Free Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton Page B

divisions on the whole island. And each division was separated from the road by a concrete moat. Outside each moat was a fence with a little lightning sign alongside it. That mystified them until they were finally able to figure out It meant the fences were electrified.
        "That's odd," she said. "Electrified fences at a resort?"
        "Miles of them," Grant said. "Electrified fences and moats, together. And usually with a road alongside them as well."
        "Just like a zoo," Ellie said.
        They went back to the topographical map and looked closely at the contour lines. The roads had been placed oddly. The main road ran north-soutb, right through the central hills of the island, including one section of road that seemed to be literally cut into the side of a cliff, above a river. It began to look as if there had been a deliberate effort to leave these open areas as big enclosures, separated from the roads by moats and electric fences. And the roads were raised up above ground level, so you could see over the fences. . . .
        "You know," Ellie said, "some of these dimensions are enormous. Look at this. This concrete moat is thirty feet wide. That's like a military fortification."
        "So are these buildings," Grant said. He had noticed that each open division had a few buildings, usually located in out-of-the-way corners. But the buildings were all concrete, with thick walls. In side-view elevations they looked like concrete bunkers with small windows. Like the Nazi pillboxes from old war movies.
        At that moment, they heard a muffled explosion, and Grant put the papers aside. "Back to work," he said.

    "Fire!"
        There was a slight vibration, and then yellow contour lines traced across the computer screen. This time the resolution was perfect, and Alan Grant had a glimpse of the skeleton, beautifully defined, the long neck arched back. It was unquestionably an infant velociraptor, and it looked in perfect-
        The screen went blank.
        "I hate computers," Grant said, squinting in the sun. "What happened now?"
        "Lost the integrator input," one of the kids said. "Just a minute." The kid bent to look at the tangle of wires going into the back of the battery-powered portable computer. They had set the computer up on a beer carton on top of Hill Four, not far from the device they called Thumper.
        Grant sat down on the side of the hill and looked at his watch. He said to Ellie, "We're going to have to do this the old-fashioned way."
        One of the kids overheard. "Aw, Alan."
        "Look," Grant said, "I've got a plane to catch. And I want the fossil protected before I go."
        Once you began to expose a fossil, you had to continue, or risk losing it. Visitors imagined the landscape of the badlands to be unchanging, but in fact it was continuously eroding, literally right before your eyes; all day long you could hear the clatter of pebbles rolling down the crumbling hillside. And there was always the risk of a rainstorm; even a brief shower would wash away a delicate fossil. Thus Grant's partially exposed skeleton was at risk, and it had to be protected until he returned.
        Fossil protection ordinarily consisted of a tarp over the site, and a trench around the perimeter to control water runoff. The question was how large a trench the velociraptor fossil required. To decide that, they were using computer-assisted sonic tomography, or CAST. This was a new procedure, in which Thumper fired a soft lead slug into the ground, setting up shock waves that were read by the computer and assembled into a kind of X-ray image of the hillside. They had been using it all summer with varying results.
        Thumper was twenty feet away now, a big silver box on wheels, with an umbrella on top. It looked like an ice-cream vendor's pushcart, parked incongruously on the badlands. Thumper had two youthful attendants loading the next soft lead pellet.
        So far, the CAST