7] Velociraptor, and Coelurus[8] – 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.

“My God,” he 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 a triassicus[9], not a lizard,” she said.