"I didn't think so," Grant said.
"It still doesn't make sense," Wu said. "You can't support fifty additional animals on a couple of nests of eggs."
"No," Grant said. "I assume they are eating something else as well. Perhaps small rodents. Mice and rats?"
There was another silence.
"Let me guess," Grant said. "When you first came to the island, you had a problem with rats. But as time passed, the problem faded away."
"Yes. That's true… "
"And you never thought to investigate why."
"Well, we just assumed…" Arnold said.
"Look," Wu said, "the fact remains, all the animals are female. They can't breed."
Grant had been thinking about that. He had recently learned of an intriguing West German study that he suspected held the answer. "When you made your dinosaur DNA," Grant said, "you were working with fragmentary pieces, is that right?"
"Yes," Wu said.
"In order to make a complete strand, we're you ever required to include DNA fragments from other species?"
"Occasionally, yes," Wu said. "It's the only way to accomplish the job. Sometimes we included avian DNA, from a variety of birds, and sometimes reptilian DNA."
"Any amphibian DNA? Specifically, frog DNA?"
"Possibly. I'd have to check."
"Check," Grant said. "I think you'll find that holds the answer."
Malcolm said, "Frog DNA? Why frog DNA?"
Gennaro said impatiently, "Listen, this is all very intriguing, but we're forgetting the main question: have any animals gotten off the island?"
Grant said, "We can't tell from these data."
"Then how are we going to find out?"
"There's only one way I know," Grant said. "We'll have to find the individual dinosaur nests, inspect them, and count the remaining egg fragments. From that we may be able to determine how many animals were originally hatched. And we can begin to assess whether any are missing."
Malcolm said, "Even so, you won't know if the missing animals are killed, or dead from natural causes, or whether they have left the island."
"No," Grant said, "but it's a start. And I think we can get more information from an intensive look at the population graphs."
"How are we going to find these nests?"
"Actually," Grant said, "I think the computer will be able to help us with that."
"Can we go back now?" Lex said. "I'm hungry."
"Yes, let's go," Grant said, smiling at her. "You've been very patient."
"You'll be able to eat in about twenty minutes," Ed Regis said, starting toward the two Land Cruisers.
"I'll stay for a while," Ellie said, "and get photos of the stego with Dr. Harding's camera. Those vesicles in the mouth will have cleared up by tomorrow."
"I want to get back," Grant said. "I'll go with the kids."
"I will, too," Malcolm said.
"I think I'll stay," Gennaro said, "and go back with Harding in his Jeep, with Dr. Sattler."
"Fine, let's go."
They started walking. Malcolm said, "Why exactly is our lawyer staying?"
Grant shrugged. "I think it might have something to do with Dr. Sattler."
"Really? The shorts, you think?"
"It's happened before," Grant said.
When they came to the Land Cruisers, Tim said, "I want to ride in the front one this time, with Dr. Grant."
Malcolm said, "Unfortunately, Dr. Grant and I need to talk."
"I'll just sit and listen. I won't say anything," Tim said.
"It's a private conversation," Malcolm said.
"Tell you what, Tim," Ed Regis said. "Let them sit in the rear car by themselves. We'll sit in the front car, and you can use the night-vision goggles. Have you ever used night-vision goggles, Tim? They're goggles with very sensitive CCDs that allow you to see in the dark."
"Neat," he said, and moved toward the first car.
"Hey!" Lex said. "I want to use it, too."
"No," Tim said.
"No fair! No fair! You get to do everything, Timmy!"
Ed Regis watched them go and said to Grant, "I can see what the ride back is going to be like."
Grant and Malcolm climbed into the second car. A few raindrops spattered the windshield. "Let's get going," Ed Regis said. "I'm about ready for dinner. And I could do with a nice banana daiquiri. What do you say, folks? Daiquiri sound good?" He pounded the metal panel of the car. "See you back at camp" he said, and he started running toward the first car, and climbed aboard.
A red light on the dashboard blinked. With a soft electric whirr, the Land Cruisers started off.
Driving back in the fading light, Malcolm seemed oddly subdued. Grant said, "You must feel vindicated. About your theory."
"As a matter of fact, I'm feeling a bit of dread. I suspect we are at a very dangerous point."
"Why?"
"Intuition."
"Do mathematicians believe in intuition?"
"Absolutely. Very important, intuition. Actually, I was thinking of fractals," Malcolm said. "You know about fractals?"
Grant shook his head. "Not really, no."
"Fractals are a kind of geometry, associated with a man named Mandelbrot. Unlike ordinary Euclidean geometry that everybody learns in school-squares and cubes and spheres-fractal geometry appears to describe real objects in the natural world. Mountains and clouds are fractal shapes. So fractals are probably related to reality. Somehow.
"Well, Mandelbrot found a remarkable thing with his geometric tools. He found that things looked almost identical at different scales."
"At different scales?" Grant said.
"For example," Malcolm said, "a big mountain, seen from far away, has a certain rugged mountain shape. If you get closer, and examine a small peak of the big mountain, it will have the same mountain shape. In fact, you can go all the way down the scale to a tiny speck of rock, seen under a microscope-it will have the same basic fractal shape as the big mountain."
"I don't really see why this is worrying you," Grant said. He yawned. He smelled the sulfur fumes of the volcanic steam. They were coming now to the section of road that ran near the coastline, overlooking the beach and the ocean.
"It's a way of looking at things," Malcolm said. "Mandelbrot found a sameness from the smallest to the largest. And this sameness of scale also occurs for events."
"Events?"
"Consider cotton prices," Malcolm said. "There are good records of cotton prices going back more than a hundred years. When you study fluctuations in cotton prices, you find that the graph of price fluctuations in the course of a day looks basically like the graph for a week, which looks basically like the graph for a year, or for ten years. And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there… And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day."
"I guess it's one way to look at things," Grant said.
"No," Malcolm said. "It's the only way to look at things. At least, the only way that is true to reality. You see, the fractal idea of sameness carries within it an aspect of recursion, a kind of doubling back on itself, which means that events are unpredictable. That they can change suddenly, and without warning."
"Okay…"
"But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us," Malcolm said, "that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way." Malcolm sat back in his seat, looking toward the other Land Cruiser, a few yards ahead. "That's a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true."
At that moment, the cars jolted to a stop, "What's happened?" Grant said.
Up ahead, they saw the kids in the car, pointing toward the ocean. Offshore, beneath lowering clouds, Grant saw the dark outline of the supply boat making its way back toward Puntarenas.
"Why have we stopped?" Malcolm said.