Читать книгу «Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода» онлайн полностью📖 — Майкла Крайтона — MyBook.

New York

Dr. Richard Stone, head of the Tropical Diseases Laboratory of Columbia University was unprepared for what he received that morning.

The white plastic cylinder was the size of a half-gallon milk container, it had locking metal latches and a screw top. Inside he found a plastic sandwich bag, containing something green. Stone spread a surgical drape on the table and shook out the contents of the bag. A piece of frozen flesh struck the table with a dull thud.

“Huh,” the technician said. “Looks eaten.”

“Yes, it does,” Stone said. “What do they want with us?”

The technician consulted the enclosed documents. “Lizard is biting local children. They have a question about identification of the species, and a concern about diseases transmitted from the bite.” She produced a child’s picture of a lizard, signed TINA at the top. “One of the kids drew a picture of the lizard.”

Stone glanced at the picture. “Obviously we can’t verify the species,” Stone said. “But we can check diseases easily enough, if we can get any blood out of this fragment. What are they calling this animal?”

“ ‘Basiliscus amoratus with three-toed genetic anomaly,’ ” she said, reading.

“Okay,” Stone said. “Let’s get started. Do an X-ray and take Polaroids for the record. Once we have blood, start running antibody sets until we get some matches.”

Before lunchtime, the lab had its answer: the lizard blood showed no significant reactivity to any viral or bacterial antigen. They had run toxicity profiles as well, and they had found only one positive match: the blood was mildly reactive to the venom of the Indian king cobra. They faxed the answer to Dr. Martin Guitierrez that same evening.

Martin Guitierrez read the fax from the Columbia Medical Center/Tropical Diseases Laboratory.

Guitierrez made two assumptions. First, that his identification of the lizard as a basilisk had been confirmed by scientists at Columbia University. And second, that the absence of communicable disease meant the recent episodes of sporadic lizard bites implied no serious health hazards for Costa Rica.

It was nearly midnight in the clinic in Bahia Anasco when the midwife Elena Morales heard a squeaking, chirping sound. Thinking that it was a rat, she quickly put a compress on the forehead of the mother and went into the next room to check on the newborn baby. As her hand touched the doorknob, she heard the chirping again, and she relaxed. Evidently it was just a bird. Costa Ricans said that when a bird came to visit a newborn child, it brought good luck.

Elena opened the door. The infant lay in a wicker bassinet, wrapped in a light blanket, only its face exposed. Around the rim of the bassinet, three dark-green lizards crouched like gargoyles. When they saw Elena, they cocked their heads and stared curiously at her, but did not flee. In the light of her flashlight Elena saw that blood dripped from their snouts. Softly chirping, one lizard bent down and, with a quick shake of its head, tore a ragged chunk of flesh from the baby.

Elena rushed forward, screaming, and the lizards fled into the darkness. But long before she reached the bassinet, she could see what had happened to the infant’s face, and she knew the child must be dead. The lizards scattered into the rainy night, chirping and squealing, leaving behind only bloody three-toed tracks, like birds.

Elena Morales decided not to report the lizard attack: she left the baby alone in the room. So she reported the death as SIDS: sudden infant death syndrome. This was a syndrome of unexplained death among very young children.

The university lab in San Jose that analyzed the saliva sample from Tina Bowman’s arm made several remarkable discoveries. There was, as expected, a great deal of serotonin. But among the salivary proteins was a real monster, one of the largest proteins known. Biological activity was still under study, but it seemed to be a neurotoxic poison related to cobra venom, although more primitive in structure.

The lab also detected trace quantities of the enzyme that was a marker for genetic engineering, and not found in wild animals, technicians assumed it was a lab contaminant and did not report it when they called Dr. Cruz, the physician in Puntarenas.

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

The Shore of the Inland Sea

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.”