Jurassic Park: A Novel (26 page)

“You’ll be able to eat in about twenty minutes,” Ed Regis said, starting toward the two Land Cruisers.

“I’ll stay for a while,” Ellie said, “and get photos of the stego with Dr. Harding’s camera. Those vesicles in the mouth will have cleared up by tomorrow.”

“I want to get back,” Grant said. “I’ll go with the kids.”

“I will, too,” Malcolm said.

“I think I’ll stay,” Gennaro said, “and go back with Harding in his Jeep, with Dr. Sattler.”

“Fine, let’s go.”

They started walking. Malcolm said, “Why exactly is our lawyer staying?”

Grant shrugged. “I think it might have something to do with Dr. Sattler.”

“Really? The shorts, you think?”

“It’s happened before,” Grant said.

When they came to the Land Cruisers, Tim said, “I want to ride in the front one this time, with Dr. Grant.”

Malcolm said, “Unfortunately, Dr. Grant and I need to talk.”

“I’ll just sit and listen. I won’t say anything,” Tim said.

“It’s a private conversation,” Malcolm said.

“Tell you what, Tim,” Ed Regis said. “Let them sit in the rear car by themselves. We’ll sit in the front car, and you can use the night-vision goggles. Have you ever used night-vision goggles, Tim? They’re goggles with very sensitive CCDs that allow you to see in the dark.”

“Neat,” he said, and moved toward the first car.

“Hey!” Lex said. “I want to use it, too.”

“No,” Tim said.

“No fair! No fair! You get to do everything, Timmy!”

Ed Regis watched them go and said to Grant, “I can see what the ride back is going to be like.”

Grant and Malcolm climbed into the second car. A few raindrops spattered the windshield. “Let’s get going,” Ed Regis said. “I’m about ready for dinner. And I could do with a nice banana daiquiri. What do you say, folks? Daiquiri sound good?” He pounded the metal panel of the car. “See you back at camp,” he said, and he started running toward the first car, and climbed aboard.

A red light on the dashboard blinked. With a soft electric whirr, the Land Cruisers started off.

Driving back in the fading light, Malcolm seemed oddly subdued. Grant said, “You must feel vindicated. About your theory.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m feeling a bit of dread. I suspect we are at a very dangerous point.”

“Why?”

“Intuition.”

“Do mathematicians believe in intuition?”

“Absolutely. Very important, intuition. Actually, I was thinking of fractals,” Malcolm said. “You know about fractals?”

Grant shook his head. “Not really, no.”

“Fractals are a kind of geometry, associated with a man named Mandelbrot. Unlike ordinary Euclidean geometry that everybody learns in school—squares and cubes and spheres—fractal geometry appears to describe real objects in the natural world. Mountains and clouds are fractal shapes. So fractals are probably related to reality. Somehow.

“Well, Mandelbrot found a remarkable thing with his geometric tools. He found that things looked almost identical at different scales.”

“At different scales?” Grant said.

“For example,” Malcolm said, “a big mountain, seen from far away, has a certain rugged mountain shape. If you get closer, and examine a small peak of the big mountain, it will have the same mountain shape. In fact, you can go all the way down the scale to a tiny speck of rock, seen under a microscope—it will have the same basic fractal shape as the big mountain.”

“I don’t really see why this is worrying you,” Grant said. He yawned. He smelled the sulfur fumes of the volcanic steam. They were coming now to the section of road that ran near the coastline, overlooking the beach and the ocean.

“It’s a way of looking at things,” Malcolm said. “Mandelbrot found a sameness from the smallest to the largest. And this sameness of scale also occurs for events.”

“Events?”

“Consider cotton prices,” Malcolm said. “There are good records of cotton prices going back more than a hundred years. When you study fluctuations in cotton prices, you find that the graph of price
fluctuations in the course of a day looks basically like the graph for a week, which looks basically like the graph for a year, or for ten years. And that’s how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there.… And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.”

“I guess it’s one way to look at things,” Grant said.

“No,” Malcolm said. “It’s the
only
way to look at things. At least, the only way that is true to reality. You see, the fractal idea of sameness carries within it an aspect of recursion, a kind of doubling back on itself, which means that events are unpredictable. That they can change suddenly, and without warning.”

“Okay …”

“But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us,” Malcolm said, “that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.” Malcolm sat back in his seat, looking toward the other Land Cruiser, a few yards ahead. “That’s a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.”

At that moment, the cars jolted to a stop.

“What’s happened?” Grant said.

Up ahead, they saw the kids in the car, pointing toward the ocean. Offshore, beneath lowering clouds, Grant saw the dark outline of the supply boat making its way back toward Puntarenas.

“Why have we stopped?” Malcolm said.

Grant turned on the radio and heard the girl saying excitedly, “Look there, Timmy! You see it, it’s there!”

Malcolm squinted at the boat. “They talking about the boat?”

“Apparently.”

Ed Regis climbed out of the front car and came running back
to their window. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the kids are all worked up. Do you have binoculars here?”

“For what?”

“The little girl says she sees something on the boat. Some kind of animal,” Regis said.

Grant grabbed the binoculars and rested his elbows on the window ledge of the Land Cruiser. He scanned the long shape of the supply ship. It was so dark it was almost a silhouette; as he watched, the ship’s running lights came on, brilliant in the dark purple twilight.

“Do you see anything?” Regis said.

“No,” Grant said.

“They’re low down,” Lex said, over the radio. “Look low down.”

Grant tilted the binoculars down, scanning the hull just above the waterline. The supply ship was broad-beamed, with a splash flange that ran the length of the ship. But it was quite dark now, and he could hardly make out details.

“No, nothing …”

“I can see them,” Lex said impatiently. “Near the back. Look near the
back
!”

“How can she see anything in this light?” Malcolm said.

“Kids can see,” Grant said. “They’ve got visual acuity we forgot we ever had.”

He swung the binoculars toward the stern, moving them slowly, and suddenly he saw the animals. They were playing, darting among the silhouetted stern structures. He could see them only briefly, but even in the fading light he could tell that they were upright animals, about two feet tall, standing with stiff balancing tails.

“You see them now?” Lex said.

“I see them,” he said.

“What are they?”

“They’re raptors,” Grant said. “At least two. Maybe more. Juveniles.”

“Jesus,” Ed Regis said. “That boat’s going to the mainland.”

Malcolm shrugged. “Don’t get excited. Just call the control room and tell them to recall the boat.”

Ed Regis reached in and grabbed the radio from the dashboard. They heard hissing static, and clicks as he rapidly changed channels. “There’s something wrong with this one,” he said. “It’s not working.”

He ran off to the first Land Cruiser. They saw him duck into it. Then he looked back at them. “There’s something wrong with both the radios,” he said. “I can’t raise the control room.”

“Then let’s get going,” Grant said.

In the control room, Muldoon stood before the big windows that overlooked the park. At seven o’clock, the quartz floodlights came on all over the island, turning the landscape into a glowing jewel stretching away to the south. This was his favorite moment of the day. He heard the crackle of static from the radios.

“The Land Cruisers have started again,” Arnold said. “They’re on their way home.”

“But why did they stop?” Hammond said. “And why can’t we talk to them?”

“I don’t know,” Arnold said. “Maybe they turned off the radios in the cars.”

“Probably the storm,” Muldoon said. “Interference from the storm.”

“They’ll be here in twenty minutes,” Hammond said. “You better call down and make sure the dining room is ready for them. Those kids are going to be hungry.”

Arnold picked up the phone and heard a steady monotonous hiss. “What’s this? What’s going on?”

“Jesus, hang that up,” Nedry said. “You’ll screw up the data stream.”

“You’ve taken
all
the phone lines? Even the internal ones?”

“I’ve taken all the lines that communicate outside,” Nedry said. “But your internal lines should still work.”

Arnold punched console buttons one after another. He heard nothing but hissing on all the lines.

“Looks like you’ve got ’em all.”

“Sorry about that,” Nedry said. “I’ll clear a couple for you at the end of the next transmission, in about fifteen minutes.” He yawned. “Looks like a long weekend for me. I guess I’ll go get that Coke now.” He picked up his shoulder bag and headed for the door. “Don’t touch my console, okay?”

The door closed.

“What a slob,” Hammond said.

“Yeah,” Arnold said. “But I guess he knows what he’s doing.”

Along the side of the road, clouds of volcanic steam misted rainbows in the bright quartz lights. Grant said into the radio, “How long does it take the ship to reach the mainland?”

“Eighteen hours,” Ed Regis said. “More or less. It’s pretty reliable.” He glanced at his watch. “It should arrive around eleven tomorrow morning.”

Grant frowned. “You still can’t talk to the control room?”

“Not so far.”

“How about Harding? Can you reach him?”

“No, I’ve tried. He may have his radio turned off.”

Malcolm was shaking his head. “So we’re the only ones who know about the animals on the ship.”

“I’m trying to raise somebody,” Ed Regis said. “I mean, Christ, we don’t want those animals on the mainland.”

“How long until we get back to the base?”

“From here, another sixteen, seventeen minutes,” Ed Regis said.

At night, the whole road was illuminated by big floodlights. It felt to Grant as if they were driving through a bright green tunnel of leaves. Large raindrops spattered the windshield.

Grant felt the Land Cruiser slow, then stop. “Now what?”

Lex said, “I don’t want to stop. Why did we stop?”

And then, suddenly, all the floodlights went out. The road was plunged into darkness. Lex said, “Hey!”

“Probably just a power outage or something,” Ed Regis said. “I’m sure the lights’ll be on in a minute.”

“What the hell?” Arnold said, staring at his monitors.

“What happened?” Muldoon said. “You lose power?”

“Yeah, but only power on the perimeter. Everything in this building’s working fine. But outside, in the park, the power is gone. Lights, TV cameras, everything.” His remote video monitors had gone black.

“What about the two Land Cruisers?”

“Stopped somewhere around the tyrannosaur paddock.”

“Well,” Muldoon said, “call Maintenance and let’s get the power back on.”

Arnold picked up one of his phones and heard hissing: Nedry’s computers talking to each other. “No phones. That damn Nedry. Nedry! Where the hell is he?”