© Беспятых Н. Г., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2018

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2018

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Introduction “The InGen Incident”

The late twentieth century has witnessed a scientific gold rush: the haste to make genetic engineering profitable. Biotechnology promises the greatest revolution in human history. By the end of this decade, it will surpass atomic power and computers in its effect on our everyday lives; it is going to transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertainment, and our bodies. Nothing will ever be the same again. It’s going to change the face of the planet.

When, in 1953, two young researchers in England, James Watson and Francis Crick, deciphered the structure of DNA, this was a triumph of the human spirit, of the centuries-old quest to understand the universe in a scientific way. It was expected that their discovery would be used to the greater benefit of mankind.

Yet thirty years later research in molecular genetics had become a vast, multibillion dollar industry.

In April 1976 Robert Swanson, a rich industrialist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California founded a commercial company to exploit Boyer’s gene-splicing techniques. Their new company, Genentech, quickly became the largest and most successful of the genetic engineering start-ups. Suddenly everyone wanted to become rich. New companies were founded almost weekly, and scientists from universities went there to exploit genetic research and make money. By 1986, at least 362 scientists, including 64 in the National Academy, sat on the boards of biotech firms.

This shift in attitude actually was very significant. In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn’t get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. So there were independent university scientists free of industry ties, who could discuss the problems at the highest levels.

But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial interests. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.

In this commercial climate, a company named International Genetic Technologies, Inc., of Palo Alto, arose and went bankrupt. It created the genetic crisis that went nearly unnoticed. After all, InGen conducted its research in secret; the actual incident occurred in the most remote region of Central America; and fewer than twenty people were there to witness it. Of those, only a handful survived, and they were willing to discuss the remarkable events that lead up to those final two days in August 1989 on a remote island off the west coast of Costa Rica.

Prologue:
The Bite of the Raptor

The tropical rain fell like wall, splashed on the ground in a torrent. Roberta Carter sighed, and stared out the window. From the clinic, she couldn’t see the beach or the ocean beyond. This wasn’t what she had expected when she decided to spend two months as a visiting physician in the village on the west coast of Costa Rica.

She had been in the village now for three weeks. And it had rained every day.

Everything else was fine. She liked the isolation of the place and the friendliness of its people. Costa Rica had one of the twenty best medical systems in the world, and even in this remote coastal village, the clinic was well maintained and supplied. Her paramedic, Manuel Aragon, was intelligent and well trained. Bobbie was able to practice a level of medicine equal to what she had practiced in Chicago.

But the rain! The constant, unending rain!

Across the examining room, Manuel cocked his head. “Listen,” he said.

“Believe me, I hear it,” Bobbie said.

“No. Listen.”

And then she caught the rhythmic thumping of a helicopter which burst low through the ocean fog and roared overhead, circled, and came back. She saw the helicopter swing back over the water, near the fishing boats. It was looking for a place to land.

Bobbie wondered what was so urgent that the helicopter would fly in this weather. The helicopter settled onto the wet sand of the beach. Uniformed men jumped out, and flung open the big side door. She heard frantic shouts in Spanish. They were calling for a doctor. She ran up to the helicopter.

“I’m Dr. Carter,” she said.

“Ed Regis. We’ve got a very sick man here, doctor.”

“Then you better take him to San Jose,” she said. San Jose was the capital, just twenty minutes away by air.

“We would, but we can’t get over the mountains in this weather. You have to treat him here.”

Bobbie trotted alongside the injured man as they carried him to the clinic. He was a kid, no older than eighteen. She lifted the blood-soaked shirt and saw a big slashing rip along his shoulder, and another on the leg.

“What happened to him?”

“Construction accident,” Ed shouted. “He fell.”

The kid was pale, unconscious. Bobbie bent to examine the wounds. A big tearing laceration ran from his shoulder down his torso. At the edge of the wound, the flesh was shredded. A second slash cut through the heavy muscles of the thigh. Her first impression was that his leg had been ripped open.

“Tell me again about this injury,” she said.

“I didn’t see it,” Ed said. “They say the backhoe dragged him.”

“Because it almost looks as if some big animal mauled him,” Bobbie Carter said. Like most emergency room physicians, she could remember in detail patients she had seen even years before. She had seen two maulings. One was a two-year-old child who had been attacked by a Rottweiler dog. The other was a circus attendant who had been attacked by a Bengal tiger. Both injuries were similar. There was a characteristic look to an animal attack.

“Mauled?” Ed said. “No, no. It was a backhoe, believe me.” Ed licked his lips as he spoke. He was acting as if he had done something wrong.

She bent lower, probed the wound with her fingertips. If an earth mover had rolled over him, there would be dirt in the wound. But there wasn’t any dirt, just a slippery, slimy foam. And the wound had a strange odor, a kind of rotten stench, a smell of death and decay. She had never smelled anything like it before.

“How long ago did this happen?”

“An hour.”

Bobbie Carter turned back to the injuries. Somehow she didn’t think she was seeing mechanical trauma. It just didn’t look right. No soil in the wound, and no crush- injury. Mechanical trauma of any sort – an auto injury, a factory accident – almost always had some component of crushing. But here there was none. Instead, the man’s skin was shredded – ripped – across his shoulder, and again across his thigh.

It really did look like a maul. On the other hand, most of the body was unmarked, which was unusual for an animal attack. She looked again at the head, the arms, the hands. She felt a chill when she looked at the kid’s hands. There were short slashing cuts on both palms, and bruises on the wrists and forearms. She had worked in Chicago long enough to know what that meant.

“All right,” she said. “Wait outside.”

“Why?” Ed said, alarmed. He didn’t like that.

“Do you want me to help him, or not?” she said, and pushed him out the door and closed it on his face. She didn’t know what was going on, but she didn’t like it. Manuel hesitated. “I continue to wash?”

“Yes,” she said. She reached for her little photo camera. She took several snapshots of the injury. It really did look like bites, she thought. Then the kid groaned, and she put her camera aside and bent toward him. His lips moved, his tongue thick.

“Raptor,” he said. “Lo sa raptor.”

At those words, Manuel froze, stepped back in horror.

“What does it mean?” Bobbie said.

Manuel shook his head. “I do not know, doctor. ‘Lo sa raptor’ – no es espanol.”

“No?” It sounded to her like Spanish. “Then please continue to wash him.”

“No, doctor.” He wrinkled his nose. “Bad smell.” And he crossed himself.

Bobbie looked again at the slippery foam streaked across the wound. She touched it, rubbing it between her fingers. It seemed almost like saliva.

The injured boy’s lips moved. “Raptor,” he whispered.

In a tone of horror, Manuel said, “It bit him.”

“What bit him?”

“Raptor.”

“What’s a raptor?”

“It means hupia.”

Bobbie frowned. The Costa Ricans were not especially superstitious, but she had heard the hupia mentioned in the village before. They were said to be night ghosts, faceless vampires who kidnapped small children. According to the belief, the hupia had once lived in the mountains of Costa Rica, but now inhabited the islands offshore.

Manuel was backing away, murmuring and crossing himself. “It is not normal, this smell,” he said. “It is the hupia.”

Suddenly the injured youth opened his eyes and sat straight up on the table. Manuel shrieked in terror. The injured boy moaned and twisted his head, looked left and right with wide open eyes, and then he vomited blood. He went immediately into convulsions, his body vibrated, and Bobbie grabbed for him but he fell off the table onto the concrete floor. He vomited again. There was blood everywhere. Ed opened the door, saying, “What the hell’s happening?” and when he saw the blood he turned away, his hand to his mouth. Bobbie was grabbing for a stick to put in the boy’s clenched jaws, but even as she did it she knew it was hopeless, and with a final spastic jerk he relaxed and lay still.

She bent to perform mouth-to-mouth, but Manuel grabbed her shoulder fiercely, pulling her back. “No,” he said. “The hupia will cross over.”

“Manuel, for God’s sake!”

“No.” He stared at her fiercely. “No. You do not understand these things.”

Bobbie looked at the body on the ground and realized that it didn’t matter; the boy was dead. Manuel called for the men, who came back into the room and took the body away. Ed appeared, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, muttering, “I’m sure you did all you could,” and then she watched as the men took the body away, back to the helicopter, and it lifted thunderously up into the sky.

“It is better,” Manuel said.

Bobbie was thinking about the boy’s hands. They had been covered with cuts and bruises, in the characteristic pattern of defense wounds. She was quite sure he had not died in a construction accident; he had been attacked, and he had held up his bands against his attacker. “Where is this island they’ve come from?” she asked.

“In the ocean. Perhaps a hundred, hundred and twenty miles offshore,”

“Pretty far for a resort,” she said.

Manuel watched the helicopter. “I hope they never come back.”

Well, she thought, at least she had pictures. But when she turned back to the table, she saw that her camera was gone.

The rain finally stopped later that night. Alone in the bedroom behind the clinic, Bobbie thumbed through her Spanish dictionary. The boy had said “raptor,” and, despite Manuel’s protests, she suspected it was a Spanish word. Sure enough, she found it in her dictionary. It meant “ravisher” or “abductor.”

That gave her pause. The sense of the word was suspiciously close to the meaning of hupia. Of course she did not believe in the superstition. And no ghost had cut those hands. What had the boy been trying to tell her?

Bobbie looked at the stars. The whole scene was quiet, so normal, she felt foolish to talk of vampires and kidnapped babies.