Chapter Forty-Nine

Equal and Opposite


Previously…

- Campbell turned around again. He looked Rossiter dead in the eye.

"How did you really get future creatures?" he asked.

"Time-travel."

Campbell raised his eyebrows. "Excuse me?"

"It's true. That facility contains wormholes in time, through which creatures from ages past and future can be collected."-


...

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. – Marcus Aurelius

...

Danny woke up on a hard bed. He opened his eyes slowly. He looked around the room, raising his head slightly. He was in a small hospital ward, with four beds. The other three were empty.

Danny found that he wasn't actually in the bed, just lying on the covers. He wasn't connected to anything, either.

He lifted his body into a sitting position, and then swung his legs around to the edge of the bed. Stiffly, he stood up.

He took a better look around. The walls were painted white. A few yellow noticeboards faced him, and featured a selection of charts and scans. The open door was to his left.

Danny rubbed his forehead, and tried to remember what had happened. The last thing he could recollect was walking after Doctor Malcolm and Helen. After that, nothing.

A doctor walked through the doorway. "Oh, you're awake!" She was a blonde woman, looking to be in her thirties, and was wearing a white coat. "How do you feel?"

"Fine, wh… what happened?"

"Sit down please." She walked over to him. He did as she told him. She pulled a seat over to the side of the bed, and shone small light in his eyes. "You just collapsed in the middle of the floor. Hawkins took you in to me."

Danny was somewhat pleased that he'd finally got a proper sleep. "How long was I out?"

"Oh, only fifteen minutes," she answered, turning off the light.

No wonder I'm still exhausted… Danny thought. "Who are you?"

"I'm Doctor Thorpe," she replied. She reached over to the bedside table, and picked up a roll of bandage. "I'm in charge of medical research…" She unrolled a length of bandage and measured it against Danny's forehead.

"What are you…" Danny was too exhausted to resist any more than moving his head back a little.

"You have a cut on your forehead," she explained. "Nah, you'll be fine." She rerolled the bandage, and put it back on the bed-side table.

"What research do you do?"

"I'm afraid that's rather confidential, Mister Quinn." She stood up, and put the chair away. "You should be fine. Goodbye." She walked away, towards where she had come. Danny suddenly remembered what he'd been doing when he collapsed.

He hurried out of the ward, through the corridor. He passed several side passages, and emerged into the room with the tied man. One of the soldiers was still with him. The other, who'd volunteered to go with Danny earlier, was nowhere to be seen.

"Where's Helen?" Danny asked.

Before the soldier could reply, footsteps back the way Danny had come signalled the arrival of Doctor Malcolm, and the other soldier. They both seemed rather exasperated.

"Quinn!" Malcolm remarked. "Do you know who's left in the park?"

"I think Connor, Abby and Doctor Grant might still be," Danny answered. "Why?"

"Do you have any way of contacting them?"

"Uh…" he checked that the walkie was still in his pocket. "Yeah. Why?"

"You need to tell them to get out of there, now. As quickly as they can."

"What… why?"

"Helen's gonna bomb the park, dammit!" Hawkins interjected from behind Malcolm. The doctor looked a little annoyed that his moment had been stolen.

"He's telling the truth," Malcolm assured. "Just before she disappeared through that anomaly, she said it to me."

"Well, didn't you follow her?" Danny asked.

"No, she closed it, and Skinner said he couldn't re-open it."

Danny clenched his jaw, and pulled the walkie out of his pocket.

"Connor!" he said into it. "Connor! Come in, dammit!"

"Message received, Operative Quinn," came Connor's voice through the other end. "Explain your transmission. Over." That was getting a little out of hand.

"Connor, tell me you're out of the park!" Danny responded. "Please!"

"We're about halfway to the lodge, why? I mean, over. And… roger that. Over."

"Damn… you need to run. Get to the lodge. Get to the gate. Any way you can, get the hell out of there, now!"

"What… why?"

"Helen's about to bomb the place. We told her the future predators are breeding, and, well, she took it badly. You need to move. Get to the rescue helicopters, they must be back by now."

"Yeah, we saw them fly back a while ago. They should still be there-" A lengthy pause. "OK. This is gonna be bad…"

"What?" Danny asked. "What happened?"

"The helicopters just left the lodge."

"What, all of them?"

"Four, anyway."

"Look, there might still be some left. Just get to the lodge now. Run!"

"OK," Connor turned the walkie off.

Danny put the walkie away, and turned back to Malcolm. "Doctor Malcolm, you stay here. For some reason, Helen seems to trust you. So, if these scientists ever manage to get that anomaly open, you should go after her. And you need to hurry. You're our best hope."

"What about you?" Malcolm asked.

"I'm going to find Richard Levine."

"What? Why him? What could he…"

"If what he says is true, then he's in contact with the US military. And they're our best hope at stopping this."

"But what he's saying probably isn't true! I know this guy, and if you did, you'd realise how entirely unlikely his story is."

Danny ignored him. "Find Cutter, Malcolm. Let me deal with Plan B." With that, he left the facility.

"Richard Levine! Agent Levine!"

Danny had little idea of how to find this man in the expanse of Miami, so he had resorted to just calling out his name. Levine, Campbell, Hemple and Mason had all gone completely off the radar since leaving the complex. They were supposedly organising a rescue, but Danny had heard nothing from them since.

Danny came to the outskirts of the city, and beyond, the forest. He passed the tree-line, and continued calling. Still nothing.

"Quinn?"

It was Campbell's voice, from behind him.

"That was lucky!" Danny said, smiling, as he turned around.

"Not for you," Campbell said. His voice was stern. Danny turned to face him, and saw the rifle, raised and pointed straight at him.

"What… what's this for?" Danny asked, confused.

"It was you, wasn't it? You cut the power."

"Wha… What?"

"The code you told Temple to put into that computer. It was the emergency protocol to shut down the system."

"But… that's just stupid! What, seven numbers, and the whole park goes down? And it's a pretty bad password too. Who told you that?"

"…Rossiter…" Campbell looked down.

"Oh. That makes sense."

Richard Levine emerged form the bushes behind the head-keeper. "Campbell, put the gun down. He was calling my name."

"Agent Levine!" Danny exclaimed.

"I was wondering when someone would actually call me that outside the army…" he said, with a smile. "What's the problem?"

"Helen Cutter just disappeared through an anomaly. According to Doctor Malcolm, her last words involved telling us all that she planned on bombing the park to destruction."

"What… why?" Levine's face had slowly dropped over the course of Danny's speech.

"Because she caught wind that the future predators were breeding."

"They are?" Levine's face now turned to shock.

"Look, you know why I came to you. You need to tell the air-force, the army, whoever it was you were in contact with."

"Alright," Levine said. "Anything else?"

"No, that's everything we were told. You need to go now. I'm assuming you have a contact number?"

"Yeah. Thanks." Levine set off in the direction of the city.

"Quinn," Campbell said, "do you know who's still in the park?"

"Connor, Abby, and Doctor Grant for sure. I have no ideas about the others, though."

"How do you know about them?"

"Walkie," Danny took out the walkie, and showed it to him. "They said the complex was attacked after I left. They don't know who else survived."

"No idea about the visitor lodge?"

"The wooden building? I walked past it on the way out. It was destroyed."

Campbell's face dropped even further.

"Hello?" It was a voice from the trees.

Campbell wheeled around. "Amy?"

"Campbell!" The woman emerged through the trees. Danny recognised her as the blonde woman who'd replaced Campbell at the lodge. Perhaps she was the one Campbell had been worrying about.

"You're alive!" Campbell hugged her. Amy seemed somewhat less enthusiastic to embrace him.

A second person, a tall, blonde-haired man, emerged behind her. He was wearing the same keeper's uniform as Campbell and Amy.

"Well, at least that's two more people out of the park," Danny remarked.

By now, Campbell and Amy had separated again. "Campbell," Amy whispered, "that's the man who let the scorpions out…" She looked Danny up and down nervously.

"Oh," Campbell said, "He's fine."

"How dangerous is it back there?" Malcolm asked Harper. The two of them were standing alone in a facility storeroom, lit by a single bulb above their heads. Lockers and cabinets were situated around the walls of this dull, dusty room. At the time, Skinner was busy trying to get the console in working order. Malcolm was stuffing various supplies, including ample food rations and batteries, into a backpack he'd found in this room.

Harper replied, "Professor Skinner says it's the KT boundary, so that means large dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs. Are you planning on going through?"

Malcolm didn't immediately answer the question. "How often do your men go back to the past?"

"As rarely as possible. There have been about forty missions from this facility, that I know of."

"And have you ever recorded any… how do I put this… changes?"

"You mean a Butterfly effect?" The Butterfly effect was a classic, if a horrifically overused, principle of chaos theory. It held that one minor, insignificant action in the present can cause major changes in the future. In essence, a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, and changes the weather in New York. More recently, the phrase had been applied more and more to hypothetical time-travel scenarios, where a very minor change in the past could potentially have huge effects in the time-traveller's present. Even the time-traveller's very presence in the past could cause changes, without him moving a muscle – he could block air-currents, remove bacteria from the air by letting them land on his skin, or introduce new pathogens into the atmosphere by exhaling. In Malcolm's mind, the possibility and pursuit of time-travel had always seemed largely irrelevant: even if man were to unlock the secrets of time-travel, using it would have been far too risky.

But now, the revelation that there was a whole agency in Britain devoted to the study of wormholes in time, and the eras they linked to, changed everything. Had they changed anything before? Or did time have some way of… course-correcting itself? There was the pebble-in-a-stream theory, which posited that the stream of time worked like a literal stream of water. If a time-traveller were to make a minor change to the past, or throw a proverbial pebble in the water, then the stream would flow right over it, and save for a few minor changes in the change's immediate vicinity, the stream's ultimate destiny would be unchanged. Time would find some way of can celling out the time-traveller's change. Only a major change, a proverbial boulder, would actually be capable of changing the river's course. This was a neat theory, seeing as it eliminated the possibility of paradoxes – where a time-traveller made a change in the past which would remove his original reason for going, or ability to go, back in time, like by killing his younger self.

Malcolm felt like a whole world of possibilities had been opened before him. He had to test his own theories. That settled it. He would go back and find Helen.

Danny learned that the two keepers were named Amy McCoy and Vincent Scott. They'd trekked all this way through the park, through a Camarasaur-sized hole in the fence, and to the edge of the city. They decided to take a breather here, and then head on to help stop the creatures getting into the city.

The prefix 'Head-Keeper' was a little redundant now. He was just Gary Campbell. He felt a little isolated. Amy seemed somehow annoyed with him. Although, she'd just experienced incredible trauma, and he was probably just misconstruing those feelings. Still, he decided to ask Scott about it. This wasn't something he was going to enjoy – the pair had never seen eye-to-eye.

With Amy and Quinn elsewhere, he approached Scott at a space between trees. Scott was sitting on a large, black boulder, his elbows resting between his widely parted legs. Campbell sat down on a rock opposite him.

"Scott," he began. "How are you feeling?"

Scott turned around on his rock to face him. "Not great, Gary."

"Yeah, I can't blame you. You think we were sabotaged?"

Scott left a pause. "That… wouldn't make sense. Who would be sabotaging us?" Scott was acting rather awkwardly.

"I don't know, but it does seem likely."

"I… did you come over here to say something?" That was a rather ungainly change of subject.

"Yeah… Amy, she seems kinda distant to me. Did anything happen?"

"Well, she underwent terrible trauma, Gary!"

"I mean, personally, to me."

"We did bump into Howard Rossiter on our way here. Not for very long, but he did have time to tell us that he had apparently turned you… what was it… 'around to his way of thinking'."

"Wh… Wh,… I – that was Rossiter. I mean, did you listen to him?" Gary tried to smile.

"Yeah…" Scott smiled weakly back.

"So…" Campbell didn't quite know how to finish.

"What happens next?" Scott asked.

"What do you mean?"

"After the clean-up. Then what? About the technology, the creatures? The uh… the cloning, I mean."

"Well, for a start," Campbell smiled, "they didn't clone them."

"Oh?" Scott looked overly surprised. "Then how did they get them?"

"Uh, well… I'm not sure if I even believe this myself, but… Apparently it's got something to do with… wormholes… in time."

"Oh really?" That expression was too fake. Scott was hiding something. None of the keepers were told about the wormholes until Rossiter had told Campbell.

"You don't seem that surprised?"

"Well, yeah, of course I am. It's just… I'm not really able to take it in." Clearly, exhaustion was affecting Scott's ability to lie.

And exhaustion was affecting Campbell's ability to tolerate it. "Why are you lying?"

"I'm not," Scott said. "But, I was gonna ask you about what you think we should do with the park after it gets shut down."

Campbell decided to calm down. He was jumping to irrational conclusions here. "It should be preserved. No question of that. Too much work has been put into the project for it to be abandoned. Land of Time has been a disaster, obviously. But maybe in a more isolated location…"

"You're kidding me! The park has to be closed down. The whole fundament on which the park was based, the idea, is inhumane."

"What, cloning back extinct dinosaurs?"

"I thought you said that they got them through time-travel?"

"Yeah, but you didn't know that until a minute ago. Supposedly." Campbell leaned back and crossed his arms.

"Gary, are you trying to accuse me of something?"

"No, not yet. Anyway, go on. Your idea."

Scott continued, his train of thought disrupted a little. "Well, these creatures were taken from a different time-zone completely and placed in an environment in which they have no idea of how to survive."

"But, if we were to believe they were cloned, then they were born in the present, raised to know what to do in the present, and then put in habitats that would best suit their own instincts."

"Can we stop talking about what supposedly happened? Ignore the cloning, concentrate on what actually happened, the time-travel."

"But how could you have come up with a theory based on something you didn't even know existed until two minutes ago?"

"I'm re-assessing my old theories. They fit even better in this reality."

"OK, keep going. Convince me."

"See, the creatures were plucked right out of their natural habitat, the one they'd grown up in, the one they knew as home. Then, they were put right into a completely new habitat. Campbell, you yourself know how many creatures died from the trauma that such a change of scenery caused. That's not to mention the diseases they weren't used to. We couldn't vaccinate against all of them. And then there's DX."

"DX?" Campbell decided to lay a trap. He, as Head-Keeper, knew that they hadn't cured DX, but supposedly, none of the other keepers did. "But that was cured by BioSyn."

Scott's eyebrows rose. "Yeah, well, it wasn't. Rossiter lied."

"How would you know that?"

"Because I was in the facility. Where they've been working on a cure for months. They never found one."

"You were in the facility?" Campbell asked. "The one in downtown Miami?"

"Yeah, why?" Scott looked away, and seemed to realise that he'd cornered himself.

"The facility that also contains all of the wormholes. Which you couldn't possibly have missed." Checkmate.

Scott's eyebrows rose again. "What? Really? I didn't know…"

"Yes, you did. For some reason, you knew about the wormholes, and just decided to keep it from us." Campbell stood up and walked away. Why would Scott be lying? Sure, Rossiter had connected him to the non-existent 'emergency protocol', but that was just him trying to put the blame off himself. There was that one possibility that had remained in Campbell's head ever since then. That Scott had had a hand in the power-cut. Now, it made sense. Scott found out that the creatures were inhumanely taken through anomalies, and that DX hadn't been cured. So, he decided that the park was an abomination, and shut down the fences.

Then Campbell remembered something else.


Head-Keeper Campbell surveyed his domain. It was the week before the opening-day. All of the final pieces were being prepared for the big day. Mainly commercial things: stocking the kiosks and the restaurant; finishing off the map artwork; things like that. Those weren't really his concern. There was just one final big job that needed doing. It was something that they'd put off before, but was just a simple matter. Campbell decided to check up on its progress.

He strolled leisurely through the finished enclosures. The park was something of which he was immensely proud. He'd had a major hand in its creation. Four years earlier, just a year into the project's construction, he had been hired as Head-Keeper. The day he was shown the prehistoric creatures had been one of the stand-out moments of his forty-year-long life. He'd moved house across the country from his home in Illinois to work here. He didn't know what he'd do if anything happened to it.

He arrived at the management complex. Here was the brains behind the project. The one thing he disliked about the park was its management. Howard Rossiter, CEO of BioSyn, didn't know how to deal with the creatures. Inspired though he was, he was not the man to front a project like this. Then there was his secretive co-creator, Helen Cutter. Campbell was the only keeper who knew about her. Campbell rarely met her, and didn't warm to her.

The one remaining job was the set-up of a secondary power-supply. Should the first one go, the second one would kick in to maintain the enclosure fencing, and the phones. This was originally Cutter's job, but she passed it down to one of the higher-ranking keepers later on.

Campbell decided to check in on him. He was working at one of the computers in a small, four-desk office, when Campbell arrived. The other three desks were left vacant.

"Keeper Scott, everything going alright?" Campbell asked cheerily.

"Oh, sure it's going great. Should be up and running long before opening day."

"That's great. Thanks Vincent." Campbell left him to it, and carried on his walk.

Campbell never got a chance to check back with the progress of the work.


Campbell turned around to face Scott. "You. You never got the secondary power-supply up, did you?"

Scott stood off his rock. He looked a little sheepish. "No, I never got the chance."

"Why not?"

"Because… because Rossiter…"

"No, I'm not buying it anymore." Campbell walked up to Scott. "You caused it. It was you. It was all you!"

"What? No, I… just hold on a second, Gary…"

"You killed all of them! You destroyed everything!" Anger exploded.

He took a massive swing at Scott. The punch struck across his face, and knocked him backwards.

There was a cut on his face. Scott wiped his cheek, checking for blood. He looked up at Campbell, and charged back at him, head lowered.

Scott's head buried in Campbell's stomach, and pushed him back against a tree-trunk. It hurt like hell. Campbell grabbed Scott's head with one hand and punched his face with the other. The head was loosened, and Scott walked backwards a bit.

Campbell grunted and spat. "You think you can just take everything away 'cause of your damn eco-"

Scott punched Campbell in the nose. It cracked.

Campbell returned the favour. "This was my life!" Campbell raised his arm again.

"Break it up!" Quinn grabbed Campbell's arm and twisted it behind his back. "Now is not the time…"

Scott just turned and walked away.

"Now you two calm down…" Quinn let go and Campbell leaned up against a tree-trunk. He turned and saw McCoy. Her hand was over her mouth in an expression of shock.

"Come on," Danny told them. "Time to go." He led the way through the trees.

XXXX

Richard Levine rushed through the streets of Miami. The creatures would be here any second. At this exact moment, that wasn't his concern. He needed to remember.

Down 31st… second corner…

There it was. The little coffee shop where he'd first met with Colonel Hopper. Now it was more important than ever.

He walked through the door and up to the counter. A blonde-haired woman dressed in the coffee-shop uniform, called Denise, stood behind. "Can I take your order?" she asked.

"Hi," said Levine, "Can I have a double espresso with Pandora?"

Denise smiled, but there was concern in that expression too.

She disappeared into the store room for a few seconds. She emerged carrying a small object wrapped in tissue. She put it under the counter for a second while she dispensed the coffee. Once it was finished, she placed it on the counter and put the tissue-wrapped object alongside it. Levine paid her, put the object in his pocket, thanked her, and left.

After walking a small distance down the street, he stopped, checked around himself that no one was watching, and took out the object. Still drinking the espresso to maintain the cover, he discarded the tissues to reveal the object.

It was a small, black flip-phone.

Hopper's number was highly restricted. Only two phones could access it. One, he'd taken with him to the park. That had been destroyed by Rossiter's men. This was the back-up.

He dialled Hopper's number, and waited.

"Agent Levine, why are you breaking radio silence?" Hopper's voice seemed somewhat agitated.

"I've just received word that Helen Cutter, Rossiter's accomplice, plans to destroy the park by bombing it."

"What? Who told you this?"

"Helen herself, via Ian Malcolm, via Danny Quinn."

"Can you vouch for this man's credibility? This Quinn?"

"The ARC team seem to trust him, so I would too."

"Right… I'll tell Delta. Thank you, Agent Levine."

"Proud to have been of service, sir."

Hopper hung up. Now it was a matter of waiting.

Ian Malcolm had no intention of waiting any longer.

He re-donned his black leather jacket, placed his sunglasses back in his shirt pocket, and turned to face the empty space where the portal was about to materialize.

"Nearly ready Skinner?" he asked the scientist busily typing at the console.

"Nearly… just a few more… got it!" One final keyboard tap, and the anomaly burst forth. It was the late Cretaceous anomaly that Helen had escaped through earlier. It had taken them half an hour, but they'd done it.

"How exact is it?" Malcolm asked. He didn't want to end up five million years ahead of or behind her.

"To within an hour. It's the best that we can do."

"It's good enough," Malcolm reassured him. He'd taken their little pink pills, which wiped out much of the contagious bacteria that might affect the past. Now he had to find Helen, before she bombed the park.

He lifted the Heckler and Koch G-36c assault rifle that he'd borrowed from Sergeant Rogers. He'd also borrowed a Sig Sauer P226 from Hawkins, which now rested in his back pocket. He needed to get in and out quickly.

He then lifted a small gadget. It was pulsing with sound, and a compass-like needle was pointing unfailingly at the anomaly. It was one of the BioSyn anomaly detectors. He tucked it into his pocket.

Hawkins, Rogers, Jenson and Skinner were all gathered behind him, ready to send him off.

Skinner passed Malcolm a walkie-talkie. "The reception won't be great," he told him, "and it'll get worse the further you go from the anomaly."

"You need any back-up, just call and we'll follow," said Jenson.

"Yeah, something tells me she won't want to reason with me if I take soldiers. I need to go alone, or else it'll all be pointless," Malcolm replied. He put on a backpack full of supplies, and placed a sunhat on his head. He felt like Alan Grant.

"Am I ready to go?" Malcolm asked.

"Yeah," Skinner told him. "Good luck."

"Godspeed," Hawkins said.

"Ah… thanks…" Malcolm readied his backpack, and plunged into the past.