Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

     They moved Malcolm to another room in the lodge, to a clean bed. Hammond seemed to revive, and began bustling around, straightening up. “Well,” he said, “at least disaster is averted.”
     “What disaster is that?” Malcolm said, sighing.
     “Well,” Hammond said, “they didn’t get free and overrun the world.”
     Malcolm sat up on one elbow. “You were worried about that?”
     “Surely that’s what was at stake,” Hammond said. “These animals, lacking predators, might get out and destroy the planet.”
     “You egomaniacal idiot,” Malcolm said in a fury. “Do you have any idea what you are talking about? You think you can destroy the planet? My, what intoxicating power you must have.” Malcolm sank back on the bed. “You can’t destroy this planet. You can’t ever come close.”
     “Most people believe,” Hammond said stiffly, “that the planet is in jeopardy.”
     “Well, it’s not,” Malcolm said.
     “All the experts agree that our planet is in trouble.”
     Malcolm sighed. “Let me tell you about our planet,” he said. “Our planet is four and a half billion years old. There has been life on this planet for nearly that long. Three point eight billion years. The first bacteria. And, later, the first multicellular animals, then the first complex creatures, in the sea, on the land. Then the great sweeping ages of animals—the amphibians, the dinosaurs, the mammals, each lasting millions upon millions of years. Great dynasties of creatures arising, flourishing, dying away. All this happening against a background of continuous and violent upheaval, mountain ranges thrust up and eroded away, cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving… Endless, constant and violent change… Even today, the greatest geographical feature on the planet comes from two great continents colliding, buckling to make the Himalayan mountain range over millions of years. The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.”
     Hammond frowned. “Just because it lasted a long time,” he said, “doesn’t mean it is permanent. If there was a radiation accident….”
     “Suppose there was,” Malcolm said. “Let’s say we had a bad one, and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere—under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic ice. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. And of course it would be very different from what it is now. But the earth would survive our folly. Life would survive our folly. Only we,” Malcolm said, “think it wouldn’t.”
     Hammond said, “Well, if the ozone layer gets thinner—”
     “There will be more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. So what?”
     “Well. It’ll cause skin cancer.”
     Malcolm shook his head. “Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation.”
     “And many others will die out,” Hammond said.
     Malcolm sighed. “You think this is the first time such a thing has happened? Don’t you know about oxygen?”
     “I know it’s necessary for life.”
     “It is now,” Malcolm said. “But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It’s a corrosive gas, like flourine, which is used to etch glass. And when oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells—say, around three billion years ago—it created a crisis for all other life on our planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. On earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly—five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth had an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!”
     Hammond looked irritated. “So what is your point? That modern pollutants will be incorporated, too?”
     “No,” Malcolm said. “My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn’t have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines… It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”
     “And we very well might be gone,” Hammond said, huffing.
     “Yes,” Malcolm said. “We might.”
     “So what are you saying? We shouldn’t care about the environment?”
     “No, of course not.”
     “Then what?”
     Malcolm coughed, and stared into the distance. “Let’s be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven’t got the power to destroy the planet—or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”

Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

     Lying in bed, soaked in sweat, Malcolm listened as the radio crackled.
     “Anything?” Muldoon said. “You getting anything?”
     “No word, Wu said.
     “Hell,” Muldoon said.
     There was a pause.
     Malcolm sighed. “I can’t wait,” he said, “to hear his new plan.”
     “What I would like,” Muldoon said, “is to get everybody to the lodge and regroup. But I don’t see how.”
     There’s a Jeep in front of the visitor center,” Wu said. “If I drove over to you, could you get yourself into it?”
     “Maybe. But you’d be abandoning the control room.”
     “I can’t do anything here anyway.”
     “God knows that’s true,” Malcolm said. “A control room without electricity is not much of a control room.”
     “All right,” Muldoon said. “Let’s try. This isn’t looking good.”
     Lying in his bed, Malcolm said, “No, it’s not looking good. It’s looking like a disaster.”
     Wu said, “The raptors are going to follow us over there.”
     “We’re still better off,” Malcolm said. “Let’s go.”
     The radio clicked off. Malcolm closed his eyes, and breathed slowly, marshaling his strength.
     “Just relax,” Ellie said. “Just take it easy.”
     “You know what we are really talking about here,” Malcolm said. “All this attempt to control… We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old. They began at the time when Florence, Italy, was the most important city in the world. The basic idea of science—that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational—that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn’t really work anymore. It didn’t work economically, it didn’t work intellectually, and it didn’t fit the new world that was emerging.”
     Malcolm coughed.
     “But now,” he continued, “science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world anymore. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways—air, and water, and land–because of ungovernable science.” He sighed. “This much is obvious to everyone.”
     There was a silence. Malcolm lay with his eyes closed, his breathing labored. No one spoke, and it seemed to Ellie that Malcolm had finally fallen asleep. Then he sat up again, abruptly.
     “At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn’t make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Gödel’s theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some special inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know that what we call ‘reason’ is just an arbitrary game. It’s not special, in the way we thought it was.
     “And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rainstorm we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old—the dream of total control—has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn’t true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.”
     “This is very extreme,” Hammond said, shaking his head.
     “We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now. Fifty years ago, everyone was gaga over the atomic bomb. That was power. No one could imagine anything more. Yet, a bare decade after the bomb, we began to have genetic power. And genetic power is far more potent than atomic power. And it will be in everyone’s hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question—What should I do with my power?—which is the very question science says it cannot answer.”
     “So what will happen?” Ellie said.
     Malcolm shrugged. “A change.”
     “What kind of change?”
     “All major changes are like death,” he said. “You can’t see to the other side until you are there.” And he closed his eyes.
     “The poor man,” Hammond said, shaking his head.
     Malcolm sighed. “Do you have any idea,” he said, “how unlikely it is that you, or any of us, will get off this island alive?”

Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

     Arnold stared in shock.
     One after another, the monitors went black, and then the room lights went out, plunging the control room into darkness and confusion. Everyone started yelling at once. Muldoon opened the blinds and let light in, and Wu brought over the printout.
     “Look at this,” Wu said.

Time     Event                        System Status
---------------------------------------------------------------
5:12:44  Safety 1 Off                Operative
5:12:45  Safety 2 Off                Operative
5:12:46  Safety 3 Off                Operative
5:12:51  Shutdown Command            Shutdown
5:13:48  Startup Command             Shutdown
5:13:55  Safety 1 On                 Shutdown
5:13:57  Safety 2 On                 Shutdown
5:13:59  Safety 3 On                 Shutdown
5:14:08  Startup Command             Startup - Aux Power
5:14:18  Monitor-Main                Operative - Aux Power
5:14:19  Security-Main               Operative - Aux Power
5:14:22  Command-Main                Operative - Aux Power
5:14:24  Laboratory-Main             Operative - Aux Power
5:14:29  TeleCom-VBB                 Operative - Aux Power
5:14:32  Schematic-Main              Operative - Aux Power
5:14:37  View                        Operative - Aux Power
5:14:44  Control Status Chk          Operative - Aux Power
5:14:57  Warning: Fence Status [NB]  Operative - Aux Power
9:11:37  Warning: Aux Fuel (20%)     Operative - Aux Power
9:33:19  Warning: Aux Fuel (10%)     Operative - Aux Power
9:53:19  Warning: Aux Fuel (1%)      Operative - Aux Power
9:53:39  Warning: Aux Fuel (0%)      Shutdown  

     Wu said, “You shut down at five-thirteen this morning, and when you started back up, you started with auxiliary power.”
     “Jesus,” Arnold said. Apparently, main power had not been on since shutdown. When he powered back up, only the auxiliary power came on. Arnold was thinking that as strange, when he suddenly realized that that was normal. That was what was supposed to happen. It made perfect sense: the auxiliary generator fired up first, and it was used to turn on the main generator, because it took a heavy charge to start the main power generator. That was the way the system was designed.
     But Arnold had never before had occasion to turn the main power off. And when the lights and screens came back on in the control room, it never occurred to him that main power hadn’t also been restored.
     But it hadn’t, and all during the time since then, while they were looking for the rex, and doing one thing and another, the park had been running on auxiliary power. And that wasn’t a good idea. In fact, the implications were just beginning to hit him—
     “What does this line mean?” Muldoon said, pointing to the list.

5:14:57  Warning: Fence Status [NB]  Operative - Aux Power  [AV09]

     “It means a system status warning was sent to the monitors in the control room,” Arnold said. “Concerning the fences.”
     “Did you see that warning?”
     Arnold shook his head. “No. I must have been talking to you in the field. Anyway, no, I didn’t see it.”
     “What does it mean, ‘Warning: Fence Status’?”
     “Well, I didn’t know it at the time, but we were running on backup power,” Arnold said. “And backup doesn’t generate enough amperage to power the electrified fences, so they were automatically kept off.”
     Muldoon scowled. “The electrified fences were off?”
     “Yes.”
     “All of them? Since five this morning? For the last five hours?”
     “Yes.”
     “Including the velociraptor fences?”
     Arnold sighed. “Yes.”
     “Jesus Christ,” Muldoon said. “Five hours. Those animals could be out.”
     And then, from somewhere in the distance, they heard a scream. Muldoon began to talk very fast. He went around the room, handing out the portable radios.
     “Mr. Arnold is going to the maintenance shed to turn on main power. Dr. Wu, stay in the control room. You’re the only other one who can work the computers. Mr. Hammond, go back to the lodge. Don’t argue with me. Go now. Lock the gates, and stay behind them until you hear from me. I’ll help Arnold deal with the raptors.” He turned to Genarro. “Like to live dangerously again?”
     “Not really,” Gennaro said. He was very pale.
     “Fine. Then go with the others to the lodge.” Muldoon turned away. “That’s it, everybody. Now move.”
     Hammond whined, “But what are you going to do to my animals?”
     “That’s not really the question, Mr. Hammond,” Muldoon said. “The question is, what are they going to do to us?”
     He went through the door, and hurried down the hall toward his office. Gennaro fell into step alongside him. “Change your mind?” Muldoon growled.
     “You’ll need help,” Gennaro said.
     “I might.” Muldoon went into the room marked ANIMAL SUPERVISOR, picked up the gray shoulder launcher, and unlocked a panel in the wall behind the desk. There were six cylinders and six canisters.
     “The thing about these damn dinos,” Muldoon said, “is that they have distributed nervous systems. They don’t die fast, even with a direct hit to the brain. And they’re built solidly; thick ribs make a shot to the heart dicey, and they’re difficult to cripple in the legs or hindquarters. Slow bleeders, slow to die.” He was opening the cylinders one after another and dropping in the canisters. He tossed a thick webbed belt to Gennaro. “Put that on.”
     Genarro tightened the belt, and Muldoon passed him the shells. “About all we can hope to do is blow them apart. Unfortunately we’ve only got six shells here. There’s eight raptors in that fenced compound. Let’s go. Stay close. You have the shells.”
     Muldoon went out and ran along the hallway, looking down over the balcony to the path leading toward the maintenance shed. Gennaro was puffing alongside him. They got to the ground floor and went out through the glass doors, and Muldoon stopped.
     Arnold was standing with his back to the maintenance shed. Three raptors approached him. Arnold had picked up a stick, and was waving it at them, shouting. The raptors fanned out as they came closer, one staying in the center, the other two moving to each side. Coordinated. Smooth. Gennaro shivered.
     Pack behavior.
     Muldoon was already crouching, setting the launcher on his shoulder. “Load,” he said. Gennaro slipped the shell in the back of the launcher. There was an electric sizzle. Nothing happened. “Christ, you’ve got it in backward,” Muldoon said, tilting the barrel so the shell fell into Gennaro’s hands. Gennaro loaded it again. The raptors were snarling at Arnold when the animal on the left simply exploded, the upper part of the torso flying into the air, blood spattering like a burst tomato on the walls of the building. The lower torso collapsed on the ground, the legs kicking in the air, the tail flopping.
     “That’ll wake ’em up,” Muldoon said.
     Arnold ran for the door of the maintenance shed. The velociraptors turned, and started toward Muldoon and Gennaro. They fanned out as they came closer. In the distance, somewhere near the lodge, he heard screams.
     Gennaro said, “This could be a disaster.”
     “Load,” Muldoon said.

Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

     Malcolm groaned. “Isn’t it time for more morphine yet?”
     “Not yet,” Ellie said.
     Malcolm sighed. “How much water have we got here?”
     “I don’t know. There’s plenty of running water from the tap—”
     “No, I mean, how much stored? Any?”
     Ellie shrugged. “None.”
     “Go into the rooms on this floor,” Malcolm said, “and fill the bathtubs with water.”
     Ellie frowned.
     “Also,” Malcolm said, “have we got any walkie-talkies? Flashlights? Matches? Sterno stoves? Things like that?”
     “I’ll look around. You planning for an earthquake?”
     “Something like that,”Malcolm said. “Malcolm Effect implies catastrophic changes.”
     “But Arnold says all the systems are working perfectly.”
     “That’s when it happens,” Malcolm said.
     “Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”
     “He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”
     “Don’t you think it’s just human nature?” Ellie said.
     “God, no,” Malcolm said. “That’s like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s uniquely Western training, and much of the rest of the world is nauseated by the thought of it.” He winced in pain. “The morphine’s making me philosophical.”
     “You want some water?”
     “No. I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like ‘seeking truth.’
     “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether thy can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penatrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.
     The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch. They can’t just appreciate. They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.” He sighed, and sank back.
     Ellie said, “Don’t you think you’re overstating—”
     “What does one of your excavations look like a year later.”
     “Pretty bad,” she admitted.
     “You don’t replant, you don’t restore the land after you dig?”
     “No.”
     “Why not?”
     She shrugged. “There’s no money, I guess….”
     “There’s only enough money to dig, but not to repair?”
     “Well, we’re just working in the bandlands….”
     “Just the badlands,” Malcolm said, shaking his head. “Just trash. Just byproducts. Just side effects… I’m trying to tell you that scientists want it this way. They want byproducts and trash and scars and side effects. It’s a way of reassuring themselves. It’s built into the fabric of science, and it’s increasingly a disaster.”
     “Then what’s the answer?”
     “Get rid of the thintelligent ones. Take them out of power.”
     “But then we’d lose all the advances—”
     “What advances?” Malcolm said irritably. “The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics… Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?”
     Ellie said nothing.
     “Because there haven’t been any advances,” Malcolm said. “Not really. Thirty thousand years ago, when men were doing cave paintings a Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep, or do whatever they wanted. And they lived in a natural world, with clean air, clean water, beautiful trees and sunsets. Think about it. Twenty hours a week. Thirty thousand years ago.”
     Ellie said, “You want to turn back the clock?”
     “No,” Malcolm said. “I want people to wake up. We’ve had four hundred years of modern science, and we ought to know by now what it’s good for, and what it’s not good for. It’s time for a change.”
     “Before we destroy the planet?” she said.
     He sighed, and closed his eyes. “Oh dear,” he said. “That’s the last thing I would worry about.”