Search
Muldoon and Gennaro, in the Jeep, search for the tyrannosaur.
Arnold tells them over the radio that he has discovered on the
monitors where Nedry is. Muldoon and Gennaro find the body.
On the raft, Grant, Tim and Lex drift down the river and approach
the dome of the large aviary. They climb out of the raft and
head for the lodge, hoping that there will be a telephone there
that they can use to call the control room.
Aviary
Arnold and Malcolm discuss why they are unable to locate Grant
and the children. Malcolm thinks it is because the motion sensors
cover an inadequate area. Arnold hopes they are nowhere near
the aviary, since the pterodactyls are vicious birds that will
attack humans. Sure enough, that is exactly what happens. Several
dactyls swoop down, but Grant manages to fight them off. They
get back in their raft and resume their course downriver. They
are stalked by the tyrannosaur behind the trees that line the
riverbank. Back at the hotel, Malcolm is still expecting disaster.
He launches into a long criticism of scientists and their methods.
Grant eases the raft down the jungle river. They encounter two
dilophosaurs, which are poisonous animals. They try to drift
past them. For a moment the raft runs aground, but then resumes
its downriver drift.
Tyrannosaur
Muldoon and Gennaro locate the tyrannosaur. Muldoon’s
aim is to tranquilize it. He shoots from fifty yards away and
misses. The tyrannosaur charges, and Muldoon shoots again, but
the animal keeps on coming. Muldoon and Gennaro escape in the
Jeep and head back for the hotel. Grant’s raft goes over
a fifty-foot waterfall, and a tyrannosaur waits for them in
the surging pool below. They manage to swim ashore, although
the dinosaur gets Lex’s life vest. They elude the dinosaur
and find themselves in a little recess where there is a collection
of machinery. Grant opens a door and goes through it. The door
snaps shut behind him. He goes down a flight of stairs, finds
a car and is then attacked by a baby raptor. He shoots it with
a tranquilizer dart. He sees that the animal is male, and has
obviously been bred in the wild. Lex and Tim are attacked by
the tyrannosaur but it unaccountably lets Tim escape from its
grasp.
Control
In the control room, Arnold, Muldoon and Gennaro observe that
the tyrannosaur has collapsed. It just took an hour for the
tranquilizer to take effect. Arnold is again confident that
the park is back to normal. But then they discover that the
park is running on auxiliary power rather than main power. The
auxiliary power then fails. Tim and Lex observe the stricken
dinosaur. Then the waterfall stops, and they realize the power
has failed. Wu realizes that when Arnold restarted the system,
it started up with auxiliary power. Auxiliary power does not
generate enough amperage to power the electric fences, so they
have been off for five hours. This means the velociraptors have
probably escaped. Muldoon heads for the maintenance shed to
get the heaviest weapons he has. He finds three raptors ready
to attack Arnold. Muldoon shoots one of them but the other two
pursue him. In the hotel, Malcolm rants to Hammond about what
is wrong with contemporary science. Wu desperately tries to
get the main power on, and Muldoon takes refuge in a drainage
pipe; Arnold and then Gennaro are attacked by a raptor in the
maintenance shed. Arnold is killed. Muldoon and Wu agree to
try to make it to the lodge. Meanwhile, Malcolm declares that
it is very unlikely that any of them will get off the island
alive.
Analysis
This section
is short and action-packed, but Crichton manages to pack into
it no less than three long speeches by Malcolm in which he holds
forth on the history of science and attacks the way it is practiced
in the modern world. One cannot help but think that these are
Crichton’s views that he wanted to get into the novel
somewhere, and Malcolm is merely the mouthpiece for them. It
seems incongruous that a dying man should discourse so eloquently
on such topics. It is a reminder that the strength of the novel
is not in the characterization, which is only perfunctory, but
in its action and some of the ideas that underlie it.
In this Iteration, Crichton has Grant set up the last piece
of major action in the novel—the raptor attacks—by
saying that when he is confronted by a young raptor, he has
“a clear feeling of intelligence from this creature”
(p. 296). The intelligence of the raptors will be a key element
of the Sixth Iteration. They are able to open doors, for example.
This is another example of Crichton’s imaginative skill.
Fossil records of raptors indicate that they were probably no
more intelligent than today's ostrich. But making them into
intelligent creatures suits Crichton’s purpose. He needs
a grandstand finish in which he adds a component that has not
been present so far.
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