The Lost World

One of the conches was speckled with crusty brown mold; the other had been covered with a plastic tarp. Next to this couch was what was left of Levine’s green backpack, with several deep tears on the fabric. On the coffee table were two empty plastic Evian bottles, a satellite phone, a pair of muddy hiking shorts, and several crumpled candy-bar wrappers. A bright-green snake slithered quickly away as they approached.

"So this is an InGen building?" Thorne said, looking at the wall sign.

"Absolutely," Malcolm said.

Eddie bent over Levine’s backpack, ran his fingers along the tears in the fabric. As he did so, a large rat jumped out from the pack.

"Jesus!"

The rat scurried away, squeaking. Eddie looked cautiously inside the pack. "I don’t think anybody’s going to want the rest of these candy bars," he said. He turned to the pile of clothes. "You getting a reading from this?" Some of the expedition clothes had micro-sensors sewn into them.

"No," Thorne said, moving his hand monitor. "I have a reading, but…it seems to be coming from there."

He pointed to a set of metal doors beyond the reception desk, leading into the building beyond. The doors had once been bolted shut and locked with rusted padlocks. But the padlocks now lay on the floor, broken open.

"Let’s go get him," Eddie said, heading for the doors. "What kind of a snake do you think that was?"

"I don’t know."

"Was it poisonous?"

"I don’t know."

The doors opened with a loud creak. The three men found themselves in a blank corridor, with broken windows along one wall, and dried leaves and debris on the floor. The walls were dirty and darkly stained in several places with what looked like blood. They saw several doors opening off the corridor. None appeared to be locked.

Plants were growing up through rips in the carpeted floor. Near the windows, where it was light, vines grew thickly over the cracked walls. More vines hung down from the ceiling. Thorne and the others headed down the hallway. There was no sound except their feet crunching on the dried leaves.

"Getting stronger," Thorne said, looking at his monitor. "He must be somewhere in this building."

Thorne opened the first door he came to, and saw a plain office: a desk and chair, a map of the island on the wall. A desk lamp, toppled over from the weight of tangled vines. A computer monitor, with a film of mold. At the far end of the room, light filtered through a grimy window.

They went down the hall to the second door, and saw an almost identical office: similar desk and chair, similar window at the far side of the room.

Eddie grunted. "Looks like we’re in an office building," he said.

Thorne went on. He opened the third door, and then the fourth. More offices.

Thorne opened the fifth door, and paused.

He was in a conference room, dirty with leaves and debris. There were animal droppings on the long wooden table in the center of the room. The window on the far side was dusty. Thorne was drawn to a large map, which covered one whole wall of the conference room. There were pushpins of various colors stuck in the map. Eddie came in, and frowned.

Beneath the map was a chest of drawers. Thorne tried to open them, but they were all locked. Malcolm walked slowly into the room, looking around, taking it in. "What’s this map mean?" Eddie said. "You have any idea what the pins are?"

Malcolm glanced at it. "Twenty pins in four different colors. Five pins of each color. Arranged in a pentagon, or anyway a five-pronged pattern of some kind, going to all parts of the island. I’d say it looks like a network."

"Didn’t Arby say there was a network on this island?"

"Yes, he did….Interesting…."

"Well, never mind that now," Thorne said. He went back into the hallway again, following the signal from his hand unit. Malcolm closed the door behind them, and they continued on. They saw more offices, but no longer opened the doors. They followed the signal from Levine.

At the end of the corridor was a pair of sliding glass doors marked NO ADMITTANCE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Thorne peered through the glass, but he could not see much beyond. He had the sense of a large space, and complex machinery, but the glass was dusty and streaked with grime. It was difficult to see.

Thorne said to Malcolm, "You really think you know what this building was for?"

"I know exactly what it was for," Malcolm said. "It’s a manufacturing plant for dinosaurs."

"Why," Eddie said, "would anybody want that?"

"Nobody would," Malcolm said. "That’s why they kept it a secret."

"I don’t get it," Eddie said.

Malcolm smiled. "Long story," he said.

He slipped his hands between the doors, and tried to pull them open, but they remained shut fast. He grunted, straining with effort. And then suddenly, with a metallic screech, they slid apart.

They stepped into the darkness beyond.

Their flashlights shone down an inky corridor, as they moved forward. "To understand this place, you have to go back ten years, to a man named John Hammond, and an animal called the quagga."

"The what?"

"The quagga," Malcolm said, "is an African mammal, rather like a zebra. It became extinct in the last century. But in the 1980s, somebody used the latest DNA-extraction techniques on a piece of quagga hide, and recovered a lot of DNA. So much DNA that people began to talk about bringing the quagga back to life. And if you could bring the quagga back to life, why not other extinct animals? The dodo? The saber-toothed tiger? Or even a dinosaur?"

"Where could you get dinosaur DNA?" Thorne said.