Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
“God damn it, Arnold, you son of a bitch! God damn it, get this park back on track! Now! Get my grandkids back here! Now!” John Hammond stood in the control room, screaming and stamping his little feet. He had been carrying on this way for the last two minutes, while Henry Wu stood in the corner, looking stunned.
“Well, Mr. Hammond,” Arnold said, “Muldoon’s on his way out right now, to do exactly that.” Arnold turned away, and lit another cigarette. Hammond was like every other management guy Arnold had ever seen. Whether it was Disney or the Navy, management guys always behaved the same. They never understood the technical issues; and they thought that screaming was the way to make things happen. And maybe it was, if you were shouting at your secretaries to get you a limousine.
But screaming didn’t make any difference at all to the problems that Arnold now faced. The computer didn’t care if it was screamed at. The power network didn’t care if it was screamed at. Technical systems were completely indifferent to all this explosive human emotion. If anything, screaming was counterproductive, because Arnold now faced the virtual certainty that Nedry wasn’t coming back, which meant that Arnold himself had to go into the computer code and try and figure out what had gone wrong. It was going to be a painstaking job; he’d need to be calm and careful.
“Why don’t you go downstairs to the cafeteria,” Arnold said, “and get a cup of coffee? We’ll call you when we have more news.
“I don’t want a Malcolm Effect here,” Hammond said.
“Don’t worry about a Malcolm Effect,” Arnold said. “Will you let me go to work?”
“God damn you,” Hammond said.
“I’ll call you, sir, when I have news from Muldoon,” Arnold said.
He pushed buttons on his console, and saw the familiar control screens change.
*/Jurassic Park Main Modules/
*/
*/ Call Libs
Include: biostat.sys
Include: sysrom.vst
Include: net.sys
Include: pwr.mdl
*/
*/Initialize
SetMain[42]2002/9A{total CoreSysop %4 [vig. 7*tty]}
if ValidMeter(mH) (**mH).MeterVis return
Term Call 909 c.lev {void MeterVis $303} Random(3#*MaxFid)
on SetSystem(!Dn) set shp_val.obj to lim(Val{d}SumVal
if SetMeter(mH) (**mH).ValdidMeter(Vdd) return
on_SetSystem(!Telcom) set mxcpl.obj to lim(Val{pd})NextVal
Arnold was no longer operating the computer. He had now gone behind the scenes to look at the code—the line-by-line instructions that told the computer how to behave. Arnold was unhappily aware that thet complete Jurassic Park program contained more than half a million lines of code, most of it undocumented, without explanation.
Wu came forward. “What are you doing, John?”
“Checking the code.”
“By inspection? That’ll take forever.”
“Tell me,” Arnold said. “Tell me.”