Muldoon worried even more about the velociraptors. They were instinctive hunters, and they never passed up prey, They killed even when they 't weren't hungry. They killed for the pleasure of killing. They were swift: strong runners and astonishing jumpers. They had lethal claws on all four limbs; one swipe of a forearm would disembowel a man, spilling his guts out. And they had powerful tearing jaws that ripped flesh instead of biting it. They were far more intelligent than the other dinosaurs, and they seemed to be natural cage-breakers.
Every zoo expert knew that certain animals were especially likely to get free of their cages. Some, like monkeys and elephants, could undo cage doors. Others, like wild pigs, were unusually intelligent and could lift gate fasteners with their snouts. But who would suspect that the giant armadillo was a notorious cage-breaker? Or the moose? Yet a moose was almost as skillful with its snout as an elephant with its trunk. Moose were always getting free; they had a talent for it.
And so did velociraptors.
Raptors were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees. And, like chimpanzees, they had agile hands that enabled them to open doors and manipulate objects. They could escape with ease. And when, as Muldoon had feared, one of them finally escaped, it killed two construction workers and maimed a third before being recaptured. After that episode, the visitor lodge had been reworked with heavy barred gates, a high perimeter fence, and tempered-glass windows. And the raptor holding pen was rebuilt with electronic sensors to warn of another impending escape.
Muldoon wanted guns as well. And he wanted shoulder-mounted TOW-missile launchers. Hunters knew how difficult it was to bring down a four-ton African elephant-and some of the dinosaurs weighed ten times as much. Management was horrified, insisting there be no guns anywhere on the island. When Muldoon threatened to quit, and to take his story to the press, a compromise was reached. In the end, two specially built laser-guided missile launchers were kept in a locked room in the basement. Only Muldoon had keys to the room.
Those were the keys Muldoon was twirling now. "I'm going downstairs," he said.
Arnold, watching the control screens, nodded. The two Land Cruisers sat at the top of the hill, waiting for the T-rex to appear.
"Hey," Dennis Nedry called, from the far console. "As long as you're up, get me a Coke, okay?"
Grant waited in the car, watching quietly. The bleating of the goat became louder, more insistent. The goat tugged frantically at its tether, racing back and forth. Over the radio, Grant heard Lex say in alarm, "What's going to happen to the goat? Is she going to eat the goat?"
"I think so," someone said to her, and then Ellie turned the radio down. Then they smelled the odor, a garbage stench of putrefaction and decay that drifted up the hillside toward them.
Grant whispered, "He's here."
"She," Malcolm said.
The goat was tethered in the center of the field, thirty yards from the nearest trees. The dinosaur must be somewhere among the trees, but for a moment Grant could see nothing at all. Then he realized he was looking too low: the animal's head stood twenty feet above the ground, half concealed among the upper branches of the palm trees.
Malcolm whispered, "Oh, my God. . . . She's as large as a bloody building. . . ."
Grant stared at the enormous square head, five feet long, mottled reddish brown, with huge jaws and fangs. The tyrannosaur's jaws worked once, opening and closing. But the huge animal did not emerge from hiding.
Malcolm whispered: "How long will it wait?"
"Maybe three or four minutes. Maybe-"
The tyrannosaur sprang silently forward, fully revealing her enormous body. In four bounding steps she covered the distance to the goat, bent down, and bit it through the neck. The bleating stopped. There was silence.
Poised over her kill, the tyrannosaur became suddenly hesitant. Her massive head turned on the muscular neck, looking in all directions. She stared fixedly at the Land Cruiser, high above on the hill.
Malcolm whispered, "Can she see us?"
"Oh yes," Regis said, on the intercom. "Let's see if she's going to eat here in front of us, or if she's going to drag the prey away."
The tyrannosaur bent down, and sniffed the carcass of the goat. A bird chirped: her head snapped up, alert, watchful. She looked back and forth, scanning in small jerking shifts.
"Like a bird," Ellie said.
Still the tyrannosaur hesitated. "What is she afraid of?" Malcolm whispered.
"Probably another tyrannosaur," Grant whispered. Big carnivores like lions and tigers often became cautious after a kill, behaving as if suddenly exposed. Nineteenth-century zoologists imagined the animals felt guilty for what they had done. But contemporary scientists documented the effort behind a kill-hours of patient stalking before the final lunge-as well as the frequency of failure. The idea of "nature, red in tooth and claw" was wrong; most often the prey got away. When a carnivore finally brought down an animal, it was watchful for another predator, who might attack it and steal its prize. Thus this tyrannosaur was probably fearful of another tyrannosaur.
The huge animal bent over the goat again. One great hind limb held the carcass in place as the jaws began to tear the flesh.
"She's going to stay," Regis whispered. "Excellent." The tyrannosaur lifted her head again, ragged chunks of bleeding flesh in her jaws. She stared at the Land Cruiser. She began to chew. They heard the sickening crunch of bones.
"Ewww," Lex said, over the intercom. "That's disgusting."
And then, as if caution had finally gotten the better of her, the tyrannosaur lifted the remains of the goat in her jaws and carried it silently back among the trees.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Tyrannosaurus rex, " the tape said. The Land Cruisers started up, and moved silently off, through the foliage.
Malcolm sat back in his seat. "Fantastic," he said.
Gennaro wiped his forehead. He looked pale.
Control
Henry Wu came into the control room to find everyone sitting in the dark, listening to the voices on the radio.
"-Jesus, if an animal like that gets out," Gennaro was saying, his voice tinny on the speaker, "there'd be no stopping it."
"No stopping it, no . . ."
"Huge, with no natural enemies . . ."
"My God, think of it . . ."
In the control room, Hammond said, "Damn those people. They are so negative."
Wu said, "They're still going on about an animal escaping? I don't understand. They must have seen by now that we have everything under control. We've engineered the animals and engineered the resort. . . ." He shrugged.
It was Wu's deepest perception that the park was fundamentally sound, as he believed his paleo-DNA was fundamentally sound. Whatever problems might arise in the DNA were essentially point-problems in the code, causing a specific problem in the phenotype: an enzyme that didn't switch on, or a protein that didn't fold. Whatever the difficulty, it was always solved with a relatively minor adjustment in the next version.
Similarly, he knew that Jurassic Park's problems were not fundamental problems. They were not control problems. Nothing as basic, or as serious, as the possibility of an animal escaping. Wu found it offensive to think that anyone would believe him capable of contributing to a system where such a thing could happen.
"It's that Malcolm," Hammond said darkly. "He's behind it all. He was against us from the start, you know. He's got his theory that complex systems can't be controlled and nature can't be imitated. I don't know what his problem is. Hell, we're just making a zoo here. World's full of 'em, and they all work fine. But he's going to prove his theory or die trying. I just hope he doesn't panic Gennaro into trying to shut the park down."
Wu said, "Can he do that?"
"No," Hammond said. "But he can try. He can try and frighten the Japanese investors, and get them to withdraw funds. Or he can make a stink with the San Jose government. He can make trouble."
Arnold stubbed out his cigarette. "Let's wait and see what happens," he said. "We believe in the park. Let's see how it plays out."
Muldoon got off the elevator, nodded to the ground-floor guard, and went downstairs to the basement. He flicked on the lights. The basement was filled with two dozen Land Cruisers, arranged in neat rows. These were the electric cars that would eventually form an endless loop, touring the park, returning to the visitor center.
In the corner was a Jeep with a red stripe, one of two gasoline-powered vebicles-Harding, the vet, had taken the other that morning-which could go anywhere in the park, even among the animals. The Jeeps were painted with a diagonal red stripe because for some reason it discouraged the triceratops from charging the car.
Muldoon moved past the Jeep, toward the back. The steel door to the armaments room was unmarked. He unlocked it with his key, and swung the heavy door wide. Gun racks lined the interior. He pulled out a Randler Shoulder Launcher and a case of canisters. He tucked two gray rockets under his other arm.
After locking the door behind him, he put the gun into the back seat of the Jeep. As he left the garage, he heard the distant rumble of thunder.
"Looks like rain," Ed Regis said, glancing up at the sky.
The Land Cruisers had stopped again, near the sauropod swamp. A large herd of apatosaurs was grazing at the edge of the lagoon, eating the leaves of the upper branches of the palm trees. In the same area were several duckbilled hadrosaurs, which in comparison looked much smaller.