Jurassic Park - Crichton Michael - Страница 83

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"I am," Gennaro said, coughing.

"No, you're not. You've shirked your responsibility all along, from the very beginning."

"The hell-"

"You sold investors on an undertaking you didn't fully understand. You were part owner of a business you failed to supervise. You did not check the activities of a man whom you knew from experience to be a liar, and you permitted that man to screw around with the most dangerous technology in human history. I'd say you shirked your responsibility."

Gennaro coughed again. "Well, now I'm taking responsibility."

"No," Grant said. "You're still shirking it. And you can't do that any more." He released Gennaro, who bent over, gasping for breath. Grant turned to Muldoon. "What have we got for weapons?"

Muldoon said, "We've got some control nets, and shock prods."

"How good are these shock prods?" Grant said.

"They're like bang sticks for sharks. They have an explosive capacitor tip, delivers a shock on contact. High voltage, low amps. Not fatal, but it's definitely incapacitating."

"That's not going to do it," Grant said. "Not in the nest."

"What nest?" Gennaro said, coughing.

"The raptor nest," Ellie said.

"The raptor nest?"

Grant was saying, "Have you got any radio collars?"

"I'm sure we do," Muldoon said.

"Get one. And is there anything else that can be used for defense?"

Muldoon shock his head.

"Well, get whatever you can."

Muldoon went away. Grant turned to Gennaro. "Your island is a mess, Mr. Gennaro. Your experiment is a mess. It has to be cleaned up. But you can't do that until you know the extent of the mess. And that means finding the nests on the island. Especially the raptor nests. They'll be hidden. We have to find them, and inspect them, and count the eggs. We have to account for every animal born on this island. Then we can burn it down. But first we have a little work to do."

Ellie was looking at the wall map, which now showed the animal ranges. Tim was working the keyboard. She pointed to the map. "The raptors are localized in the southern area, down where the volcanic steam fields are. Maybe they like the warmth."

"Is there any place to hide down there?"

"Turns out there is," she said. "There's massive concrete waterworks, to control flooding in the southern flatlands. Big underground area. Water and shade."

Grant nodded. "Then that's where they'll be."

Ellie said, "I think there's an entrance from the beach, too." She turned to the consoles and said, "Tim, show us the cutaways on the waterworks." Tim wasn't listening. "Tim?"

He was hunched over the keyboard. "Just a minute," he said. "I found something."

"What is it?"

"It's an unmarked storage room. I don't know what's there."

"Then it might have weapons, Grant said.

They were all behind the maintenance building, unlocking a steel storm door, lifting it up into the sunlight, to reveal concrete steps going down into the earth. "Damned Arnold," Muldoon said, as he hobbled down the steps. "He must have known this was here all along."

"Maybe not," Grant said. "He didn't try to go here."

"Well, then, Hammond knew. Somebody knew."

"Where is Hammond now?"

"Still in the lodge."

They reached the bottom of the stairs, and came upon rows of gas masks hanging on the wall, in plastic containers. They shone their flashlights deeper into the room and saw several heavy glass cubes, two feet high, with steel caps. Grant could see small dark spheres inside the cubes. It was like being in a room full of giant pepper mills, he thought.

Muldoon opened the cap of one, reached in, and withdrew a sphere. He turned it in the light, frowning. "I'll be damned."

"What is it?" Grant said.

"MORO-12," Muldoon said. "It's an inhalation nerve gas. These are grenades. Lots and lots of grenades."

"Let's get started," Grant said grimly.

"It likes me," Lex said, smiling. They were standing in the garage of the visitor center, by the little raptor that Grant had captured in the tunnel. She was petting the raptor through the cage bars. The animal rubbed up against her hand.

"I'd be careful there," Muldoon said. "They can give a nasty bite."

"He likes me," Lex said. "His name is Clarence."

"Clarence?"

"Yes," Lex said.

Muldoon was holding the leather collar with the small metal box attached to it. Grant heard the high-pitched beeping in the headset. "Is it a problem putting the collar on the animal?"

Lex was still petting the raptor, reaching through the cage. "I het he'll let me put it on him," she said.

"I wouldn't try," Muldoon said. "They're unpredictable."

"I het he'll let me," she said.

So Muldoon gave Lex the collar, and she held it out so the raptor could smell it. Then she slowly slipped it around the animal's neck. The raptor turned brighter green when Lex buckled it and closed the Velcro cover over the buckle. Then the animal relaxed, and turned paler again.

"I'll be damned," Muldoon said.

"It's a chameleon," Lex said.

"The other raptors couldn't do that," Muldoon said, frowning. "This wild animal must be different. By the way," he said, turning to Grant, "if they're all born females, how do they breed? You never explained that bit about the frog DNA."

"It's not frog DNA," Grant said. "It's amphibian DNA. But the phenomenon happens to be particularly well documented in frogs. Especially West African frogs, if I remember."

"What phenomenon is that?"

"Gender transition," Grant said. "Actually, it's just plain changing sex." Grant explained that a number of plants and animals were known to have the ability to change their sex during life-orchids, some fish and shrimp, and now frogs. Frogs that had been observed to lay eggs were able to change, over a period of months, into complete males. They first adopted the fighting stance of males, they developed the mating whistle of males, they stimulated the hormones and grew the gonads of males, and eventually they successfully mated with females.

"You're kidding," Gennaro said. "And what makes it happen?"

"Apparently the change is stimulated by an environment in which all the animals are of the same sex. In that situation, some of the amphibians will spontaneously begin to change sex from female to male."

"And you think that's what happened to the dinosaurs?"

"Until we have a better explanation, yes," Grant said. "I think that's what happened. Now, shall we find this nest?"

They piled into the Jeep, and Lex lifted the raptor from the cage. The animal seemed quite calm, almost tame in her bands. She gave it a final pat on the head, and released it.

The animal wouldn't leave.

"Go on, shoo!" Lex said. "Go home!"

The raptor turned, and ran off into the foliage.

Grant held the receiver and wore the headphones. Muldoon drove. The car bounced along the main road, going south. Gennaro turned to Grant and said, "What is it like, this nest?"

"Nobody knows," Grant said.

"But I thought you'd dug them up."

"I've dug up fossil dinosaur nests," Grant said. "But all fossils are distorted by the weight of millennia. We've made some hypotheses, some suppositions, but nobody really knows what the nests were like."

Grant listened to the beeps, and signaled Muldoon to head farther west. It looked more and more as if Ellie had been correct: the nest was in the southern volcanic fields.

Grant shook his head. "Not much about nesting behavior is clear," he said. He found himself explaining about the modern reptiles, like crocodiles and alligators. Even their nesting behavior wasn't well understood. Actually, the American alligator was better studied than most, and in the case of alligators, only the female guarded the nest, and only until the time of birth. The male alligator had spent days in early spring lying beside the female in a mating pair, blowing bubbles on her checks and providing her with other signs of masculine attention designed to bring her to receptivity, causing her finally to lift her tail and allow him, as he lay beside her, to insert his penis. By the time the female built her nest, two months later, the male was long gone. And although the female guarded her cone-shaped, three-foot-high mud nest ferociously, her attention seemed to wane with time, and she generally abandoned her eggs by the time the hatchlings began to squeak and emerge from their shells. Thus, in the wild, a baby alligator began its life entirely on its own, and for that reason its belly was stuffed with egg yolk for nourishment in its early days.

"So the adult alligators don't protect the young?"

"Not as we imagine it," Grant said. "The biological parents both abandon the offspring. But there is a kind of group protection. Young alligators have a very distinctive distress cry, and it brings any adult who hears it-parent or not-to their assistance with a full-fledged, violent attack. Not a threat display. A full-on attack."

"Oh." Gennaro fell silent.

"But that's in all respects a distinctly reptile pattern," Grant continued. "For example, the alligator's biggest problem is to keep the eggs cool. The nests are always located in the shade. A temperature of ninety-eigbt point six degrees will kill an alligator egg, so the mother mostly guards her eggs to keep them cool."

"And dinos aren't reptiles," Muldoon said laconically.

"Exactly. The dinosaur nesting pattern could be much more closely related to that of any of a variety of birds-"

"So you actually mean you don't know," Gennaro said, getting annoyed. "You don't know what the nest is like?"

"No," Grant said. "I don't."

"Well," Gennaro said. "So much for the damn experts."

Grant ignored him. Already he could smell the sulfur. And up ahead he saw the rising steam of the volcanic fields.

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