Майкл Крайтон – Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода (страница 4)
The lizard fragment rested in the freezer at Columbia University; a technician named Alice Levin walked into the Tropical Diseases Laboratory, looked at Tina Bowman’s picture, and said, “Oh, whose kid drew the dinosaur?”
“What?” Richard Stone said, turning slowly toward her.
“The dinosaur. Isn’t that what it is? My kid draws them all the time.”
“This is a lizard,” Stone said. “From Costa Rica. Some girl down there drew a picture of it.”
“No,” Alice Levin said, shaking her head. “Look at it. It’s very clear. Big head, long neck, stands on its hind legs, thick tail. It’s a dinosaur.”
“It can’t be. It was only a foot tall.”
“So? There were little dinosaurs back then,” Alice said. “Believe me, I know. I have two boys, I’m an expert. The smallest dinosaurs were under a foot. Teenysaurus or something, I don’t know. Those names are impossible. You’ll never learn those names if you’re over the age of ten.”
“You don’t understand,” Richard Stone said. “This is a picture of a contemporary animal. They sent us a fragment of the animal. It’s in the freezer now.” Stone went and got it, and shook it out of the bag.
Alice Levin looked at the frozen piece of leg and tail, and shrugged. She didn’t touch it. “I don’t know,” she said. “But that looks like a dinosaur to me.”
Stone continued to shake his head. Alice was uninformed; she was just a technician who worked in the bacteriology lab down the hall. And she had an active imagination.
“Well, take it to the Museum of Natural History or something,” Alice Levin said. “You really should.”
“No,” Richard Stone said. “I won’t.”
He put the bag back in the freezer and slammed the door. “It’s not a dinosaur, it’s a lizard. That’s final, Alice. This lizard’s not going anywhere.”
SECOND EPISODE
Alan Grant crouched down, his nose inches from the ground. The temperature was over a hundred degrees. His knees ached, his lungs burned from the dust. Sweat dripped off his forehead. But Grant didn’t notice it. His entire attention was focused on the six-inch square of earth in front of him.
Working patiently with a dental pick and an artist’s brush, he exposed the tiny L-shaped fragment ofjawbone. It was only an inch long, and no thicker than his little finger. There was no question that this was the jawbone from an infant carnivorous dinosaur. Its owner had died seventy-nine million years ago, at the age of about two months. With any luck, Grant might find the rest of the skeleton as well. If so, it would be the first complete skeleton of a baby carnivore.
“Hey, Alan!”
Alan Grant looked up, and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.
Visitors found the badlands depressing, but when Grant looked at this landscape, he saw something else entirely. This dry land was what remained of another, very different world, which had vanished eighty million years ago. In his mind’s eye, Grant saw himself back in the warm, swampy bayou that formed the shoreline of a great inland sea. This inland sea was a thousand miles wide, extending all the way from the Rocky Mountains to the sharp peaks of the Appalachians. All of the American West was underwater.
At that time, there were thin clouds in the sky overhead, darkened by the smoke of nearby volcanoes. The atmosphere was denser, richer in carbon dioxide. Plants grew rapidly along the shoreline. There were no fish in these waters, but there were clams and snails. A few carnivorous dinosaurs prowled the swampy shores of the lake, moving among the palm trees. There was a small island, about two acres in size. This island formed a sanctuary where herds of herbivorous dinosaurs laid their eggs in communal nests, and raised their squeaking young.
Over the millions of years the lake vanished, the island with its dinosaur eggs became the eroded hillside in northern Montana which Alan Grant was now excavating.
“Hey, Alan!”
He saw Ellie waving to him, from the shadow of the field laboratory.
“Visitor!” she called, and pointed to the east.
They didn’t get many visitors in Snakewater, and they didn’t know what a lawyer from the Environmental Protection Agency would want.
But Grant knew that paleontology, the study of extinct life, had in recent years taken on an unexpected relevance to the modern world. The modern world was changing fast, and urgent questions about the weather, global warming, or the ozone layer often seemed answerable with information from the past. Information that paleontologists could provide. He had been called as an expert witness twice in the past few years.
Grant started down the hill to meet the car.
“Bob Morris, EPA,” the visitor said. “I’m with the San Francisco office.”
Morris was in his late twenties, wearing a tie, and pants from a business suit.
“How long you been out here?”
“About sixty days. We start in June.”
“Sixty-three, to be exact,” Ellie Sattler said, as they reached the trailer. Ellie was wearing cut-offjeans and a shirt tied at her midriff. She was twenty-four and darkly tanned. Her blond hair was pulled back.
“Ellie keeps us going,” Grant said, introducing her. “She’s very good at what she does.”
“What does she do?” Morris asked.
“Paleobotany,” Ellie said. She opened the door and they went inside the laboratory trailer.
The trailer had a series of long wooden tables, with tiny bone specimens neatly laid out, tagged and labeled. Farther along were ceramic dishes and crocks. There was a strong odor of vinegar.
Morris glanced at the bones. “I thought dinosaurs were big,” he said.
“They were,” Ellie said. “But everything you see here comes from babies. Snakewater is important primarily because of the number of dinosaur nesting sites here. Until we started this work, there were hardly any infant dinosaurs known. Only one nest had ever been found, in the Gobi Desert. We’ve discovered a dozen different hadrosaur[3] nests, complete with eggs and bones of infants.”
“They look like chicken bones,” Morris said, peering into the ceramic dishes.
“Yes,” she said. “They’re very bird-like.”
“And what about those?” Morris said, pointing through the trailer window to piles of large bones outside, wrapped in heavy plastic.
“Rejects,” Ellie said. “Bones too fragmentary when we took them out of the ground, In the old days we’d just discard them, but nowadays we send them for genetic testing.”
Grant led Morris to the end of the trailer, where there was a torn couch, a sagging chair, and a battered table. Grant dropped onto the couch, leaned back and gestured for Morris to sit in the chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Grant was a professor of paleontology at the University of Denver, and one of the foremost researchers in his field, but he had never been comfortable with social niceties. He was an outdoor man, and he knew that all the important work in paleontology was done outdoors, with your hands. Grant had little patience for the academics, for the museum curators, for what he called Teacup Dinosaur Hunters.
Grant watched as Morris primly brushed off the seat of the chair before he sat down. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
Grant nodded. “It’s a long way to come, Mr. Morris.”
“Well,” Morris said, “to get right to the point, we are concerned about the activities of the Hammond Foundation. You receive some funding from them.”
“Thirty thousand dollars a year,” Grant said, nodding. “For the last five years.”
“What do you know about the foundation?” Morris said.
Grant shrugged. “The Hammond Foundation is a respected source of academic grants. They fund research all over the world, including several dinosaur researchers. I know they support Bob Kerry in Alberta, and John Weller in Alaska. Probably more.”
“Do you know why the Hammond Foundation supports so much dinosaur research?” Morris asked.
“Of course. It’s because old John Hammond is a dinosaur nut.”
“You’ve met Hammond?”
Grant shrugged. “Once or twice. He comes here for brief visits. He’s quite elderly, you know. And eccentric, the way rich people sometimes are. But always very enthusiastic. Why?”
“Well,” Morris said, “the Hammond Foundation is actually a rather mysterious organization. The Hammond Foundation only supports cold-weather digs. We’d like to know why. And there are other puzzles,” Morris said. “For example, what is the relationship of dinosaurs to amber?”
“Amber?”
“Yes. It’s the hard yellow resin of dried tree sap—”
“I know what it is,” Grant said. “But why are you asking?”
“Because,” Morris said, “over the last five years, Hammond has purchased enormous quantities of amber in America, Europe, and Asia, including many pieces of museum-quality jewelry. The foundation has spent seventeen million dollars on amber. They now possess the largest privately held stock of this material in the world.”
“I don’t get it,” Grant said.
“Neither does anybody else,” Morris said. “As far as we can tell, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Amber has no commercial or defense value. There’s no reason to stockpile it. But Hammond has done just that, over many years.”
“Amber,” Grant said, shaking his head.
“And what about his island in Costa Rica?” Morris continued. “Ten years ago, the Hammond Foundation leased an island from the government of Costa Rica. Supposedly to set up a biological preserve.”