Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park

Gennaro flipped up the dial on his watch, and looked at the way the animals were standing. "Northeast-soutbwest. Same as before."

Behind the beach, deeper in the woods, they heard the hum of the electric fence. "At least we know how they get outside the fence," Ellie said.

Then they heard the throb of marine diesels, and through the mist they saw a ship appearing in the south. A large freighter, it slowly moved north.

"So that's why they came out?" Gennaro said.

Grant nodded. "They must have heard it coming,"

As the freighter passed, all the animals watched it, standing silent except for the occasional chirp or squeak. Grant was struck by the coordination of their behavior, the way they moved and acted as a group. But perhaps it was not really so mysterious. In his mind, he reviewed the sequence of events that had begun in the cave.

First the infants had been agitated. Then the adults had noticed. And finally all the animals had stampeded to the beach. That sequence seemed to imply that the younger animals, with keener bearing, had detected the boat first. Then the adults had led the troop out onto the beach. And as Grant looked, he saw that the adults were in charge now. There was a clear spatial organization along the beach, and as the animals settled down, it was not loose and shifting, the way it had been inside. Rather, it was quite regular, almost regimented. The adults were spaced every ten yards or so, each adult surrounded by a cluster of infants. The juveniles were positioned between, and slightly ahead of, the adults.

But Grant also saw that all the adults were not equal. There was a female with a distinctive stripe along her head, and she was in the very center of the group as it ranged along the beach. That same female had stayed in the center of the nesting area, too. He guessed that, like certain monkey troops, the raptors were organized around a matriarchal pecking order, and that this striped animal was the alpha female of the colony. The males, he saw, were arranged defensively at the perimeter of the group.

But unlike monkeys, which were loosely and flexibly organized, the dinosaurs settled into a rigid arrangement-almost a military formation, it seemed. Then, too, there was the oddity of the northeast-southwest spatial orientation. That was beyond Grant. But, in another sense, he was not surprised. Paleontologists had been digging up bones for so long that they had forgotten how little information could be gleaned from a skeleton. Bones might tell you something about the gross appearance of an animal, its height and weight. They might tell you something about how the muscles attached, and therefore something about the crude behavior of the animal during life. They might give you clues to the few diseases that affected bone. But a skeleton was a poor thing, really, from which to try and deduce the total behavior of an organism.

Since bones were all the paleontologists had, bones were what they used. Like other paleontologists, Grant had become very expert at working with bones. And somewhere along the way, he had started to forget the unprovable possibilities-that the dinosaurs might be truly different animals, that they might possess behavior and social life organized along lines that were utterly mysterious to their later, mammalian descendants. That, since the dinosaurs were fundamentally birds-

"Oh, my God," Grant said.

He stared at the raptors, ranged along the beach in a rigid formation, silently watching the boat. And he suddenly understood what he was looking at.

"Those animals," Gennaro said, shaking his head, "they sure are desperate to escape from here."

"No," Grant said. "They don't want to escape at all."

"They don't?"

"No," Grant said. "They want to migrate."

"Migrating!" Ellie said. "That's fantastic!"

"Yes," Grant said. He was grinning.

Ellie said, "Where do you suppose they want to go?"

"I don't know," Grant said, and then the big helicopters burst through the fog, thundering and wheeling over the landscape, their underbellies heavy with armament. The raptors scattered in alarm as one of the helicopters circled back, following the line of the surf, and then moved in to land on the beach. A door was flung open and soldiers in olive uniforms came running toward them. Grant heard the rapid babble of voices in Spanish and saw that Muldoon was already aboard with the kids. One of the soldiers said in English, "Please, you will come with us. Please, there is no time here."

Grant looked back at the beach where the raptors had been, but they were gone. All the animals had vanished. It was as if they had never existed. The soldiers were tugging at him, and he allowed himself to be led beneath the thumping blades and climbed up through the big door. Muldoon leaned over and shouted in Grant's ear, "They want us out of here now. They're going to do it now!"

The soldiers pushed Grant and Ellie and Gennaro into seats, and helped them clip on the harnesses. Tim and Lex waved to him and he suddenly saw how young they were, and how exhausted. Lex was yawning, leaning against her brother's shoulder.

An officer came toward Grant and shouted, "Senor: are you in charge?"

"No," Grant said. "I'm not in charge."

"Who is in charge, please?"

"I don't know."

The officer went on to Gennaro, and asked the same question: "Are you in charge?"

"No," Gennaro said.

The officer looked at Ellie, but said nothing to her. The door was left open as the helicopter lifted away from the beach, and Grant leaned out to see if he could catch a last look at the raptors, but then the helicopter was above the palm trees, moving north over the island.

Grant leaned to Muldoon, and shouted: "What about the others?"

Muldoon shouted, "They've already taken off Harding and some workmen. Hammond had an accident. Found him on the hill near his bungalow. Must have fallen."

"Is he all right?" Grant said.

"No. Compys got him."

"What about Malcolm?" Grant said.

Muldoon shook his head.

Grant was too tired to feel much of anything. He turned away, and looked back out the door. It was getting dark now, and in the fading light he could barely see the little rex, with bloody jaws, crouched over a hadrosaur by the edge of the lagoon and looking up at the helicopter and roaring as it passed by.

Somewhere behind them they heard explosions, and then ahead they saw another helicopter wheeling through the mist over the visitor center, and a moment later the building burst in a bright orange fireball, and Lex began to cry, and Ellie put her arm around her and tried to get her not to look.

Grant was staring down at the ground, and he had a last glimpse of the hypsilophodonts, leaping gracefully as gazelles, moments before another explosion flared bright beneath them. Their helicopter gained altitude, and then moved cast, out over the ocean.

Grant sat back in his seat. He thought of the dinosaurs standing on the beach, and he wondered where they would migrate if they could, and he realized he would never know, and he felt sad and relieved in the same moment.

The officer came forward again, bending close to his face. "Are you in charge?"

"No," Grant said.

"Please, senor, who is in charge?"

"Nobody," Grant said.

The helicopter gained speed as it headed toward the mainland. It was cold now, and the soldiers muscled the door closed. As they did, Grant looked back just once, and saw the island against a deep purple sky and sea, cloaked in a deep mist that blurred the white-hot explosions that burst rapidly, one after another, until it seemed the entire island was glowing, a diminishing bright spot in the darkening night.

Days went by. The government was polite, and put them up in a nice hotel in San Jose. They were free to come and go, and to call whomever they wished. But they were not permitted to leave the country. Each day a young man from the American Embassy came to visit them, to ask if they needed anything, and to explain that Washington was doing everything it could to hasten their departure. But the plain fact was that many people had died in a territorial possession of Costa Rica. The plain fact was that an ecological disaster had been narrowly averted. The government of Costa Rica felt it had been misled and deceived by John Hammond and his plans for the island. Under the circumstances, the government was not disposed to release survivors in a hurry. They did not even permit the burial of Hammond or Ian Malcolm. They simply waited.