Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода. Майкл Крайтон

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 to Alan Grant in the amount of twelve thousand dollars.

      “Oh, sure,” Grant said. “I remember that. It was weird as hell, but I remember it. And it didn’t have anything to do with an island.”

      Alan Grant had found the first dinosaur eggs in Montana in 1979, and his paper made Grant a celebrity overnight. He reported that a herd of ten thousand duckbilled dinosaurs lived along the shore of a vast inland sea, had communal nests of eggs in the mud, raised their infant dinosaurs in the herd. It was during those days 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 a man named Gennaro or Gennino, something like that.”

      Morris nodded. “Donald Gennaro,” he said. “He’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 data on eating habits. But Gennaro said he knew we hadn’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 table. “You mind?”

      “No, go ahead.”

      “So Gennaro telephoned you in 1984. What happened then?”

      “Well,” Grant said. “You see our operation here. Fifty thousand would support two full summers of digging. I told him I’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 academic consultants, and named them. There were paleontologists like me, and a mathematician from Texas named Ian Malcolm, and a couple of ecologists. A systems analyst. Good group.”

      Morris nodded, making notes. “So you accepted the consultancy?”

      “Yes. I agreed to send him a summary of our work: what we knew about the habits of the duckbilled hadrosaurs we’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. Sometimes in the middle of the night. 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’ve been dead sixty-five million years. You’d think his calls could wait until morning.”

      “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 ’85.”

      Morris made a note. “And InGen? Any other contact with them?”

      “Not since 1985.”

      “And when did the Hammond Foundation begin to fund your research?”

      “I’d have to look,” Grant said. “But it was around then. Mid-eighties.”

      “And you know Hammond as just a rich dinosaur enthusiast.”

      “Yes.”

      Morris made another note.

      “Look,” Grant said. “If the EPA is so concerned about John Hammond and what he’s doing why don’t you just ask him about it?”

      “At the moment, we can’t,” Morris said.

      “Why not?” Grant asked.

      “Because we don’t have any evidence of wrongdoing,” Morris said. “But personally, I think it’s clear John Hammond is evading the law.”

      “Besides amber, there are other questions.” Morris explained, “In the few past years the InGen shipped to Costa Rica three very powerful supercomputers and twenty-four automated gene sequencers – machines that work out the genetic code by themselves. InGen was obviously setting up one of the most powerful genetic engineering facilities in the world in an obscure Central American country. A country with no regulations. That kind of thing has happened before.”

      There had already been cases of American bioengineering companies moving to another country so they could work without regulations and rules. The most scandalous, Morris explained, was the Biosyn rabies case.

      In 1986, Genetic Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino tested a bioengineered rabies vaccine on a farm in Chile. They didn’t test it. Biosyn modified the virus and you could get an infection just inhaling it.

      It was outrageous. It was irresponsible. It was criminally negligent. But no action was taken against Biosyn.

      “So that’s why we began our investigation of InGen,” Morris said. “About three weeks ago.”

      “And what have you actually found?” Grant said.

      “Not much,” Morris admitted. “When I go back to San Francisco, we’ll probably have to close the investigation.”

      At the far end of the trailer, the phone rang. Ellie answered it. She said, “He’s in a meeting right now. Can he call you back?”

      Morris snapped his briefcase shut and stood. “Thanks for your help,” he said.

      “No problem,” Grant said.

      Grant walked with Morris down the trailer to the door at the far end. Morris said, “Did Hammond ever ask for any physical materials from your site? Bones, or eggs, or anything like that?”

      “No,” Grant said.

      “Dr. Sattler mentioned you do some genetic work here.”

      “Well, not exactly,” Grant said. “When we remove fossils that are broken or for some other reason not suitable for museum preservation, we send the bones out to a lab that grinds them up and tries to extract proteins for us. The proteins are then identified and the report is sent back to us.”

      “Which lab is that?” Morris asked.

      “Medical Biologic Services in Salt Lake.”

      “How’d you choose them?”

      “Competitive bids.”

      “The lab has nothing to do with InGen?” Morris asked.

      “Not that I know,” Grant said.

      They came to the door of the trailer. Grant opened it, and felt the rush of hot air from outside. Morris paused