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SECOND ITERATION

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"With subsequent drawings of the fractal curve, sudden changes may appear"

IAN MALCOM

The Shore of the Inland Sea

Alan Grant crouched down, his nose inches frorees His knees ached, despite the rug-layer&039;s pads he wore His lungs burned from the harsh alkaline dust Sweat dripped off his forehead onto the ground But Grant was oblivious to the discomfort His entire attention was focused on the six-inch square of earth in front of hi patiently with a dental pick and an artist&039;s ca, and no thicker than his little finger The teeth were a row of s Bits of bone flaked away as he dug Grant paused for ato expose it There was no question that this was the jawbone from an infant carnivorous dinosaur Its owner had died seventy-nine e of about two ht find the rest of the skeleton as well If so, it would be the first complete skeleton of a baby carnivore -

"Hey, Alan!"

Alan Grant looked up, blinking in the sunlight He pulled down his sunglasses, and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm

He was crouched on an eroded hillside in the badlands outside Snakewater, Montana Beneath the great blue bowl of sky, blunted hills, exposed outcroppings of cru limestone, stretched for miles in every direction There was not a tree, or a bush Nothing but barren rock, hot sun, and whining wind

Visitors found the badlands depressingly bleak, but when Grant looked at this landscape, he saw so else entirely This barren land hat remained of another, very different world, which had vanished eighty o In his mind&039;s eye, Grant saw himself back in the warreat inland sea This inland sea was a thousandall the way froy peaks of the Appalachians All of the American West was underwater

At that time, there were thin clouds in the sky overhead, darkened by the smoke of nearby volcanoes The atrew rapidly along the shoreline There were no fish in these waters, but there were claae from the surface A few carnivorous dinosaurs prowled the swa the palm trees And offshore was a setation, this island formed a protected sanctuary where herds of herbivorous duckbilled dinosaurs laid their eggs in co

Over the reen alkaline lake grew shallower, and finally vanished The exposed land buckled and cracked under the heat And the offshore island with its dinosaur eggs became the eroded hillside in northern Montana which Alan Grant was now excavating

"Hey, Alan!"

He stood, a barrel-chested, bearded enerator, and the distant clatter of the jackha into the dense rock on the next hill He saw the kids working around the jackha them for fossils At the foot of the hill, he saw the six tipis of his ca mess tent, and the trailer that served as their field laboratory And he saw Ellie waving to him, from the shadow of the field laboratory

"Visitor!" she called, and pointed to the east

Grant saw the cloud of dust, and the blue Ford sedan bouncing over the rutted road toward theht on time On the other hill, the kids looked up with interest They didn&039;t get many visitors in Snakewater, and there had been a lot of speculation about what a lawyer froency would want to see Alan Grant about

But Grant knew that paleontology, the study of extinct life, had in recent years taken on an unexpected relevance to the ent questions about the weather, deforestation, global war, or the ozone layer often seemed answerable, at least in part, with inforists could provide He had been called as an expert witness twice in the past few years

Grant started down the hill to hed in the white dust as he sla his hand "I&039;m with the San Francisco office "

Grant introduced himself and said, "You look hot Want a beer?"

"Jesus, yeah" Morris was in his late twenties, wearing a tie, and pants fro-tip shoes crunched on the rocks as they walked toward the trailer

"When I first caht this was an Indian reservation," Morris said, pointing to the tipis

"No," Grant said "Just the best way to live out here" Grant explained that in 1978, the first year of the excavations, they had come out in North Slope octahedral tents, the most advanced available But the tents always blew over in the wind They tried other kinds of tents, with the sa up tipis, which were larger inside, more comfortable, and more stable in wind "These&039;re Blackfoot tipis, built around four poles," Grant said "Sioux tipis are built around three But this used to be Blackfoot territory, so we thought"

"Uh-huh," Morris said "Very fitting" He squinted at the desolate landscape and shook his head "How long you been out here?"

"About sixty cases," Grant said When Morris looked surprised, he explained, "We measure time in beer We start in June with a hundred cases We&039;ve gone through about sixty so far"

"Sixty-three, to be exact," Ellie Sattler said, as they reached the trailer Grant was a cut-off jeans and a workshirt tied at her midriff She enty-four and darkly tanned Her blond hair was pulled back

"Ellie keeps us going," Grant said, introducing her "She&039;s very good at what she does"

"What does she do?" Morris asked

"Paleobotany," Ellie said "And I also do the standard field preps" She opened the door and they went inside

The air conditioning in the trailer only brought the terees, but it seemed cool after thewooden tables, with tiny bone speci were ceraar

Morris glanced at the bones "I thought dinosaurs were big," he said

"They were," Ellie said "But everything you see here comes from babies Snakewater is i sites here Until we started this work, there were hardly any infant dinosaurs known Only one nest had ever been found, in the Gobi Desert We&039;ve discovered a dozen different hadrosaur nests, cos and bones of infants"

While Grant went to the refrigerator, she showed Morris the acetic acid baths, which were used to dissolve away the limestone from the delicate bones

"They look like chicken bones," Morris said, peering into the ceramic dishes

"Yes," she said "They&039;re very bird-like"

"And what about those?" Morris said, pointing through the trailerto piles of large bones outside, wrapped in heavy plastic

"Rejects," Ellie said "Bones too fraground, In the old days we&039;d just discard the"

"Genetic testing?" Morris said

"Here you go," Grant said, thrusting a beer into his band He gave another to Ellie She chugged hers, throwing her long neck back Morris stared

"We&039;re pretty informal here," Grant said "Want to step into my office?"

"Sure," Morris said Grant led him to the end of the trailer, where there was a torn couch, a sagging chair, and a battered endtable Grant dropped onto the couch, which creaked and exhaled a cloud of chalky dust He leaned back, thuestured for Morris to sit in the chair "Make yourself comfortable"

Grant was a professor of paleontology at the University of Denver, and one of the foremost researchers in his field, but he had never been comfortable with social niceties He saw himself as an outdoor y was done outdoors, with your bands Grant had little patience for the academics, for the museum curators, for what he called Teacup Dinosaur Hunters And he took some pains to distance himself in dress and behavior fro his lectures in jeans and sneakers

Grant watched as Morris primly brushed off the seat of the chair before he sat down Morris opened his briefcase, rulanced back at Ellie, as lifting bones with tweezers fro no attention to the why I&039;m here"

Grant nodded "It&039;s a long way to come, Mr Morris"

"Well," Morris said, "to get right to the point, the EPA is concerned about the activities of the Ha from them"

"Thirty thousand dollars a year," Grant said, nodding "For the last five years"

"What do you know about the foundation?" Morris said

Grant shrugged "The Harants They fund research all over the world, including several dinosaur researchers I know they support Bob Kerry out of the Tyrrell in Alberta, and John Weller in Alaska Probably more"

"Do you knohy the Hammond Foundation supports so much dinosaur research?" Morris asked

"Of course It&039;s because old John Hammond is a dinosaur nut"

"You&039;ve ed "Once or twice He comes here for brief visits He&039;s quite elderly, you know And eccentric, the way rich people sometimes are But always very enthusiastic Why?"

"Well," Morris said, "the Haanization" He pulled out a Xeroxed world map, marked with red dots, and passed it to Grant "These are the digs the foundation financed last year Notice anything odd about them? Montana, Alaska, Canada, SwedenThey&039;re all sites in the north There&039;s nothing below the forty-fifth parallel" Morris pulled out more maps "It&039;s the same, year after year Dinosaur projects to the south, in Utah or Colorado or Mexico, never get funded The Has We&039;d like to knohy"

Grant shuffled through the maps quickly If it was true that the foundation only supported cold-weather digs, then it was strange behavior, because so in hot climates, and -

"And there are other puzzles," Morris said "For example, what is the relationship of dinosaurs to amber?"

"Amber?"

"Yes It&039;s the hard yellow resin of dried tree sap-"

"I knohat it is," Grant said "But why are you asking?"

"Because," Morris said, "over the last five years, Hammond has purchased enormous quantities of a many pieces of museum-quality jewelry The foundation has spent seventeen est privately held stock of this material in the world"

"I don&039;t get it," Grant said

"Neither does anybody else," Morris said "As far as we can tell, it doesn&039;t make any sense at all Amber is easily synthesized It has no commercial or defense value There&039;s no reason to stockpile it But Hammond has done just that, over many years"

"A his head

"And what about his island in Costa Rica?" Morris continued "Ten years ago, the Haovernical preserve"

"I don&039;t know anything about that," Grant said, frowning

"I haven&039;t been able to find out much," Morris said "The island is a hundred ed, and it&039;s in an area of ocean where the combinations of wind and currentThey used to call it Cloud Island Isla Nublar Apparently the Costa Ricans were amazed that anybody would want it" Morris searched in his briefcase "The reason Ito the records, you were paid a consultant&039;s fee in connection with this island"

"I was?" Grant said

Morris passed a sheet of paper to Grant It was the Xerox of a check issued in March 1984 from InGen Inc, Farallon Road, Palo Alto, California Made out to Alan Grant In the amount of twelve thousand dollars At the lower corner, the check was marked CONSULTANT SERVICES/COSTA RICA/JUVENILE HYPERSPACE

"Ob, sure," Grant said "I remember that It eird as hell, but I re to do with an island"

Alan Grant had found the first clutch of dinosaur eggs in Montana in 1979, and otten around to publishing his findings until 1983 His paper, with its report of a herd of ten thousand duckbilled dinosaurs living along the shore of a vast inland sea, building co their infant dinosaurs in the herd, ht The notion of s of cute babies poking their snouts out of the eggs-had appeal around the world Grant was besieged with requests for interviews, lectures, books Characteristically, he turned the only to continue his excavations But it was during those frantic days of the mid-1980s that he was approached by the InGen corporation with a request for consulting services

"Had you heard of InGen before?" Morris asked "No"

"How did they contact you?"

"Telephone call It was alike that"

Morris nodded "Donald Gennaro," he said "He&039;s the legal counsel for InGen"

"Anyway, he wanted to know about eating habits of dinosaurs And he offered me a fee to draw up a paper for him" Grant drank his beer, set the can on the floor "Gennaro was particularly interested in young dinosaurs Infants and juveniles What they ate I guess he thought I would know about that"

"Did you?"

"Not really, no I told him that We had found lots of skeletal material, but we had very little dietary data But Gennaro said he knee hadn&039;t published everything, and he wanted whatever we had And he offered a very large fee Fifty thousand dollars"

Morris took out a tape recorder and set it on the endtable "You o ahead"

"So Gennaro telephoned you in 1984 What happened then?"

"Well," Grant said "You see our operation here Fifty thousand would support two full su I told him I&039;d do what I could"

"So you agreed to prepare a paper for him"

"Yes"

"On the dietary habits of juvenile dinosaurs?"

"Yes"

"You met Gennaro?"

"No Just on the phone"

"Did Gennaro say why he wanted this information?"

"Yes," Grant said "He was planning a museum for children, and he wanted to feature baby dinosaurs He said he was hiring a number of acadeists like me, and a matheists A systeroup"

Morris nodded,notes "So you accepted the consultancy?"

"Yes I agreed to send him a summary of our work: e knew about the habits of the duckbilled hadrosaurs we&039;d found"

"What kind of information did you send?" Morris asked

"Everything: nesting behavior, territorial ranges, feeding behavior, social behavior Everything"

"And how did Gennaro respond?"

"He kept calling and calling Soht Would the dinosaurs eat this? Would they eat that? Should the exhibit include this? I could never understand why he was so worked up I mean, I think dinosaurs are important, too, but not that important They&039;ve been dead sixty-five million years You&039;d think his calls could wait until "

"I see," Morris said "And the fifty thousand dollars?"

Grant shook his head "I got tired of Gennaro and called the whole thing off We settled up for twelve thousand That must have been about the middle of &039;85"

Morris made a note "And InGen? Any other contact with them?"

"Not since 1985"

"And when did the Hain to fund your research?"

"I&039;d have to look," Grant said "But it was around then Mid-eighties"