"I'll look around. You planning for an earthquake?"
"Something like that," Malcolm said. "Malcolm Effect implies catastrophic changes."
"But Arnold says all the systems are working perfectly."
"That's when it happens," Malcolm said.
Ellie said, "You don't think much of Arnold, do you?"
"He's all right. He's an engineer. Wu's the same. They're both technicians. They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences. That's how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don't see that."
"Don't you think it's just human nature?" Ellie said.
"God, no," Malcolm said. "That's like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It's nothing of the sort. It's uniquely Western training, and much of the rest of the world is nauseated by the thought of it." He winced in pain. "The morphine's making me philosophical."
"You want some water?"
"No. I'll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that's not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.'
"Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don't do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators sear the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.
"The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can't just watch. They can't just appreciate. They can't just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist's job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific." He sighed, and sank back.
Ellie said, "Don't you think you're overstating-"
"What does one of your excavations look like a year later?"
"Pretty had," she admitted.
"You don't replant, you don't restore the land after you dig?"
"No."
"Why not?"
She shrugged. "There's no money, I guess…
"There's only enough money to dig, but not to repair?"
"Well, we're just working in the badlands…"
"Just the badlands," Malcolm said, shaking his head. "Just trash. Just byproducts. Just side effects… I'm trying to tell you that scientists want it this way. They want byproducts and trash and scars and side effects. It's a way of reassuring themselves. It's built into the fabric of science, and it's increasingly a disaster."
"Then what's the answer?"
"Get rid of the thintelligent ones. Take them out of power."
"But then we'd lose all the advances-"
"What advances?" Malcolm said irritably. "The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics… Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?"
Ellie said nothing.
"Because there haven't been any advances," Malcolm said. "Not really. Thirty thousand years ago, when men were doing cave paintings at Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep, or do whatever they wanted. And they lived in a natural world, with clean air, clean water, beautiful trees and sunsets. Think about it. Twenty hours a week. Thirty thousand years ago."
Ellie said, "You want to turn back the clock?"
"No," Malcolm said. "I want people to wake up. We've had four hundred years of modern science, and we ought to know by now what it's good for, and what it's not good for. It's time for a change."
"Before we destroy the planet?" she said.
He sighed, and closed his eyes. "Oh dear," he said. "That's the last thing I would worry about."
In the dark tunnel of the jungle river, Grant went hand over hand, holding branches, moving the raft cautiously forward. He still heard the sounds. And finally he saw the dinosaurs.
"Aren't those the ones that are poison?"
"Yes," Grant said. "Dilophosaurus."
Standing on the riverbank were two dilophosaurs. The ten-foot-tall bodies were spotted yellow and black. Underneath, the bellies were bright green, like lizards. Twin red curving crests ran along the top of the head from the eyes to the nose, making a V shape above the head. The bird-like quality was reinforced by the way they moved, bending to drink from the river, then rising to snarl and hoot.
Lex whispered, "Should we get out and walk?"
Grant shook his head no. The dilophosaurs were smaller than the tyrannosaur, small enough to slip through the dense foliage at the banks of the river. And they seemed quick, as they snarled and hooted at each other.
"But we can't get past them in the boat," Lex said. "They're poison."
"We have to," Grant said. "Somehow."
The dilophosaurs continued to drink and hoot. They seemed to be interacting with each other in a strangely ritualistic, repetitive way. The animal on the left would bend to drink, opening its mouth to bare long rows of sharp teeth, and then it would hoot. The animal on the right would boot in reply and bend to drink, in a mirror image of the first animal's movements. Then the sequence would be repeated, exactly the same way.
Grant noticed that the animal on the right was smaller, with smaller spots on its back, and its crest was a duller red-
"I'll be damned," he said. "It's a mating ritual."
"Can we get past them?" Tim asked.
"Not the way they are now. They're right by the edge of the water." Grant knew animals often performed such mating rituals for hours at a time. They went without food, they paid attention to nothing else… He glanced at his watch. Nine-twenty.
"What do we do?" Tim said.
Grant sighed. "I have no idea."
He sat down in the raft, and then the dilopbosaurs began to bonk and roar repeatedly, in agitation. He looked up. The animals were both facing away from the river.
"What is it?" Lex said.
Grant smiled, "I think we're finally getting some help." He pushed off from the bank. "I want you two kids to lie flat on the rubber. We'll go past as fast as we can. But just remember: whatever happens, don't say anything, and don't move- Okay?"
The raft began to drift downstream, toward the hooting dilophosaurs. It gained speed. Lex lay at Grant's feet, staring at him with friehtened eyes. They were coming closer to the dilophosaurs, which were still turned away from the river. But he pulled out his air pistol, checked the chamber.
The raft continued on, and they smelled a peculiar odor, sweet and nauseating at the same time. It smelled like dried vomit. The hooting of the dilophosaurs was louder. The raft came around a final bend and Grant caught his breath. The dilophosaurs were just a few feet away, honking at the trees beyond the river.
As Grant had suspected, they were honking at the tyrannosaur. The tyrannosaur was trying to break through the foliage, and the dilos hooted and stomped their feet in the mud. The raft drifted past them. The smell was nauseating. The tyrannosaur roared, probably because it saw the raft. But in another moment…
A thump.
The raft stopped moving. They were aground, against the riverbank, just a few feet downstream from the dilophosaurs.
Lex whispered, "Oh, great "
There was a long slow scraping sound of the raft against the mud. Then the raft was moving again. They were going down the river. The tyrannosaur roared a final time and moved off; one dilophosaur looked surprised, then hooted. The other dilophosaur hooted in reply.
The raft floated downriver.
Tyrannosaur
The Jeep bounced along in the glaring sun. Muldoon was driving, with Gennaro at his side. They were in an open field, moving away from the dense line of foliage and palm trees that marked the course of the river, a hundred yards to the east. They came to a rise, and Muldoon stopped the car.