The Lost World Read Free Page B

doesn't want to hurt tourism. So nobody will talk. That's what I've heard."
    Malcolm stared at him. "And you believe that?"
    "Not at first, I didn't," Levine said. "But the thing is, I keep hearing it. The rumors keep floating around. Supposedly you, and Alan Grant, and a bunch of other people were there."
    "Did you ask Grant about it?"
    "I asked him, last year, at a conference in Peking. He said it was absurd."
    Malcolm nodded slowly.
    "Is that what you say?" Levine asked, drinking his beer. "I mean, you know Grant, don't you?"
    "No. I never met him."
    Levine was watching Malcolm closely. "So it's not true?"
    Malcolm sighed. "Are you familiar with the concept of a technomyth? It was developed by Geller at Princeton. Basic thesis is that we've lost all the old myths, Orpheus and Eurydice and Perseus and Medusa. So we fill the gap with modern techno-myths. Geller listed a dozen or so. One is that an alien's living at a hangar at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Another is that somebody invented a carburetor that gets a hundred and fifty miles to the gallon, but the automobile companies bought the patent and are sitting on it. Then there's the story that the Russians trained children in ESP at a secret base in Siberia and these kids can kill people anywhere in the world with their thoughts. The story that the lines in Nazca, Peru, are an alien spaceport. That the CIA released the AIDS virus to kill homosexuals. That Nikola Tesla discovers an incredible energy source but his notes are lost. That in Istanbul there's a tenth-century drawing that shows the earth from space. That the Stanford Research Institute found a guy whose body glows in the dark. Get the picture?"
    "You're saying InGen's dinosaurs are a myth," Levine said.
    "Of course they are. They have to be. Do you think it's possible to genetically engineer a dinosaur?"
    "The experts all tell me It's not."
    "And they're right," Malcolm said. He glanced at Harding, as if for confirmation. She said nothing, just drank her beer.
    In fact, Harding knew something more about these dinosaur rumors. Once after surgery, Malcolm had been delirious, mumbling nonsense from the anaesthesia and pain medication. And he had been seemingly fearful, twisting in the bed, repeating the names of several kinds of dinosaurs. Harding had asked the nurse about it; she said he was like that after every operation. The hospital staff assumed it was a drug-induced fantasy - yet it seemed to Harding that Malcolm was reliving some terrifying actual experience. The feeling was heightened by the slangy, familiar way Malcolm referred to the dinosaurs: he called them "raptors" and "compys" and "trikes." And he seemed especially fearful of the raptors.
    Later, when he was back home, she had asked him about his delirium. He had just shrugged it off, making a bad joke - "At least I didn't mention other women, did I?" And then he made some comment about having been a dinosaur nut as a kid, and how illness made you regress. His whole attitude was elaborately indifferent, as if it were all unimportant; she had the distinct feeling he was being evasive. But she wasn't inclined to push it; those were the days when she was in love with him, her attitude indulgent.
    Now he was looking at her in a questioning way, as if to ask if she was going to contradict him. Harding just raised an eyebrow, and stared back. He must have his reasons. She could wait him out.
    Levine leaned forward across the table toward Malcolm and said, "So the InGen story is entirely untrue?"
    "Entirely untrue," Malcolm said, nodding gravely. "Entirely untrue."
    Malcolm had been denying the speculation for three years. By now he was getting good at it; his weariness was no longer affected but genuine. In fact, he had been a consultant to International Genetic Technologies of Palo Alto in the summer of 1989, and he had made a trip to Costa Rica for them, which had turned out disastrously. In the aftermath, everyone involved had moved quickly to