The Lost World

"Does he live here?" Kelly said. She found it hard to believe. The apartment seemed so impersonal to her, almost inhuman. And her own apartment was such a mess all the time….

"Yeah, he does," Thorne said, pocketing the key. "It always looks like this. It’s why he can never live with a woman. He can’t stand to have anybody touch anything."

The living-room couches were arranged around a glass coffee table. On the table were four piles of books, each neatly aligned with the glass edge. Arby glanced at the titles. Catastrophe Theory and Emergent Structures. Inductive Processes in Molecular Evolution. Cellular Automata. Methodology of Non-Linear Adaptation. Phase Transition in Evolutionary Systems. There were also some older books, with titles in German.

Kelly sniffed the air. "Something cooking?"

"I don’t know" Thorne said. He went into the dining room. Along the wall, he saw a hot plate with a row of covered dishes. They saw a polished wood dining table, with a place set for one, silver and cut glass. Soup steamed from a bowl.

Thorne walked over and picked up a sheet of paper on the table and read: "Lobster bisque, baby organic greens, seared ahi tuna." A yellow Post-it was attached. "Hope your trip was good! Romelia."

"Wow, " Kelly said."You mean somebody makes dinner for him every day?"

"I guess," Thorne said. He didn’t seem impressed; he shuffled through a stack of unopened mail that had been set out beside the plate. Kelly turned to some faxes on a nearby table. The first one was from the Peabody Museum at Yale, in New Haven. "Is this German?" she said handing it to Thorne.

Dear Dr. Levine:

Your requested document:

"Geschichtliche Forschungsarbeiten über die Geologie Zentralamerikas, 1922-1929"

has been sent by Federal Express today.

Thank you.

(signed)

Dina Skrumbis, Archivist

"I can’t read it," Thorne said. "But I think it’s ‘Something Researches on the Geology of Central America.’ And it’s from the twenties – not exactly hot news."

"I wonder why he wanted it?" she said.

Thorne didn’t answer her. He went into the bedroom.

The bedroom had a spare, minimal look, the bed a black futon, neatly made. Thorne opened the closet doors, and saw racks of clothing, everything pressed, neatly spaced, much of it in plastic. He opened the top dresser drawer and saw socks folded, arranged by color.

"I don’t know how he can live like this," Kelly said.

"Nothing to it," Thorne said. "All you need is servants." He opened the other drawers quickly, one after another.

Kelly wandered over to the bedside table. There were several books there. The one on top was very small, and yellowing with age. It was in German; the title was Die Fünf Todesarten. She flipped through it, saw colored pictures of what looked like Aztecs in colorful costumes. It was almost like an illustrated children’s book she thought.

Underneath were books and journal articles with the dark-red cover of the Santa Fe Institute: Genetic Algorithms and Heuristic Networks. Geology of Central America, Tessellation Automata of Arbitrary Dimension. The 1989 Annual Report of the InGen Corporation. And next to the telephone, she noticed a sheet of hastily scribbled notes. She recognized the precise handwriting as Levine’s.

It said:

"SITE B"

Vulkanische

Taca?o?

Nublar?

1 of 5 Deaths?

in mtns? No!!!

maybe Guitierrez

careful

Kelly said, "What’s Site B? He has notes about it."

Thorne came over to look. "Vulkanische," he said. "That means volcanic,’ I think. And Taca?o and Nublar…They sound like place names. If they are, we can check that on an atlas…."

"And what’s this about one of five deaths?" Kelly said.

"Damned if I know," he said.

They were staring at the paper when Arby walked into the bedroom and said, "What’s Site B?"

Thorne looked up. "Why?"

"You better see his office," Arby said.

Levine had turned the second bedroom into an office. It was, like the rest of the apartment, admirably treat. There was a desk with papers laid out in tidy stacks alongside a computer, covered in plastic. But behind the desk there was a large corkboard that covered most of the wall. And on this board, Levine had tacked up maps, charts, newspaper clippings, Landsat images, and aerial photographs. At the top of the board was a large sign that said "Site B?"

Alongside that was a blurred, curling snapshot of a bespectacled Chinese man in a white lab coat, standing in the jungle beside a wooden sign that said "Site B." His coat was unbuttoned, and he was wearing a tee shirt with lettering on it.

Alongside the photo was a large blowup of the tee shirt, as seen in the original photograph. It was hard to read the lettering, which was partly covered on both sides by the lab coat, but the shirt seemed to say:

nGen Site B

esearch Facili

In neat handwriting, Levine had noted: "InGen Site B Research Facility???? WHERE???"

Just below that was a page cut from the InGen Annual Report. A circled paragraph read:

In addition to its headquarters in Palo Alto, where InGen maintains an ultra-modern 200,000 square foot research laboratory, the company runs three field laboratories around the world. A geological lab in South Africa, where amber and other biological specimens are acquired; a research farm in the mountains of Costa Rica, where exotic varieties of plants are grown; and a facility on the island of Isla Nublar, 120 miles west of Costa Rica.

Next to that Levine had written: "No B! Liars!"

Arby said, "He’s really obsessed with Site B."