MICHAEL CRICHTON

secondary jungle was replaced by another form of secondary jungle, and later bystill another form.By checking regions where late secondary jungle was generally found—suchas the banks of large rivers, where innumerable human settlements had beencleared and abandoned—Ross confirmed that the ERTS computers could,indeed, measure the necessary small differences in reflectivity.She then instructed the ERTS scanners to search for albedo differences of .03or less, with a unit signature size of a hundred meters or less, across the fiftythousand square kilometers of rain forest on the western slopes of the Virungavolcanoes. This job would occupy a team of fifty human aerial photographicanalysts for thirty-one years. The computer scanned 129,000 satellite and aerialphotographs in under nine hours.And found her city.In May, 1979, Ross had a computer image showing a very old secondaryjungle pattern laid out in a geometric, gridlike form. The pattern was located 2degrees north of the equator, longitude 3 degrees, on the western slopes of theactive volcano Mukenko. The computer estimated the age of the secondaryjungle at five hundred to eight hundred years.“So you sent an expedition in?” Elliot said.Ross nodded. “Three weeks ago, led by a South African named Kruger. Theexpedition confirmed the placer diamond deposits, went on to search for theorigin, and found the ruins of the city.,,“And then what happened?” Elliot asked.He ran the videotape a second time.Onscreen he saw black-and-white images of the camp, destroyed, smoldering.Several dead bodies with crushed skulls were visible. As they watched, ashadow moved over the dead bodies, and the camera zoomed back to show theoutline of the lumbering shadow. Elliot agreed that it looked like the shadow of agorilla, but he insisted, “Gorillas couldn’t do this. Gorillas are peaceful, vegetariananimals.”They watched as the tape ran to the end. And then they reviewed her finalcomputer-reconstituted image, which clearly showed the head of a male gorilla.62