The Lost World

"I don’t see Dodgson anywhere," Malcolm said unhappily. "Where could he have gone?"

Thorne pushed the radio button. "Arby?"

"Yes, Doc."

"Do you see them?"

"No, but…" He hesitated.

"What?"

"Don’t you want to come back here now? It’s pretty amazing."

"What is?" Thorne said.

"Eddie," Arby said. "He just got back. And he brought the baby with

him."

Malcolm leaned forward. "He did what?"

FIFTH CONFIGURATION

"At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe."

IAN MALCOLM

Baby

In the trailer, they were clustered around the table where the baby Tyrannosaurus rex now lay unconscious on a stainless-steel pan, his large eyes closed, his snout pushed into the clear plastic oval of an oxygen mask. The mask almost fitted the baby’s blunt snout. The oxygen hissed softly.

"I couldn’t just leave him," Eddie said. "And I figured we can fix his leg…"

"But Eddie," Malcolm said, shaking his head.

"So I shot him full of morphine from the first-aid kit, and brought him back. You see? The oxygen mask almost fits him."

"Eddie," Malcolm said, "this was the wrong thing to do."

"Why? He’s okay. We just fix him and take him back."

"But you’re interfering with the system," Malcolm said.

The radio clicked. "This is extremely unwise," Levine said, over the radio. "Extremely."

"Thank you, Richard," Thorne said.

"I am entirely opposed to bringing any animal back to the trailer."

"Too late to worry about that now," Sarah Harding said. She had moved forward alongside the baby, and began strapping cardiac leads to the animal’s chest; they heard the thump of the heartbeat. It was very fast, over a hundred and fifty beats a minute. "How much morphine did you give him?"

"Gee," Eddie said. "I just…you know. The whole syringe."

"What is that? Ten cc’s?"

"I think. Maybe twenty."

Malcolm looked at Harding. "How long before it wears off?"

"I have no idea," she said. "I’ve sedated lions and jackals in the field, when I tagged them. With those animals, there’s a rough correlation between dose and body weight. But with young animals, it’s unpredictable. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours. And I don’t know a thing about baby tyrannosaurs. Basically, it’s a function of metabolism, and this one seems to be rapid, bird-like. The heart’s pumping very fast. All I can say is, let’s get him out of here as quickly as possible."

Harding picked up the small ultrasound transducer and held it to the baby’s leg. She looked over her shoulder at the monitor. Kelly and Arby were blocking the view. "Please, give us a little room here," she said, and they moved away. "We don’t have much time. Please."

As they moved away, Sarah saw the green-and-white outlines of the leg and its bones. Surprisingly like a large bird, she thought. A vulture or a stork. She moved the transducer. "Okay…there’s the metatarsals…and there’s the tibia and fibula, the two bones of the lower leg…."

Arby said, "Why are the bones different shades like that?" The legs had some dense white sections within paler-green outlines.

"Because it’s an infant," Harding said. "His legs are still mostly cartilage, with very little calcified bone. I’d guess this baby probably can’t walk yet – at least, not very well. There. Look at the patella….You can see the blood supply to the joint capsule…."

"How come you know all this anatomy?" Kelly said.

"I have to. I spend a lot of time looking through the seat of predators, she said. "Examining pieces of bones that are left behind, and figuring out which animals have been eaten. To do that, you have to know comparative anatomy very well." She moved the transducer along the baby’s leg. "And my father was a vet."

Malcolm looked up sharply. "Your father was a vet?"

"Yes. At the San Diego Zoo. He was a bird specialist. But I don’t see…Can you magnify this?"

Arby flicked a switch. The image doubled in size.

"Ah. Okay. All right. There it is. You see it?"

"No."

"It’s mid-fibula. See it? A thin black line. That’s a fracture, just above the epiphysis."

"That little black line there?" Arby said.

"That little black line means death for this infant," Sarah said. "The fibula won’t heal straight, so the ankle joint can’t pivot when he stands on his hind feet. The baby won’t be able to run, and probably can’t even walk. It’ll be crippled, and a predator will pick it off before it gets more than a few weeks old."

Eddie said, "But we can set it."

"Okay," Sarah said. "What were you going to use for a cast?"

"Diesterase," Eddie said. "I brought a kilo of it, in hundred-cc tubes. I packed lots, for glue. The stuff’s polymer resin, it solidifies hard as steel."

"Great," Harding said. "That’ll kill him, too."

"It will?"

"He’s growing, Eddie. In a few weeks he’ll be much larger. We need something that’s rigid, but biodegradeable," she said. "Something that will wear off, or break off, in three to five weeks, when his leg’s healed. What have you got?"

Eddie frowned. "I don’t know."

"Well, we haven’t got much time," Harding said.

Eddie said, "Doc? This is like one of your famous test questions. How to make a dinosaur cast with only Q-tips and superglue."