Hammond turned to Gennaro and raised his hands. "You invited him."
"And a lucky thing, too," Malcolm said. "Because it sounds as if you have a serious problem."
"We have no problem," Hammond said quickly.
"I always maintained this island would be unworkable," Malcolm said. "I predicted it from the beginning." He reached into a soft leather briefcase. "And I trust by now we all know what the eventual outcome is going to be. You're going to have to shut the thing down."
"Shut it down!" Hammond stood angrily. "This is ridiculous."
Malcolm shrugged, indifferent to Hammond's outburst. "I've brought copies of my original paper for you to took at," he said. "The original consultancy paper I did for InGen. The mathematics are a bit sticky, but I can walk you through it. Are you leaving now?"
"I have some phone calls to make," Hammond said, and went into the adjoining cabin.
"Well, it's a long flight," Malcolm said to the others. "At least my paper will give you something to do."
The plane flew through the night.
Grant knew that Ian Malcolm had his share of detractors, and he could understand why some found his style too abrasive, and his applications of chaos theory too glib. Grant thumbed through the paper, glancing at the equations.
Gennaro said, "Your paper concludes that Hammond's island is bound to fail?"
"Correct."
"Because of chaos theory?"
"Correct. To be more precise, because of the behavior of the system in phase space."
Gennaro tossed the paper aside and said, "Can you explain this in English?"
"Surely," Malcolm said. "Let's see where we have to start.You know what a nonlinear equation is?"
"No."
"Strange attractors?"
"No."
"All right," Malcolm said. "Let's go back to the beginning." He paused, staring at the ceiling. "Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for hundreds of years."
"Okay," Gennaro said.
"But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They're bard to solve-in fact, they're usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory.
"Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in the 1960s. Weather is a big complicated system, namely the earth's atmosphere as it interacts with the land and the sun. The behavior of this big complicated system always defied understanding. So naturally we couldn't predict weather. But what the early researchers learned from computer models was that, even if you could understand it, you still couldn't predict it. Weather prediction is absolutely impossible. The reason is that the behavior of the system is sensitively dependent on initial conditions."
"You lost me," Gennaro said.
use a cannon to fire a shell of a certain weight, at a certain speed, and a certain angle of inclination-and if I then fire a second shell with almost the same weight, speed, and angle-what well happen?"
"The two shells will land at almost the same spot."
"Right," Malcolm said. "That's linear dynamics."
"Okay."
"But if I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity-and if I then repeat it with almost the same temperature, wind, and humidity-the second system will not behave almost the same. It'll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first. Thunderstorms instead of sunshine. That's nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified."
"I think I see," Gennaro said.
"The shorthand is the 'butterfly effect.' A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and weather in New York is different."
"So chaos is all just random and unpredictable?" Gennaro said. "Is that it?"
"No," Malcolm said. "We actually find bidden regularities within the complex variety of a system's behavior. That's why chaos has now become a very broad theory that's used to study everything from the stock market, to rioting crowds, to brain waves during epilepsy. Any sort of complex system where there is confusion and unpredictability. We can find an underlying order. Okay?"
"Okay," Gennaro said. "But what is this underlying order?"
"It's essentially characterized by the movement of the system within phase space," Malcolm said.
"Jesus," Gennaro said. "All I want to know is why you think Hammond's island can't work."
"I understand," Malcolm said. "I'll get there. Chaos theory says two things. First, that complex systems like weather have an underlying order. Second, the reverse of that-that simple systems can produce complex behavior. For example, pool balls. You hit a pool ball, and it starts to carom off the sides of the table. In theory, that's a fairly simple system, almost a Newtonian system. Since you can know the force imparted to the ball, and the mass of the ball, and you can calculate the angles at which it will strike the walls, you can predict the future behavior of the ball. In theory, you could predict the behavior of the ball far into the future, as it keeps bouncing from side to side. You could predict where it will end up three hours from now, in theory."
"Okay." Gennaro nodded.
But in fact," Malcolm said, "it turns out you can't predict more than a few seconds into the future. Because almost immediately very small effects-imperfections in the surface of the ball, tiny indentations in the wood of the table-start to make a difference. And it doesn't take long before they overpower your careful calculations. So it turns out that this simple system of a pool ball on a table has unpredictable behavior."
" Okay."
"And Hammond's project," Malcolm said, "is another apparently simple system-animals within a zoo environment-that will eventually show unpredictable behavior."
"You know this because of . . ."
"Theory," Malcolm said.
"But hadn't you better see the island, to see what he's actually done?"
"No. That is quite unnecessary. The details don't matter. Theory tells me that the island will quickly proceed to behave in unpredictable fashion.
"And you're confident of your theory."
"Ob, yes," Malcolm said. "Totally confident." He sat back in the chair. "There is a problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen."
Isla Nublar
With a whine, the rotors began to swing in circles overhead, casting shadows on the runway of San Jose airport. Grant listened to the crackle in his earphones as the pilot talked to the tower.
They had picked up another passenger in San Jose, a man named Dennis Nedry, who had flown In to meet them. He was fat and sloppy, eating a candy bar, and there was sticky chocolate on his fingers, and flecks of aluminum foil on his shirt. Nedry had mumbled something about doing computers on the island, and hadn't offered to shake hands.
Through the Plexi bubble Grant watched the airport concrete drop away beneath his feet, and he saw the shadow of the helicopter racing along as they went west, toward the mountains.
"It's about a forty-minute trip," Hammond said, from one of the rear seats.
Grant watched the low hills rise up, and then they were passing through intermittent clouds, breaking out into sunshine. The mountains were rugged, though he was surprised at the amount of deforestation, acre after acre of denuded, eroded hills. "Costa Rica," Hammond said, "has better population control than other countries in Central America. But, even so, the land is badly deforested. Most of this is within the last ten years."
They came down out of the clouds on the other side of the mountains, and Grant saw the beaches of the west coast. They flashed over a small coastal village.
"Bahía Anasco," the pilot said. "Fishing village." He pointed north. "Up the coast there, you see the Cabo Blanco preserve. They have beautiful beaches." The pilot headed straight out over the ocean. The water turned green, and then deep aquamarine. The sun shone on the water. It was about ten in the morning.
"Just a few minutes now," Hammond said, "and we should be seeing Isla Nublar."
Isla Nublar, Hammond explained, was not a true island. Rather, it was a seamount, a volcanic upthrusting of rock from the ocean floor. "Its volcanic origins can be seen all over the island," Hammond said. "There are steam vents in many places, and the ground is often hot underfoot. Because of this, and also because of prevailing currents, Isla Nublar lies in a foggy area. As we get there you will see-ah, there we are."
The helicopter rushed forward, low to the water. Ahead Grant saw an island, rugged and craggy, rising sharply from the ocean.