The Lost World (27 page)

D
riving up the trail, Malcolm stared at the dashboard monitor, as the image flicked from one camera view to another. He was looking for Dodgson and the rest of his party.

Over the radio, Levine said, "How bad was it?"

"They took one egg," Malcolm said. "And we had to shoot one of the babies."

"So, a loss of two. Out of a total hatching brood of what, six?"

"That's right."

"Frankly, I'd say it's a minor matter," Levine said. "As long as you stop those people from doing anything more."

"We're looking for them now," Malcolm said morosely.

Harding said, "It was bound to happen, Ian. You know you can't expect to observe the animals without changing anything. It's a scientific impossibility."

"Of course it is," Malcolm said. "That's the greatest single scientific discovery of the twentieth century. You can't study anything without changing it."

Since Galileo, scientists had adopted the view that they were objective observers of the natural world. That was implicit in every aspect of their behavior, even the way they wrote scientific papers, saying things like "It was observed…" As if nobody had observed it. For three hundred years, that impersonal quality was the hallmark of science. Science was objective, and the observer had no influence on the results he or she described.

This objectivity made science different from the humanities, or from religion-fields where the observer's point of view was integral, where the observer was inextricably mixed up in the results observed.

But in the twentieth century, that difference had vanished. Scientific objectivity was gone, even at the most fundamental levels. Physicists now knew you couldn't even measure a single subatomic particle without affecting it totally. If you stuck your Instruments in to measure a particle's position, you changed its velocity. If you measured its velocity, you changed its position. That basic truth became the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that whatever you studied you also changed. In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.

"I know objectivity is impossible," Malcolm said impatiently. "I'm not concerned about that."

"Then what are you concerned about?"

"I'm concerned about the Gambler's Ruin," Malcolm said, staring at the monitor.

Gambler's Ruin was a notorious and much-debated statistical phenomenon that had major consequences both for evolution, and for everyday life. "Let's say you're a gambler," he said. "And you're playing a coin-toss game. Every time the coin comes up heads, you win a dollar. Every time it comes up tails, you lose a dollar."

"Okay."

"What happens over time?"

Harding shrugged. "The chances of getting either heads or tails is even. So maybe you win, maybe you lose. But in the end, you'll Come out at zero."

"Unfortunately, you don't," Malcolm said. "If you gamble long enough, you'll always lose - the gambler is always ruined. That's why casinos stay in business. But the question is, what happens over time? What happens in the period before the gambler is finally ruined?"

"Okay," she said. "What happens?"

"If you chart the gambler's fortunes over time, what you find is the gambler wins for a period, or loses for a period. In other words, everything in the world goes in streaks. It's a real phenomenon, and you see it everywhere: in weather, in river flooding, in baseball, in heart rhythms, in stock markets. Once things go bad, they tend to stay bad. Like the old folk saying that bad things come in threes. Complexity theory tells us the folk wisdom is right. Bad things cluster. Things go to hell together. That's the real world."

"So what are you saying? That things are going to hell now?"

"They could be, thanks to Dodgson," Malcolm said, frowning at the monitor. "What happened to those bastards, anyway?"

T
here was a buzzing, like the sound of a distant bee. Howard King was dimly aware of it, as he came slowly back to consciousness. He opened his eyes, and saw the windshield of a car, and the branches of trees beyond.

The buzzing was louder.

King didn't know where he was. He couldn't remember how he got here, what had happened. He felt pain in his shoulders, and at his hips. His forehead throbbed. He tried to remember but the pain distracted him, prevented him from thinking clearly. The last thing he remembered was the tyrannosaur in front of him on the road. That was the last thing. Then Dodgson had looked back and -

King turned his head, and cried out as sudden, sharp pain ran up his neck to his skull. The pain made him gasp, took his breath away. He closed his eyes, wincing. Then he slowly opened them again.

Dodgson was not in the car. The driver's door hung wide open, a dappled shadow across the door panel. The keys were still in the ignition.

Dodgson was gone.

There was a streak of blood across the top of the steering wheel. The black box was on the floor by the gearshift. The open driver's door creaked a little, moved a little.

In the distance, King heard the buzzing again, like a giant bee. It was a mechanical sound, he now realized. Something mechanical.

It made him think of the boat. How long would the boat wait at the river? What time was it, anyway? He looked at his watch. The crystal was smashed, the hands fixed at 1:54.

He heard the buzzing again. It was coming closer.

With an effort, King pushed himself away from the seat, toward the dashboard. Streaks of electric pain shot up his spine, but quickly subsided. He took a deep breath.

I'm all right, he thought. At least, I'm still here.

King looked at the open driver's door, in the sunlight. The sun was still high. It must still be sometime in the afternoon. When was the boat leaving? Four o'clock? Five o'clock? He couldn't remember any more. But he was certain that those Spanish fishermen wouldn't hang around once it started to get dark. They'd leave the island.

And Howard King wanted to be on the boat when they did. It was the only thing he wanted in the world. Wincing, he raised himself up, and painfully slid over to the driver's seat. He settled himself in, took a deep breath, and then leaned over, and looked out the open door.

The car was hanging over empty space, supported by trees. He saw a steep jungle hillside, falling away beneath him. It was dark beneath the canopy of trees. He felt dizzy, just looking down. The ground must be twenty or thirty feet below him. He saw scattered green ferns, and a few dark boulders. He twisted his body to look more.

And then he saw him.

Dodgson lay on his back, head downward, on the slope of the hill. His body was crumpled, arms and legs thrown out in awkward positions. He was not moving. King couldn't see him very well, in the dense foliage on the hillside, but Dodgson looked dead.

The buzzing was suddenly very loud, building rapidly, and King looked forward and saw, through the foliage that blocked the windshield, a car driving by, not ten yards away. A car!

And then the car was gone. From the sound of it, he thought, it was an electric car. So it must be Malcolm.

Howard King was somehow encouraged by the thought that other people were on this island. He felt new strength, despite the pain in his body. He reached forward, and turned the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled.

He put the car in gear, and gently stepped on the accelerator.

The rear wheels spun. He engaged the front-wheel drive. At once, the Jeep rumbled forward, lurching through the branches. A moment later, he was out on the road.

He remembered this road now. To the right, it led down to the tyrannosaurus nest. Malcolm's car had gone to the left.

King turned left, and headed up the road. He was trying to remember how to get back to the river, back to the boat. He vaguely recalled that there was a Y-fork in the road at the top of the hill. He would take that fork, he decided, drive down the hill, and get the hell off this island.

That was his only goal.

To get off this island, before it was too late.

T
he Explorer came to the top of the hill, and Thorne drove onto the ridge road. The road curved back and forth, cut into the rock face of the cliff. In many places, the dropoff was precipitous, but they had views over the entire island. Eventually they came to a place where they could look over the valley. They could see the high hide off to the left, and closer by, the clearing with the two trailers. Off to the right was the laboratory complex, and the worker complex beyond.

"I don't see Dodgson anywhere," Malcolm said unhappily. "Where could he have gone?"

Thorne pushed the radio button. "Arby?"

"Yes, Doc."

"Do you see them?"

"No, but…" He hesitated.

"What?"

"Don't you want to come back here now? It's pretty amazing."

"What is?" Thorne said.

"Eddie," Arby said. "He just got back. And he brought the baby with

him."

Malcolm leaned forward. "He did what?"

I
n the trailer, they were clustered around the table where the baby Tyrannosaurus rex now lay unconscious on a stainless-steel pan, his large eyes closed, his snout pushed into the clear plastic oval of an oxygen mask. The mask almost fitted the baby's blunt snout. The oxygen hissed softly.

"I couldn't just leave him," Eddie said. "And I figured we can fix his leg…"

"But Eddie," Malcolm said, shaking his head.

"So I shot him full of morphine from the first-aid kit, and brought him back. You see? The oxygen mask almost fits him."

"Eddie," Malcolm said, "this was the wrong thing to do."

"Why? He's okay. We just fix him and take him back."

"But you're interfering with the system," Malcolm said.

The radio clicked. "This is extremely unwise," Levine said, over the radio. "Extremely."

"Thank you, Richard," Thorne said.

"I am entirely opposed to bringing any animal back to the trailer."

"Too late to worry about that now," Sarah Harding said. She had moved forward alongside the baby, and began strapping cardiac leads to the animal's chest; they heard the thump of the heartbeat. It was very fast, over a hundred and fifty beats a minute. "How much morphine did you give him?"

"Gee," Eddie said. "I just…you know. The whole syringe."

"What is that? Ten cc's?"

"I think. Maybe twenty."

Malcolm looked at Harding. "How long before it wears off?"

"I have no idea," she said. "I've sedated lions and jackals in the field, when I tagged them. With those animals, there's a rough correlation between dose and body weight. But with young animals, it's unpredictable. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours. And I don't know a thing about baby tyrannosaurs. Basically, it's a function of metabolism, and this one seems to be rapid, bird-like. The heart's pumping very fast. All I can say is, let's get him out of here as quickly as possible."

Harding picked up the small ultrasound transducer and held it to the baby's leg. She looked over her shoulder at the monitor. Kelly and Arby were blocking the view. "Please, give us a little room here," she said, and they moved away. "We don't have much time. Please."

As they moved away, Sarah saw the green-and-white outlines of the leg and its bones. Surprisingly like a large bird, she thought. A vulture or a stork. She moved the transducer. "Okay…there's the metatarsals…and there's the tibia and fibula, the two bones of the lower leg…"

Arby said, "Why are the bones different shades like that?" The legs had some dense white sections within paler-green outlines.

"Because it's an infant," Harding said. "His legs are still mostly cartilage, with very little calcified bone. I'd guess this baby probably can't walk yet - at least, not very well. There. Look at the patella…You can see the blood supply to the joint capsule…"

"How come you know all this anatomy?" Kelly said.

"I have to. I spend a lot of time looking through the seat of predators, she said. "Examining pieces of bones that are left behind, and figuring out which animals have been eaten. To do that, you have to know comparative anatomy very well." She moved the transducer along the baby's leg. "And my father was a vet."

Malcolm looked up sharply. "Your father was a vet?"

"Yes. At the San Diego Zoo. He was a bird specialist. But I don't see…Can you magnify this?"

Arby flicked a switch. The image doubled in size.

"Ah. Okay. All right. There it is. You see it?"

"No."

"It's mid-fibula. See it? A thin black line. That's a fracture, just above the epiphysis."

"That little black line there?" Arby said.

"That little black line means death for this infant," Sarah said. "The fibula won't heal straight, so the ankle joint can't pivot when he stands on his hind feet. The baby won't be able to run, and probably can't even walk. It'll be crippled, and a predator will pick it off before it gets more than a few weeks old."

Eddie said, "But we can set it."

"Okay," Sarah said. "What were you going to use for a cast?"

"Diesterase," Eddie said. "I brought a kilo of it, in hundred-cc tubes. I packed lots, for glue. The stuff's polymer resin, it solidifies hard as steel."

"Great," Harding said. "That'll kill him, too."

"It will?"

"He's growing, Eddie. In a few weeks he'll be much larger. We need something that's rigid, but biodegradeable," she said. "Something that will wear off, or break off, in three to five weeks, when his leg's healed. What have you got?"

Eddie frowned. "I don't know."

"Well, we haven't got much time," Harding said.

Eddie said, "Doc? This is like one of your famous test questions. How to make a dinosaur cast with only Q-tips and superglue."

"I know," Thorne said. The irony of the situation was not lost on him. He had given problems such as these to his engineering students for three decades. Now he was faced with one himself.

Eddie said, "Maybe we could degrade the resin - mix it with something like table sugar."

Thorne shook his head. "Hydroxy groups in the sucrose will make the resin friable. It'll harden okay, but it'll shatter like glass as soon as the animal moves."

"What if we mix it with cloth that's been soaked in sugar?"

"You mean, to get bacteria to decay the cloth?"

"Yeah."

"And then the cast breaks?"

"Yeah."

Thorne shrugged. "That might work," he said. "But without testing, we can't know how long the cast will last. Might be a few days, it might be a few months."

"That's too long," Sarah said. "This animal is growing rapidly. If growth is constricted, it'll end up being crippled by the cast."

"What we need," Eddie said, "is an organic resin that will form a decaying binder. Like a gum of some kind."

"Chewing gum?" Arby said. "Because I have plenty of - "

"No, I was thinking of a different kind of gum. Chemically speaking, the diesterase resin - "

"We'll never solve it chemically," Thorne said. "We don't have the supplies."

"What else can we do? There's no choice but - "

"What if you make something that's different in different directions?" Arby said. "Strong one way and weak in another?"

"You can't," Eddie said. "It's a homogeneous resin. It's all the same stuff, goopy glue that turns rock-hard when it dries, and - "

"No, Wait a minute," Thorne said, turning to the boy. "What do you mean, Arby?"

"Well," Arby said, "Sarah said the leg is growing. That means it's, going to grow longer, which doesn't matter for a cast, and wider, which does, because it'll start to squeeze the leg. But if you made it weak in the diameter - "

"He's right," Thorne said. "We can solve it structurally."

"How?" Eddie said.

"Just build in a split-line. Maybe using aluminum foil. We have some for cooking."

"That'd be much too weak," Eddie said.

"Not if we coat it with a layer of resin." Thorne turned to Sarah. "What we can do is make a cast that is very strong for vertical stresses, but weak for lateral stresses. It's a simple engineering problem. The baby can walk around on its cuff, and everything is fine, as long as the stresses are, vertical. But when its leg grows, it will pop the split-line open, and the cuff will fall away."

"Yes," Arby said, nodding.

"Is that hard to do?" she said.

"No. It should be pretty easy. You just build a cuff of aluminum foil, and coat it with resin."

Eddie said, "And what'll hold the cuff together while you coat it.

"How about chewing gum?" Arby said.

"You got it," Thorne said, smiling.

At that moment, the baby rex stirred, its legs twitching. It raised its head, the oxygen mask dropping away, and gave a low, weak squeak.

"Quickly," Sarah said, grabbing the head. "More morphine."

Malcolm had a syringe ready. He jabbed it into the animal's neck.

"Just five cc's now," Sarah said.

"What's wrong with more? Keep him out longer?"

"He's in shock from the injury, Ian. You can kill him with too much morphine. You'll put him into respiratory arrest. His adrenal glands are probably stressed, too."

"If he even has adrenals, " Malcolm said. "Does a Tyrannosaurus rex have hormones at all? The truth is, we don't know anything about these animals."

The radio clicked, and Levine said, "Speak for yourself, Ian. In point of fact, I suspect we will find that dinosaurs have hormones. There are compelling reasons to imagine they do. As long as you have gone to the misguided trouble of taking the baby, you might draw some tubes of blood. Meanwhile, Doc, could you pick up the phone?"

Malcolm sighed. "That guy," he said, "is starting to get on my nerves."

Thorne moved down the trailer to the communications module near the front. Levine's request was odd; there was a perfectly good system of microphones throughout the trailer. But Levine knew that; he had designed the system himself.

Thorne picked up the phone. "Yes?

"Doc," Levine said, "I'll get right to the point. Bringing the baby to the trailer was a mistake. It's asking for trouble."

"What sort of trouble?"

"We don't know, is the point. And I don't want to alarm anybody. But why don't you bring the kids out to the high hide for a while? And why don't you and Eddie come, too?"

"You're telling me to get the hell out of here. You really think it's necessary?"

"In a word," Levine said, "yes. I do."

As the morphine was injected into the baby, he gave a sighing wheeze and collapsed back onto the steel pan. Sarah adjusted the oxygen mask around his face. She glanced back at the monitor, checking the heart rate, but once again Arby and Kelly were blocking her view. "Kids, please."

Thorne stepped forward, clapped his bands. "Okay, kids! Field trip! Let's get moving."

Arby said, "Now? But we want to watch the baby - "

"No, no," Thorne said. "Dr. Malcolm and Dr. Harding need room to work. This is the time for a field trip to the high hide. We can watch the dinosaurs for the rest of the afternoon."

"But Doc - "

"Don't argue. We're just in the way here, and we're going," Thorne said. "Eddie, you come, too. Leave these two lovebirds to do their work."

In a few moments, they left. The trailer door slammed shut behind them. Sarah Harding heard the soft whirr of the Explorer as it drove away. Bent over the baby, adjusting the oxygen mask, she said, "Lovebirds?"

Malcolm shrugged. "Levine…"

"Was this Levine's idea? Clearing everybody out?"

"Probably."

"Does he know something we don't?"

Malcolm laughed. "I'm sure he thinks he does."

"Well, let's start the cast," she said. "I want to get it done quickly, and take this baby home again."