"If I know Sarah," Malcolm said, climbing down the scaffolding, she's going to show up on this island just looking great."

Cave

She struggled upward, and her head broke the surface, but she saw only water - great swells rising fifteen feet above her, on all sides. The power of the ocean was immense. The surge dragged her forward, then back, and she was helpless to resist. She could not see the boat anywhere, only foaming sea, on all sides. She could not see the island, only water. Only water. She fought a sense of overwhelming panic.

    She tried to kick against the current, but her boots were leaden. She sank down again, and struggled back, gasping for air. She had to get her boots off, somehow. She gulped a breath and ducked her head under the water, and tried to unlace the boots. Her lungs burned as she fumbled with the knots. The ocean swept her back and forth, ceaselessly

    She got one boot off, gulped air, and ducked down again. Her fingers were stiff with cold and fright, as she worked on the other boot. It seemed to take hours. Finally her legs were free, light, and she dogpaddled, catching her breath. The surge lifted her high, dropped her again. She could not see the island. She felt panic again. She turned, and felt the surge lift once more. And then she saw the island

    The sheer cliffs were close, frighteningly close. The waves boomed as they smashed against the rocks. She was no more than fifty yards offshore, being swept inexorably toward the crashing surf On the next crest, she saw the cave, a hundred yards to her right. She tried to swim toward it, but it was hopeless. She had no power at all to move in this gigantic surf. She felt only the strength of the sea, sweeping her to the Cliffs.

    Panic made her heart race. She knew she would be instantly killed. A wave crested over her; she gulped sea water, and coughed. Her eyes blurred. She felt nausea and deep, deep terror.

    She put her head down and began to swim, arm over arm, kicking as hard as she could. She had no sense of movement, only the sideways pull of the surge. She dared not look up. She kicked harder. When she raised her head for another breath, she saw she had moved a little - not much, but a little - to the north. She was a little nearer to the cave.

    She was encouraged, but she was terrified. She had so little strength! Her arms and legs ached with her effort. Her lungs burned. Her breath came in short ragged heaving gasps. She coughed again, grabbed another breath, put her head down and kicked onward.

    Even with her head in the water, she heard the deep boom of the surf against the cliffs. She kicked with all her might. The currents and surge moved her left and right, forward and back. It was hopeless. But still she tried.

    Gradually, the ache in her muscles became a steady drill pain. She felt she had lived with this pain all her life. She did not notice it any more. She kicked on, oblivious.

    When she felt the surge lift her up again, she raised her head for a breath. She was startled to see that the cave was very close. A few more strokes and she would be swept inside it. She had thought the current might be less severe around the cave. But it wasn't; on either side of the opening, the waves crashed high, climbing the cliff walls, and then falling back. The boat was nowhere in sight.

    She ducked her head down again, kicked forward, using the last of her strength. She could feel her entire body weakening. She could not last much longer. She knew she was being carried toward the cliffs. She heard the boom of the surf louder now, and she kicked again, and suddenly a huge swell swept her up, lifting her, carrying her toward the cliffs. She was powerless to resist it. She raised her head to look, and saw darkness, inky darkness.

    In her exhaustion and pain, she realized that she was inside the cave. She had been swept into the cave! The booming sound was hollow, reverberating. It was too dark to see the walls on either side. The current was intense, sweeping her ever deeper. She gasped for breath and paddled ineffectually. Her body scraped against rock; she felt a moment of searing pain, and then she was swept farther into the depths of the cave. But now there was a difference. She saw faint light on the ceiling, and the water around her seemed to glow. The surge lessened. She found it easier to keep her head above water. She saw hot light ahead, brilliantly hot - the end of the cave.

    And suddenly, astonishingly, she was carried through, and burst into sunlight and open air. She found herself in the middle of a broad muddy river, surrounded by dense green foliage. The air was hot and still; she heard the distant cries of jungle birds.

    Up ahead, around a bend in the river, she saw the stern of Dodgson's boat, already tied up to the shore. She could not see any of the people, and she didn't want to see them.

    Summoning her remaining strength, she kicked toward shore, and clutched at a stand of mangroves, growing thickly along the water's edge. Too weak to hold on, she hooked her arm around a root, and lay on her back in the gentle current, looking up at the sky, gasping for breath. She did not know how much time passed, but finally she felt strong enough to haul herself arm over arm along the mangrove roots at the water's edge, until she came to a narrow break in the foliage, leading to a patch of muddy shore beyond. As she dragged herself out of the water, and up on the slippery bank, she noticed several rather large animal footprints in the mud. They were curious, three-toed footprints, with each toe ending in a large claw...

    She bent to examine them more closely, and then she felt the earth vibrating, trembling beneath her hands. A large shadow fell over her and she looked up in astonishment at the leathery, pale underbelly of an enormous animal. She was too weak to react, even to raise her head.

    The last thing she saw was a huge leathery foot landing beside her, shushing in the mud, and a soft snorting sound. And then suddenly, abruptly, exhaustion overtook her, and Sarah Harding collapsed, and fell onto her back. Her eyes rolled up into her head, and she lost consciousness.

Dodgson

A few yards up from the shore of the river, Lewis Dodgson climbed into the custom-made jeep Wrangler and slammed the door shut. Beside him in the passenger seat, Howard King was wringing his hands. He said, "How could you have done that to her?"

    "Done what?" George Baselton said, from the back seat.

    Dodgson did not reply. He turned the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled to life. He popped the four-wheel drive into gear and headed up the hill into the jungle, away from the boat at the shore.

    "How could you?" King said again, agitated. "I mean, Jesus."

    "What happened was an accident," Dodgson said.

    "An accident? An accident?"

    "That's right, an accident," Dodgson said calmly. "She fell overboard."

    "I didn't see anything," Baselton said.

    King was shaking his head. "Jesus, what if somebody comes to investigate and - "

    "What if they do?" Dodgson said, interrupting him. "We were in rough seas, she was standing at the bow, a big wave hit us and she was washed overboard. She couldn't swim very well. We circled and looked for her, but there was no hope. A very unfortunate accident. So what are you concerned about?"

    "What am I concerned about?"

    "Yes, Howard. Exactly what the fuck are you concerned about?"

    "I saw it, for Christ's sake - "

    "No, you didn't," Dodgson said.

    "I didn't see anything," Baselton said. "I was down below, the whole time."

    "That's fine for you," Howard King said. "But what if there's an investigation?"

    The Jeep bounced up the dirt track, moving deeper into the jungle. "There won't be," Dodgson said. "She left Africa in a hurry, and she didn't tell anybody where she was going."

    "How do you know?" King whined.

    "Because she told me, Howard. That's how I know. Now get the map out and stop moaning. You knew the deal when you joined me."

    "I didn't know you were going to kill somebody, for Christ's sake."

    "Howard," Dodgson said, with a sigh. "Nothing's going to happen. Get the map out."

    "How do you know?" King said.

    "Because I know what I'm doing," Dodgson said. "That's why. Unlike Malcolm and Thorne, who are somewhere on this island, screwing around, doing fuck knows what in this damned jungle."

    Mention of the others caused a new worry. Fretting, King said, "Maybe we'll run into them...."

    "No, Howard, we won't. They'll never even know we're here. We're only going to be on this island for four hours, remember? Land at one. Back on the boat by five. Back at the port by seven. Back in San Francisco by midnight. Bang. Done. Finito. And finally, after all these years, I'll have what I should have had long ago."

    "Dinosaur embryos," Baselton said.

    "Embryos?" King asked, surprised.

    "Oh, I'm not interested in embryos any more," Dodgson said. "Years ago, I tried to get frozen embryos, but there's no reason to bother with embryos now. I want fertilized eggs. And in four hours, I'll have them from every species on this island."

    "How can you do that in four hours?"

    "Because I already know the precise location of every dinosaur breeding site on the island. The map, Howard."

    King opened the map. It was a large topographical chart of the island, two feet by three feet, showing terrain elevations in blue contours. At several places in lowland valleys, there were dense red concentric circles. In some places, clusters of circles. "What's this?" King said.

    "Why don't you read what it says," Dodgson said.

    King turned the map, and looked at the legend. "'Sigma data Landsat/Nordstat mixed spectra VSFR/FASLR/IFFVR.' And then a bunch of numbers. No, wait. Dates."

    "Correct," Dodgson said. "Dates."

    "Pass dates? This is a summary chart, combining data from several satellite passes?"

    "Correct."

    King frowned. "And it looks like...visible spectrum, and false aparture radar, and...what?"

    "Infrared. Broadband thermal VR." Dodgson smiled. "I did all this in about two hours. Downloaded all the satellite data summarized it, and had the answers I wanted."

    "I get it," King said. "These red circles are infrared signatures!"

    "Yes," Dodgson said. "Big animals leave big signatures. I got all the satellite flybys over this island for the last few years, and mapped the location of heat sources. And the locations overlapped from pass to pass, which is what makes these red concentric marks. Meaning that the animals tend to be located in these particular places. Why?" He turned to King. "Because these are the nesting sites."

    "Yes. They must be," Baselton said.

    "Maybe that's where they eat," King said.

    Dodgson shook his head irritably. "Obviously, those circles can't be feeding sites."

    "Why not?"

    "Because these animals average twenty tons apiece, that's why. You get a herd of twenty-ton dinos, and you're talking a combined biomass of more than half a million pounds moving through the forest. That many big animals are going to eat a lot of plant matter in the course of a day. And the only way they can do that is by moving. Right?"

    "I guess..."

    "You guess? Look around you, Howard. Do you see any denuded sections of forest? No, you don't. They eat a few leaves from the trees, and move on. Trust me, these animals have to move to eat. But what they don't move is their nesting sites. So these red circles must be nesting sites." He glanced at the map. "And unless I'm wrong, the first of the nests is just over this rise, and down the hill on the other side."

    The Jeep fishtailed in a patch of mud, and ground forward, lurching up the hill.

Mating Calls

Richard Levine stood in the high hide, staring at the herds through binoculars. Malcolm had gone back to the trailer with the others, leaving Levine alone. In fact, Levine was relieved to have him gone. Levine was quite content to make observations on these extraordinary animals, and he was aware that Malcolm did not share his boundless enthusiasm. Indeed, Malcolm always seemed to have other considerations on his mind. And Malcolm was notably impatient with the act of observation - he wanted to analyze the data, but he did not want to collect it.

    Of course, among scientists, that represented a well-known difference in personality. Physics was a perfect example. The experimentalists and the theorists lived in utterly different worlds, passing papers back and forth but sharing little else in common. It was almost as if they were in different disciplines.

    And for Levine and Malcolm, the difference in their approach had surfaced early, back in the Santa Fe days. Both men were interested in extinction, but Malcolm approached the subject broadly, from a purely mathematical standpoint. His detachment, his inexorable formulas, had fascinated Levine, and the two men began an informal exchange over frequent lunches: Levine taught Malcolm paleontology; Malcolm taught Levine nonlinear mathematics. They began to draw some tentative conclusions which both found exciting. But they also began to disagree. More than once they were asked to leave the restaurant; then they would go out into the heat of Guadelupe Street, and walk back toward the river, still shouting at each other, while approaching tourists hurried to the other side of the street.

    In the end, their differences came down to personalities. Malcolm considered Levine pedantic and fussy, preoccupied with petty details. Levine never saw the big picture. He never looked at the consequences of his actions. For his own part, Levine did not hesitate to call Malcolm imperious and detached, indifferent to details.

    "God is in the details," Levine once reminded him.

    "Maybe your God," Malcolm shot back. "Not mine. Mine is in the process."

    Standing in the high hide, Levine thought that answer was exactly what you would expect from a mathematician. Levine was quite satisfied that details were everything, at least in biology, and that the most common failing of his biological colleagues was insufficient attention to detail.

    For himself, Levine lived for the details, and he could not ever let them go. Like the animal that had attacked him with Diego. Levine thought of it often, turning it over and over again, reliving the events. Because there was something troubling, some impression that he could not get right.

    The animal had attacked quickly, and he had sensed it was a basic theropod form-hind legs, stiff tail, large skull, the usual-but in the brief flash in which he had seen the creature, there seemed to be a peculiarity around the orbits, which made him think of Carnotaurus sastrei. From the Gorro Frigo formation in Argentina. And in addition, the skin was extremely unusual, it seemed to be a sort of bright mottled green, but there was something about it...

    He shrugged. The troubling idea hung in the back of his mind, but he couldn't get to it. He 'ust couldn't get it.

Reluctantly, Levine turned his attention to the parasaur herd, browsing by the river, alongside the apatosaurs. He listened as the parasaurs made their distinctive, low trumpeting sounds. Levine noticed that most often the parasaurs made a sound of short duration, a kind of rumbling honk. Sometimes, several animals made this sound at once, or very nearly overlapping; so it seemed to be an audible way of indicating to the herd where all the members were. Then there was a much longer, more dramatic trumpeting call. This sound was made infrequently, and only by the two largest animals in the herd, which raised their heads and trumpeted loud and long. But what did the sound mean?

    Standing there in the hot sun, Levine decided to perform a little experiment. He cupped his hands around his mouth, and imitated the parasaur's trumpeting cry. It wasn't a very good imitation, but immediately the lead parasaur looked up, turning its head this way and that. And it gave a low cry, answering Levine.

    Levine gave a second call.

    Again, the parasaur answered.   

    Levine was pleased by this response, and made an entry in his notebook. But when he looked up again, he was surprised to see that the parasaur herd was drifting away from the apatosaurs. They collected together, formed a single line, and began to walk directly toward the high hide.

    Levine started to sweat.

    What had he done? In some bizarre corner of his mind, he wondered if he had imitated a mating cry. That was all he needed, to attract a randy dinosaur. Who knew how these animals behaved in mating? With growing anxiety, he watched them march forward. Probably, he should call Malcolm, and ask his advice. But as he thought about it, he realized that by imitating that cry he had interfered with the environment, introduced a new variable. He had done exactly what he had told Thorne he did not intend to do. It was thoughtless, of course. And surely not very important in the scheme of things. But Malcolm was certain to give him hell about it.

    Levine lowered his binoculars and stared. A deep trumpeting sound reverberated through the air, so loud it hurt his ears. The ground began to shake, making the high hide sway back and forth precariously.

    My God, he thought. They're coming right for me. He bent over, and with fumbling fingers, searched his backpack for the radio.

Problems of Evolution

In the trailer, Thorne took the rehydrated meals out of the microwave, and passed the plates around the little table. Everyone unwrapped them, and began to cat. Malcolm poked his fork into the food. "What is this stuff?"

    "Herb-baked chicken breast," Thorne said.

    Malcolm took a bite, and shook his head. "Isn't technology wonderful?" he said. "They manage to make it taste just like cardboard."

    Malcolm looked at the two kids seated opposite him, who were eating energetically. Kelly glanced up at him, and gestured with her fork at the books strapped into a shelf beside the table. "One thing I don't understand."

    "Only one?" Malcolm said.

    "All this business about evolution," she said. "Darwin wrote his book a long time ago, right?"

    "Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859," Malcolm said.

    "And by now, everybody believes it, isn't that right?"

    "I think it's fair to say that every scientist in the world agrees that evolution is a feature of life on earth," Malcolm said. "And that we are descended from animal ancestors. Yes."

    "Okay," Kelly said. "So, what's the big deal now?"

    Malcolm smiled. "The big deal," he said, "is that everybody agrees evolution occurs, but nobody understands how it works. There are big problems with the theory. And more and more scientists are admitting it."

Malcolm pushed his plate away. "You have to track the theory," he said, "over a couple of hundred years. Start with Baron Georges Cuvier: the most famous anatomist in the world in his day, living in the intellectual center of the world, Paris. Around 1800, people began digging up old bones, and Cuvier realized that they belonged to animals no longer found on earth. That was a problem, because back in 1800, everybody believed that all the animal species ever created were still alive. The idea seemed reasonable because the earth was thought to be only a few thousand years old. And because God, who had created all the animals, would never let any of his creations become extinct. So extinction was agreed to be impossible. Cuvier agonized over these dug-up bones, but he finally concluded that God or no God, many animals had become extinct - as a result, he thought, of worldwide catastrophes, like Noah's flood."

    "Okay..."

    "So Cuvier reluctantly came to believe in extinction," Malcolm said, "but he never accepted evolution. In Cuvier's mind, evolution didn't occur. Some animals died and some survived, but none evolved. In his view, animals didn't change. Then along came Darwin, who said that animals did evolve, and that the dug-up bones were actually the extinct predecessors of living animals. The implications of Darwin's idea upset lots of people. They didn't like to think of God's creations changing, and they didn't like to think of monkeys in their family trees. It was embarrassing and offensive. The debate was fierce. But Darwin amassed a tremendous amount of factual data - he had made an overwhelming case. So gradually his idea of evolution was accepted by scientists, and by the world at large. But the question remained: how does evolution happen? For that, Darwin didn't have a good answer."

    " Natural selection," Arby said.

    "Yes, that was Darwin's explanation. The environment exerts pressure which favors certain animals, and they breed more often in subsequent generations, and that's how evolution occurs. But as many people realized, natural selection isn't really an explanation. It's just a definition: if an animal succeeds, it must have been selected for. But what in the animal is favored? And how does natural selection actually operate? Darwin had no idea. And neither did anybody else for another fifty years."

    "But it's genes," Kelly said.

    "Okay," Malcolm said. "Fine. We come to the twentieth century. Mendel's work with plants is rediscovered. Fischer and Wright do population studies. Pretty soon we know genes control heredity-whatever genes are. Remember, through the first half of the century, all during World War I and World War II, nobody had any idea what a gene was. After Watson and Crick in 1953, we knew that genes were nucleotides arranged in a double helix. Great. And we knew about mutation. So by the late twentieth century, we have a theory of natural selection which says that mutations arise spontaneously in genes, that the environment favors the mutations that are beneficial, and out of this selection process evolution occurs. It's simple and straightforward. God is not at work. No higher organizing principle involved. In the end, evolution is just the result of a bunch of mutations that either Survive or die. Right?"

    "Right," Arby said.

    "But there are problems with that idea," Malcolm said. "First of all, there's a time problem. A single bacterium - the earliest form of life has two thousand enzymes. Scientists have estimated how long it would take to randomly assemble those enzymes from a primordial soup. Estimates run from forty billion years to one hundred billion years. But the earth is only four billion years old. So, chance alone seems too slow. Particularly since we know bacteria actually appeared only four hundred million years after the earth began. Life appeared very fast - which is why some scientists have decided life on earth must be of extraterrestrial origin. Although I think that's just evading the issue."

    "Okay..."

    "Second, there's the coordination problem. If you believe the current theory, then all the wonderful complexity of life is nothing but the accumulation of chance events - a bunch of genetic accidents strung together. Yet when we look closely at animals, it appears as if many elements must have evolved simultaneously. Take bats, which have echolocation-they navigate by sound. To do that, many things must evolve. Bats need a specialized apparatus to make sounds, they need specialized ears to hear echoes, they need specialized brains to interpret the sounds, and they need specialized bodies to dive and swoop and catch insects. If all these things don't evolve simultaneously, there's no advantage. And to imagine all these things happen purely by chance is like imagining that a tornado can hit a junkyard and assemble the Parts into a working 747 airplane. It's very hard to believe."

    "Okay," Thorne said. "I agree."

    "Next problem. Evolution doesn't always act like a blind force should. Certain environmental niches don't get filled. Certain plants don't get eaten. And certain animals don't evolve much. Sharks haven't changed for a hundred and sixty million years. Opossums haven't changed since dinosaurs became extinct, sixty-five million years ago. The environments for these animals have changed dramatically, but the animals have remained almost the same. Not exactly the same, but almost. In other words, it appears they haven't responded to their environment."

    "Maybe they're still well adapted," Arby said.

    "Maybe. Or maybe there's something else going on that we don't understand."

    " Like what?"

    "Like other rules that influence the outcome."

    Thorne said, "Are you saying evolution is directed?"

    "No," Malcolm said. "That's Creationism and it's wrong. Just plain wrong. But I am saying that natural selection acting on genes is probably not the whole story. It's too simple. Other forces are also at work. The hemoglobin molecule is a protein that is folded like a sandwich around a central iron atom that binds oxygen. Hemoglobin expands and contracts when it takes on and gives up oxygen-like a tiny molecular lung. Now, we know the sequence of amino acids that make up hemoglobin. But we don't know how to fold it. Fortunately, we don't need to know that, because if you make the molecule, it folds all by itself. It organizes itself. And it turns out, again and again, that living things seem to have a self-organizing quality. Proteins fold. Enzymes interact. Cells arrange themselves to form organs and the organs arrange themselves to form a coherent individual. Individuals organize themselves to make a population. And populations organize themselves to make a coherent biosphere. From complexity theory, we're starting to have a sense of how this self-organization may happen, and what it means. And it implies a major change in how we view evolution."

    "But," Arby said, "in the end, evolution still must be the result of the environment acting on genes."

    "I don't think it's enough, Arb," Malcolm said. "I think more is involved - I think there has to be more, even to explain how our own species arose."

"About three million years ago," Malcolm said, "some African apes that had been living in trees came down to the ground. There was nothing special about these apes. Their brains were small and they weren't especially smart. They didn't have claws or sharp teeth for weapons. They weren't particularly strong, or fast. They were certainly no match for a leopard. But because they were short, they started standing upright on their hind legs, to see over the tall African grass. That's how it began. just some ordinary apes, looking out over the grass.

    "As time went on, the apes stood upright more and more of the time. That left their hands free to do things. Like all apes, they were tool-users. Chimps, for example, use twigs to fish for termites. That sort of thing. As time went on, our ape ancestors developed more complex tools. That stimulated their brains to grow in size and complexity. It began a spiral: more complex tools provoked more complex brains which provoked more complex tools. And our brains literally exploded, in evolutionary terms. Our brains more than doubled in size in about a million years. And that caused problems for us."

    "Like what?"

    "Like getting born, for one thing. Big brains can't pass through the birth canal - which means that both mother and child die in childbirth. That's no good. What's the evolutionary response? To make human infants born very early in development, when their brains are still small enough to pass through the pelvis. It's the marsupial solution - most of the growth occurs outside the mother's body. A human child's brain doubles during the first year of life. That's a good solution to the problem of birth, but it creates other problems. It means that human children will be helpless long after birth. The infants of many mammals can walk minutes after they're born. Others walk in a few days, or weeks. But human infants can't walk for a full year. They can't feed themselves for even longer. So one price of big brains was that our ancestors had to evolve new, stable social organizations to permit long-term child care, lasting many years, These big-brained, totally helpless children changed society. But that's not the most important consequence."

    "No?"

    "No. Being born in an immature state means that human infants have unformed brains. They don't arrive with a lot of built-in, instinctive behavior. Instinctively, a newborn infant can suck and grasp, but that's about all. Complex human behavior is not instinctive at all. So human societies had to develop education to train the brains of their children. To teach them how to act. Every human society expends tremendous time and energy teaching its children the right way to behave. You look at a simpler society, in the rain forest somewhere, and you find that every child is born into a network of adults responsible for helping to raise the child. Not only parents, but aunts and uncles and grandparents and tribal elders. Some teach the child to hunt or gather food or weave; some teach them about sex or war. But the responsibilities are clearly defined, and if a child does not have, say, a mother's brother's sister to do a specific teaching job, the people get together and appoint a substitute. Because raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved. And eventually, a few million years later, we have kids using computers.

    "Now, if this picture makes sense, where does natural selection act? Does it act on the body, enlarging the brain? Does it act on the developmental sequence, pushing the kids out early? Does it act on social behavior, provoking cooperation and child-caring? Or does it act everywhere all at once - on bodies, on development, and on social behavior?"

    "Everywhere at once," Arby said.

    "I think so," Malcolm said. "But there may also be parts of this story that happen automatically, the result of self-organization. For example, infants of all species have a characteristic appearance. Big eyes, big heads, small faces, uncoordinated movements. That's true of kids and puppies and baby birds. And it seems to provoke adults of all species to act tenderly toward them. In a sense, you might say infant appearance seems to self-organize adult behavior. And in our case, a good thing, too."

    Thorne said, "What does that have to do with dinosaur extinction?"

    "Self-organizing principles can act for better or worse. Just as self-organization can coordinate change, it can also lead a population into decline, and cause it to lose its edge. On this island, my hope is we'll see self-organizing adaptations in the behavior of real dinosaurs - and it'll tell us why they became extinct. In fact, I'm pretty sure we already know why the dinosaurs became extinct."

    The radio clicked. "Bravo," Levine said, over the intercom. "I couldn't have put it better myself. But perhaps you better see what is happening out here. The parasaurs are doing something very interesting, Ian."

    "What's that?"

    "Come and look."

    "Kids," Malcolm said, "you stay here and watch the monitors." He pressed the radio button. "Richard? We're on our way."

Parasaurs

Richard Levine gripped the railing of the high hide, and watched tensely. Directly ahead, coming into view over a low rise, he saw the magnificent head of a Parasaurolophus walkeri. The duck-billed hadrosaur's skull was three feet long, but it was made larger by a long horned crest that extended backward high in the air.

    As the animal approached, Levine could see the green mottling on the head. He saw the long powerful neck, the heavy body with its light green underbelly. The parasaurolophus was twelve feet tall, and roughly the size of a large elephant. Its head was almost as high as the floor of the high hide. The animal moved steadily toward him, its footsteps thumping on the ground. Moments later, he saw a second head appear over the rise-then a third, and a fourth. The animals trumpeted, and walked in single file directly toward him.

    Within moments, the lead animal was abreast of the hide. Levine held his breath as it passed. The animal stared at him, its large brown eye rolling to watch him. It licked its lips with a dark-purple tongue. The hide shook with its footsteps. And then it had passed, continuing on toward the jungle behind. Soon after, the second animal passed.

    The third animal brushed against the structure, rocking it slightly. But the dinosaur did not seem to notice; it continued steadily on. So did the others. One by one, they disappeared, into the dense foliage behind the high hide. The earth ceased to vibrate. It was then that he saw the game trail, running past the high hide and into the jungle.

    Levine sighed.

    His body relaxed slowly. He picked up his binoculars and took a deep breath, calming himself His panic faded. He began to feel better.

    And then he thought: What are they doing? Where are they going? Because, as he considered it, the behavior of the parasaurs seemed extremely strange. They had been in a defensive cluster while they fed, but in movement they had shifted to single file which broke the usual clumped herd pattern, and made every animal vulnerable to predation. Yet the behavior was clearly organized. Moving in single file must serve some purpose.

    But what?

    Now that they were within the jungle, the animals had begun making low trumpeting sounds of short duration. Again, he had the sense that this was some sort of vocalization to convey position. Perhaps for members to keep track of each other while they moved through the jungle, while they changed locations.

    But why were they changing locations?

    Where were they going? What were they doing?

    He certainly couldn't tell here, standing up in the high hide. He hesitated, listening to them. Then, in a decisive moment, he swung his leg over the railing and climbed quickly down the scaffolding.

Heat

She felt heat, and wet. Something rough scraped along her face, like sandpaper. It happened again, this roughness on her cheek. Sarah Harding coughed. Something dripped on her neck. She smelled an odd, sweetish odor, like fermenting African beer. There was a deep hissing sound. Then the rough scraping again, starting at her neck, moving up her cheek.

    Slowly, she opened her eyes and stared up into the face of a horse. The big, dull eye of the horse peered down at her, with soft eyelashes. The horse was licking her with its tongue. It was almost pleasant, she thought, almost reassuring. Lying on her back in the mud, with a horse -

    It wasn't a horse.

    The head was too narrow, she suddenly saw, the snout too tapered, the proportions all wrong. She turned to look and saw that it was a small head, leading to a surprisingly thick neck, and a heavy body -

    She jumped up, scrambling to her knees. "Oh my God!"

    Her sudden movement startled the big animal, which snorted in alarm, and moved slowly away. It walked a few steps down the muddy shore and then turned back, looking at her reproachfully.

    But she could see it now: small head, thick neck, huge lumbering body, with a double row of pentagonal plates running along the crest of the back. A dragging tail, with spikes in it.

    Harding blinked.

    It couldn't be.

    Confused and dazed, her brain fumbled for the name of this creature, and it came back to her, all the way from childhood.

    Stegosaurus.

    It was a God damn stegosaurus.

    In her astonishment, her mind went back to the glaring white hospital room, when she had visited Ian Malcolm in his delirium, when he mumbled the names of several dinosaurs. She had always had her suspicions. But even now, confronted by a living stegosaur, her immediate reaction was that it must be some kind of a trick. Sarah squinted at the animal, looking for the seam in the costume, the mechanical joints beneath the skin. But the skin was seamless, and the animal moved in an integrated, organic way. The eyes blinked again, slowly. Then the stegosaurus turned away from her, moved to the water's edge, and lapped it with its large rough tongue.

    The tongue was dark blue.

    How could that be? Dark blue from venous blood? Was it coldblooded? No. This animal moved much too smoothly; it had the assurance - and indifference - of a warm-blooded creature. Lizards and reptiles always seemed to be paying attention to the temperature of their surroundings. This creature didn't behave that way at all. It stood in the shade, and lapped up the cold water, indifferent to it all.

    She looked down at her shirt, saw the foamy spittle running down from her neck. It had drooled on her. She touched it with her fingers. It was warm.

    It was warm-blooded, all right.

    A stegosaurus.

    She stared.

    The stegosaurus's skin had a pebbled texture, but it was not scaly, like a reptile's. It was more like the skin of a rhino, she thought. Or of a warthog. Except it was entirely hairless, without the bristles of a pig.

    The stegosaurus moved slowly. It had a peaceful, rather stupid air. And it probably was stupid, she thought, looking again at the head. The braincase was much smaller than that of a horse. Very small for the body weight.

    She got to her feet, and groaned. Her body ached. Every limb and muscle was sore. Her legs trembled. She took a breath.

    A few yards away, the stegosaurus paused, glanced at her, taking in her new upright appearance. When she did not move, it became indifferent once again, and returned to drinking from the river.

    "I'll be damned," she said.

    She looked at her watch. It was one-thirty in the afternoon, the sun still high overhead. She couldn't use the sun to navigate, and the afternoon was very hot. She decided she had better start walking, and try and find Malcolm and Thorne. Barefooted, moving stiffly, her muscles aching, she headed into the jungle, away from the river.

After walking half an hour, she was very thirsty, but she had trained herself to go without water for long periods in the African savannah. She continued on, indifferent to her own discomfort. As she approached the top of a ridge, she came to a game trail, a wide muddy track through the jungle. It was easier walking along the trail, and she had been following it for about fifteen minutes when she heard an excited yelping from somewhere ahead. It reminded her of dogs, and she proceeded cautiously.

    Moments later, there was a crashing sound in the underbrush, corning from several directions at once, and suddenly a dark-green, lizard-like animal about four feet high burst through the foliage at terrific speed, shrieked, and leapt over her. She ducked instinctively, and hardly had time to recover before a second animal appeared and raced past her. Within instants, a whole herd of animals was running past her on all sides, yelping in fear, and then the next one brushed against her and knocked her over. She fell in the mud as other animals leapt and crashed around her.

    A few feet ahead on the trail she saw a large tree with low-hanging branches. She acted without thinking, jumping to her feet, grabbing the branch, and swinging up. She reached safety just as a new dinosaur, with sharp-clawed feet, rushed through the maid beneath her, and chased after the fleeing green creatures. As this animal went away from her, she glimpsed a dark body, six feet tall, with reddish stripes like a tiger. Soon after, a second striped animal appeared, then a third - a pack of predators, hissing and snarling, as they pursued the green dinosaurs.

    From her years in the field, she found herself automatically counting the animals that rushed past her. By her count, there were ten striped predators, and that immediately piqued her interest. It made no sense, she thought. As soon as the last of the predators was gone, she dropped down to the ground arid hurried to follow them. It occurred to hey that it might be foolish to do so, but her curiosity overcame her.

    She chased the tiger-dinosaurs up a hill, but even before she reached the crest she could tell from the snarls and growls that they had already brought an animal down. At the crest, she looked down on their kill.

    But it was like no kill she had ever seen in Africa. On the Seronera plain, a kill site had its own organization which was quite predictable, and in a way was almost stately. The biggest predators, lions or hyenas, were closest to the carcass, feeding with their young. Farther out, waiting their turn, were the vultures and marabou storks, and still farther out, the jackals and other small scavengers circled warily. After the big predators finished, the smaller animals moved in. Different animals ate different parts of the bodies: the hyenas and vultures ate bones; the jackals nibbled the carcass clean. This was the pattern at any kill, and as a result there was very little squabbling or fighting around the food.

    But here, she saw pandemonium - a feeding frenzy. The fallen animal was thickly covered with striped predators, all furiously ripping the flesh of the carcass, with frequent pauses to snarl and fight with each other. Their fights were openly vicious - one predator bit the adjacent animal, inflicting a deep flank wound. Immediately, several other predators snapped at the same animal, which limped away, hissing and bleeding, badly wounded. Once at the periphery, the wounded animal retaliated by biting the tail of another creature, again causing a serious wound.

    A young juvenile, about half the size of the others, kept pushing forward, trying to get at a bit of the carcass, but the adults did not make room for it. Instead, they snarled and snapped in fury. The youngster was frequently obliged to hop back nimbly, keeping its distance from the razor-sharp fangs of the grownups. Harding saw no infants at all. This was a society of vicious adults.

    As she watched the big predators, their heads and bodies smeared in blood, she noticed the crisscross pattern of healed scars on their flanks and necks. These were obviously quick, intelligent animals, yet they fought continually. Was that the way their social organization had evolved? If so, it was a rare event.

    Animals of many species fought for food, territory, and sex, but these fights most often involved display and ritual aggression; serious Injury seldom occurred. There were exceptions, of course. When male hippos fought to take over a harem, they often severely wounded other males. But in any case, nothing matched what she saw now.

    As she watched, the wounded animal at the edge of the kill slunk forward and bit another adult, which snarled and leapt at it, slashing with its long toe-claw. In a flash, the injured predator was eviscerated, coils of pale intestine slipping out through a wide gash. The animal fell howling to the ground, and immediately three adults turned away from the kill and jumped onto its newly fallen body, and began to tear the animal's flesh with rapacious intensity.

    Harding closed her eyes, and turned away. This was a different world, and one she did not understand at all. In a daze, she headed back down the bill, moving quietly, carefully away from the kill.

Noise

The Ford Explorer glided quietly forward along the jungle path. They were following a game trail on the ridge above the valley, heading down toward the high hide, in the valley below.

    Thorne drove. He said to Malcolm, "You were saying earlier that you knew why the dinosaurs became extinct...."

    "Well, I'm pretty sure I do," Malcolm said. "The basic situation is simple enough." He shifted in his seat. "Dinosaurs arose in the Triassic, about two hundred million years ago. They proliferated throughout the Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods that followed. They were the dominant life form on this planet for about a hundred and fifty million years - which is a very long time."

    "Considering we've been here for only three million," Eddie said.

    "Let's not put on airs," Malcolm said. "Some puny apes have been here for three miIlion years. We haven't. Recognizable human beings have only been on this planet for thirty-five thousand years," he said. "That's how long it's been since our ancestors painted caves in France and Spain, drawing pictures of game to invoke success in the hunt. Thirty-five thousand years. In the history of the earth, that's nothing at all. We've just arrived."

    "Okay..."

    "And of course even thirty-five thousand years ago, we were already making species extinct. Cavemen killed so much game that animals became extinct on several continents. There used to be lions and tigers in Europe. There used to be giraffes and rhinos in Los Angeles. Hell, ten thousand years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction. This is nothing new, this human tendency - "

    "Ian.'

    "Well, it's a fact, although your modern airheads think it's all so brand-new - "

    "Ian. You were talking about dinosaurs."

    "Right. Dinosaurs. Anyway, during a hundred and fifty million years on this planet, dinosaurs were so successful that by the Cretaceous there were twenty-one major groups of them. A few groups, like the camarasaurs and fabrosaurs, had died out. But the overwhelming majority of dinosaur groups were still active throughout the Cretaceous. And then, suddenly, about sixty-five million years ago, every single group became extinct. And only the birds remained. So. The question is - What was that?"

    "I thought you knew," Thorne said.

    "No. I mean, what was that sound? Did you hear something?" "No," Thorne said.

    "Stop the car," Malcolm said.

    Thorne stopped the car, and clicked off the engine. They rolled down the windows and felt the still, midday heat. There was almost no breeze. They listened for a while.

    Thorne shrugged. "I don't hear anything. What did you think you - "

    "Sssh," Malcolm said. He cupped his hand to his ear and put his head out the window, listening intently. After a moment, he came back in. "I could have sworn I heard an engine."

    "An engine? You mean an internal-combustion engine?"

    "Right." He pointed to the east. "It sounded like it was coming from over there."

    They listened again, and heard nothing.

    Thorne shook his head. "I can't imagine a gas engine here, Ian. There's no gas to run one."

    The radio clicked. "Dr. Malcolm?" It was Arby, in the trailer.

    " Yes, Arby."

    "Who else is here? On the island?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "Turn on your monitor."

    Thorne flicked on the dashboard monitor. They saw a view from one of the security cameras. The view looked down into the narrow, steep east valley. They saw the slope of a hillside, dark beneath the trees. A tree branch blocked much of the frame. But the view was still, silent. There was no sign of activity.

    "What did you see, Arby?"

    "Just watch."

    Through the leaves, Thorne saw a flash of khaki, then another. He realized it was a person, half-walking, half-sliding, down the steep jungle slope toward the floor below. Small compact frame, short dark hair.

    "I'll be damned," Malcolm said, smiling.

    "You know who that is?"

    "Yes, of course. It's Sarah."

"Well, we better go get her." Thorne reached for the radio, pressed the button. "Richard," he said.

    There was no answer.

    "Richard? Are you reading?"

    There was no answer.

    Malcolm sighed. "Great. He's not answering. Probably decided to go for a walk. Pursuing his research..."

    "That's what I'm afraid of," Thorne said. "Eddie, unhook the motorcycle and go see what Levine's doing now. Take a Lindstradt with you. We'll go pick up Sarah."

Trail

Levine followed the game trail, moving deeper into the darkness of the jungle. The parasaurs were somewhere up ahead, making a lot of noise as they crashed through the ferns and palms on the jungle floor. At least now he understood why they had formed into a single file: there was no other practical way to move through the dense growth of the rain forest.

    Their vocalizations had never stopped, but Levine noticed they were taking on a different character - more high-pitched, more excited. He hurried forward, pushing past wet palm fronds taller than he was, following the beaten trail. As he listened to the cries of the animals ahead, he also began to notice a distinctive odor, pungent and sweet-sour. He had the feeling the odor was growing stronger.

    But up ahead, something was happening, there was no doubt about it. The parasaur vocalizations were now clipped, almost barking sounds. He sensed in them an agitated quality. But what could agitate an animal twelve feet high and thirty feet long?

    His curiosity overwhelmed him. Levine began to run through the jungle, shoving aside palms, leaping over fallen trees. In the foliage ahead, he heard a hissing sound, a sort of spattering, and then one of the parasaurs gave a long, low trumpeting cry.

Eddie Carr drove the motorcycle up to the high hide, and stopped. Levine was gone. He looked at the ground around the hide, and saw many deep animal footprints in the ground. The prints were large, about two feet in diameter, and they seemed to be going off into the jungle behind the hide.

    He scanned the ground, and saw fresh bootmarks as well. They had an Asolo tread; he recognized them as Levine's. In some places the bootmarks disrupted the edge of the animal footprints, which meant that they had been made afterward. The bootmarks also led into the forest.

    Eddie Carr swore. The last thing he wanted to do was to go into that jungle. The very idea gave him the creeps. But what choice was there?

    He had to get Levine back. That guy, he thought, was getting to be a real problem. Eddie unshouldered the rifle, and set it laterally across the handlebars of the motorcycle. Then he twisted the grips, and silently, the bike moved forward, into darkness.

Heart pounding with excitement, Levine pushed past the last of the big palms. He stopped abruptly. Directly ahead of him, the tall of a parasaur swung back and forth above his head. The animal's hindquarters were turned toward him. And a thick stream of urine gushed from the poste-rior pubis, spattering on the ground below. Levine jumped back, avoiding the stream. Beyond the nearest animal, he saw a clearing in the jungle, trampled flat by countless animal feet. The parasaurs had located themselves at various positions within this clearing, and they were all urinating together.

    So they were latrine animals, he thought. That was fascinating, and totally unexpected.

    Many contemporary animals, including rhinos and deer, preferred to relieve themselves at particular spots. And many times, the behavior of herds was coordinated. Latrine behavior was generally considered to be a method of marking territory. But whatever the reason, no one had ever suspected that dinosaurs acted in this way.

    As Levine watched, the parasaurs finished urinating, and each moved a few feet to the side. Then they defecated, again in unison. Each parasaur produced a large mound of straw-colored spoor. This was accompanied by low trumpeting from each animal in the herd - along with an enormous quantity of expelled flatus, redolent of methane.

    Behind him, a voice whispered, "Very nice."

    He turned, and saw Eddie Carr sitting on the motorcycle. He was waving his hand in front of his face. "Dino farts," he said. "Better not light a match around here, you'll blow the place up...."

    "Ssssh," Levine hissed angrily, shaking his head. He turned back to the parasaurs. This was no time to be interrupted by a vulgar young fool. Several of the animals bent their heads down, and began to lick the puddles of urine. No doubt they wanted to recover lost nutrients, he thought. Perhaps salt. Or perhaps hormones. Or perhaps it was something seasonal. Or perhaps -

    Levine edged forward.

    They knew so little about these creatures. They didn't even know the most basic facts about their lives - how they ate, how they eliminated, how they slept and bred. A whole world of intricate, interlocking behaviors had evolved in these long-vanished animals. Understanding them now could be the work of a lifetime for dozens of scientists. But that would probably never happen. All he could hope to do was make a few conjectures, a few simple deductions that skimmed the surface of the complexity of their lives.

    The parasaurs trumpeted, and headed deeper into the forest. Levine moved forward to follow them.

    "Dr. Levine," Eddie said quietly. "Get on the bike. Now."

    Levine ignored him, but as the big animals departed, he saw dozens of tiny green dinosaurs leap chattering out into the clearing. He realized at once what they were: Procompsognathus triassicus. Small scavenger, found by Fraas in 1913, in Bavaria. Levine stared, fascinated. Of course he knew the animal well, but only from reconstructions, because there were no complete skeletons of Procompsognathus anywhere in the world. Ostrom had done the most complete studies, but he had to work with a skeleton that was badly crushed, and fragmentary. The tall, neck, and arms were all missing from the animals Ostrom described. Yet here the procompsognathids were, fully formed and active, hopping around I Ike so many chickens. As he watched, the compys began to eat the fresh dung, and drink what was left of the urine. Levine frowned. Was that part of ordinary scavenger behavior?

    Levine wasn't sure....

    He edged forward, to look at them more closely.

    "Dr. Levine!" Eddie whispered.

    It was interesting that the compys only ate fresh dung, not the dried remnants that were everywhere in the clearing. Whatever nutrients they were obtaining from the dung, it must only be present in fresh specimens. That suggested a protein or hormone that would degrade over time. Probably he should obtain a fresh sample for analysis. He reached into his shirt pocket, and withdrew a plastic baggie. He moved among the compys, which seemed indifferent to his presence.

    He crouched down by the nearest dung pile, and reached slowly forward.

    "Dr. Levine!"

    He glanced back, annoyed, and in that moment one of the compys leapt forward and bit his hand. Another jumped onto his shoulder and bit his car. Levine yelled, and stood up. The compys hopped onto the ground and scampered away.

    "Damn it!" he said.

    Eddie drove up on the motorcycle. "That's enough," he said. "Get on the damn bike. We're getting out of here."

Nest

The red Jeep Wrangler came to a stop. Directly ahead, the game trail they had been following continued through the foliage, to a clearing beyond. The game trail was wide and muddy, trampled flat by large animals. They could see large, deep footprints in the mud.

    From the clearing, they heard a low honking noise, like the sound of very large geese. Dodgson said, "Okay. Give me the box."

    King didn't answer.

    Baselton said, "What box?"

    Without taking his eyes off the clearing, Dodgson said, "There's a black box on the seat beside you, and a battery pack. Give them to me."

    Baselton grunted. "It's heavy."

    "That's because of the cone magnets." Dodgson reached back, took the box, which was made of black anodized metal. It was the size of a shoebox, except it ended in a flaring cone. Underneath was mounted a pistol grip. Dodgson clipped a battery pack to his belt, and plugged it into the box. Then he picked the box up by the pistol grip. There was a knob at the back, facing him, and a graduated dial.

    Dodgson said, "Batteries charged?"

    "They're charged," King said.

    "Okay," Dodgson said. "I'll go first, into the nest area. I'll adjust the box, and get rid of the animals. You two follow behind me, and once the animals are gone, you each take an egg from the nest. Then you leave, and bring them back to the car. I'll come back last. Then we all drive off, Got it?"

    "Right," Baselton said.

    "Okay," King said. "What kind of dinosaurs are these?"

    "I have no fucking idea," Dodgson said, climbing out of the car. "And it doesn't make any difference. Just follow the procedure." He closed the door softly.

    The others got out quietly, and they started forward, down the wet trail. Their feet squished in the mud. The sound from the clearing continued. To Dodgson, it sounded like a lot of animals.

    He pushed aside the last of the ferns and saw them.

    It was a large nesting site, with perhaps four or five low earthen mounds, covered in grasses. The mounds were about seven feet wide, and three feet deep. There were twenty beige-colored adults around the mounds-a whole herd of dinosaurs, surrounding the nesting site. And the adults were big, thirty feet long and ten feet high, all honking and snorting,

    "Oh, my God," Baselton said, staring.

    Dodgson shook his head. "They're maiasaurs , he whispered. "This is going to be a piece of cake."

Maiasaurs had been named by paleontologist Jack Horner. Before Horner, scientists assumed that dinosaurs abandoned their eggs, as most reptiles did. Those assumptions fitted the old picture of dinosaurs as cold-blooded, reptilian creatures, Like reptiles, they were thought to be solitary; murals on museum walls rarely showed more than one example from each species - a brontosaurus here, a stegosaurus or a triceratops there, wading through the swamps. But Horner's excavations in the badlands of Montana provided clear, unambiguous evidence that at least one species of hadrosaurs had engaged in complex nesting and parenting behavior. Horner incorporated that behavior in the name he gave these creatures: maiasaur meant "good-mother lizard."

    Watching them now, Dodgson could see the maiasaurs were indeed attentive parents, the big adults circling the nests, moving carefully to step outside the shallow earthen mounds. The beige maiasaurs were duck-billed dinosaurs; they had large heads that ended in a broad, flattened snout, rather like the bill of a duck.

    They were taking mouthfuls of grass, and dropping it on the eggs in the mounds. This was, he knew, a way to regulate the temperature of the eggs. If the huge animals sat on the eggs, they would crush them. So instead they put a layer of grass over the eggs, which trapped heat and kept the eggs at a more constant temperature. The animals worked steadily.

    "They're huge," Baselton said.

    "They're nothing but oversized cows," Dodgson said. Although the maiasaurs were large, they were plant-eaters, and they had the docile, slightly stupid manner of cows. "Ready? Here we go."

    He lifted the box like a gun, and stepped forward, into view.

Dodgson expected a big reaction when the maiasaurs saw him, but there was none at all. They hardly seemed to notice him. One or two adults looked over, stared with dumb eyes, and then looked away. The animals continued to drop grass on the eggs, which were pale white, oval, and nearly two feet long. Each was about twice the size of an ostrich egg. About the size of a small beach ball. No animals had hatched yet.

    King and Baselton stepped out, and stood beside him in the clearing. Still the maiasaurs ignored them.

    "Amazing," Baselton said.

    "Fine for us," Dodgson said. And he turned on the box.

    A continuous, high-pitched shriek filled the clearing. The maiasaurs immediately turned toward the sound, honking and lifting their heads. They seemed agitated, confused. Dodgson twisted the dial, and the shriek became higher, ear-splitting.

    The maiasaurs bobbed their heads, and moved away from the painful sound. They clustered at the far end of the clearing. Several of the animals urinated in alarm. A few of them moved away into the folliage, abandoning the nest. They were agitated, but they stayed away.

    "Go now," Dodgson said.

    King stepped into the nearest nest, and grunted as he picked up an egg. His arms hardly reached around the huge oval. The maiasaurs honked at him, but none of the ' adults moved forward. Then Baselton went into the nest, took an egg, and followed King back to the car.

    Dodgson walked backward, holding the box on the adults. At the edge of the clearing, he turned the sound off.

    At once the maiasaurs came back, honking loudly and repeatedly. But as they returned to the nests, it seemed as if the adults forgot what had just happened. Within a few moments, they ceased honking, and went back to dropping grass over the eggs. They ignored Dodgson as he left and headed back along the game trail.

    Stupid animals, Dodgson thought, as he went to the car. Baselton and King were setting the eggs into big Styrofoam containers in the back, and fitting the foam packing around them carefully. Both men were grinning like kids.

    "That was amazing!"

    "Great! Fantastic!"

    "What'd I tell you?" Dodgsoii said. "Nothing to it." He glanced at his watch. "At this rate, we'll finish in less than four hours."

    He climbed behind the steering wheel and turned on the engine. Baselton got into the back seat. King got in the passenger seat and took out the map.

    "Next," Dodgson said.

The High Hide

"I tell you, it's fine," Levine said irritably. He was sweating in the stifling heat beneath the aluminum roof of the high hide. "Look, it didn't even break the skin." He held out his hand. There was a red semicircle where the compy had pressed its teeth into the skin, but that was all.

    Beside him, Eddie said, "Yeah, well, your ear is bleeding a little."

    "I don't feel anything. It can't be bad."

    "No, it's not bad, " Eddie said, opening the first-aid kit. "But I better clean it up."

    "I prefer," Levine said, "to get on with my observations." The dinosaurs were barely a quarter-mile away from him, and he could see them well. In the still midday air, he could hear them breathe.

    He could hear them breathe.

    Or at least he could, if this young man would leave him alone. "Look," Levine said, "I know what I'm doing here. You came in at the end of a very interesting and successful experiment. I actually called the dinosaurs to me, by imitating their cry."

    "You did?" Eddie said.

    "Yes, I did. That was what led them into the forest in the first place. So I hardly think that I need your assistance - "

    "The thing is," Eddie said, "you got some of that dino shit on your ear and there's a couple of little punctures. I'll just clean it off for you." He soaked a gauze pad with disinfectant. "May sting a little."

    "I don't care, I have other - Ow!"

    "Stop moving," Eddie said. "It'll only take a second."

    "It's absolutely unnecessary."

    "If you just stand still, it'll be done. There." He took the gauze away. Levine saw brown and a faint streak of red. Just as he suspected, the injury was trivial. He reached up and touched his ear. It didn't hurt at all.

    Levine squinted out at the plain, as Eddie packed up the first-aid case.

    "Jeez, it's hot up here," Eddie said.

    "Yes," Levine said, shrugging.

    "Sarah Harding arrived, and I think they took her back to the trailer. You want to go back now?"

    "I can't imagine why," Levine said.

    "I just thought you might want to say hello or something," Eddie said.

    "My work is here," Levine said. He turned away, raised his binoculars to his eyes.

    "So," Eddie said. "You don't want to come back?"

    "Wouldn't dream of it," Levine said, staring through binoculars. "Not in a million years. Not in sixty-five million years."

Trailer

Kelly Curtis listened to the sound of the shower. She couldn't believe it. She stared at the muddy clothes tossed casually on the bed. Shorts and a khaki short-sleeve shirt.

    Sarah Harding's actual clothes.

    She couldn't help it. Kelly reached out and touched them. She noticed how the fabric was worn and frayed. Buttons sewn back on; they didn't match. And there were some reddish streaks near the pocket that she thought must be old bloodstains. She reached down and touched the fabric -

    "Kelly?"

    Sarah was calling to her, from the shower.

    She remembered my name.

    "Yes?" Kelly said, her voice betraying her nervousness.

    "Is there any shampoo?"

    "I'll look, Dr. Harding," Kelly said, opening drawers hastily. The men had all gone into the next compartment, leaving her alone with Sarah while she washed. Kelly searched desperately, opening the drawers, slamming them shut again.

    "Listen," Sarah called, "it's okay if you can't find any."

    "I'm looking.

    "Is there any dishwashing liquid?"

    Kelly paused. There was a green plastic bottle by the sink. "Yes, Dr. Harding, but - "

    "Give it to me. It's all the same stuff. I don't care." The hand reached out, past the shower curtain. Kelly handed it to her. "And my name is Sarah."

    "Okay, Dr. Harding."

    "Sarah."

    "Okay, Sarah."

    Sarah Harding was a regular person. Very informal and normal.

    Entranced, Kelly sat on the seat in the kitchen and waited, swinging her feet, in case Dr. Harding - Sarah - needed anything else. She listened to Sarah humming "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair." After a few moments, the shower turned off, and her hand reached out and took the towel on the hook. And then she came out, wrapped in the towel.

    Sarah ran her fingers through her short hair, which seemed to be all the attention she gave to her appearance. "That feels better. Boy, this is a plush field trailer. Doc really did a great job."

    "Yes," she said. "It's nice."

    She smiled at Kelly. "How old are you, Kelly?"

    "Thirteen."

    "What is that, eighth grade?"

    "Seventh."

    "Seventh grade," Sarah said, thoughtfully.

    Kelly said, "Dr. Malcolm left some clothes for you. He said he thought they'd fit." She pointed to a clean pair of shorts and a tee shirt.

    "Whose are these?"

    "I think they're Eddie's."

    Sarah held them up. "Might work." She took them around the corner, into the sleeping area, and started getting dressed. She said, "What are you going to do when you grow up?"

    "I don't know," Kelly said.

    "That's a very good answer."

    "It is?" Kelly's mother was always pushing her to get a part-time job to decide what she wanted to do with her life.

    "Yes," Sarah said. "Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties."

    "Oh."

    "What do you like to study?"

    "Actually, uh, I like math," she said, in a sort of guilty voice.

    Sarah must have heard her tone, because she said, "What's wrong with math?"

    "Well, girls aren't good at it. I mean, you know."

    "No, I don't know." Sarah's voice was flat.

    Kelly felt panic. She had been experiencing this warm feeling with Sarah Harding, but now she sensed it was dissolving away, as if she had given a wrong answer to a disapproving teacher. She decided not to say anything else. She waited in silence.

    After a moment Sarah came out again, wearing Eddie's baggy clothes. She sat down and started putting on a pair of boots. She moved in a very normal, matter-of-fact way. "What did you mean girls aren't good at mathematics?"

    "Well, that's what everybody says."

    "Everybody like who?"

    "My teachers."

    Sarah sighed. "Great" she said, shaking her head. "Your teachers..."

    "And the other kids call me a brainer. Stuff like that. You know." Kelly Just blurted it out. She couldn't believe that she was saying all this to Sarah Harding, whom she hardly knew at all except from articles and pictures, but here she was, telling her all this personal stuff. All these things that upset her.

    Sarah just smiled cheerfully. "Well, if they say that, you must be pretty good at math, huh?"

    "I guess."

    She smiled. "That's wonderful, Kelly.

    "But the thing is, boys don't like girls who are too smart."

    Sarah's eyebrows went up. "Is that so?"

    "Well, that's what everybody says.

    "Like who?"

    "Like my mom."

    "Uh-huh. And she probably knows what she's talking about."

    "I don't know," Kelly admitted. "My mom only dates jerks, actually."

    "So she could be wrong?" Sarah asked, glancing up at Kelly as she tied her laces.

    "I guess."

    "Well, in my experience, Some men like smart women, and some don't. It's like everything else in the world. She stood up. "You know about George Schaller?"

    "Sure. He studied pandas."

    "Right. Pandas, and before that, snow leopards and lions and gorillas. He's the most important animal researcher in the twentieth century-and you know how he works?"

    Kelly shook her head.

    "Before he goes into the field, George reads everything that's ever been written about the animal he's going to study. Popular books, newspaper accounts, scientific papers, everything. Then he goes out and observes the animal for himself. And you know what he usually finds?"

    She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

    "That nearly everything that's been written or said is wrong. Like the gorilla. George studied mountain gorillas ten years before Dian Fossey ever thought of it. And he found that what was believed about gorillas was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or just plain fantasy - like the idea that you couldn't take women on gorilla expeditions, because the gorillas would rape them, Wrong. Everything...just... wrong."

    Sarah finished tying her boots, and stood.

    "So, Kelly, even at your young age, there's something you might as well learn now. All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong."

    Kelly said nothing. She felt oddly disheartened to hear this.

    "It's a fact of life," Sarah said. "Human beings are just stuffed full of misinformation. So it's hard to know who to believe. I know how you feel."

    "You do?"

    "Sure. My mom used to tell me I'd never amount to anything." She smiled. "So did some of my professors."

    "Really?" It didn't seem possible.

    "Oh yes," Sarah said. "As a matter of fact - "

    From the other section of the trailer, they heard Malcolm say, No! No! Those idiots! They could ruin everything!"

    Sarah immediately turned, and went into the other section. Kelly jumped off the seat, and hurried after her.

The men were all clustered around the monitor. Everyone was talking at once, and they seemed to be upset. "This is terrible," Malcolm was saying. "Terrible!"

    Thorne said, "Is that a jeep?"

    "They had a red Jeep," Harding said, coming up to look.

    "Then it's Dodgson," Malcolm said. "Damn!"

    "What's he doing here?"

    "I can guess."

    Kelly pushed through to get a look. On the screen, she saw foliage, and intermittent flashes of a red-and-black vehicle.

    "Where are they now?" Malcolm said to Arby.

    "I think they're in the east valley," Arby said. "Near where we found Dr. Levine."

    The radio clicked. Levine's voice said, "Do you mean there are now other people on the island?"

    "Yes, Richard."

    "Well, you better go stop them, before they mess everything up."

    "I know. Do you want to come back?"

    "Not without a compelling reason. Inform me if one arises." And his radio clicked off.

    Harding stared at the screen, watching the Jeep. "That's them, all right," she said. "That's your friend Dodgson."

    "He's not my friend," Malcolm said. He got up, wincing in pain from his leg. "Let's go," he said. "We have to stop these bastards. There's no time to waste."

Nest

The red jeep Wrangler rolled softly to a stop. Directly ahead was a wall of dense foliage. But through it they could see sunlight, from the clearing beyond.

    Dodgson sat quietly in the car, listening. King turned to him I I about to speak, but Dodgson held up his hand, gesturing to him to be silent.

    Then he heard it clearly - a low rumbling growl, almost a purr. It was coming from beyond the foliage ahead. It sounded like the biggest jungle cat he had ever heard. And intermittently, he felt a slight vibration, hardly anything, but enough to make the car keys clink against the steering column. As he felt that vibration, it slowly dawned on him: It's walking.

    Something very big. Walking.

    Beside him, King was staring forward in astonishment; his mouth hung open. Dodgson glanced back at Baselton; the professor was gripping the seat with white fingers, as he listened to the sound.

    A shadow moved across the ferns directly ahead. judging the shadow, the animal was twenty feet high, and forty feet long. It walked on its hind legs, and had a large body, a short neck, a very big head.

    A tyrannosaur.

    Dodgson hesitated, staring at the shadow. His heart was pounding in his chest. He considered going on to the next nest, but he was confident that the box would work here, too. He said, "Let's get this over with. Give me the box."

    Baselton handed him the box, just as he had done before.

    Dodgson said, "Charged?"

    "Batteries arc charged," King said.

    "Okay," he said. "Here we go. Exactly the same as before. I'll go first, you two follow, and bring the eggs back to the car. Ready?"

    "Ready," Baselton said.

    King did not answer. He was still staring at the shadow. "What kind of a dinosaur is that?"

    "That's a tyrannosaurus."

    "Oh Jesus," King said.

    "A tyrannosaurus?" Baselton said.

    "It doesn't matter what it is," Dodgson said irritably. "Just follow the plan, like before. Everybody ready?"

    "Just a minute," Baselton said.

    King said, "What if it doesn't work?"

    "We already know it works," Dodgson said.

    "There's a rather curious fact about tyrannosaurs that was recently reported," Baselton said. "A paleontologist named Roxton did a study of the tyrannosaur braincase, and concluded that they have a brain not much different from a frog's, although of course much bigger. The implication was their nervous systems were adapted to motion only. They can 't see you if you stand still. Stationary objects become invisible to them."

    Are you sure about that?" King said.

    Baselton said, "That was the report. And it makes perfect sense. One can't forget that dinosaurs, for all their intimidating size, were actually rather primitive intellects. It's quite logical that a tyrannosaur would have the mental equipment of a frog."

    "I don't see why we're rushing into this," King said, nervously. He stared forward. "It's much bigger than the other ones."

    "So what?" Dodgson said. "You heard what George said. It's just a big frog. Let's get it done. Get out of the fucking car. And don't slam the doors."

George Baselton had felt quite good and authoritative, recalling that obscure article from the journals. He had been in his accustomed role, dispensing information to people who lacked it. Now that he approached the nest, he was astonished to notice that his knees had begun to tremble. His legs felt like rubber, He had always thought that was a figure of speech. He was alarmed to realize it could be literally true. He bit his lip, and forced himself under control. He was not, he told himself, going to show fear. He was the master of this situation.

    Dodgson was already moving ahead, holding the black box like a gun in his hand. Baselton glanced over at King, who was deathly pale and sweating. He looked on the verge of collapse; he moved forward slowly. Baselton walked alongside him. Making sure he was all right.

    Up ahead, Dodgson gave a final glance back, waved to Baselton and King to catch up. He glared at both of them, and then he stepped through the foliage into the clearing.

    Baselton saw the tyrannosaur. No - there were two! They stood on both sides of a mud mound, two adults, twenty feet high on their hind legs, powerful, dark red, with big vicious jaws. Like the maiasaurs, the animals stared at Dodgson for a moment, a dumb stare, as if amazed to see an intruder. And then the tyrannosatirs roared in fury. An incredible, bellowing, air-shaking roar.

    Dodgson lifted the box, pointed it at the animals. Immediately, a continuous, high-pitched shriek filled the clearing.

    The tyrannosaurs roared in response, and lowered their heads, extending their necks forward, snapping their jaws, preparing to attack. They were huge - and they were unaffected by the sound. They started to come around the mound, toward Dodgson. The earth shook as they moved.

    "Oh fuck," Kin said.

    But Dodgson stayed cool. He twisted the dial. Baselton clapped his hands over his cars. The shriek became higher, louder, ear-splitting, incredibly painful. The response was immediate: the tyrannosaurs stepped back as if they had received a physical blow. They ducked their heads. They blinked their eyes rapidly. The sound seemed to vibrate in the air. They roared again, but weakly now, without conviction. A terrible screaming came from inside the mud nest.

    Dodgson moved forward, pointing the box in the air, directly at the animals. The tyrannosaurs backed away, looking into the nest, then to Dodgson. They swung their heads back and forth rapidly, as if trying to clear their ears. Dodgson calmly adjusted the dial. The sound went higher. It was now excruciating.

    Dodgson began to climb the mud mound of the nest. Baselton and King scrambled up, following him. Baselton found himself looking down into a nest with four mottled white eggs, and two young babies that looked for all the world like scrawny oversized turkeys. Anyway, some kind of gigantic baby birds.

    The two tyrannosaurs were at the far end of the clearing, held away by the sound. Like the maiasaurs, they urinated in agitation. They stomped their feet. But they did not come closer.

    Over the ear-splitting shriek of the box, Dodgson shouted, "Get the eggs!" In a daze, King stumbled down into the nest, grabbing the nearest egg. He fumbled it in his shaking hands; the egg flew into the air; he caught it again, and lurched back. He stepped on the leg of one of the babies, which screamed in fear and pain.

    At this, the parents tried to come forward again, drawn by the infants cries. King hastily clambered out of the nest, ducked away through the foliage. Baselton watched him go.

    "George!" Dodgson shouted, still aiming the box at the tyrannosaurs. "Get the other egg!"

    Baselton turned to look at the adult tyrannosaurs, seeing their agitation and their anger, watching their laws snap open and closed, and he had the sudden feeling that sound or no sound, these animals would not allow anyone to enter the nest again. King had been lucky but Baselton would not be lucky, he could feel it, and -

    George! Now!"

    Baselton said, "I can't!"

    "You dumb fuck!" Holding the gun high, Dodgson began to climb down into the nest himself But as he started, he twisted his body - and the battery plug pulled out of the box.

    The sound abruptly died.

    In the clearing, there was silence.

    Baselton moaned.

    The tyrannosaurs shook their heads a final time, and roared.

    Baselton saw Dodgson go rigidly still, his body frozen. Baselton also stood still. Somehow, he forced his body to stay where he was. He forced his knees to stop trembling. He held his breath.

    And he waited.

    On the far side of the clearing, the tyrannosaurs began to move toward him.

"What are they doing?" Arby cried, in the trailer. He was so close to the monitor his nose almost touched the screen. "Are they crazy? They're just standing there."

    Beside him, Kelly said nothing. She watched the screen silently. "Want to be out there now, Kel?" Arby said.

    "Shut up," Kelly said.

"No, they're not crazy," Malcolm said over the radio, as he stared at the dashboard monitor. The Explorer lurched down the trail, heading toward the eastern sector of the island. Thorne was driving. Sarah and Malcolm were in the back seat.

    Sarah said, "He should be trying to put his sound machine together again. Are they really just going to stand there?"

    "Yes," Malcolm said.

    "Why?"

    "They are misinformed," Malcolm said.

Dodgson

Dodgson watched the lead tyrannosaur come toward him. For such big animals, they were cautious. Only one of the two parents approached them, and although it paused to roar fiercely every few paces, it seemed oddly tentative, as if it was perplexed by the fact that the men were staying there. Or perhaps it could not see them. Perhaps he and Baselton had vanished from their view.

    The other parent hung back, remaining toward the other side of the nest. Bobbing and ducking its head, agitated.

    Agitated but not attacking.

    Of course, the roars of the approaching dinosaur were terrifying, blood-chilling. Dodgson didn't dare glance at Baselton, just a few yards away. Baselton was probably peeing in his pants right now. just so he didn't turn and run, Dodgson thought. If he ran, he was a dead man. If he stayed perfectly still, everything would be all right.

    Standing stiffly, keeping his body rigid, Dodgson held the anodized box at waist level in his left hand, near his belt buckle. With his right hand, he slowly, ever so slowly, pulled up the disconnected power cord. In a few moments he would feel the end plug in his hands, and then he, would slip it back into the box.

    Meanwhile, he never took his eyes off the approaching tyrannosaur He felt the ground shake beneath his feet. He heard the cries of the infant that King had stepped on. Those cries seemed to bother the parents, to arouse them.

    No matter. Just a few seconds more, and he would have the plug back in the power pack. And then...

    The tyrannosaur was very close now. Dodgson could smell the rotten odor of the carnivore. The animal roared, and he felt hot breath. it was standing right by Baselton. Dodgson turned his head fractionally, to watch.

    Baselton stood entirely still. The tyrannosaur came close, and lowered his big head. He snorted at Baselton. He raised his head again, as if perplexed.

    He really can't see him, Dodgson thought.

    The tyrannosaur bellowed, a ferocious sound. Somehow Baselton stayed unmoving. The tyrannosaur bent over, bringing his huge head down again. The jaws opened and closed. Baselton stared straight forward, not blinking. With huge flaring nostrils, the tyrannosaur smelled him, a long snuffling inhalation that fluttered Baselton's trouser legs.

    Then the tyrannosaur nudged Baselton tentatively with his snout. And in that moment Dodgson realized that the animal could see him after all, and then the tyrannosaur swung his head laterally, striking Baselton in the side and easily knocking him to the earth. Baselton yelled as the tyrannosaur's big foot came down, pinning him to the ground. Baselton raised his arms and shouted "You son of a bitch!" just as the head came down, jaws wide, and closed on him. The movement was gentle, almost delicate, but in the next instant the head snapped high, tearing the body, and Dodgson heard a scream and saw something small and floppy hanging from the jaws, and realized it was Baselton's arm. Baselton's hand swung freely, the metal band of his wristwatch glinting beneath the tyrannosaur's huge eye.

    Baselton was screaming, a continuous undifferentiated sound, and hearing it, Dodgson broke into a dizzying sweat. Then he turned and ran, back toward the car, back toward safety, back toward anything.

    He ran.

Kell and Arb turned away from the monitor at the same moment. Kelly felt sick. She couldn't watch. But through the radio they could till hear the tinny screams of the man lying on his back, while the tyrannosaur tore him apart.

    "Turn it off," Kelly said.

    A moment later, the sound stopped.

    Kelly sighed, let her shoulders drop. "Thank you," she said.

    "I didn't do anything," Arby said.

    She glanced back at the screen, and quickly looked away again. The tyrannosaur was tearing at something red. She shivered.

    It was silent in the trailer. Kelly heard the tick of electronic counters, and the thumping of the water pumps under the floor. Outside, there was the faint sound of wind rustling the tall grass. Kelly suddenly felt very alone, very isolated on this island.

    Arby," she said, "what are we going to do?"

    Arby didn't answer her.

    He bolted for the bathroom.

"I knew it," Malcolm said, staring at the dashboard monitor. "I knew that would happen. They tried to steal eggs. Now look - the tyrannosaurs are leaving! Both of them!" He pushed the radio transmitter. "Arby. Kelly. Are you there?"

    "We can't talk," Kelly said.

    The Explorer continued down the hillside, toward the area of the tyrannosaur nest. Thorne gripped the wheel grimly as he drove. "What a damn mess."

    "Kelly. Are you listening? We can't see what's happening down there. The tyrannosaurs have left the nest! Kelly? What's happening?"

Dodgson sprinted for the Jeep. The battery pack fell off his belt as he ran, but he didn't care. Up ahead in the jeep, he saw King waiting, tense and pale.

    Dodgson got behind the wheel, started the engine. The tyrannosaurs roared.

    "Where's Baselton?" King asked.

    "Didn't make it," Dodgson said.

    "What do you mean?"

    "I mean he fucking didn't make it!" Dodgson yelled, and slammed the car into gear. The Jeep took off, bouncing up the hill. They heard the tyrannosaurs bellowing behind them.

    King was holding the egg, looking back down the road. "Maybe we should get rid of this," he said.

    "Don't you fucking dare!" Dodgson said.

    King was rolling down the window. "Maybe he just wants the egg back."

    "No," Dodgson said. "No!" He reached across the passenger seat, struggling with King as he drove. The trail was narrow, with deep ruts. The Jeep lurched forward.

    Suddenly, one of the tyrannosaurs burst from the trees in the road ahead. The animal stood there, snarling, blocking the road.

    "Oh Christ," Dodgson said, slamming on the brakes. The car slid sickeningly in the muddy track, came to a stop.

    The tyrannosaur lumbered toward them, bellowing.

    "Turn around!" King screamed. "Turn around!"

    But Dodgson didn't turn around. He slammed the car into reverse, and started backing down the trail. He was driving fast, and the road was narrow.

    "You're crazy!" King said. "You're going to kill us!"

    Dodgson swung his arm, smacked King with his hand. "Shut the flick up!" he shouted. It took all his attention to maneuver the car back down the winding trail. Even going as fast as he could, he was sure the tyrannosaur would be faster. It wasn't going to work. They were in a fucking jeep with a fucking cloth top, and they were going to get killed and -

    "No!" King shouted.

    Behind them, Dodgson saw the second tyrannosaur, charging up the road toward them. He looked forward, saw the first tyrannosaur bearing down on them. They were trapped.

    He twisted the wheel in panic and the car ran off the road, crashing backward into dense underbrush and surrounding trees, and he felt a jolting impact. Then the rear of the car dropped sickeningly, and he realized the back wheels were hanging over the edge of a hill. He gunned the engine frantically, but the wheels just spun in the air. It was hopeless. And slowly, the car sank backward, deeper into foliage so dense he could not see through it. But they were over the edge. Beside him, King was sobbing. He heard the tyrannosaurs roaring, very near now.

    Dodgson flung open the car door, and jumped out into space. He lunged through the foliage, fell, hit a tree trunk, and tumbled down a steep jungle hill. Somewhere along the way he felt a sharp pain in his forehead, and saw stars for the brief moment before blackness enveloped him, and he lost consciousness.

Decision

They sat in the Explorer, on top of the ridge overlooking the jungle-covered east valley. The windows were down. They listened to the bellowing of the tyrannosaurs, as the huge animals crashed through the underbrush.

    "They both left the nest," Thorne said.

    "Yeah. Those guys must have taken something." Malcolm sighed.

    They were silent a while, listening.

    They heard a soft buzzing, and then Eddie pulled up alongside them, in the motorcycle. "I thought you might need help. Are you going to go down?"

    Malcolm shook his head. "No, absolutely not. It's too dangerous - we don't know where they are."

    Sarah Harding said, "Why did Dodgson just stand there like that? That's not the way to act around predators. You get caught around lions, you make a lot of noise, wave your hands, throw things at them. Try to scare them off. You don't just stand there."

    "He probably read the wrong research paper," Malcolm said, shaking his head. "There's been a theory going around that tyrannosaurs can only see movement. A guy named Roxton made casts of rex braincases, and concluded that tyrannosaurs had the brain of a frog."

    The radio clicked. Levine said, "Roxton is an idiot. He doesn't know enough anatomy to have sex with his wife. His paper was a joke."

    "What paper?" Thorne said.

    The radio clicked again. "Roxton," Levine said, "believed that tyrannosaurs had a visual system like an amphibian: like a frog. A frog sees motion but doesn't see stillness. But it is quite impossible that a predator such as a tyrannosaur would have a visual system that worked that way. Quite impossible. Because the most common defense of prey animals is to freeze. A deer or something like that, it senses danger, and it freezes. A predator has to be able to see them anyway. And of course a tyrannosaur could."

    Over the radio, Levine snorted with disgust. "It's just like the other idiotic theory put forth by Grant a few years back that a tyrannosaur could be confused by a driving rainstorm, because it was not adapted to wet climates. That's equally absurd. The Cretaceous wasn't particularly dry. And in any case, tyrannosaurs are North American animals they've only been found in the U.S. or Canada. Tyrannosaurs lived on the shores of the great inland sea, east of the Rocky Mountains. There are lots of thunderstorms on mountain slopes. I'm quite sure tyrannosaurs saw plenty of rain, and they evolved to deal with it."

    "So is there any reason why a tyrannosaur might not attack somebody?" Malcolm said.

    "Yes, Of Course. The most obvious one," Levine said.

    "Which is?"

    "If it wasn't hungry. If it had just eaten another animal. Anything larger than a goat would take care of its hunger for hours to come. No, no. The tyrannosaur sees fine, moving or still."

They listened to the roaring, coming up from the valley below. They saw thrashing in the underbrush, about half a mile away, to the north. More bellowing. The two rexes seemed to be answering each other.

    Sarah Harding said, "What are we carrying?"

    Thorne said, "Three Lindstradts. Fully loaded."

    "Okay," she said. "Let's go."

    The radio crackled. "I'm not there," Levine said, over the radio. "But I'd certainly advise waiting."

    "The hell with waiting," Malcolm said. "Sarah's right. Let's go down there and see how bad it is."

    "Your funeral," Levine said.

Arby came back to the monitor, wiping his chin. He still looked a little green. "What are they doing now?"

    "Dr. Malcolm and the others are going to the nest."

    "Are you kidding?" he said, alarmed.

    "Don't worry," Kelly said. "Sarah can handle it."

    "You hope," Arby said.

Nest

Just beyond the clearing, they parked the Explorer. Eddie pulled up in the motorcycle, and leaned it against the trunk of a tree and waited while the others climbed out of the Explorer.

    Sarah Harding smelled the familiar sour odor of rotting flesh and excrement that always marked a carnivore nesting site. In the afternoon heat, it was faintly nauseating. Flies buzzed in the still air. Harding took one of the rifles, slung it over her shoulder. She looked at the three men. They were all standing very still, tense, not moving. Malcolm's face was pale, particularly around the lips. It reminded her of the time that Coffmann, her old professor, had visited her in Africa. Coffmann was one of those hard-drinking Hemingway types, with lots of affairs at home, and lots of tales of his adventures with the orangs in Sumatra, the ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar. So she took him with her to a kill site in the savannah. And he promptly passed out. He weighed more than two hundred pounds, and she had to drag him out by the collar while the lions circled and snarled at her. It had been a good lesson for her.

    Now she leaned close to the three men and whispered, "If you've got any qualms about this, don't go. Just wait here. I don't want to worry about you. I can do this myself" She started off.

    "Are you sure - "

    "Yes. Now keep quiet." She moved directly toward the clearing. Malcolm and the others hurried to catch up with her. She pushed aside the palm fronds, and stepped out into the open. The tyrannosaurs were gone, and the mud cone was deserted. Over to the right, she saw a shoe, with a bit of torn flesh sticking out above the ragged sock. That was all there was left of Baselton.

    From within the nest, she heard a plaintive, high-pitched squeal. Harding climbed up the mud bank, with Malcolm struggling to follow. She saw two infant tyrannosaurs there, mewling. Nearby were three large eggs. They saw heavy footprints all around, in the mud.

    "They took one of the eggs," Malcolm said. "Damn."

    "You didn't want anything to disrupt your little ecosystem?"

    Malcolm smiled crookedly. "Yeah. I was hoping."

    "Too bad," she said, and moved quickly around the edge of the pit.

    She bent over, looking at the baby tyrannosaurs. One of the babies was cowering, its downy neck pulled into its body. But the second one behaved very differently. It did not move as they approached, but remained lying sprawled on its side, breathing shallowly, eyes glazed.

    "This one's been hurt," she said.

Levine was standing in the high hide. He pressed the headset to his ear, and spoke into the microphone near his cheek. "I need a description," he said.

    Thorne said, "There's two of them, roughly two feet long, weighing maybe forty pounds. About the size of small cassowary birds. Large eyes. Short snouts. Pale-brown color. And there's a ring of down around the necks."

    "Can they stand?"

    "Uh...if they can, not very well. They're kind of flopping around. Squeaking a lot."

    "Then they're infants," Levine said, nodding. "Probably only a few days old. Never been out of the nest. I'd be very careful."

    "Why is that?"

    "With offspring that young," Levine said, "the parents won't leave them for long."

Harding moved closer to the injured infant. Still mewling, the baby tried to crawl toward her, dragging its body awkwardly. One leg was bent at an odd angle. "I think the left leg's hurt."

    Eddie came closer, standing alongside her to see. "Is it broken?"

    "Yeah, probably, but - "

    "Hey!" Eddie said. The baby lunge d forward, and clamped its jaws around the ankle of his boot. He pulled his foot away, dragging the baby, which held its grip tightly. "Hey! Let go!"

    Eddie lifted his leg up, shook it back and forth, but the baby refused to let go. He pulled for a moment longer, then stopped. Now the baby just lay there on the ground, breathing shallowly, jaws still locked around Eddie's boot. "Jeez," Eddie said.

    "Aggressive little guy, isn't he," Sarah said. "Right from birth..."

    Eddie looked down at the tiny, razor-sharp jaws. They hadn't penetrated the leather. The baby held on firmly. With the butt of his rifle, he poked the infant's head a couple of times. It had no effect at all. The baby lay on the ground, breathing shallowly. Its big eyes blinked slowly as they stared up at Eddie, but it did not release its grip.

    They heard the distant roars of the parents, somewhere to the north. "Let's get out of here," Malcolm said. "We've seen what we came here to see. We've got to find where Dodgson went."

    Thorne said, "I think I saw a track up the trail. They might have gone off there."

    "We better have a look."

    They all started back to the car.

    "Wait a minute," Eddie said, looking down at his foot. "What am I going to do about the baby?"

    "Shoot it," Malcolm said, over his shoulder.

    "You mean kill it?"

    Sarah said, "It's got a broken leg, Eddie, it's going to die anyway."

    "Yeah, but - "

    Thorne called, "We're going back up the trail, Eddie, and if we don't find Dodgson, we'll take the ridge road going toward the laboratory. Then down to the trailer again."

    "Okay, Doc. I'm right behind you." Eddie lifted his rifle, turned it in his hands.

    "Do it now," Sarah said, climbing into the Explorer. "Because you don't want to be here when Momma and Poppa get back."

Gambler's Ruin

Driving 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?"

King

There 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.

Bad News

The 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?"

FIFTH CONFIGURATION

"At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe."

IAN MALCOLM

Baby

In 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."

The High Hide

The sun had disappeared behind low-banging clouds by the time they reached the high hide. The entire valley was bathed in a soft reddish glow as Eddie parked the Explorer beneath the aluminum scaffolding, and they all climbed up to the little shelter above. Levine was there, binoculars to his eyes. He did not seem glad to see them. "Stop moving around so much," he said irritably.

    From the shelter, they had a magnificent view over the valley. Somewhere in the north, thunder rumbled. The air was cooling, and felt electric.

    "Is there going to be a storm?" Kelly asked.

    "Looks like it," Thorne said.

    Arby glanced doubtfully at the metal roof of the shelter. "How long are we staying out here?"

    "For a while," Thorne said. "This is our only ay here. The helicopters are taking us away tomorrow morning. I thought you kids deserved a chance to see the dinosaurs in the field one more time."

    Arby squinted at him. "What's the real reason?"

    "I know," Kelly said, in a worldly tone.

    "Yeah? What?"

    "Dr. Malcolm wants to be alone with Sarah, stupid."

    "Why?"

    "They're old friends," Kelly said.

    "So? We were just going to watch."

    "No," Kelly said. "I mean, they're old friends."

    "I know what you're talking about," Arby said. "I'm not stupid, you know."

    "Knock it off," Levine said, staring through the binoculars. "You're missing the interesting stuff."

    "What's that?"

    "Those triceratops, down at the river. Something's bothering them."

    The triceratops herd had been drinking peacefully from the river, but now they were beginning to make noise. For such huge animals, their vocalizations were incongruously high-pitched: they sounded more like yelping dogs.

    Arby turned to look. "There's something in the trees," he said, "across the river." There was some hint of dark movement, beneath the trees.

    The triceratops herd shifted, and began backing toward each other until they formed a sort of rosette, with their curved horns facing outward, against the unseen menace. The solitary baby was in the center, yelping in fear. One of the animals, presumably its mother, turned and nuzzled it. Afterward, the baby was silent.

    "I see them," Kelly said, staring at the trees. "They're raptors. Over there."

    The triceratops herd faced the raptors, the adults barking as they swung their sharp horns up and down. They created a kind of barrier of moving spikes. There was an unmistakable sense of coordination, of group defense against predators.

    Levine was smiling happily. "There's never been any evidence for this," he said, suddenly cheerful. "In fact, most paleontologists don't believe it happens."

    "Don't believe what happens?" Arby said.

    "This kind of group defensive behavior. Especially with trikes - they look a bit like rhinos, so they've been assumed to be solitary, like rhinos. But now we will see....Ah.Yes."

    From beneath the trees, a single velociraptor hopped out into view. It moved quickly on its hind legs, balancing with a stiff tall.

    The triceratops herd barked noisily at the appearance of the raptor. The other raptors remained hidden beneath the trees, The solitary velociraptor in full view moved in a slow semicircle around the herd, entering the water on the far side. It crossed, swimming easily, and came out on the other bank, It was now about fifty yards upstream from the barking triceratops- herd, which wheeled to present a united front. All their attention was focused on the single velociraptor.

    Slowly, other raptors began to slink out of their hiding place. They moved low, bodies hidden in the tall grass.

    "Jeez," Arby said. "They're hunting."

    "In a pack," Levine said, nodding. He picked up a bit of candy bar wrapper from the floor of the shelter, and dropped it, watching it flutter off in the wind. "The main pack is downwind, so the trikes can't smell them." He raised the binoculars to his eyes again. "I think," he said, "that we're about to see a kill."

    They watched as the raptors closed in around the herd. And then suddenly, lightning cracked on the island rim, brilliantly lighting the valley floor. One of the stalking raptors stood up in surprise. Its head was briefly visible above the grass.

    Immediately, the triceratops herd wheeled again, regrouping to face the new menace. All the raptors stopped, as if to reconsider their plan.

    "What happened?" Arby said. "Why are they stopping?"

    "They're in trouble."

    "Why?"

    "Look at them. The main pack is still across the river. They're too far away to mount an attack."

    "You mean they're giving up? Already?"

    "Looks like it," Levine said.

    One by one, the raptors in the grass raised their heads, making their positions known, As each new predator appeared, the triceratops barked loudly. The raptors seemed to know the situation was hopeless. They slunk away, moving back toward the trees. Seeing them retreat, the triceratops barked even louder.

    And then the single raptor by the water's edge charged. It moved incredibly fast - astonishingly fast - streaking like a cheetah across the fifty yards that separated it from the herd. The adult triceratops had no time to re-form. The baby was exposed. It squealed in fright as it saw the approaching animal.

    The velociraptor leapt into the air, raising both its hind legs. Lightning cracked again, and in the brilliant light they saw the twin curved claws high in the air. At the last moment, the nearest adult turned, swiveling its big horned head with the wide bony crest, and it knocked the raptor a glancing blow, sending the animal sprawling on the muddy bank. Immediately the adult triceratops charged forward, its head high. When it reached the raptor it stopped abruptly and swung its big head down, lowering its horns toward the fallen animal. But the raptor was quick; hissing, it leapt to its feet, and the triceratotops horns slashed harmlessly into the mud. The raptor spun sideways, and kicked the adult on the snout, drawing blood with its big curved claw. The adult bellowed, but by then two other adults were charging forward, while the others remained behind with the baby. The raptor scrambled away, back into the grass.

    "Wow," Arby said. "That was something!"

The Herd

King gave a long sigh of relief as he came to the Y-fork in the road, and drove the red Jeep left, coming onto a wide dirt road. He recognized it at once: this was the ridge road that led back to the boat. As he looked off to his left, he could see down across the east valley. The boat was still there! All right! He gave a shout and accelerated sharply, relief flooding through him. On the deck, he could see the Spanish fishermen, staring up at the sky. Despite the threatening storm, they didn't seem to be preparing to leave. Probably they were waiting for Dodgson.

    Well, he thought, that was fine. King would be there in a few minutes. After working his wav through dense jungle, he could finally see exactly where he was. The ridge road was high, following the crest of one of the volcanic spines. There was almost no foliage up here, and as the road twisted and turned, he had views across the entire island. To the east, he could look down into the ravine, and the boat at the shore. To the west, he could look straight across at the laboratory, and Malcolm's twin trailers parked near the far edge of the clearing.

    They never did find out what the hell Malcolm was doing here, he thought. Not that it mattered now. King was getting off the island. That was the only thing that mattered. He could almost feel the deck beneath his feet. Maybe one of the fishermen would even have a beer. A nice cold beer, while they chugged down the river, and pulled out of this damned island. He'd toast Dodgson, is what he'd do.

    Maybe, he thought, I'll have two beers.

King came around a curve, and saw a herd of animals standing thickly in the road. They were some kind of green dinosaurs, about four feet tall, with big domed heads and a bunch of little horns. They reminded him of green water buffalo. But there were a lot of them. He braked sharply; the car swerved to a stop.

    The green dinosaurs looked at his car, but they did not move. The herd just stood there in a lazy, contented way. King waited, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. When nothing happened, he honked the horn, and flashed his headlights.

    The animals just stared.

    They were funny-looking creatures, with that smooth bulging curve on the forehead and all those little horns around it. They just stared at him, with a stupid cow-like look. He slipped the car into gear and edged it forward slowly, expecting that he could push his way through the animals. They didn't move aside. Finally his front bumper nudged the nearest animal, which grunted, took a couple of steps back, lowered its head, and butted the front of the car, hard, with a metallic clang!

    Christ, he thought. It could puncture the radiator, if he wasn't careful. He stopped the car again and waited, the motor idling. The animals settled down again.

    Several of them lay down on the road. He couldn't drive over them. He looked ahead toward the river and saw the boat, not more than a quarter of a mile away. He hadn't realized it was so near. As he watched, he realized that the fishermen were very busy on the deck. They were swinging the crane back, lashing it down. They were getting ready to leave!

    The hell with waiting, he thought. He opened the door, and climbed out, leaving the car in the center of the road. Immediately, the animals jumped to their feet, and the nearest one charged him. He had the door open; the animal smashed into it, slamming it shut, leaving a deep dent in the metal. King scrambled toward the edge of the hill, only to find he was at the top of a steep vertical descent of more than a hundred feet. He'd never make it down, at least not here. Farther along, the slope was not so steep. But now more animals were charging him. He had no choice. He ran around the back of the car, just as another animal smashed into the rear taillight, shattering the plastic.

    A third animal charged the back of the car directly. King scrambled up onto the spare tire, as the animal slammed into the bumper. The jolt knocked him off, and he fell to the ground, rolling, while the buffaloes snorted all around him. He got to his feet and ran to the opposite side of the Toad, where there was a slight rise; he scrambled up it, moving into foliage. The animals did not pursue him. Not that it did him any good-now he was on the wrong side of the road!

    Somehow he had to get back to the other side.

    He climbed to the top of the rise and started down, swearing to himself. He decided to work his way forward a hundred yards or so, until he was beyond the butting animals, and then cross the road. If he could do that, then he could get to the boat.

    Almost immediately, he was surrounded by dense jungle. He tripped, tumbled down a muddy slope, and when he got to his feet was no longer sure which way to go. He was at the bottom of a ravine, and the palm trees were ten feet tall, and very thick. He couldn't see more than a few feet in any direction. In a moment of panic, he realized he didn't know which way to go. He pushed forward through the wet leaves, hoping to get his bearings back.

The kids were still peering over the railing, looking at the departing raptors. Thorne pulled Levine to one side, and said quietly, "Why did you want us to come here?"

    "Just a precaution," Levine said. "Bringing the infant to the trailer is asking for trouble."

    "What sort of trouble?"

    Levine shrugged. "We don't know, is the point. But in general, parents don't like it when their babies are taken away. And that baby has some very big parents."

    From the other side of the shelter Arby said, "Look! Look!"

    "What is it?" Levine said.

    "It's a man."

    Gasping for breath, King emerged from the jungle and walked out onto the plain. At last he could see where he was! He paused, soaked and muddy, to get his bearings.

    He was disappointed to find that he was nowhere near the boat. In fact, he still seemed to be on the wrong side of the road. He was facing a broad grassy plain, with a river coursing through it. The plain was mostly deserted, although there were several dinosaurs farther down the banks. They were the horned ones: triceratops. And they looked a little agitated. The big adults were raising their heads up and down, making barking sounds.

    Obviously, he would have to follow the river, until it brought him to the boat. But he'd have to be careful getting past these triceratops. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a candy bar. He ripped the wrapping while he watched the triceratops, wishing they would go away. How long would it take him to reach the boat? That was the only question on his mind. He decided to move, triceratops or not. He began walking through the tall grass.

    Then he heard a reptilian hiss. It was coming from the grass, somewhere to his left. And he noticed a smell, a peculiar rotten smell. He paused, waiting. The candy bar didn't taste so good, any more.

    Then, behind him, he heard splashing. It was coming from the river.

    King turned to look.

"It's one of those men from the jeep," Arby said, standing in the high hide. "But why is he waiting?"

    From their vantage point, they could see the dark shapes of the raptors, moving through the grass on the other side of the river. Now two of the raptors came forward, splashing in the water. Moving toward the man.

    "Oh no," Arby said.

King saw two dark, striped lizards moving across the river. They walked on their hind legs, with a sort of hopping motion. Their bodies were reflected in the flowing water of the river. They snapped their long jaws, and hissed menacingly at King.

    He glanced upstream, and saw another lizard crossing, and another beyond that. Those other animals were already deep in the water, and had begun to swim.

    Howard King backed away from the river, moving deeper into the tall grass. Then he turned, and ran. He was chest-deep in grass and running hard, gasping for breath, when suddenly another lizard head rose up in front of him, hissing and snarling. He dodged, changed direction, but suddenly the nearest lizard leapt in the air. It jumped so high its body cleared the grass-, he could see the entire animal flying through the air, its two hind legs raised to pounce. He glimpsed curved, dagger-like claws.

    King turned again and the lizard shrieked as it landed on the ground behind him, and tumbled away in the grass. King ran on. He was energized by pure fear. Behind him he heard the lizard snarling. He ran hard: ahead was another twenty yards of grassy clearing, and then the jungle began again. He saw trees - big trees. He could climb one and get away.

    Off to the left, he saw another lizard moving diagonally across the clearing toward him. King could only see the head above the grass. The lizard seemed to be moving incredibly fast. He thought: I'm not going to make it.

    But he would try.

    Panting, lungs searing, he sprinted for the trees. Only ten more yards now. His arms pumped, his legs churned. His breath came in ragged gasps.

    And then something heavy struck him from behind, forcing him to the ground, and he felt searing pain down his back and he knew -it was the claws, they dug into the flesh of his back as he was knocked down. He hit the dirt hard, and tried to roll, but the animal on his back held on, he could not move. He was pinned down on his stomach, hearing the animal snarl behind him. The pain in his back was excruciating, dizzying.

    And then he felt the animal's hot breath on the back of his neck, and he heard the snorting breath, and his terror was extreme. Then suddenly a kind of lassitude, a deep and welcome sleepiness, took him. Everything became slow. As if in a dream, he could see all the blades of grass in the ground in front of his face. He saw them with a kind of languid intensity, and he almost did not mind the sharp pain on his neck, and he almost did not care that his neck was within the animal's hot jaws. It seemed to be happening to someone else. He was many miles away. He had a moment of surprise when he felt the bones of his neck crunching loudly -

    And then blackness.

    Nothing.

"Don't look," Thorne said, turning Arby away from the railing in the high hide. He drew the boy toward his chest, but Arby impatiently pushed away again, to watch what was happening. Thorne reached for Kelly, but she stepped away from him, and stared out at the plain.

    "Don't look," Thorne kept saying. "Don't look."

    The kids watched, in silence.

Levine focused his binoculars on the kill. There were now five raptors snarling around the man's body, tearing viciously at the carcass. As he watched, one of the raptors jerked its head up, tearing away a piece of blood-soaked shirt, the ragged edge of the collar. Another was shaking the man's severed head in its jaws, before finally dropping it on the ground. Thunder rumbled, and lightning flashed in the distant sky. It was growing dark, and Levine was having difficulty seeing exactly what was happening. But it was clear that whatever hierarchical organization they had adopted for hunting was abandoned for a kill.

    Here it was every animal for itself; the frenzied raptors hopped and ducked their heads as they tore the body to pieces; and there was plenty of nipping and fighting among themselves. One animal came up, with something brown hanging from its jaws. The animal got an odd expression on its face as it chewed. Then it turned away from the rest of the pack, and held the brown object carefully in its forearms. In the growing darkness, it took Levine a moment to recognize what it was doing: it was eating a candy bar. And it seemed to be enjoying it.

    The raptor turned back, and buried its long nose in the bloody carcass again. From across the plain, other raptors were racing to join the feast, half-running, half-bounding in great forward leaps. Snarling and furious, they threw themselves into the fray.

    Levine lowered his glasses, and looked at the two kids. They were staring silently and calmly at the kill.

Dodgson

Dodgson was awakened by a noisy chattering, like the sound of a hundred tiny birds. It seemed to be coming from all around him. Slowly, he realized that he was lying on his back, on damp sloping ground. He tried to move, but his body felt painful and heavy. Some sort of weight pressed down on his legs, his stomach, his arms. The weight on his chest made it difficult to breathe.

    And he was sleepy, incredibly sleepy. He wanted nothing more in all the world than to go back to sleep. Dodgson started to drift off to unconsciousness, but something was pulling at his hand. Tugging at his fingers, one by one. As if pulling him back to consciousness. Slowly, slowly, pulling him back.

    Dodgson opened his eyes.

    There was a little green dinosaur standing beside his hand. It leaned over, and bit his finger in its tiny jaws, tugging at the flesh. His fingers were bleeding; ragged chunks of flesh had already been bitten away.

    He pulled his hand away in surprise, and suddenly the chattering grew louder. He turned and saw that he was surrounded by these little dinosaurs; they were standing on his chest and legs as well. They were the size of chickens and they pecked at him like chickens, quick darting bites on his stomach, his thighs, his crotch -

    Revolted, Dodgson jumped to his feet, scattering the lizards, which hopped away, chirping in annoyance. The little animals moved a few feet away, then stopped. They turned back, and stared at him, showing no sign of fear. On the contrary, they seemed to be waiting.

    That was when he realized what they were. They were procompsognathids. Compys.

    Scavengers.

    Christ, he thought. They thought I was dead.

    He staggered back, almost losing his balance. He felt pain and a wave of dizziness. The little animals chittered, watched his every move.

    "Go on," he said, waving his hand. "Get out of here."

    They did not leave. They stood there, cocking their heads to one side quizzically, and waited.   

    He bent his head, stared down at himself. His shirt, his trousers were torn in a hundred places. Blood dribbled from a hundred tiny wounds down his clothes. He felt a wave of dizziness and put his hands on his knees. He took a deep breath, and watched his blood drip onto the leaf-strewn ground.

    Christ, he thought. He took another deep breath.

    When he did not move, the animals began to inch forward. He stood up, and they backed away. But a moment later, they began to come forward again.

    One came close. Dodgson kicked it viciously, sending the little body flying through the air. The animal squealed in alarm, but it landed like a cat, upright and uninjured.

    The others remained where they were. Waiting.

He looked around, realized it was getting dark. He looked at his watch: 6:40. There were only a few minutes more of daylight. Beneath the jungle canopy, it was already quite dark.

    He had to get to safety, and soon. He checked the compass on his watch strap, and headed south. He was pretty sure the river was to the south. He had to get back to the boat. He would be safe at the boat.

    As he started walking, the compys chittered and followed after him. They stayed about five or ten feet behind, making a lot of noise as they hopped and crashed through the low foliage. There were dozens of them, he realized. As darkness descended, their eyes glowed bright green.

    His body was a mass of pain. Every step hurt. His balance was not good. He was losing blood, and he was very, very sleepy. He would never make it all the way to the river. He would not make it more than another couple of hundred yards. He fell, tripping over a root. He got up slowly, dirt clinging to his blood-soaked clothes.

    He looked back at the green eyes behind him, and forced himself onward. He could go a little farther, he thought. And then, directly ahead, he saw a light through the foliage. Was it the boat? He moved faster, hearing the compys behind him.

    He pushed through the foliage and then saw a little shed, like a toolshed or a guardhouse, made of concrete, with a tin roof. It had a square  window and light was shining through the window. He fell again, got to his knees, and crawled the rest of the way to the house. He reached the door, pulled himself up on the doorknob, and opened the door.

    Inside, the shed was empty. Some pipes came up through the floor. Some time in the past, they had connected to machinery, but the machinery was gone; there were only the rust spots where it had once been bolted to the concrete floor.

    In a corner of the room was an electric light. It was fitted with a timer, so that it came on at night. That was the light he had seen. Did they have electricity on this island? How? He didn't care. He staggered into the room, closed the door firmly behind him, and sank down onto the bare concrete. Through the dirty windowpanes, he saw the compys outside, banging against the glass, hopping in frustration. But he was safe for the moment.

    He would have to go on, of course. He would somehow have to get off this fucking island. But not now, he thought.

    Later.

    He'd worry about everything later.

    Dodgson laid his cheek on the damp concrete floor, and slept.

Trailer

Sarah Harding laced the aluminum-foil cuff around the baby's injured leg. The baby was still unconscious, breathing easily, not moving. Its body was relaxed. The oxygen hissed softly.

    She finished shaping the aluminum foil into a cuff six inches long. Using a small brush, she began to paint resin over it, to make a cast.

    "How many raptors are there?" she said. "I couldn't tell for sure, when I saw them. I thought nine."

    "I think there's more," Malcolm said "I think eleven or twelve in all."

    "Twelve?" she said, glancing up at him. "On this little island?"

    "Yes."

    The resin had a sharp odor, like glue. She brushed it evenly on the aluminum. "You know what I'm thinking," she said.

    "Yes," he said. "There are too many."

    "Far too many, Ian." She worked steadily. "It doesn't make sense. In Africa, active predators like lions are very spread out. There's one lion for every ten square kilometers. Sometimes every fifteen kilometers. That's all the ecology can support. On an island like this, you should have no more than five raptors. Hold this."

    "Uh-huh. But don't forget, the prey here is huge....Some of those animals are twenty, thirty tons."

    "I'm not convinced that's a factor," Sarah said, "but for the sake of argument, let's say it is. I'll double the estimate, and give you ten raptors for the island. But you tell me there are twelve. And there are other major predators, as well. Like the rexes..."

    "Yes. There are."

    "That's too many, she said, shaking her head.

    "The animals are pretty dense here," Malcolm said.

    "Not dense enough," she said. "In general, predator studies - whether tigers in India, or lions in Africa - all seem to show that you can support one predator for every two hundred prey animals. That means to support twenty-five predators here, you need at least five thousand prey on this island. Do you have anything like that?"

    "No."

    "How many animals in total do you think are here?"

    He shrugged. "A couple of hundred. Maybe five hundred at most."

    "So you're off by an order of magnitude, Ian. Hold this, and I'll get the lamp."

    She swung the heat lamp over the baby, to harden the resin. She adjusted the oxygen mask over the baby's snout.

    "The island can't support all those predators," she said. "And yet they're here."

    He said, "What could explain it?"

    She shook her head. "There has to be a food source that we don't know about."

    "You mean, an artificial source?" he said. "I don't think there is one."

    "No," she said. "Artificial food sources make animals tame. And these animals aren't tame. The only other possibility I can think of is that there's a differential death rate among prey. If they grow very fast, or die young, then that might represent a larger food supply than expected."

    Malcolm said, "I've noticed, the largest animals seem small. It's as if they don't seem to reach maturity. Maybe they're being killed off early."

    "Maybe," she said. "But if there's a differential death rate large enough to support this population, you should see evidence of carcasses, and lots of skeletons of dead animals. Have you seen that?"

    Malcolm shook his head. "No. In fact, now that you mention it, I haven't seen any skeletons at all."  

    "Me neither." She pushed the light away. "There's something funny about this island, Ian."

    "I know," Malcolm said.

    "You do?"

    "Yes," he said. "I've suspected it from the beginning."

Thunder rumbled. From the high hide, the plain below them was dark and silent, except for the distant snarling of the raptors. "Maybe we should go back," Eddie said anxiously.

    "Why?" Levine said. Levine had switched to his night-vision glasses, pleased with himself that he had thought to bring them. Through the goggles, the world was shades of pale green. He clearly saw the raptors at the kill site, the tall grass trampled and bloody all around. The carcass was long since finished, though they could still hear the cracking of bones as the animals gnawed on them.

    "I just think," Eddie said, "that now that it's night, we'd be safer in the trailer."

    "Why?" Levine said.

    "Well, it's reinforced, it's strong, and very safe. It has everything that we need. I just think we should be there. I mean, you're not planning on staying out here all night, are you?"

    "No," Levine said. "What do you think I am, a fanatic?" Eddie grunted.

    "But let's stay for a while longer," Levine said.

    Eddie turned to Thorne. "Doc? What do you say? It's going to start raining soon.

    "Just a little longer," Thorne said. "And then we'll all go back together."

"There have been dinosaurs on this island for five years, maybe more, " Malcolm said, "but none have appeared elsewhere. Suddenly, in the last year, carcasses of dead animals are showing up on the beaches of Costa Rica, and according to reports, on islands of the Pacific as well."

    "Carried by currents?"

    "Presumably. But the question is, why now? Why all of a sudden, after five years? Something has changed, but we don't know - wait a minute" He moved away from the table, over to the computer console. He turned toward the screen.

    "What are you doing?" she said.

    "Arby got us into the old network," he said, "and it still has research files from the eighties." He moved the mouse across the screen. "We haven't looked at them...." He saw the menu come up, showing work files and research files. He began to scroll through screens of text.

    "Years ago, they had trouble with some disease," he said. "There were a lot of notes about it in the laboratory."

    "What kind of disease'?"

    "They didn't know," Malcolm said.

    "In the wild, there are some very slow-acting illnesses," she said. "May take five or ten years to show up. Caused by viruses, or prions. You know, protein fragments-like scrapie or mad-cow disease."

    "But," Malcolm said, "those diseases only come from eating contaminated food."

    There was a silence.

    "What do you suppose they fed them, back then?" she asked. "Because if I was growing baby dinosaurs, I'd wonder. What do they cat? Milk, I suppose, but - "

    "Milk, yes," Malcolm said, reading the screens. "First six weeks, goat's milk."

    "That's the logical choice," she said. "Goat's milk is what they always use in zoos, because it's so hypoallergenic. But what about later?"

    Give me a minute here," Malcolm said.

    Harding held the baby's leg in her hand, waiting for the resin to harden. She looked at the cast, sniffed it. It was still strong-smelling. "I hope that's all right," she said. "Sometimes if there's a distinctive smell, the animals won't allow infants to return. But maybe this will dissipate after the compound hardens. How long has it been?"

    Malcolm glanced at his watch. "Ten minutes. Another ten minutes and it'll set."

    She said, "I'd like to take this guy back to the nest."

    Thunder rumbled. They looked out the window at the black night.

    "Probably too late to return him tonight," Malcolm said. He was still typing, peering at the screen.

    "So...what did they feed them? Okay. In the period from 1988 to 1989...the herbivores got a macerated plant matter on a feeding schedule three times a day...and the carnivores got..."

    He stopped.

    "What'd the carnivores get?"

    "Looks like a ground-up extract of animal protein...."

    "From what? The usual source is turkey or chicken, with some antibiotics added."

    "Sarah," he said. "They used sheep extract."

    "No," she said. "They wouldn't do that."

    "Yeah, they did. Came from their supplier, who used ground-up sheep."

    "You're kidding," she said.

    Malcolm said, "I'm afraid so. Now, let me see if I can find ou - "

    A soft alarm sounded. On the wall panel above him, a red light began to flash. A moment later, the exterior lights above the trailer turned on, bathing the grassy clearing around them in bright halogen glare.

    "What's that?" Harding said.

    "The sensors - something set them off." Malcolm moved away from the computer, peered out the window. He saw nothing but tall grass, and the dark trees at the perimeter. It was silent, still.

    Sarah, still intent on the baby, said, "What happened?"

    "I don't know. I don't see anything."

    "But something triggered the sensors?"

    "I guess."

    "Wind?"

    "There's no wind," he said.

In the high hide, Kelly said,"Hey, look!"

    Thorne turned. From their location in the valley, they could look north to the high cliff behind them and the two trailers above, in the grassy clearing.

    The exterior lights on the trailers had come on.

    Thorne unclipped the radio at his belt. "Ian? Are you there?"

    A momentary crackle: "I'm here, Doc."

    "What's happening?"

    "I don't know," Malcolm said.

    "The perimeter lights just turned on. I think the sensor was activated. But we don't see anything out there."

    Eddie said, "Air's cooling off fast now. Might have been convection currents, set it off."

    Thorne said, "Ian? Everything okay?"

    "Yes. Fine. Don't worry."

    Eddie said, "I always figured we set the sensitivity too high. That's all it is.

    Levine frowned, and said nothing.

Sarah finished with the baby, and wrapped him in a blanket, and gently strapped him down to the table with cloth restraint straps. She came over and stood beside Malcolm. She looked out the window.

    "What do you think?"

    Malcolm shrugged. "Eddie says the system's too sensitive."

    "Is it?"

    "I don't know. It's never been tested before." He scanned the trees at the edge of the clearing, looking for any movement. Then he thought he heard a snorting sound, almost a growl. It seemed like it was answered from somewhere behind him. He went to look out the other side of the trailer, at the trees on the other side.

    Malcolm and Harding looked out, straining to see something in the night. Malcolm held his breath, tensely. After a moment, Harding sighed. "I don't see anything, Ian."

    "No. Me neither."

    'Must be a false alarm."

    Then he felt the vibration, a deep resonant thumping in the ground, that was carried to them through the floor of the trailer. He glanced at Sarah. Her eyes widened.

    Malcolm knew what it was. The vibration came again, unmistakably this time.

    Sarah stared out the window. She whispered, "Ian: I see it."

    Malcolm turned, and joined her. She was pointing out the window toward the nearest trees.

    "What?"

    And then he saw the big head emerge from the foliage midway u one tree. The head turned slowly from side to side, as if listening. It was an adult Tyrannosaurus rex.

    "Ian," she whispered. "Look - there are two of them."

    Over to the right, he saw a second animal step from behind the trees. It was larger, the female of the pair. The animals growled, a deep rumble in the night. They emerged slowly from the cover of the trees, stepping into the clearing. They blinked in the harsh light.

    "Are those the parents?"

    "I don't know. I think so."

    He glanced over at the baby. It was still unconscious, breathing steadily, the blanket rising and falling regularly.

    "What are they doing here?" she said.

    "I don't know."

    The animals were still standing at the edge of the clearing, near the cover of the trees. They seemed hesitant, waiting.

    "Are they looking for the baby?" she said.

    "Sarah, please."

    "I'm serious."

    "That's ridiculous."

    "Why? They must have tracked it here."

    The tyrannosaurs raised their heads, lifting their jaws. Then they turned their heads left and right, in slow arcs. They repeated the movement, then took a step forward, toward the trailer.

    "Sarah," he said. "We're miles from the nest. There isn't any way for them to track it."

    "How do you know?"

    "Sarah - "

    "You said yourself, we don't know anything about these animals. We don't know anything about their physiology, their biochemistry, their nervous systems, their behavior. And we don't know anything about their sensory equipment, either."

    "Yes, but - "

    "They're predators, Ian. Good sense of vision, good sense of hearing and smell."

    "I assume so, yes."

    "But we don't know what else," Sarah said.

    "What else?" Malcolm said.

    "Ian. There are other sensory modalities. Snakes sense infrared. Bats have echolocation. Birds and turtles have magnetosensors - they can detect the earth's magnetic field, which is how they migrate. Dinosaurs may have other sensory modalities that we can't imagine."

    "Sarah, this is ridiculous."

    "Is it? Then you tell me. What are they doing out there?"

    Outside, near the trees, the tyrannosaurs had become silent. They were no longer growling, but they were still moving their heads back and forth in slow arcs, turning left and right.

    Malcolm frowned. "It looks like...they're looking around...."

    "Straight into bright lights? No, Ian. They're blinded."

    As soon as she said it, he realized she was right. But the heads were turning back and forth in that regular way. "Then what are they doing? Smelling?"

    "No. Heads are high. Nostrils aren't moving."

    "Listening?"

    She nodded. "Possibly."

    "Listening to what?"

    "Maybe to the baby."

    He glanced over again. "Sarah. The baby is out cold."

    "I know."

    "It isn't making any noise."

    "None that we can hear." She stared at the tyrannosaurs. "But they're doing something, Ian. That behavior we're seeing has meaning. We just don't know what it is."

From the high hide, Levine stared through his night-vision glasses at the clearing. He saw the two tyrannosaurs standing at the edge of the forest. They were moving their heads in an odd, synchronized way.

    They took a few hesitant steps toward the trailer, lifted their heads, turned right and left, and then seemed finally to make up their minds. The animals moved quickly, almost aggressively, across the clearing.

    Over the radio, they heard Malcolm say, "It's the lights! The lights are drawing them."

    A moment later, the exterior lights were turned off, and the clearing went black. They all squinted in the darkness. They heard Malcolm say, "That did it."

    Thorne said to Levine, "What do you see?"

    "Nothing."

    "What're they doing?"

    "They're just standing there."

    Through the night-vision goggles, he saw that the tyrannosaurs had paused, as if confused by this change in light. Even from a distance, he could hear their growls, but they were uneasy. They swung their great heads up and down, and snapped their jaws. But they did not move closer.

    Kelly said, "What is it?"

    "They're waiting," Levine said. "At least for the moment."

    Levine had the distinct impression that the tyrannosaurs were unsettled. The trailer must represent a large and fearsome change in their environment. Perhaps they would turn away, he thought, and leave. Despite their enormous size, they were cautious, almost timid animals.

    They growled again. And then he saw them move forward, toward the darkened trailer.

"Ian: what do we do?"

    "Damned if I know," Malcolm whispered.

    They were crouched down side by side in the passageway, trying to stay out of sight in the windows. The tyrannosaurs moved implacably forward. They could feel each step as a distinct vibration now - two ten ton animals, moving toward them.

    "They're coming right at us!"

    "I noticed," he said.

    The first of the animals reached the trailer, coming so close that the body blocked the entire window. All Malcolm could see was powerfully muscled legs and underbelly. The head was far above them, out of view.

    Then the second tyrannosaur came up on the opposite side. The two animals began to circle the trailer, growling and snorting. Heavy footsteps shook the floor beneath them. They smelled the pungent predator odor. One of the tyrannosaurs brushed against the side of the trailer and they heard a scraping sound, scaly flesh on metal.

    Malcolm felt sudden panic. It was the smell that did it, the smell that he suddenly remembered, from before. He began to sweat. He glanced over at Sarah, and saw that she was intent, watching the movements of the animals. "This isn't hunting behavior," she whispered.

    "I don't know," Malcolm said. "Maybe it is. They aren't lions, you know."

    One of the tyrannosaurs bellowed in the night, a frightening earsplitting sound.

    "Not hunting," she said "They're searching, Ian."

    A moment later, the second tyrannosaur bellowed in reply. Then the big head swung down, and peered in through the window in front of them. Malcolm ducked down, flattening himself on the trailer floor, and Sarah collapsed on top of him. Her shoe pressed on his ear.

    "It's going to be fine, Sarah."

    Outside, they heard the tyrannosaurs snorting and growling.  

    Malcolm whispered, "Would you mind moving?"

    She edged to one side, and he eased up slowly, peering cautiously over the seat cushions. He had a glimpse of the big eye of the rex staring in at him. The eye swiveled in the socket. He saw the jaws open and close. The hot breath of the animal fogged the glass.

    The tyrannosaur's head swung away, moving back from the trailers and for a moment Malcolm breathed more easily. But then the head swung back, and slammed with a heavy thud into the trailer, rocking it hard.

    "Don't worry, Sarah. The trailer's very strong."

    She whispered, "I can't tell you how relieved I am."

    From the opposite side, the other rex bellowed and struck the trailer with it's snout. The suspension creaked with the impact.

    The two tyrannosaurs now began an alternating, rhythmic pounding of the trailer from either side. Malcolm and Harding were thrown back and forth. Sarah tried to steady herself, but was knocked away at the next impact. The floor tilted crazily under each blow. Lab equipment flew off the tables. Glass shattered.

    And then, abruptly, the pounding stopped. There was silence.

    Grunting, Malcolm got up on one knee. He peered out the window, and saw the hindquarters of one of the tyrannosaurs, as it moved forward.

    "What do we do?" he whispered.

    The radio crackled. Thorne said, "Ian, are you there? Ian!"

    "For God's sake, turn that off," Sarah whispered.

    Malcolm reached for his belt, whispered, "We're okay," and clicked the radio off.

    Sarah was crawling on her hands and knees forward through the trailer, into the biology lab. He followed her, and saw the big tyrannosaur peering in through the window, at the baby, strapped down. The tyrannosaur made a soft grunting sound.

    Then it paused, looking in the window. It grunted again.

    "She wants her baby, Ian," Sarah whispered.

    "Well, God knows," Malcolm said, "it's all right with me."

    They were huddled on the floor, trying to stay out of sight.

    "How are we going to get it to her?"

    "I don't know. Maybe push it out the door?"

    "I don't want them to step on it," Sarah said.

    "Who cares?" Malcolm said.

    The tyrannosaur at the window made a series of soft grunts, followed by a long, menacing growl. It was the big female.

    "Sarah - "

    But she was already standing up, facing the tyrannosaur. She immediately began to speak, her voice soft, soothing. "It's okay....It's all right now....The baby is fine....I'm just going to loosen these straps here....You can watch me...."

    The head outside the window was so huge it filled the entire glass frame. Sarah saw the powerful muscles of the neck ripple beneath the skin. The jaws moved slightly. Her hands trembled as she undid the straps.

    "That's right....Your baby is fine....See, it's just fine...."

    Crouched below at her feet, Malcolm whispered, "What are you doing?"

    She did not change her soft, soothing tone. "I know it sounds crazy....But it works with lions...sometimes....There we are....Your baby is free...."

    Sarah unwrapped the blanket, and took away the oxygen mask, all the while speaking calmly. "Now...all I have to do..." She lifted the baby up in her hands. "...is get it to you...."

    Suddenly, the female's head swung back, and smashed side-on into the glass, which shattered into a white spiderweb with a harsh crack. Sarah couldn't see through it, but she saw a shadow move and then the second impact broke the glass free. Sarah dropped the baby on the tray and jumped back as the head crashed through, and pushed several feet into the trailer. Streams of blood ran down the adult's snout, from the shards of glass. But after the initial violence it stopped, and became delicate in its movements. It sniffed the baby, starting at the head, moving slowly down the body. It sniffed the cast, too, and licked it briefly with its tongue. Finally, it rested its lower jaw lightly on the baby's chest. It stayed that way for a long time, not moving. Only the eyes blinked slowly, staring at Sarah.

    Malcolm, lying on the floor, saw blood dripping over the edge of the counter. He started to get up, but she pushed his head back down with her hand. She whispered, "Ssssh."

    "What's happening?"

    "It's feeling the heartbeat."

    The tyrannosaur grunted, opened its mouth, and gently gripped the infant between its jaws. Then it moved slowly back, out through the broken glass, carrying the baby outside.

    It set the baby on the ground, below their vision. It bent over, the head disappearing from view.

    Malcolm whispered, "Did it wake up? Is the baby awake?"

    "Ssssh!"

    There was a repetitive slurping sound, coming from outside the trailer. It was interspersed with soft, guttural growls. Malcolm saw Sarah leaning forward, trying to see out the window. He whispered, "What's happening?"

    "She's licking him. And pushing him with her snout."

    "And?"         

    "That's all. She just keeps doing it."

    "What about the baby?"

    "Nothing. It keeps rolling over, like it's dead. How much morphine did we give him, the last time?"

    "I don't know," he said. "How should I know?"

    Malcolm remained on the floor, listening to the slurping and the growling. And finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he heard a soft high-pitched squeak.

    "He's waking up! Ian! The baby's waking up!"

    Malcolm crawled up on his knees, and looked out the window in time to see the adult carrying the baby in its jaws, walking away toward the perimeter of the clearing.

    "What's it doing?"

    "I guess, taking it back."

    The second adult came into view, following the first. Malcolm and Sarah watched the two tyrannosaurs move away from the trailer, across the clearing.

    Malcolm's shoulders dropped. "That was close," he said.

    "Yes. That was close." She sighed, and wiped blood from her forearm.

In the high hide, Thorne pressed the radio button. "Ian! Are you there? Ian!"

    Kelly said, "Maybe they turned the radio off."

    A light rain began to fall, pattering on the metal roof of the shed. Levine was staring through his night-vision glasses toward the cliff. Lightning flashed, and Thorne said, "Can you see what the animals are doing?"

    "I can," Eddie said. "It looks...it looks like they're going away." They all began to cheer.

    Only Levine remained silent, watching through the glasses. Thorne turned to him. "Is that right, Richard? Is everything okay?"

    Actually, I think not," Levine said. "I'm afraid we have made a serious error.

Malcolm watched the retreating tyrannosaurs through the shattered glass window. Beside him, Sarah said nothing. She never took her eyes off the animals.

    Rain started to fall; water dripped from the shards of lass. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and lightning cracked harshly down, illuminating, the giant animals as they moved away.

    At the nearest of the big trees, the adults stopped, and placed the baby on the ground.

    "Why are they doing that?" Sarah said. "They should be going back to the nest."

    "I don't know, maybe they're - "

    "Maybe the baby is dead," she said.

    But no, in the next flash of lightning they could see the baby moving. It was still alive. They could hear its high-pitched squeaking as one of the adults took the baby in its laws, and gently placed it in a fork among the high branches of a tree.

    "Oh no," Sarah said, shaking her head. "This is wrong Ian. This is all wrong."

    The female tyrannosaur remained with the baby for some moments, moving it, positioning it. Then the female turned, opened its jaws, and roared.

    The male tyrannosaur roared in response.

    And then both animals charged the trailer at full speed, racing across the clearing toward them.

    "Oh, my God," Sarah said.

    "Brace yourself, Sarah!" Malcolm shouted. "It's going to be bad!"

The impact was stunning, knocking them sideways through the air. Sarah screamed as she tumbled away. Malcolm hit his head and fell to the floor, seeing stars. Beneath him, the trailer rocked on its suspension, with a metallic scream. The tyrannosaurs roared, and slammed into it again.

    He heard her shouting, "Ian! Ian!" and then the trailer crashed over onto its side. Malcolm turned away; glassware and lab equipment smashed all around him. When he looked up, everything was cockeyed. Directly above him was the broken window the tyrannosaur had smashed. Rain dripped through onto Malcolm's face. Lightning flashed, and then he saw a big head peering down at him and snarling. He heard the harsh scratching of the tyrannosaurs' claws on the metal side of the trailer, then the face disappeared. A moment later, he heard them bellowing as they pushed the trailer through the dirt.

    He called "Sarah!" and he saw her, somewhere behind him, just as the world spun crazily again, and the trailer was upended with a crash. Now the trailer was lying on its roof; Malcolm started crawling along the ceiling, trying to reach Sarah. He looked up at the lab equipment, locked down on the lab benches, above his head. Liquid dripped onto him from a dozen sources. Something stung his shoulder. He heard a hiss, and realized it must be acid.

    Somewhere in the darkness ahead, Sarah was groaning. Lightning flashed again, and Malcolm saw her, lying crumpled near the accordion junction that connected the two trailers. That junction was twisted almost shut, which must mean that the second trailer was still upright. It was crazy. Everything was crazy.

    Outside, the tyrannosaurs roared, and he heard a muffled explosion. They were biting the tires. He thought: Too bad they don't bite into the battery cable. That'd give them a real surprise.

    Suddenly, the tyrannosaurs slammed into the trailer again, knocking it laterally along the clearing. As soon as it stopped, they slammed again. The trailer lurched sideways.

    By then he had reached Sarah. She threw her arms around him. "Ian," she said. The whole left half of her face was dark. When the lightning flashed, he saw it was covered in blood.

    "Are you okay?"

    "I'm fine," she said. With the back of her hand, she wiped blood out of her eye. "Can you see what it is?"

    In another lightning flash, he saw the glint of a large chunk of glass, embedded near her hairline. He pulled it out, and pressed his hand against the sudden gush of blood. They were in the kitchen; he reached up toward the stove, and pulled down a dishtowel. He held 'it against her head, and watched the cloth darken.

    "Does it hurt?"

    "It's okay."

    "I think it's not too bad," he said. Outside, the tyrannosaurs roared in the night.

    "What are they doing?" she said. Her voice was dull.

    The tyrannosaurs slammed into the trailer again. With this impact, the trailer seemed to move a lot more than before, sliding sideways - and down.

    Sliding down.

    "They're pushing us," he said.

    "Where, Ian?"

    "To the edge of the clearing." The tyrannosaurs slammed again, and the trailer moved farther. "They're pushing us over the cliff," The cliff was five hundred feet of sheer rock, straight down to the valley below.

    They'd never survive the fall.

    She held the dishtowel with her own hand, pushing his hand away. "Do something."

    "Yeah, okay," he said.

    He moved away from her, bracing for the next impact. He didn't know what to do. He had no idea what to do. The trailer was upside down, and everything was crazy. His shoulder burned and he could smell the acid eating his shirt. Or maybe it was his flesh. It burned a lot. The whole trailer was dark, all the power was out, there was glass everywhere, and he -

    All the power was out.

    Malcolm started to get to his feet, but the next impact flung him sideways, and he fell hard, slamming his head against the refrigerator. The door swung open and cartons of cold milk, glass bottles, crashed down on him. But there was no light from the refrigerator.

    Because all the power was out.

    Lying on his back, Malcolm looked out the window and saw the big foot of a tyrannosaur standing in the grass. Lightning flashed as the foot raised to kick, and immediately the trailer moved again, sliding easily now, metal screeching, and then tilting downward.

    "Oh, shit," he said.

    "Ian..."

    But it was too late, the whole trailer was groaning and creaking in metallic protest, and then Malcolm saw the far end sink down, as the trailer slid over the cliff. It started slowly, and then gathered speed, the ceiling they were lying on falling away, everything falling, Sarah falling, clutching at him as she went, and the tyrannosaurs bellowing in triumph.

    We're going over the cliff, he thought.

    Not knowing what else to do, he grabbed the refrigerator door, hanging on tightly. The door was cold, and slippery with moisture. The trailer tilted and fell, the metal creaking loudly. Malcolm felt his hands sliding off the white enamel, sliding...sliding....And then be lost his grip and fell free, dropping helplessly straight down toward the far end of the trailer. He saw the driver's seat rushing up to him, but before he got there he struck something in the darkness, felt a moment of searing pain, and bent double.

    And slowly, gently, everything around him went black.

Rain drummed on the roof of the shed, and poured in a continuous sheet down the sides. Levine wiped the lenses of his glasses, then lifted them again to his eyes. He stared at the cliffs in the darkness.

    Arby said, "What is it? What happened?"

    "I can't tell," Levine said. It was hard to see anything in this downpour. Moments before, they had watched in horror as the two tyrannosaurs pushed the trailer toward the cliff. The large animals had done it with ease: Levine guessed the tyrannosaurs had a combined mass of twenty tons, and the trailer only weighed about two tons. Once they had turned it over, it slid easily over the wet grass as they pushed it with their underbellies, and kicked it with their powerful leg muscles.

    "Why are they doing that?" Thorne said to Levine, standing beside him.

    "I suspect, he said, that we have changed the perceived territory."

    "How's that again?"

    "You have to remember what we're dealing with," Levine said. "Tyrannosaurs may show complex behavior, but most of it is instinctual. It's unthinking behavior, wired in. And territoriality is part of that instinct. The tyrannosaurs mark territory, they defend territory. It's not thinking behavior - they don't have very large brains - but they do it from instinct. All instinctive behavior has triggers, releasers for the behavior. And I'm afraid that, by moving the baby, we redefined their territory to include the clearing where the baby was found. So now they're going to defend their territory, by driving out the trailers."

    Then lightning flashed, and they all saw it in the same horrifying moment. The first trailer had gone over the cliff. It was hanging upside down in space, still connected by the accordion connector to the second trailer in the clearing above.

    That connector won't hold!" Eddie shouted. "Not long!"

    In the glare of lightning, they saw the tyrannosaurs up in the clearing. Methodically, they were now pushing the second trailer toward the cliff.

    Thorne turned to Eddie. "I'm going!" he said.

    "I'll come with you!" Eddie said.

    "No! Stay with the kids!"

    "But you need - "

    "Stay with the kids! We can't leave them alone!"

    "But Levine can - "

    "No, you stay!" Thorne said. He was already climbing down the scaffolding, slippery in drenching rain, toward the Explorer below. He saw Kelly and Arby looking down at him. He jumped in the car, clicked on the ignition. He was already thinking of the distance to the clearing. It was three miles, maybe more. Even driving fast, it would take him seven or eight minutes to get there.

    And by then it would be too late. He'd never make it in time.

    But he had to try.

Sarah Harding heard a rhythmic creaking, and opened her eyes.

    Everything was dark- she was disoriented. Then lightning flashed and she stared straight down toward the valley, five hundred feet below. The view swung gently, back and forth.

    She was looking through the windshield of the trailer, hanging down the side of the cliff. They were not falling any more. But they were hanging precariously in space.

    She herself was lying across the driver's seat, which had broken free of its mounting, and shattered a control panel in the wall; loose wires hung out, panel indicators flickered.

    She was having trouble seeing, from the blood in her left eye. She pulled out the tail of her shirt, and ripped two strips of cloth. She folded one to make a compress, and pressed it against the gash on her forehead. Then she tied the second strip around her head, to hold the compress down. The pain was intense for a moment; she gritted her teeth until it faded.

    From somewhere above her, she felt a thumping vibration. She turned and looked straight up. She saw the whole length of the trailer, suspended vertically. Malcolm was ten feet above her, bent over a lab table, not moving.

    "Ian," she said.

    He didn't answer. He didn't move.

    The trailer shuddered again, creaking under a dull impact. And then Harding realized what was happening. The first trailer was dangling straight down the cliff face, swinging freely in space. But it was still connected to the second trailer, up on the clearing. The first trailer now hung from the accordion connector. And the tyrannosaurs, up above, were now pushing the second trailer off the cliff.

    "Ian," she said. "Ian."

    She scrambled to her feet, ignoring the pain in her body. She felt a wave of dizziness, and wondered how much blood she had lost. She began to climb straight up, standing first on the back of the driver's seat, grabbing for the nearest biology table. She pulled herself upward, until she could reach a handle mounted in the wall. The trailer swayed beneath her.

    From the handle, she managed to grab the refrigerator door, putting her fingers through a wire shelf She tested it, it held, and she gave it her full weight. She raised her leg, until she got her shoe into the refrigerator itself Then she swung her body still higher, until she was standing up and could reach the handle to the oven.

    It was like mountain climbing through a damn kitchen, she thought.

    Soon she was alongside Malcolm. Lightning flashed again, and she saw his battered face. He groaned. She crawled over to him, trying to see how badly he was hurt.

    "Ian," she said.

    His eyes were closed. "Sorry."

    "Never mind."

    "I got you into this."

    "Ian. Can you move? Are you okay?"

    He groaned. "My leg."

    "Ian. We have to do something."

    From the clearing above them, she heard the tyrannosaurs roaring. It seemed to her that they had been roaring her whole life. The trailer lurched and swung; her legs slid out of the refrigerator and she was hanging free in space from the oven door. The far end of the trailer was some twenty feet below.   

    The oven handle wouldn't hold her weight, she knew. Not for long.

    Harding swung her legs, kicking wildly, finally touched something solid. She felt with her feet, then stepped down. Looking back, she saw she was standing on the side of the stainless-steel sink. She moved her foot and the faucet turned on, soaking her feet.

    The tyrannosaurs roared, pounding hard. The trailer moved farther out into space, swinging.

    "Ian. There's not much time. We have to do something."

    He raised his head, stared at her with blank eyes. Lightning flashed again. His lips moved, "Power," he said.

    "What about it?"

    "Power is off."

    She didn't know what he was talking about. Of course the power was off. Then she remembered: he had turned it off earlier. When the tyrannosaurs were approaching. The light had bothered them before, maybe it would bother them again.

    "You want me to turn the power on?"

    His head nodded fractionally. "Yes. Turn it on."

    "How, Ian?" She looked around in the darkness.

    "There's a panel."

    "Where?"

    He didn't answer her. She reached out, shook his shoulder. "Ian: where is the panel?"

    He pointed downward.

    She looked down, saw the loose wires from the panel. "I can't. It's broken."

    "Up..."

    She could hardly hear him. Vaguely, she remembered that there was another control panel just inside the second trailer. If she could get in, she might be able to turn the power on. "Okay, Ian," she said "I'll do it."

    She moved on, going higher. The floor of the trailer was now thirty feet below her. The tyrannosaurs roared, and kicked again. She swung in space. She moved on.

    She intended to go through the accordion passage into the second trailer, but as she came closer to the top, she saw that it was not possible. In the harsh flare of lightning she saw the accordion passage was twisted tightly shut.

    She was trapped in the first trailer.

    She heard the tyrannosaurs bellowing, and slamming the second trailer above. "Ian!"

    She looked down. He wasn't moving.

    Hanging there, she realized with a sick feeling that she was defeated. Another kick, another two kicks, and it would be all over. They would fall. There was nothing they could do. There was no time left. She was hanging suspended in blackness, the power was out, and there was nothing -

    Or was there? She heard an electrical hum, not far away in the darkness. Was there a panel Lip here, at this end of the trailer? Did they design it to have panels at both ends?

    Hanging near the top of the trailer, her shoulders and forearms burning with strain, she looked around for a second power panel. She was up near the far end. If there was a panel, it should be nearby. But where? In the glare of lightning, she looked over one shoulder, then the other.

    She saw no panel.

    Her arms ached.

    "Ian, please..."

    No panel.

    It wasn't possible. She kept hearing that hum. There had to be a panel. She just wasn't seeing it. There had to be a panel. She swung left and right, and lightning flashed again, casting crazy shadows, and then at last she saw it.

    It was just six inches above her head. It was upside down, but she could see all the buttons and switches. They were dark now. If she could just figure out which was which -

    The hell with it.

    She released her right hand, and hanging from her left, pressed every button on the panel she could touch. Immediately, the trailer began to light up, every interior light coming on.

    She kept pressing the buttons, one after another. Some shorted out; there were sparks and smoke.

    She kept pressing more.

    Suddenly the side monitor came on, just inches from her face, a streaky video blur. Then it came into focus. Although she was looking at it sideways, she could see the tyrannosaurs up on the clearing, standing over the second trailer, their forearms touching it, their powerful legs kicking and pushing at it. She pressed more buttons. The final one had a silver protective cover; she flipped the cover open, and pressed that button, too.

    On the monitor she saw the tyrannosaurs disappear in a sudden flaring burst of incandescent sparks, and she heard them roar in rage. And then the video monitor went off, and there was a crackling explosion of sparks all around Harding, stinging her face and hands, and then everything in the trailer went off, and it was dark again.

    There was silence for a long moment.

    Then, inexorably, the pounding began again.

Thorne

    The windshield wipers flicked back and forth. Thorne took the curves fast, despite the driving rain. He glanced at his watch. Two minutes gone, perhaps three.

    Perhaps more. He wasn't sure.

    The road was a muddy track, slippery and dangerous. He splashed through deep puddles, holding his breath each time. The car had been waterproofed back in his shop, but you were never sure about these things. Each puddle was another test. So far, so good.

    Three minutes gone.

    At least three.

    The road curved, opened out, and in a flash of lightning he saw a deep puddle ahead. He accelerated through it, the car kicking up plumes of water on both side windows. And then he was through it, still going. Still going! As he headed up a hill, he saw the dashboard needles swing wildly, and he heard the sizzle that he knew meant a fatal electrical short, There was an explosion under the hood, and acrid smoke poured out from the radiator, and the car stopped dead.

    Four minutes.   

    He sat in the car, hearing the rain pound on the metal roof He turned the ignition key. Nothing happened.

    Dead.

    Rain poured in sheets down the windshield. He sat back in his seat sighed, and stared at the road ahead. The radio crackled on the seat beside him. "Doc? Are you almost there?"

    Thorne stared at the road, trying to guess where he was. He estimated that he must still be more than a mile from the trailer in the clearing, maybe more. Too far to try it on foot. He swore, and pounded the seat.

    "No, Eddie. I shorted."

    "You what?"

    "Eddie, the car's dead. I'm - "

    Thorne broke off.

    He noticed something.

    From around the curve ahead, he saw a faint, flashing red glow. Thorne squinted, trying to be sure. Yes, his eyes were not playing tricks on him. It was there, all right: a flashing red glow.

    Eddie said: "Doc? You there?"

    Thorne didn't answer; he grabbed the radio and the Lindstradt rifle, jumped out of the car, and ducking his head against the rain, began to run up the hill toward the junction of the ridge road. Coming around a curve, he saw the red jeep, standing in the middle of the ridge road, its taillights flashing. One of the lights was broken, glaring white.

    He ran forward, trying to see inside. In a flash of lightning he could see there was no driver. The driver's door was not even closed- the side was deeply dented. Thorne climbed inside, reaching down with his hand for the steering wheel....Yes, the keys were there! He turned the ignition. The motor rumbled to life.

    He shoved the Jeep in gear, backed it around, and headed up the ridge toward the clearing. It was only another few curves before he saw the green roof of the laboratory and turned left, his headlights swinging across the grassy clearing, and shining onto the dinosaurs pushing the trailer.

    Confronted by these new lights, the tyrannosaurs turned in unison, and bellowed at Thorne's Jeep. They abandoned the trailer, and charged. Thorne threw the jeep into reverse and was backing away frantically before he realized the animals were not coming toward him.    

    Instead, they were running diagonally across the clearing, toward a tree near Thorne. Beneath the tree they paused, their heads turned upward. Thorne doused his lights, and waited. Now he saw the animals only intermittently, in the flashes of lightning. In one crackling burst, he saw them take down the baby from the tree. Then he saw them nuzzling the baby. Obviously his sudden arrival had made them anxious about the infant.

    The next time lightning flashed, the tyrannosaurs were gone. The clearing was empty. Were they really gone? Or were they just hiding? He rolled down the window, stuck his head out in the rain. That was when he heard an odd, low, continuous squealing sound. It sounded like the extended cry of an animal, but it was too steady, too continuous. As he listened, he realized it was something else. It was metal.

    Thorne turned on his lights again, and drove for-ward slowly. The tyrannosaurs were gone. In the pale beam of the headlamps, he saw the second trailer.

    With a continuous metallic squeal, it was still sliding slowly across the wet grass, toward the edge of the cliff.

"What is he doing now?" Kelly yelled, over the rain.

    "He's driving," Levine said, looking through goggles. From the high hide, they could see Thorne's headlamps cross the clearing. "He's driving to the trailer. And he's..."

    "He's what?" Kelly said. "What is he doing now?"

    "He's driving around and around a tree," Levine said. "A big tree by the clearing."

    "Why?"

    "He must be running the cable around the tree, Eddie said. "That's the only possible reason."

    There was a moment of silence.

    "What's he doing now?" Arby said.

    "He's gotten out of the Jeep. Now he's running toward the trailer."

Thorne was down on his hands and knees in the mud, holding the big hook of the jeep winch in his hands. The trailer was sliding away from him, but he managed to crawl beneath it, and get the hook around the rear axle. He pulled his fingers clear just as the hook slammed tight against the brake cover, and he rolled his body away. Newly restrained, the trailer jumped sideways in the grass, the tires slamming down where his body had been moments before.

    The metal cable from the winch was pulled taut. The whole underbelly of the trailer creaked in protest.

    But it held.

    Thorne crawled out from beneath the trailer, and squinted at it in the rain. He looked carefully at the wheels of the jeep, to see if they were moving at all. No. With the cable wrapped around the tree, the counterbalancing weight of the jeep was enough to hold the second trailer on the rim of the cliff.

    He went back to the Jeep, climbed inside, and set the brake. He heard Eddie saying, "Doc, Doc."

    "I'm here, Eddie."

    "You manage to stop it?"

    "Yeah. It's not moving any more."

    The radio crackled. "That's great. But listen. Doc. You know that connector is just five-mil mesh over stainless rod. It was never intended to - "

    "I know, Eddie. I'm working on it." Thorne climbed out of the car again. He ran quickly through the rain toward the trailer.

    He opened the side door, and went inside. The interior was inky black. He could see nothing at all. Everything was overturned. His feet crunched on glass. All the windows were shattered. He held the radio in his hand. "Eddie!"

    "Yes, Doc."