Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton Read Free Book Online Page B

was marked CONSULTANT SERVICES/COSTA RICA/JUVENILE HYPERSPACE.
        "Ob, 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 clutch of dinosaur eggs in Montana in 1979, and many more in the next two years, but he hadn't gotten 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 communal nests of eggs in the mud, raising their infant dinosaurs in the herd, made Grant a celebrity overnight. The notion of maternal instincts in giant dinosaurs-and the drawings 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 them all down, wanting 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 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 dietary data. 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 endtable. "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