“They’re carnivores?”
“Yes, of course, they have the—”
“Where’s Thorne?”
“He went into that clump of bushes to the right, some time ago. I haven’t seen him, but—”
“What do we do?” she said.
“Do?” Levine said. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
“We have to do something,” she said, speaking slowly, as if he were a child. “We have to help Thorne get back.”
“I don’t know how,” Levine said. “Those animals must weigh five hundred pounds each. And there are two of them. I told him not to go out in the first place. But now . . .”
Harding frowned. Staring out, she said, “Go turn the lights back on.”
“I’d prefer to—”
“Go turn the lights back on!”
Levine got up irritably. He had been relishing his remarkable discovery, a truly unanticipated feature of dinosaurs—although not, of course, entirely without precedent among related vertebrates—and now this little musclebound female was barking orders at him. Levine was offended. After all, she was not much of a scientist. She was a naturalist. A field devoid of theory. One of those people who poked around in animal crap and imagined they were doing original research. A nice outdoor life, is all it amounted to. It wasn’t science by any stretch—
“On!” Harding shouted, looking out the window.
He flicked the lights on, and started to head back to the window.
“Off!”
Hastily, he went back and turned them off.
“On!”
He turned them on again.
She got up from the window, and crossed the room. “They didn’t like that,” she said. “It bothered them.”
“Well, there’s probably a refractory period—”
“Yeah, I think so. Here. Open these.” She scooped up a handful of flashlights from one of the shelves, handed them to him, then went and got batteries from an adjacent wire rack. “I hope these still work.”
“What are you going to do?” Levine said.
“We,” she said, grimly. “We.”
* * *
Thorne stood in the darkness of the shed, staring outward through the open doors. Someone had been turning the lights on and off inside the store. Then, for a while they remained on. But now suddenly they went off again. The area in front of the shed was lit only by moonlight.
He heard movement, a soft rustling. He heard the breathing again. And then he saw the two dinosaurs, walking upright with stiff tails. Their skin patterns seemed to shift as they walked, and it was difficult to follow them, but they were moving toward the shed.
They arrived at the entrance, their bodies silhouetted against the moonlight beyond, their outlines finally clear. They looked like small tyrannosaurs, except they had protuberances above the eyes, and they had very small, stubby forelimbs. The carnivores ducked their squarish heads down, and looked into the shed cautiously. Snorting, sniffing. Their tails swinging slowly behind them.
They were really too big to come inside, and for a moment he hoped that they would not. Then the first of them lowered its head, growled, and stepped through the entrance.
Thorne held his breath. He was trying to think what to do, but he couldn’t think of anything at all. The animals were methodical, the first one moving aside so the second could enter as well.
Suddenly, from along the side of the store, a half-dozen glaring lights shone out in bright beams. The lights moved, splashed on the dinosaurs’ bodies. The beams began to move back and forth in slow, erratic patterns, like searchlights.
The dinosaurs were clearly visible, and they didn’t like it. They growled and tried to step away from the lights, but the beams moved continuously, searching them out, crisscrossing over their bodies. As the lights passed over their torsos, the skin paled in response, reproducing the movement of the beams, after the lights had moved on. Their bodies streaking white, fading to dark, streaking white again.
The lights never stopped moving, except when they shone into the faces of the dinosaurs, and into their eyes. The big eyes blinked beneath their hooded wings; the animals twitched their heads and ducked away, as if annoyed by flies.
The dinosaurs became agitated. They turned, backing out of the shed, and bellowed loudly at the moving lights.
Still the lights moved, relentlessly swinging back and forth in the night. The pattern of movement was complex, confusing. The dinosaurs bellowed again, and took a menacing step toward the lights. But it was half-hearted. They clearly didn’t like being around these moving sources. After a moment, they shuffled off, the lights following them, driving them away past the tennis courts.
Thorne moved forward.
He heard Harding say, “Doc? Better get out of there, before they decide to come back.”
Thorne moved quickly toward the lights. He found himself standing beside Levine and Harding. They were swinging fistfuls of flashlights back and forth.
They all went back to the store.
Inside, Levine slammed the door shut, and sagged back against it. “I was never so frightened in my entire life.”
“Richard,” Harding said coldly. “Get a grip on yourself.” She crossed the room, and placed the flashlights on the counter.
“Going out there was insane,” Levine said, wiping his forehead. He was drenched in sweat, his shirt stained dark.
“Actually, it was a slam dunk,” Harding said. She turned to Thorne. “You could see they had a refractory period for skin response. It’s fast compared to, say, an octopus, but it’s still there. My assumption was that those dinosaurs were like all animals that rely on camouflage. They’re basically ambushers. They’re not particularly fast or active. They stand motionless for hours in an unchanging environment, disappearing into the background, and they wait until some unsuspecting meal comes along. But if they have to keep adjusting to new light conditions, they know they can’t hide. They get anxious. And if they get anxious enough, they finally just run away. Which is what happened.”
Levine turned and glared angrily at Thorne. “This was all your fault. If you hadn’t gone out there that way, just wandering off—”
“Richard,” Harding said, cutting him off. “We need gas or we’ll never get out of here. Don’t you want to get out of here?”
Levine said nothing. He sulked.
“Well,” Thorne said, “there wasn’t any gas in the shed anyway.”
“Hey, everybody,” Sarah said. “Look who’s here!”
Arby came forward, leaning on Kelly. He had changed into clothes from the store: a pair of swimming trunks and a tee shirt that said “InGen Bioengineering Labs” and beneath, “We Make The Future.”
Arby had a black eye, a swollen cheekbone, and a cut that Harding had bandaged on his forehead. His arms and legs were badly bruised. But he was walking, and he managed a crooked smile.
Thorne said, “How do you feel, son?”
Arby said, “You know what I want more than anything, right now?”
“What?” Thorne said.
“Diet Coke,” Arby said. “And a lot of aspirin.”
Sarah bent over Malcolm. He was humming softly, staring upward. “How is Arby?” he asked.
“He’ll be okay.”
“Does he need any morphine?” Malcolm asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Good,” Malcolm said. He stretched out his arm, rolling up the sleeve.
* * *
Thorne cleaned the nest out of the microwave, and heated up some canned beef stew. He found a package of paper plates decorated in a Halloween motif—pumpkins and bats—and spooned the food onto the plates. The two kids ate hungrily.
He gave a plate to Sarah, then turned to Levine. “What about you?”
Levine was staring out the window. “No.”
Thorne shrugged.
Arby came over, holding his plate. “Is there any more?”
“Sure,” Thorne said. He gave him his ow
n plate.
Levine went over and sat with Malcolm. Levine said, “Well, at least we were right about one thing. This island was a true lost world—a pristine, untouched ecology. We were right from the beginning.”
Malcolm looked over, and raised his head. “Are you joking?” he said. “What about all the dead apatosaurs?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Levine said. “The raptors killed them, obviously. And then the raptors—”
“Did what?” Malcolm said. “Dragged them to their nest? Those animals weigh fifty tons, Richard. A hundred raptors couldn’t drag them. No, no.” He sighed. “The carcasses must have floated to a bend in the river, where they beached. The raptors made their nest at a source of convenient food supply—dead apatosaurs.”
“Well, possibly . . .”
“But why so many dead apatosaurs, Richard? Why do none of the animals attain adulthood? And why are there so many predators on the island?”
“Well. We need more data, of course—” Levine began.
“No, we don’t,” Malcolm said. “Didn’t you go through the lab? We already know the answer.”
“What is it?” Levine said, irritably.
“Prions,” Malcolm said, closing his eyes.
Levine frowned. “What’re prions?”
Malcolm sighed.
“Ian,” Levine said. “What are prions?”
“Go away,” Malcolm said, waving his hand.
Arby was curled up in a corner, near sleep. Thorne rolled up a tee shirt, and put it under the boy’s head. Arby mumbled something, and smiled.
In a few moments, he began to snore.
Thorne got up and went over to Sarah, who was standing by the window. Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten above the trees, turning pale blue.
“How much time now?” she said.
Thorne looked at his watch. “Maybe an hour.”
She started to pace. “We’ve got to get gas,” she said. “If we have gas, we can drive the Jeep to the helicopter site.”
“But there’s no gas,” Thorne said.
“There must be some, somewhere.” She continued to pace. “You tried the pumps. . . .”
“Yes. They’re dry.”
“What about inside the lab?”