Jurassic Park

by Michael Crichton

  “Control. This is Muldoon. We’re ready to begin repair.”

  “All right,” Arnold said. “Shutting out your section now.”

  Muldoon glanced at his watch. Somewhere in the distance, he heard soft hooting. It sounded like owls, but he knew it was the dilophosaurs. He went over to Ramón and said, “Let’s finish this up. I want to get to those other sections of fence.”

  An hour went by. Donald Gennaro stared at the glowing map in the control room as the spots and numbers flickered and changed. “What’s happening now?”

  Arnold worked at the console. “I’m trying to get the phones back. So we can call about Malcolm.”

  “No, I mean out there.”

  Arnold glanced up at the board. “It looks as if they’re about done with the animals, and the two sections. Just as I told you, the park is back in hand. With no catastrophic Malcolm Effect. In fact, there’s just that third section of fence.…”

  “Arnold.” It was Muldoon’s voice.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you seen this bloody fence?”

  “Just a minute.”

  On one of the monitors, Gennaro saw a high angle down on a field of grass, blowing in the wind. In the distance was a low concrete roof. “That’s the sauropod maintenance building,” Arnold explained. “It’s one of the utility structures we use for equipment, feed storage, and so on. We have them all around the park, in each of the paddocks.” On the monitor, the video image panned. “We’re turning the camera now to get a look at the fence.…”

  Gennaro saw a shining wall of metallic mesh in the light. One section had been trampled, knocked flat. Muldoon’s Jeep and work crew were there.

  “Huh,” Arnold said. “Looks like the rex went into the sauropod paddock.”

  Muldoon said, “Fine dining tonight.”

  “We’ll have to get him out of there,” Arnold said.

  “With what?” Muldoon said. “We haven’t got anything to use on a rex. I’ll fix this fence, but I’m not going in there until daylight.”

  “Hammond won’t like it.”

  “We’ll discuss it when I get back,” Muldoon said.

  “How many sauropods will the rex kill?” Hammond said, pacing around the control room.

  “Probably just one,” Harding said. “Sauropods are big; the rex can feed off a single kill for several days.”

  “We have to go out and get him tonight,” Hammond said.

  Muldoon shook his head. “I’m not going in there until daylight.”

  Hammond was rising up and down on the balls of his feet, the way he did whenever he was angry. “Are you forgetting you work for me?”

  “No, Mr. Hammond, I’m not forgetting. But that’s a full-grown adult tyrannosaur out there. How do you plan to get him?”

  “We have tranquilizer guns.”

  “We have tranquilizer guns that shoot a twenty-cc dart,” Muldoon said. “Fine for an animal that weighs four or five hundred pounds. That tyrannosaur weighs eight tons. It wouldn’t even feel it.”

  “You ordered a larger weapon.…”

  “I ordered three larger weapons, Mr. Hammond, but you cut the requisition, so we got only one. And it’s gone. Nedry took it when he left.”

  “That was pretty stupid. Who let that happen?”

  “Nedry’s not my problem, Mr. Hammond,” Muldoon said.

  “You’re saying,” Hammond said, “that, as of this moment, there is no way to stop the tyrannosaur?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Muldoon said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Hammond said.

  “It’s your park, Mr. Hammond. You didn’t want anybody to be able to injure your precious dinosaurs. Well, now you’ve got a rex in with the sauropods, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.” He left the room.

  “Just a minute,” Hammond said, hurrying after him.

  Gennaro stared at the screens, and listened to the shouted argument in the hallway outside. He said to Arnold, “I guess you don’t have control of the park yet, after all.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Arnold said, lighting another cigarette. “We have the park. It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours. We may lose a couple of dinos before we get the rex out of there, but, believe me, we have the park.”

  DAWN

  Grant was awakened by a loud grinding sound, followed by a mechanical clanking. He opened his eyes and saw a bale of hay rolling past him on a conveyor belt, up toward the ceiling. Two more bales followed it. Then the clanking stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the concrete building was silent again.

  Grant yawned. He stretched sleepily, winced in pain, and sat up.

  Soft yellow light came through the side windows. It was morning: he had slept the whole night! He looked quickly at his watch: 5:00 a.m. Still almost six hours to go before the boat had to be recalled. He rolled onto his back, groaning. His head throbbed, and his body ached as if he had been beaten up. From around the corner, he heard a squeaking sound, like a rusty wheel. And then Lex giggling.

  Grant stood slowly, and looked at the building. Now that it was daylight, he could see it was some kind of a maintenance building, with stacks of hay and supplies. On the wall he saw a gray metal box and a stenciled sign: SAUROPOD MAINTENANCE BLDG (04). This must be the sauropod paddock, as he had thought. He opened the box and saw a telephone, but when he lifted the receiver he heard only hissing static. Apparently the phones weren’t working yet.

  “Chew your food,” Lex was saying. “Don’t be a piggy, Ralph.”

  Grant walked around the corner and found Lex by the bars, holding out handfuls of hay to an animal outside that looked like a large pink pig and was making the squeaking sounds Grant had heard. It was actually an infant triceratops, about the size of a pony. The infant didn’t have horns on its head yet, just a curved bony frill behind big soft eyes. It poked its snout through the bars toward Lex, its eyes watching her as she fed it more hay.

  “That’s better,” Lex said. “There’s plenty of hay, don’t worry.” She patted the baby on the head. “You like hay, don’t you, Ralph?”

  Lex turned back and saw him.

  “This is Ralph,” Lex said. “He’s my friend. He likes hay.”

  Grant took a step and stopped, wincing.

  “You look pretty bad,” Lex said.

  “I feel pretty bad.”

  “Tim, too. His nose is all swollen up.”

  “Where is Tim?”

  “Peeing,” she said. “You want to help me feed Ralph?”

  The baby triceratops looked at Grant. Hay stuck out of both sides of its mouth, dropping on the floor as it chewed.

  “He’s a very messy eater,” Lex said. “And he’s very hungry.”

  The baby finished chewing and licked its lips. It opened its mouth, waiting for more. Grant could see the slender sharp teeth, and the beaky upper jaw, like a parrot.

  “Okay, just a minute,” Lex said, scooping up more straw from the concrete floor. “Honestly, Ralph,” she said, “you’d think your mother never fed you.”

  “Why is his name Ralph?”

  “Because he looks like Ralph. At school.”

  Grant came closer and touched the skin of the neck gently.

  “It’s okay, you can pet him,” Lex said. “He likes it when you pet him, don’t you, Ralph?”

  The skin felt dry and warm, with the pebbled texture of a football. Ralph gave a little squeak as Grant petted it. Outside the bars, its thick tail swung back and forth with pleasure.

  “He’s pretty tame.” Ralph looked from Lex to Grant as it ate, and showed no sign of fear. It reminded Grant that the dinosaurs didn’t have ordinary responses to people. “Maybe I can ride him,” Lex said.

  “Let’s not.”

  “I bet he’d let me,” Lex said. “It’d be fun to ride a dinosaur.”

  Grant looked out the bars past the animal, to the open fields of the sauropod compound. It was growing lighter every minute. He should go outside, he though
t, and set off one of the motion sensors on the field above. After all, it might take the people in the control room an hour to get out here to him. And he didn’t like the idea that the phones were still down.…

  He heard a deep snorting sound, like the snort of a very large horse, and suddenly the baby became agitated. It tried to pull its head back through the bars, but got caught on the edge of its frill, and it squeaked in fright.

  The snorting came again. It was closer this time.

  Ralph reared up on its hind legs, frantic to get out from between the bars. It wriggled its head back and forth, rubbing against the bars.

  “Ralph, take it easy,” Lex said.

  “Push him out,” Grant said. He reached up to Ralph’s head and leaned against it, pushing the animal sideways and backward. The frill popped free and the baby fell outside the bars, losing its balance and flopping on its side. Then the baby was covered in shadow, and a huge leg came into view, thicker than a tree trunk. The foot had five curved toenails, like an elephant’s.

  Ralph looked up and squeaked. A head came down into view: six feet long, with three long white horns, one above each of the large brown eyes and a smaller horn at the tip of the nose. It was a full-grown triceratops. The big animal peered at Lex and Grant, blinking slowly, and then turned its attention to Ralph. A tongue came out and licked the baby. Ralph squeaked and rubbed up against the big leg happily.

  “Is that his mom?” Lex said.

  “Looks like it,” Grant said.

  “Should we feed the mom, too?” Lex said.

  But the big triceratops was already nudging Ralph with her snout, pushing the baby away from the bars.

  “Guess not.”

  The infant turned away from the bars and walked off. From time to time, the big mother nudged her baby, guiding it away, as they both walked out into the fields.

  “Good-bye, Ralph,” Lex said, waving. Tim came out of the shadows of the building.

  “Tell you what,” Grant said. “I’m going up on the hill to set off the motion sensors, so they’ll know to come get us. You two stay here and wait for me.”

  “No,” Lex said.

  “Why? Stay here. It’s safe here.”

  “You’re not leaving us,” she said. “Right, Timmy?”

  “Right,” Tim said.

  “Okay,” Grant said.

  They crawled through the bars, stepping outside.

  It was just before dawn.

  The air was warm and humid, the sky soft pink and purple. A white mist clung low to the ground. Some distance away, they saw the mother triceratops and the baby moving away toward a herd of large duckbilled hadrosaurs, eating foliage from trees at the edge of the lagoon.

  Some of the hadrosaurs stood knee-deep in the water. They drank, lowering their flat heads, meeting their own reflections in the still water. Then they looked up again, their heads swiveling. At the water’s edge, one of the babies ventured out, squeaked, and scrambled back while the adults watched indulgently.

  Farther south, other hadrosaurs were eating the lower vegetation. Sometimes they reared up on their hind legs, resting their forelegs on the tree trunks, so they could reach the leaves on higher branches. And in the far distance, a giant apatosaur stood above the trees, the tiny head swiveling on the long neck. The scene was so peaceful Grant found it hard to imagine any danger.

  “Yow!” Lex shouted, ducking. Two giant red dragonflies with six-foot wingspans hummed past them. “What was that?”

  “Dragonflies,” he said. “The Jurassic was a time of huge insects.”

  “Do they bite?” Lex said.

  “I don’t think so,” Grant said.

  Tim held out his hand. One of the dragonflies lighted on it. He could feel the weight of the huge insect.

  “He’s going to bite you,” Lex warned.

  But the dragonfly just slowly flapped its red-veined transparent wings, and then, when Tim moved his arm, flew off again.

  “Which way do we go?” Lex said.

  “There.”

  They started walking across the field. They reached a black box mounted on a heavy metal tripod, the first of the motion sensors. Grant stopped and waved his hand in front of it back and forth, but nothing happened. If the phones didn’t work, perhaps the sensors didn’t work, either. “We’ll try another one,” he said, pointing across the field. Somewhere in the distance, they heard the roar of a large animal.

  “Ah hell,” Arnold said. “I just can’t find it.” He sipped coffee and stared bleary-eyed at the screens. He had taken all the video monitors off line. In the control room, he was searching the computer code. He was exhausted; he’d been working for twelve straight hours. He turned to Wu, who had come up from the lab.

  “Find what?”

  “The phones are still out. I can’t get them back on. I think Nedry did something to the phones.”

  Wu lifted one phone, heard hissing. “Sounds like a modem.”

  “But it’s not,” Arnold said. “Because I went down into the basement and shut off all the modems. What you’re hearing is just white noise that sounds like a modem transmitting.”

  “So the phone lines are jammed?”

  “Basically, yes. Nedry jammed them very well. He’s inserted some kind of a lockout into the program code, and now I can’t find it, because I gave that restore command which erased part of the program listings. But apparently the command to shut off the phones is still resident in the computer memory.”

  Wu shrugged. “So? Just reset: shut the system down and you’ll clear memory.”

  “I’ve never done it before,” Arnold said. “And I’m reluctant to do it. Maybe all the systems will come back on start-up—but maybe they won’t. I’m not a computer expert, and neither are you. Not really. And without an open phone line, we can’t talk to anybody who is.”

  “If the command is RAM-resident, it won’t show up in the code. You can do a RAM dump and search that, but you don’t know what you’re searching for. I think all you can do is reset.”

  Gennaro stormed in. “We still don’t have any telephones.”

  “Working on it.”

  “You’ve been working on it since midnight. And Malcolm is worse. He needs medical attention.”

  “It means I’ll have to shut down,” Arnold said. “I can’t be sure everything will come back on.”

  Gennaro said, “Look. There’s a sick man over in that lodge. He needs a doctor or he’ll die. You can’t call for a doctor unless you have a phone. Four people have probably died already. Now, shut down and get the phones working!”

  Arnold hesitated.

  “Well?” Gennaro said.

  “Well, it’s just … the safety systems don’t allow the computer to be shut down, and—”

  “Then turn the goddamn safety systems off! Can’t you get it through your head that he’s going to die unless he gets help?”

  “Okay,” Arnold said.

  He got up and went to the main panel. He opened the doors, and uncovered the metal swing-latches over the safety switches. He popped them off, one after another. “You asked for it,” Arnold said. “And you got it.”

  He threw the master switch.

  The control room was dark. All the monitors were black. The three men stood there in the dark.

  “How long do we have to wait?” Gennaro said.

  “Thirty seconds,” Arnold said.

  “P-U!” Lex said, as they crossed the field.

  “What?” Grant said.

  “That smell!” Lex said. “It stinks like rotten garbage.”

  Grant hesitated. He stared across the field toward the distant trees, looking for movement. He saw nothing. There was hardly a breeze to stir the branches. It was peaceful and silent in the early morning. “I think it’s your imagination,” he said.

  “Is not—”

  Then he heard the honking sound. It came from the herd of duckbilled hadrosaurs behind them. First one animal, then another and another, until the whole herd had tak
en up the honking cry. The duckbills were agitated, twisting and turning, hurrying out of the water, circling the young ones to protect them.…

  They smell it, too, Grant thought.

  With a roar, the tyrannosaur burst from the trees fifty yards away, near the lagoon. It rushed out across the open field with huge strides. It ignored them, heading toward the herd of hadrosaurs.

  “I told you!” Lex screamed. “Nobody listens to me!”

  In the distance, the duckbills were honking and starting to run. Grant could feel the earth shake beneath his feet. “Come on, kids!” He grabbed Lex, lifting her bodily off the ground, and ran with Tim through the grass. He had glimpses of the tyrannosaur down by the lagoon, lunging at the hadrosaurs, which swung their big tails in defense and honked loudly and continuously. He heard the crashing of foliage and trees, and when he looked over again, the duckbills were charging.

  In the darkened control room, Arnold checked his watch. Thirty seconds. The memory should be cleared by now. He pushed the main power switch back on.

  Nothing happened.

  Arnold’s stomach heaved. He pushed the switch off, then on again. Still nothing happened. He felt sweat on his brow.

  “What’s wrong?” Gennaro said. “Oh hell,” Arnold said. Then he remembered you had to turn the safety switches back on before you restarted the power. He flipped on the three safeties, and covered them again with the latch covers. Then he held his breath, and turned the main power switch.

  The room lights came on.

  The computer beeped.

  The screens hummed.

  “Thank God,” Arnold said. He hurried to the main monitor. There were rows of labels on the screen:

  Gennaro reached for the phone, but it was dead. No static hissing this time—just nothing at all. “What’s this?”

  “Give me a second,” Arnold said. “After a reset, all the system modules have to be brought on line manually.” Quickly, he went back to work.

  “Why manually?” Gennaro said.

  “Will you just let me work, for Christ’s sake?”

  Wu said, “The system is not intended to ever shut down. So, if it does shut down, it assumes that there is a problem somewhere. It requires you to start up everything manually. Otherwise, if there were a short somewhere, the system would start up, short out, start up again, short out again, in an endless cycle.”