The Lost World

"This one’s been hurt," she said.

Levine was standing in the high hide. He pressed the headset to his ear, and spoke into the microphone near his cheek. "I need a description," he said.

Thorne said, "There’s two of them, roughly two feet long, weighing maybe forty pounds. About the size of small cassowary birds. Large eyes. Short snouts. Pale-brown color. And there’s a ring of down around the necks."

"Can they stand?"

"Uh…if they can, not very well. They’re kind of flopping around. Squeaking a lot."

"Then they’re infants," Levine said, nodding. "Probably only a few days old. Never been out of the nest. I’d be very careful."

"Why is that?"

"With offspring that young," Levine said, "the parents won’t leave them for long."

Harding moved closer to the injured infant. Still mewling, the baby tried to crawl toward her, dragging its body awkwardly. One leg was bent at an odd angle. "I think the left leg’s hurt."

Eddie came closer, standing alongside her to see. "Is it broken?"

"Yeah, probably, but – "

"Hey!" Eddie said. The baby lunge d forward, and clamped its jaws around the ankle of his boot. He pulled his foot away, dragging the baby, which held its grip tightly. "Hey! Let go!"

Eddie lifted his leg up, shook it back and forth, but the baby refused to let go. He pulled for a moment longer, then stopped. Now the baby just lay there on the ground, breathing shallowly, jaws still locked around Eddie’s boot. "Jeez," Eddie said.

"Aggressive little guy, isn’t he," Sarah said. "Right from birth…"

Eddie looked down at the tiny, razor-sharp jaws. They hadn’t penetrated the leather. The baby held on firmly. With the butt of his rifle, he poked the infant’s head a couple of times. It had no effect at all. The baby lay on the ground, breathing shallowly. Its big eyes blinked slowly as they stared up at Eddie, but it did not release its grip.

They heard the distant roars of the parents, somewhere to the north. "Let’s get out of here," Malcolm said. "We’ve seen what we came here to see. We’ve got to find where Dodgson went."

Thorne said, "I think I saw a track up the trail. They might have gone off there."

"We better have a look."

They all started back to the car.

"Wait a minute," Eddie said, looking down at his foot. "What am I going to do about the baby?"

"Shoot it," Malcolm said, over his shoulder.

"You mean kill it?"

Sarah said, "It’s got a broken leg, Eddie, it’s going to die anyway."

"Yeah, but – "

Thorne called, "We’re going back up the trail, Eddie, and if we don’t find Dodgson, we’ll take the ridge road going toward the laboratory. Then down to the trailer again."

"Okay, Doc. I’m right behind you." Eddie lifted his rifle, turned it in his hands.

"Do it now," Sarah said, climbing into the Explorer. "Because you don’t want to be here when Momma and Poppa get back."

Gambler’s Ruin

Driving up the trail, Malcolm stared at the dashboard monitor, as the image flicked from one camera view to another. He was looking for Dodgson and the rest of his party.

Over the radio, Levine said, "How bad was it?"

"They took one egg," Malcolm said. "And we had to shoot one of the babies."

"So, a loss of two. Out of a total hatching brood of what, six?"

"That’s right."

"Frankly, I’d say it’s a minor matter," Levine said. "As long as you stop those people from doing anything more."

"We’re looking for them now," Malcolm said morosely.

Harding said, "It was bound to happen, Ian. You know you can’t expect to observe the animals without changing anything. It’s a scientific impossibility."

"Of course it is," Malcolm said. "That’s the greatest single scientific discovery of the twentieth century. You can’t study anything without changing it."

Since Galileo, scientists had adopted the view that they were objective observers of the natural world. That was implicit in every aspect of their behavior, even the way they wrote scientific papers, saying things like "It was observed…" As if nobody had observed it. For three hundred years, that impersonal quality was the hallmark of science. Science was objective, and the observer had no influence on the results he or she described.

This objectivity made science different from the humanities, or from religion-fields where the observer’s point of view was integral, where the observer was inextricably mixed up in the results observed.

But in the twentieth century, that difference had vanished. Scientific objectivity was gone, even at the most fundamental levels. Physicists now knew you couldn’t even measure a single subatomic particle without affecting it totally. If you stuck your Instruments in to measure a particle’s position, you changed its velocity. If you measured its velocity, you changed its position. That basic truth became the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that whatever you studied you also changed. In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.

"I know objectivity is impossible," Malcolm said impatiently. "I’m not concerned about that."

"Then what are you concerned about?"

"I’m concerned about the Gambler’s Ruin," Malcolm said, staring at the monitor.

Gambler’s Ruin was a notorious and much-debated statistical phenomenon that had major consequences both for evolution, and for everyday life. "Let’s say you’re a gambler," he said. "And you’re playing a coin-toss game. Every time the coin comes up heads, you win a dollar. Every time it comes up tails, you lose a dollar."