“Look, I’ve got it covered,” the man said. “Just relax, and get the money ready I want it all Sunday morning, in San José airport, in cash.”
“It’ll be waiting for you,” Dodgson said. “Don’t worry.”
MALCOLM
Shortly before midnight, he stepped on the plane at the Dallas airport, a tall, thin, balding man of thirty-five, dressed entirely in black: black shirt, black trousers, black socks, black sneakers.
“Ah, Dr. Malcolm,” Hammond said, smiling with forced graciousness.
Malcolm grinned. “Hello, John. Yes, I am afraid your old nemesis is here.”
Malcolm shook hands with everyone, saying quickly, “Ian Malcolm, how do you do? I do maths.” He struck Grant as being more amused by the outing than anything else.
Certainly Grant recognized his name. Ian Malcolm was one of the most famous of the new generation of mathematicians who were openly interested in “how the real world works.” These scholars broke with the cloistered tradition of mathematics in several important ways. For one thing, they used computers constantly, a practice traditional mathematicians frowned on. For another, they worked almost exclusively with nonlinear equations, in the emerging field called chaos theory. For a third, they appeared to care that their mathematics described something that actually existed in the real world. And finally, as if to emphasize their emergence from academia into the world, they dressed and spoke with what one senior mathematician called “a deplorable excess of personality.” In fact, they often behaved like rock stars.
Malcolm sat in one of the padded chairs. The stewardess asked him if he wanted a drink. He said, “Diet Coke, shaken not stirred.”
Humid Dallas air drifted through the open door. Ellie said, “Isn’t it a little warm for black?”
“You’re extremely pretty, Dr. Sattler,” he said. “I could look at your legs all day. But no, as a matter of fact, black is an excellent color for heat. If you remember your black-body radiation, black is actually best in heat. Efficient radiation. In any case, I wear only two colors, black and gray.”
Ellie was staring at him, her mouth open.
“These colors are appropriate for any occasion,” Malcolm continued, “and they go well together, should I mistakenly put on a pair of gray socks with my black trousers.”
“But don’t you find it boring to wear only two colors?”
“Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don’t want to waste it thinking about clothing,” Malcolm said. “I don’t want to think about what I will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports.”
“Dr. Malcolm,” Hammond explained, “is a man of strong opinions.”
“And mad as a hatter,” Malcolm said cheerfully. “But you must admit, these are nontrivial issues. We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn’t it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.”
Hammond turned to Gennaro and raised his hands. “You invited him.”
“And a lucky thing, too,” Malcolm said. “Because it sounds as if you have a serious problem.”
“We have no problem,” Hammond said quickly.
“I always maintained this island would be unworkable,” Malcolm said. “I predicted it from the beginning.” He reached into a soft leather briefcase. “And I trust by now we all know what the eventual outcome is going to be. You’re going to have to shut the thing down.”
“Shut it down!” Hammond stood angrily. “This is ridiculous.”
Malcolm shrugged, indifferent to Hammond’s outburst. “I’ve brought copies of my original paper for you to look at,” he said. “The original consultancy paper I did for InGen. The mathematics are a bit sticky, but I can walk you through it. Are you leaving now?”
“I have some phone calls to make,” Hammond said, and went into the adjoining cabin.
“Well, it’s a long flight,” Malcolm said to the others. “At least my paper will give you something to do.”
The plane flew through the night.
Grant knew that Ian Malcolm had his share of detractors, and he could understand why some found his style too abrasive, and his applications of chaos theory too glib. Grant thumbed through the paper, glancing at the equations.
Gennaro said, “Your paper concludes that Hammond’s island is bound to fail?”
“Correct.”
“Because of chaos theory?”
“Correct. To be more precise, because of the behavior of the system in phase space.”
Gennaro tossed the paper aside and said, “Can you explain this in English?”
“Surely,” Malcolm said. “Let’s see where we have to start. You know what a nonlinear equation is?”
“No.”
“Strange attractors?”
“No.”
“All right,” Malcolm said. “Let’s go back to the beginning.” He paused, staring at the ceiling. “Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years.”
“Okay,” Gennaro said.
“But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They’re hard to solve—in fact, they’re usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory.
“Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in the 1960s. Weather is a big complicated system, namely the earth’s atmosphere as it interacts with the land and the sun. The behavior of this big complicated system always defied understanding. So naturally we couldn’t predict weather. But what the early researchers learned from computer models was that, even if you could understand it, you still couldn’t predict it. Weather prediction is absolutely impossible. The reason is that the behavior of the system is sensitively dependent on initial conditions.”
“You lost me,” Gennaro said.
“If I use a cannon to fire a shell of a certain weight, at a certain speed, and a certain angle of inclination—and if I then fire a second shell with almost the same weight, speed, and angle—what will happen?”
“The two shells will land at almost the same spot.”
“Right,” Malcolm said. “That’s linear dynamics.”
“Okay.”
“But if I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity—and if I then repeat it with almost the same temperature, wind, and humidity—the second system will not behave almost the same. It’ll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first. Thunderstorms instead of sunshine. That’s nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified.”
“I think I see,” Gennaro said.
“The shorthand is the ‘butterfly effect.’ A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and weather in New York is different.”
“So chaos is all just random and unpredictable?” Gennaro said. “Is that it?”
“No,” Malcolm said. “We actually find hidden regularities within the complex variety of a system’s behavior. That’s why chaos has now become a very broad theory that’s used to study everything from the stock market, to rioting crowds, to brain waves during
epilepsy. Any sort of complex system where there is confusion and unpredictability. We can find an underlying order. Okay?”
“Okay,” Gennaro said. “But what is this underlying order?”
“It’s essentially characterized by the movement of the system within phase space,” Malcolm said.
“Jesus,” Gennaro said. “All I want to know is why you think Hammond’s island can’t work.”
“I understand,” Malcolm said. “I’ll get there. Chaos theory says two things. First, that complex systems like weather have an underlying order. Second, the reverse of that—that simple systems can produce complex behavior. For example, pool balls. You hit a pool ball, and it starts to carom off the sides of the table. In theory, that’s a fairly simple system, almost a Newtonian system. Since you can know the force imparted to the ball, and the mass of the ball, and you can calculate the angles at which it will strike the walls, you can predict the future behavior of the ball. In theory, you could predict the behavior of the ball far into the future, as it keeps bouncing from side to side. You could predict where it will end up three hours from now, in theory.”
“Okay.” Gennaro nodded.
“But in fact,” Malcolm said, “it turns out you can’t predict more than a few seconds into the future. Because almost immediately very small effects—imperfections in the surface of the ball, tiny indentations in the wood of the table—start to make a difference. And it doesn’t take long before they overpower your careful calculations. So it turns out that this simple system of a pool ball on a table has unpredictable behavior.”
“Okay.”
“And Hammond’s project,” Malcolm said, “is another apparently simple system—animals within a zoo environment—that will eventually show unpredictable behavior.”
“You know this because of …”
“Theory,” Malcolm said.
“But hadn’t you better see the island, to see what he’s actually done?”
“No. That is quite unnecessary. The details don’t matter. Theory tells me that the island will quickly proceed to behave in unpredictable fashion.”
“And you’re confident of your theory.”
“Oh, yes,” Malcolm said. “Totally confident.” He sat back in the chair. “There is a problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen.”
ISLA NUBLAR
With a whine, the rotors began to swing in circles overhead, casting shadows on the runway of San José airport. Grant listened to the crackle in his earphones as the pilot talked to the tower.
They had picked up another passenger in San José, a man named Dennis Nedry, who had flown in to meet them. He was fat and sloppy, eating a candy bar, and there was sticky chocolate on his fingers, and flecks of aluminum foil on his shirt. Nedry had mumbled something about doing computers on the island, and hadn’t offered to shake hands.
Through the Plexi bubble Grant watched the airport concrete drop away beneath his feet, and he saw the shadow of the helicopter racing along as they went west, toward the mountains.
“It’s about a forty-minute trip,” Hammond said, from one of the rear seats.
Grant watched the low hills rise up, and then they were passing through intermittent clouds, breaking out into sunshine. The mountains were rugged, though he was surprised at the amount of deforestation, acre after acre of denuded, eroded hills. “Costa Rica,” Hammond said, “has better population control than other countries in Central America. But, even so, the land is badly deforested. Most of this is within the last ten years.”
They came down out of the clouds on the other side of the mountains, and Grant saw the beaches of the west coast. They flashed over a small coastal village.
“Bahía Anasco,” the pilot said. “Fishing village.” He pointed north. “Up the coast there, you see the Cabo Blanco preserve. They have beautiful beaches.” The pilot headed straight out over the ocean. The water turned green, and then deep aquamarine. The sun shone on the water. It was about ten in the morning.
“Just a few minutes now,” Hammond said, “and we should be seeing Isla Nublar.”
Isla Nublar, Hammond explained, was not a true island. Rather, it was a seamount, a volcanic upthrusting of rock from the ocean floor. “Its volcanic origins can be seen all over the island,” Hammond said. “There are steam vents in many places, and the ground is often hot underfoot. Because of this, and also because of prevailing currents, Isla Nublar lies in a foggy area. As we get there you will see—ah, there we are.”
The helicopter rushed forward, low to the water. Ahead Grant saw an island, rugged and craggy, rising sharply from the ocean.
“Christ, it looks like Alcatraz,” Malcolm said.
Its forested slopes were wreathed in fog, giving the island a mysterious appearance.
“Much larger, of course,” Hammond said. “Eight miles long and three miles wide at the widest point, in total some twenty-two square miles. Making it the largest private animal preserve in North America.”
The helicopter began to climb, and headed toward the north end of the island. Grant was trying to see through the dense fog.
“It’s not usually this thick,” Hammond said. He sounded worried.
At the north end of the island, the hills were highest, rising more than two thousand feet above the ocean. The tops of the hills were in fog, but Grant saw rugged cliffs and crashing ocean below. The helicopter climbed above the hills. “Unfortunately,” Hammond said, “we have to land on the island. I don’t like to do it, because it disturbs the animals. And it’s sometimes a bit thrilling—”
Hammond’s voice cut off as the pilot said, “Starting our descent now. Hang on, folks.” The helicopter started down, and immediately they were blanketed in fog. Grant heard a repetitive electronic beeping through his earphones, but he could see nothing at all; then he began dimly to discern the green branches of pine trees, reaching through the mist. Some of the branches were close.
“How the hell is he doing this?” Malcolm said, but nobody answered.
The pilot swung his gaze left, then right, looking at the pine forest. The trees were still close. The helicopter descended rapidly.
“Jesus,” Malcolm said.
The beeping was louder. Grant looked at the pilot. He was concentrating. Grant glanced down and saw a giant glowing fluorescent cross beneath the Plexi bubble at his feet. There were flashing lights at the comers of the cross. The pilot corrected slightly and touched down on a helipad. The sound of the rotors faded, and died.
Grant sighed, and released his seat belt.
“We have to come down fast, that way,” Hammond said, “because of the wind shear. There is often bad wind shear on this peak, and … well, we’re safe.”
Someone was running up to the helicopter. A man with a baseball cap and red hair. He threw open the door and said cheerfully, “Hi, I’m Ed Regis. Welcome to Isla Nublar, everybody. And watch your step, please.”
A narrow path wound down the hill. The air was chilly and damp. As they moved lower, the mist around them thinned, and Grant could see the landscape better. It looked, he thought, rather like the Pacific Northwest, the Olympic Peninsula.
“That’s right,” Regis said. “Primary ecology is deciduous rain forest. Rather different from the vegetation on the mainland, which is more classical rain forest. But this is a microclimate that only occurs at elevation, on the slopes of the northern hills. The majority of the island is tropical.”
Down below, they could see the white roofs of large buildings, nestled among the planting. Grant was surprised: the construction was elaborate. They moved lower, out of the mist, and now he could see the full extent of the island, stretching away to the south. As Regis had said, it was mostly covered in tropical forest.
To the south, rising above the palm trees, Grant saw a single trunk with no leaves at all, just a big curving stump. Then the stump moved, and twisted around to face the new arrivals. Grant realized that he was not seeing a tree at all.
He was look
ing at the graceful, curving neck of an enormous creature, rising fifty feet into the air.
He was looking at a dinosaur.
WELCOME
“My God,” Ellie said softly. They were all staring at the animal above the trees. “My God.”
Her first thought was that the dinosaur was extraordinarily beautiful. Books portrayed them as oversize, dumpy creatures, but this long-necked animal had a gracefulness, almost a dignity, about its movements. And it was quick—there was nothing lumbering or dull in its behavior. The sauropod peered alertly at them, and made a low trumpeting sound, rather like an elephant. A moment later, a second head rose above the foliage, and then a third, and a fourth.
“My God,” Ellie said again.
Gennaro was speechless. He had known all along what to expect—he had known about it for years—but he had somehow never believed it would happen, and now, he was shocked into silence. The awesome power of the new genetic technology, which he had formerly considered to be just so many words in an overwrought sales pitch—the power suddenly became clear to him. These animals were so big! They were enormous! Big as a house! And so many of them! Actual damned dinosaurs! Just as real as you could want.
Gennaro thought: We are going to make a fortune on this place. A fortune.
He hoped to God the island was safe.
Grant stood on the path on the side of the hill, with the mist on his face, staring at the gray necks craning above the palms. He felt dizzy, as if the ground were sloping away too steeply. He had trouble getting his breath. Because he was looking at something he had never expected to see in his life. Yet he was seeing it.
The animals in the mist were perfect apatosaurs, medium-size sauropods. His stunned mind made academic associations: North American herbivores, late Jurassic horizon. Commonly called “brontosaurs.” First discovered by E. D. Cope in Montana in 1876. Specimens associated with Morrison formation strata in Colorado, Utah, and Oklahoma. Recently Berman and McIntosh had reclassified it a diplodocus based on skull appearance. Traditionally, Brontosaurus was thought to spend most of its time in shallow water, which would help support its large bulk. Although this animal was clearly not in the water, it was moving much too quickly, the head and neck shifting above the palms in a very active manner—a surprisingly active manner—
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