"Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them." LINNAEUS, 1797 "You cannot recall a new form of life." ERWIN CHARGAFF, 1972 Introduction "The InGen Incident"The late twentieth century has witnessed a scientific gold rush of astonishing proportions: the headlong and furious haste to mercialize genetic engineering. This enterprise has proceeded so rapidly-with so
By P. G. Wodehouse 1 In a day in June, at the hour when London moves abroad in quest of lunch, a young man stood at the entrance of the Bandolero Restaurant looking earnestly up Shaftesbury Avenuea large young man in excellent condition, with a pleasant, good-humoured, brown, clean-cut face. He paid no attention to the stream of humanity that flowed past him. His mouth was set and his eyes wore a serious, almost a wistful expression. He was frowning slightly. One would have said that here was a man with a secret sorrow. William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Dawlish, had no secret sor
A few years ago, while I was writing Flood Tide, I realized that Dirk Pitt needed some help on a particular assignment, and so I dreamed up Juan Cabrillo. Cabrillo ran a ship called the Oregon, on the outside pletely nondescript, but on the inside packed with state-of-the-art intelligence-gathering equipment. It was a pletely private enterprise, available for any government agency that could afford it. It went where no warship could go, transported secret cargo without suspicion, plucked data out of the airit was the perfect plement to NUMA. In fact, I had so much fun writing about the Orego
Chapter one He had been walking the dirty streets since twilight first began to gather. The pain streamed like liquid fire through every cell of his body - but he locked it away in a corner of his mind, ignored it, and walked. There was little to please the eye in his surroundings, and he paid scant attention to them. He was on a small poor unimportant planet whose very name, Coranex, meant nothing to him. But around the spaceport clustered a drab, seedy town, which was a well-known stopover on the main space lanes. It attracted freightermen, traders, wandering technicians, space drifters o
The solitary figure in the saffron robes shielded his eyes from the glare and squinted down the glacier to where the enormous black vessel lay, one-third submerged, in the floor of the valley. Allowing for the portion lost below the icy surface of the frozen lake it was easily some three hundred cubits long, at least fifty wide and another thirty high. It had, overall, the appearance of some fantastic barge with a kind of gabled house mounted upon its deck. Its gopher wood timbers were blackened by a heavy coating of pitch and hardened by the petrification of the glacier which had kept it vi
Blood SportNews item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966:RAIN OF STONES REPORTEDIt was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th. The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25. Mrs White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta.Mrs White could not be reached for ment.Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the sub
The eyes behind the wide black rubber goggles were cold as flint. In the howling speed-turmoil of a BSA M20 doing seventy, they were the only quiet things in the hurtling flesh and metal. Protected by the glass of the goggles, they stared fixedly ahead from just above the centre of the handlebars, and their dark unwavering focus was that of gun muzzles. Below the goggles, the wind had got into the face through the mouth and had wrenched the lips back into a square grin that showed big tombstone teeth and strips of whitish gum. On both sides of the grin the cheeks had been blown out by the w
In the spring, families in the suburbs of New Orleans-Metairie, Jefferson, Lafayette-hang wreaths on their front doors. Gay straw wreaths of gold and purple and green, wreaths with bells and froths of ribbons trailing down, blowing, tangling in the warm wind. The children have king cake parties. Each slice of cake is iced with a different sweet, sticky topping-candied cherries and colored sugar are favorites-and the child who finds a pink plastic baby in his slice will enjoy a year of good luck. The baby represents the infant Christ, and children seldom choke on it. Jesus loves little chi
- Anonymous notation found inked inthe margin of a manuscript history(believed to date to the time of ArturHawkwing) of the last days of theTovan ConclavesOn the heights, all paths are paved with daggers.- Old Seanchan sayingPROLOGUE(Serpent and Wheel)Deceptive AppearancesEthenielle had seen mountains lower than these misnamed Black Hills, great lopsided heaps of half-buried boulders, webbed with steep twisting passes. A number of those passes would have given a goat pause. You could travel three days through drought-withered forests and brown-grassed meadows without seeing a single sign of h
Captain Sir Horatio Hornblower sat in his bath, regarding with distaste his legs dangling over the end. They were thin and hairy, and recalled to his mind the legs of the spiders he had seen in Central America. It was hard to think about anything except his legs, seeing how much they were forced upon his attention by their position under his nose as he sat in this ridiculous bath; they hung out at one end while his body protruded from the water at the other. It was only the middle portion of him, from his waist to above his knees, which was submerged, and that was bent almost double. Hornbl
SUDDENLY THE child began to scream, piercing shrieks of terror that died down to shaking sobs, clutching at his mother so that his tiny ringers pinched her skin agonisingly through her flimsy summer dress. Veronica Jones grimaced in the deep green gloom of the reptile house, had to check herself from giving her five-year-old son one of her habitual cuffs across his head. She held him to her, closed her eyes momentarily, a human ostrich trying to hide her embarrassment from the ghostly white faces that turned in her direction. Trust the little sod to start playing up. You squandered a s
CHAPTER ONE It was a very fast killing. Touch the needle to the left arm. Press your thumb in between the left bicep and the tricep to pump up the vein. Ah, there it is. Clear the air from the syringe. Then in. Full. Slowly push the plunger all the way. Done. . Remove the needle and let him collapse back again beside the chess table where he had fallen moments before. His head cracked on the polished parquet floor, and the killer could not help wincing, even though a man with a splendid overdose of heroin needs no sympathy. "You know, my dear," said the man with the needle. "Some people pay
Acknowledgements Because, in some instances, I met many of the real people in positions which, of necessity, are in this novel, I wish to state that none of the characters drawn here in any way resemble their real-life counterparts who, without exception, were extremely helpful to me. I would like to thank: Dr Gita Natarajan, Associate Medical Examiner, City of New York Lieutenant Jim Doyle, mander, Village Police, West Hampton Beach and, especially: Dr Michael Baden, former Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York Thanks to the numerous individuals who assisted me with translations, and to
While Europe was a collection of warring tribes and Rome merely another city-state on the Tiber and the people of Israel shepherds in the Judean hills, a little girl could carry a sack of diamonds across the Loni Empire in East Africa and never fear even one being taken from her. If she suffered an injured eye, here alone in all the world were men who could repair it. In any village she could receive a parchment for her jewels, take it to any other village, then collect gems of exactly identical weight and purity. Waters from the great Busati River were stored in artificial lakes and channe
FRIDAY, 11 JULY 1975 FRONT PAGE DIPLOMATS SAID TO BE LINKED WITH FUGITIVE TERRORIST KNOWN AS CARLOS Paris, 10 July - France expelled three high-ranking Cuban diplomats today in connection with the world-wide search for a man called Carlos, who is believed to be an important link in an international terrorist network. The suspect, whose real name is thought to be Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, is being sought in the killing of two French counter-intelligence agents and a Lebanese informer at a Latin Quarter apartment on 27 June. The three killings have led the police here and in Britain to what they
PART ONETheTurning WheelEnd of PART ONE1Tears and SmokeTiamak found the empty treelessness of the High Thrithing oppressive. Kwanitupul was strange, too, but he had been visiting that place since childhood, and its tumbledown buildings and ubiquitous waterways at least reminded him a little of his marshy home. Even Perdruin, where he had spent time in lonely exile, was so filled with close-leaning walls and narrow pathways, so riddled with shadowy hiding places and blanketed in the salt smell of the sea, that Tiamak had been able to live with his homesickness. But here on the grasslands he fe