Jurassic Park (Page 51)
"It won’t bother us. Are you awake now? Come on."
He led her to the fence. It was twelve feet high, with a spiral of barbed wire at the top. It seemed to stretch far above them in the moonligbt. The moat was immediately on the other side.
Lex looked up at the fence doubtfully.
"Can you climb it?" Grant asked her.
Chapter 16
She handed him her glove, and her baseball. "Sure. Easy." She started to climb. "But I bet Timmy can’t."
Tim spun in fury: "You shut up."
"Timmy’s afraid of heights."
"I am not."
She climbed higher. "Are so."
"Am not."
"Then come and get me."
Grant turned to Tim, pale in the darkness. The boy wasn’t moving. "You okay with the fence, Tim?"
"Sure."
"Want some help?"
"Timmy’s a fraidy-cat," Lex called.
"What a stupid jerk," Tim said, and he started to climb.
"It’s freezing," Lex said. They were standing waist-deep in smelly water at the bottom of a deep concrete moat. They had climbed the fence without incident, except that Tim had torn his shirt on the coils of barbed wire at the top. Then they had all slid down into the moat, and now Grant was looking for a way out.
"At least I got Timmy over the fence for you," Lex said. "He really is scared most times."
"Thanks for your help," Tim said sarcastically. In the moonlight, he could see floating lumps on the surface. He moved along the moat, looking at the concrete wall on the far side. The concrete was smooth; they couldn’t possibly climb it.
"Eww," Lex said, pointing to the water.
"It won’t hurt you, Lex."
Grant finally found a place where the concrete had cracked and a vine grew down toward the water. He tugged on the vine, and it held his weight. "Let’s go, kids." They started to climb the vine, back to the field above.
It took only a few minutes to cross the field to the embankment leading to the below-grade service road, and the maintenance building off to the right. They passed two motion sensors, and Grant noticed with some uneasiness that the sensors were still not working, nor were the lights. More than two hours had passed since the power first went out, and it was not yet restored.
Somewhere in the distance, they heard the tyrannosaur roar. "Is he around here?" Lex said.
"No," Grant said. "We’re in another section of park from him." They slid down a grassy embankment and moved toward the concrete building. In the darkness it was forbidding, bunker-like.
"What is this place?" Lex said.
"It’s safe," Grant said, hoping that was true.
The entrance gate was large enough to drive a truck through. It was fitted with heavy bars. Inside, they could see, the building was an open shed, with piles of grass and bales of bay stacked among equipment.
The gate was locked with a heavy padlock. As Grant was examining it, Lex slipped sideways between the bars. "Come on, you guys."
Tim followed her. "I think you can do it, Dr. Grant."
He was right; it was a tight squeeze, but Grant was able to ease his body between the bars and get into the shed. As soon as he was inside, a wave of exhaustion struck him.
"I wonder if there’s anything to eat," Lex said.
"Just hay." Grant broke open a bale, and spread it around on the concrete. The hay in the center was warm. They lay down, feeling the warmth. Lex curled up beside him, and closed her eyes. Tim put his arm around her. He heard the sauropods trumpeting softly in the distance.
Neither child spoke. They were almost immediately snoring. Grant raised his arm to look at his watch, but it was too dark to see. He felt the warmth of the children against his own body.
Grant closed his eves, and slept.
Control
Muldoon and Gennaro came into the control room just as Arnold clapped his bands and said, "Got you, you little son of a bitch."
"What is it?" Gennaro said,
Arnold pointed to the screen:
Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}
Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}
if Link(Vgl,Vg2) set Lim(Vgl,Vg2) return
if Link(Vg2,Vgl) set Lim(Vg2,Vgl) return
on whte_rbt.obj link set security (Vgl), perimeter (Vg2)
limitDat.1 = maxbits (%22) to {limit .04} set on
limitDat.2 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit .2-var(dzh)}
on fini.obi call link.sst {security, perimeter} set to on
on fini.obi set link.sst {security, perimeter} restore
on fini.obi delete line rf whte_rbt.obj, fini.obj
Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}
Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}
IimitDat.4 = maxbits (%33) to {limit .04} set on
limitDat.5 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit .2-var(szh)}
"That’s it," Arnold said, pleased.
"That’s what?" Gennaro asked, staring at the screen.
"I finally found the command to restore the original code. The command called ‘fini.ob’ resets the linked parameters, namely the fence and the power.
"Good," Muldoon said.
"But it does something else," Arnold said. "It then erases the code lines that refer to it. It destroys all evidence it was ever there. Pretty slick."
Gennaro shook his head. "I don’t know much about computers." Although he knew enough to know what it meant when a high-tech company went back to the source code. It meant big, big problems.
"Well, watch this," Arnold said, and he typed in the command:
FINI.OBJ
The screen flickered and immediately changed.
Vg1 = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}
Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}
if Link(Vgl,Vg2) set Lim(Vgl,Vg2) return
if Link(Vg2,Vgl) set Lim(Vg2,Vgl) return
limitDat.1 = maxbits (%22) to {limit .04} set on
limitDat.2 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit .2-var(dzh)}
Vgl = GetHandl {dat.dt} tempCall {itm.temp}
Vg2 = GetHandl {dat.itl} tempCall {itm.temp}
IimitDat.4 = maxbits (%33) to {limit .04} set on
limitDat.5 = setzero, setfive, 0 {limit .2-var(szh)}
Muldoon pointed to the windows. "Look!" Outside, the big quartz lights were coming on throughout the park, They went to the windows and looked out.
"Hot damn," Arnold said,
Gennaro said, "Does this mean the electrified fences are back on?"
"You bet it does," Arnold said. "It’ll take a few seconds to get up to full power, because we’ve got fifty miles of fence out there, and the generator has to charge the capacitors along the way. But in half a minute we’ll be back in business," Arnold pointed to the vertical glass see-through map of the park.
On the map, bright red lines were snaking out from the power station, moving throughout the park, as electricity surged through the fences.
"And the motion sensors?" Gennaro said.
"Yes, them, too. It’ll be a few minutes while the computer counts. But everything’s working," Arnold said. "Half past nine, and we’ve got the whole damn thing back up and running."
Grant opened his eyes. Brilliant blue light was streaming into the building through the bars of the gate. Quartz light: the power was back on! Groggily, he looked at his watch. It was just nine-thirty. He’d been asleep only a couple of minutes. He decided he could sleep a few minutes more, and then he would go back up to the field and stand in front of the motion sensors and wave, setting them off. The control room would spot him; they’d send a car out to pick him and the kids up, he’d tell Arnold to recall the supply ship, and they’d all finish the night in their own beds back in the lodge.
He would do that right away. In just a couple of minutes. He yawned, and closed his eyes again.
"Not bad," Arnold said in the control room, staring at the glowing map. "There’s only three cutouts in the whole park. Much better than I hoped for."
"Cutouts?" Gennaro said.
"The fence automatically cuts out short-circuited sections," he explained. "You can see a big one here, in sector twelve, near the main road."
"That’s where the rex knocked the fence down," Muldoon said.
"Exactly. And another one is here in sector eleven. Near the sauropod maintenance building."
"Why would that section be out?" Gennaro said.
"God knows," Arnold said. "Probably storm damage or a fallen tree. We can check It on the monitor in a while. The third one is over there by the jungle river. Don’t know why that should be out, either."
As Gennaro looked, the map became more complex, filling with green spots and numbers. "What’s all this?"
"The animals. The motion sensors are working again, and the computer’s starting to identify the location of all the animals in the park. And anybody else, too."
Gennaro stared at the map. "You mean Grant and the kids . . ."
"Yes. We’ve reset our search number above four hundred. So, if they’re out there moving around," Arnold said, "the motion sensors will pick them up as additional animals." He stared at the map. "But I don’t see any additionals yet."
"Why does it take so long?" Gennaro said.
"You have to realize, Mr. Gennaro," Arnold said, "that there’s a lot of extraneous movement out there. Branches blowing in the wind, birds flying around, all kinds of stuff. The computer has to eliminate all the background movement. It may take-ah. Okay. Count’s finished."