Gennaro said, "You don't see the kids?"
Arnold twisted in his chair, and looked back to the map. "No," he said, "at the moment, there are no additionals on the map at all. Everything out there has been accounted for as a dinosaur. They're probably up in a tree, or somewhere else where we can't see them. I wouldn't worry yet. Several animals haven't shown up, like the big rex. That's probably because it's sleeping somewhere and not moving. The people may be sleeping, too. We just don't know."
Muldoon shook his head. "We better get on with it," he said. "We need to repair the fences, and get the animals back into their paddocks. According to that computer, we've got five to herd back to the proper paddocks. I'll take the maintenance crews out now."
Arnold turned to Gennaro. "You may want to see how Dr. Malcolm is doing. Tell Dr. Harding that Muldoon will need him in about an hour to supervise the herding. And I'll notify Mr. Hammond that we're starting our final cleanup."
Gennaro passed through the iron gates and went in the front door of the Safari Lodge. He saw Ellie Sattler coming down the hallway, carrying towels and a pan of steaming water. "There's a kitchen at the other end," she said. "We're using that to boil water for the dressings."
"How is he?" Gennaro asked.
"Surprisingly good," she said.
Gennarro followed Ellie down to Malcolm's room, and was startled to hear the sound of laughter. The mathematician lay on his back in the bed, with Harding adjusting an IV line.
"So the other man says, 'I'll tell you frankly, I didn't like it, Bill. I went back to toilet paper!'"
Harding was laughing.
"It's not bad, is it?" Malcolm said, smiling. "Ah. Mr. Gennaro. You've come to see me. Now you know what happens from trying to get a leg up on the situation."
Gennaro came in, tentatively.
Harding said, "He's on fairly high doses of morphine."
"Not high enough, I can tell you," Malcolm said. "Christ, he's stingy with his drugs. Did they find the others yet?"
"No, not yet," Gennaro said. "But I'm glad to see you doing so well."
"How else should I be doing," Malcolm said, "with a compound fracture of the leg that is likely septic and beginning to smell rather, ah, pungent? But I always say, if you can't keep a sense of humor . . ."
Gennaro smiled. "Do you remember what happened?"
"Of course I remember," Malcolm said. "Do you think you could be bitten by a Tyrannosaurus rex and it would escape your mind? No indeed, I'll tell you, you'd remember it for the rest of your life. In my case, perhaps not a terribly long time. But, still-yes, I remember."
Malcolm described running from the Land Cruiser in the rain, and being chased down by the rex. "It was my own damned fault, he was too close, but I was panicked. In any case, he picked me up in his jaws."
"How?" Gennaro said.
"Torso," Malcolm said, and lifted his shirt. A broad semicircle of bruised punctures ran from his shoulder to his navel. "Lifted me up in his jaws, shook me bloody hard, and threw me down. And I was fine-terrified of course, but, still and all, fine-right up to the moment he threw me. I broke the leg in the fall. But the bite was not half bad." He sighed. "Considering."
Harding said, "Most of the big carnivores don't have strong jaws. The real power is in the neck musculature. The jaws just hold on, while they use the neck to twist and rip. But with a small creature like Dr. Malcolm, the animal would just shake him, and then toss him."
"I'm afraid that's right," Malcolm said. "I doubt I'd have survived, except the big chap's heart wasn't in it. To tell the truth, he struck me as a rather clumsy attacker of anything less than an automobile or a small apartment building."
"You think he attacked halfheartedly?"
"It pains me to say it," Malcolm said, "but I don't honestly feel I had his full attention. He had mine, of course. But, then, he weighs eight tons. I don't. "
Gennaro turned to Harding and said, "They're going to repair the fences now. Arnold says Muldoon will need your help herding animals."
"Okay," Harding said.
"So long as you leave me Dr. Sattler, and ample morphine," Malcolm said. "And so long as we do not have a Malcolm Effect here."
"What's a Malcolm Effect?" Gennaro said.
"Modesty forbids me," Malcolm said, "from telling you the details of a phenomenon named after me." He sighed again, and closed his eyes. In a moment, he was sleeping.
Ellie walked out into the hallway with Gennaro. "Don't be fooled," she said. "It's a great strain on him. When will you have a helicopter here?"
"A helicopter?"
"He needs surgery on that leg. Make sure they send for a helicopter, and get him off this island."
The Park
The portable generator sputtered and roared to life, and the quartz floodlights glowed at the ends of their telescoping arms. Muldoon heard the soft gurgle of the jungle river a few Yards to the north. He turned back to the maintenance van and saw one of the workmen coming out with a big power saw.
"No, no," he said. "Just the ropes, Carlos. We don't need to cut it."
He turned back to look at the fence. They had difficulty finding the shorted section at first, because there wasn't much to see: a small protocarpus tree was leaning against the fence. It was one of several that had been planted in this region of the park, their featherv branches intended to conceal the fence from view.
But this particular tree had been tied down with guy wires and turnbuckles. The wires had broken free in the storm, and the metal turnbuckles had blown against the fence and shorted it out. Of course, none of this should have happened; grounds crews were supposed to use plastic-coated wires and ceramic turnbuckles near fences. But it had happened anyway.
In any case, it wasn't going to be a big job. All they had to do was pull the tree off the fence, remove the metal fittings, and mark it for the gardeners to fix in the morning. It shouldn't take more than twenty minutes. And that was just as well, because Muldoon knew the dilophosaurs always stayed close to the river. Even though the workmen were separated from the river by the fence, the dilos could spit right through it, delivering their blinding poison.
Ramón, one of the workmen, came over. "Se?or Muldoon," he said, "did you see the lights?"
"What lights?" Muldoon said.
Ramón pointed to the east, through the jungle. "I saw it as we were coming out. It is there, very faint. You see it? It looks like the lights of a car, but it is not moving."
Muldoon squinted. It probably was just a maintenance light. After all, power was back on. "We'll worry about it later," he said. "Right now let's just get that tree off the fence."
Arnold was in an expansive mood. The park was almost back in order. Muldoon was repairing the fences. Hammond had gone off to supervise the transfer of the animals with Harding. Although he was tired, Arnold was feeling good; he was even in a mood to indulge the lawyer, Gennaro. "The Malcolm Effect?" Arnold said. "You worried about that?"
"I'm just curious," Gennaro said.
"You mean you want me to tell you why Ian Malcolm is wrong?"
"Sure."
Arnold lit another cigarette. "It's technical."
"Try me."
"Okay," Arnold said. "Chaos theory describes nonlinear systems. It's now become a very broad theory that's been used to study everything from the stock market, to rioting crowds, to brain waves during epilepsy. A very fashionable theory. Very trendy to apply it to any complex system where there might be unpredictability. Okay?"
"Okay," Gennaro said.
"Ian Malcolm is a mathematician specializing in chaos theory. Quite amusing and personable, but basically what he does, besides wear black, is use computers to model the behavior of complex systems. And John Hammond loves the latest scientific fad, so he asked Malcolm to model the system at Jurassic Park. Which Malcolm did. Malcolm's models are all phase-space shapes on a computer screen. Have you seen them?"
"No," Gennaro said.
"Well, they look like a weird twisted ship's propeller. According to Malcolm, the behavior of any system follows the surface of the propeller. You with me?"
"Not exactly," Gennaro said.
Arnold held his hand in the air. "Let's say I put a drop of water on the back of my hand. That drop is going to run off my hand. Maybe it'll run toward my wrist. Maybe it'll run toward my thumb, or down between my fingers. I don't know for sure where it will go, but I know it will run somewhere along the surface of my hand. It has to."
"Okay," Gennaro said.
"Chaos theory treats the behavior of a whole system like a drop of water moving on a complicated propeller surface. The drop may spiral down, or slip outward toward the edge. It may do many different things, depending. But it will always move along the surface of the propeller."
"Okay."
"Malcolm's models tend to have a ledge, or a sharp incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly. He modestly calls this speeding-up movement the Malcolm Effect. The whole system could suddenly collapse. And that was what he said about Jurassic Park. That it had inherent instability."